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Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after more than eight decades doing so, the public opinion polling agency confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.

The company said starting this year it would stop publishing approval and favorability ratings of individual political figures, saying in a statement it “reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership.”

“Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “That work will continue through the Gallup Poll Social Series, the Gallup Quarterly Business Review, the World Poll, and our portfolio of U.S. and global research.”

The Gallup Presidential Approval Rating has for decades been the among the top barometers cited by media outlets measuring public opinion of the president’s performance.

President Trump has seen his rating by the agency slip in recent months, peaking at 47 percent last February and dipping to less than 37 percent in its last poll taken in December.

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The Republican-led House of Representatives on Feb. 11 passed a bill favored by President Donald Trump to mandate proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.

The bill, called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America, Act, would require voters show a government-issued photo ID to cast their ballots. Polling shows support for photo ID requirements in elections is widespread in both political parties.

Yet the measure would potentially prevent millions of Americans from voting, according to independent experts and voting rights groups. And it would create broadly defined criminal penalties for election officials who register voters that haven't adequately provided evidence of their citizenship.

The legislation faces an uncertain future in the GOP-controlled Senate, where 60 votes are needed for passage and other versions of the same legislation have already stalled.

If the bill, which Trump has indicated he would sign, fully passes, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports could face extra hurdles to register to vote and cast their ballots, according to the Brennan Center.

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Ro Khanna, the US congressman, publicly revealed the names of six men whose identities were redacted from the Jeffrey Epstein files, including Leslie Wexner, a billionaire retail magnate, whom the FBI appeared to have labeled as a co-conspirator.

The Democratic representative of California disclosed the names during a floor speech on Tuesday, following a visit to the Department of Justice, where he and Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, spent two hours reviewing unredacted documents.

The six men named by Khanna are Wexner, the Victoria’s Secret founder; Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of DP World and an Emirati billionaire businessman; and four others identified as Nicola Caputo, Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze and Leonic Leonov.

Khanna did not provide evidence of wrongdoing against any of them nor have they been charged with a crime in connection with Epstein.

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The National Governors Association (NGA) has canceled its annual White House meeting after President Trump only invited Republican governors to the gathering. 

The yearly meeting is traditionally bipartisan and offers a chance for state leaders to convene with one another and the president.

“Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) wrote in a Monday letter announcing plans to forgo the meeting, according to The Associated Press.

Stitt said the Trump administration’s decision to exclude Democratic governors would not divide the association. 

“We cannot allow one divisive action to achieve its goal of dividing us,” he wrote. “The solution is not to respond in kind, but to rise above and to remain focused on our shared duty to the people we serve. America’s governors have always been models of pragmatic leadership, and that example is most important when Washington grows distracted by politics.”

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An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student, who was arrested last year as part of its targeting of pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said on Monday.

Lawyers for the Turkish student detailed the immigration judge’s decision in a filing with the New York-based second US circuit court of appeals, which had been reviewing a ruling that led to her release from immigration custody in May.

An immigration judge on 29 January concluded the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her, her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union wrote.

Her immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, said the decision was issued by immigration judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

That ended, for now, proceedings that began with Öztürk’s arrest by immigration authorities in March on a street in Massachusetts after DHS revoked her student visa.

The sole basis authorities provided for revoking her visa was an editorial she co-authored in Tufts’s student newspaper a year earlier criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza.

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The Trump administration on Monday proposed stripping the power of an independent board to review challenges from fired federal workers while barring employees from taking the matter to court.

The new proposed rule would impact federal workers fired through a Reduction in Force (RIF), the process used at 22 different agencies last year as the Trump administration conducted widespread layoffs.

If finalized, any federal worker fired in a future RIF would not be able to plead their case before the quasi-judicial Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which last year found that some agencies had “engaged in a prohibited personnel practice” in firing the workers. 

Instead, any challenges would be reviewed by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which last year alongside the Office of Management and Budget instructed agencies to begin RIFs.

“Eliminating independent review of federal RIF actions would not only make it harder for employees to challenge their proposed terminations, but would essentially give the administration free rein to terminate huge swaths of the federal workforce without meaningful independent oversight,” Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal worker union, said in a statement.

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