By LISA MASCARO, KEVIN FREKING and LEAH ASKARINAM, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now that House Republicans have passed an ambitious budget blueprint for President Donald Trump’s agenda, it’s time for the hard work of turning ideas for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $2 trillion of slashed spending into a bill that lawmakers warn could bring intense changes to Americans back home.

Republicans are insisting the costs of the tax breaks be partly paid for by the steep reductions in federal government spending as a way to ensure the nation’s $36 trillion debt load doesn’t balloon to dangerous levels.

But deciding what to cut — health care, food stamps, green energy, government regulations or student aid — is a politically agonizing choice.

And it’s not just the House that has to agree. GOP senators have their own plans. Their priority is to make the tax cuts permanent, rather than have them expire in a decade, as the House proposed. GOP senators see that as non-negotiable, but it would skyrocket the costs.

Eventually, the House and Senate must vote on a final package.

“We have a lot of hard work ahead of us,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said after the late Tuesday vote.

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It’s the start of a weeks-long — if not months — slog that is expected to consume Congress as Republicans try to deliver on Trump’s agenda and their own campaign promises.

Trump met Wednesday with Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune at the White House, after Republicans also met with Treasury Scott Bessent. Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles huddled privately with GOP senators at the Capitol.

Republicans say if they fail to act, the lower tax rates first approved in 2017 will expire, which would amount to a massive tax hike for many Americans. They believe keeping the tax cuts in place will partly pay for themselves, unleashing economic growth and fresh revenues, though others say those projections are optimistic.

Democrats put up stiff opposition against the House GOP plan — one lawmaker dashed from California after a week’s stay in the hospital and another returned to Washington for the vote with her newborn son. Democrats will spend the weeks ahead warning Americans what’s at stake.

“Republicans and Trump promised to lower costs on day one, and instead their priorities have been focused on ripping health care away from kids, moms and others who need it most,” said Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo., cradling her 4-week-old son, Sam.

“All to fund tax breaks for billionaires like Elon Musk while increasing our national deficit by trillions of dollars,” she said. “How can anyone show their face in their district after voting yes for this?”

Trump, during a freewheeling Cabinet meeting Wednesday at the White House, insisted he will not touch the nation’s premier safety net programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — but seek ways to root out what Republicans call waste, fraud and abuse.

“It won’t be ‘read my lips’ anymore,” Trump said, echoing President George H.W. Bush’s no new taxes pledge. “We’re not going to touch it.”

But the math doesn’t fully add up.

Without steep cuts to federal programs, Republicans won’t be able to claim the savings they need to offset the costs of the tax breaks. And without offsetting the costs, conservative GOP lawmakers won’t want to vote for the final package.

After the White House meeting, Johnson said Trump’s tariff policies and his new plan for $5 million gold cards for immigration “will change the math” as the lawmakers get down to work.

Johnson said he, too, wanted to make the tax cuts permanent. “That’s our goal.”

Now that the House has acted, it’s the Senate’s move.

Thune said it’s “to be determined” when the Senate would act. “It’s complicated,” Thune said. “It’s hard. Nothing about this is going to be easy.”

Initially approved during Trump’s first term, many of the tax cuts were temporary and are expiring later this year. Keeping them would cost $4.5 trillion over the next decade.

And that’s not counting the new tax cuts that Trump is asking for. The president wants to eliminate taxes on tips, which was a signature campaign promise, and has also talked about getting rid of taxes on overtime pay as well as Social Security benefits. Those would add to the price tag.

As GOP senators insist on making the tax cuts permanent, one idea supported by the Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Crapo of Idaho is to simply use a different accounting process.

It involves essentially treating the tax cuts as what’s called “existing policy,” which would mean they are not a new cost, and therefore would not need to be offset by cuts elsewhere.

Thune backs the idea, though it has run into resistance from other Republicans, including conservative House deficit hawks.

But Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, top Democrat on the Finance committee, said Republicans are engaging in “funny math.”

“It’s all a big game in order to get more money to the billionaires through their tax breaks,” Wyden said.

With reductions to the Pentagon off the table, Republicans are hunting for cost-cutting across the non-defense side of the budget. The next biggest pot of money available is the nation’s health care programs.

The House GOP’s bill directed the committee that handles Medicaid health care spending to come up with $880 billion in savings over the decade, which would be the bulk of what’s needed to offset the cost of the tax breaks.

Republicans insist there will be no direct cuts to people who receive their health care through Medicaid, some 80 million adults and children, and that they only will target waste, fraud and abuse to make it more efficient.

Mostly, Republicans talk about imposing work requirements or removing able-bodied men from the government-run Medicaid program. Doing that would save a small portion of what’s needed, some $100 billion over the decade.

For bigger savings, Republicans consider altering the way the federal government provides Medicaid money to the states. Some 40 states expanded their Medicaid programs with the Affordable Care Act, when Obamacare provided money to enroll people in the program.

The Republicans have also directed the House Agriculture Committee to come up with some $230 billion in savings. One likely place it will turn is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. GOP chair Rep. Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania said food stamps won’t be cut.

Democrats are having none of this, and advocacy groups have started showing up at town hall meetings to protest what’s happening.

At the same time, key GOP senators are still pushing their smaller $340 billion package to provide the Trump administration with money it needs for border security and its mass deportation agenda. Their idea was to include the tax cuts in a second package later in the year.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi is threatening Minnesota officials with legal action if they don’t comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes in women’s sports.

In a Tuesday letter to Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Minnesota State High School League Executive Director Erich Martens, Bondi said the state should be “on notice” that the U.S. Justice Department is ready to take action. Officials in California and Maine also received a warning letter.

The Trump Administration asserts that allowing people born male who identify as women to participate in women’s school sports violates Title IX, a federal law banning sex discrimination in education.

The president’s Feb. 5 executive order allows federal agencies to enforce the administration’s interpretation of Title IX, though some states and high school sports groups have said they would not comply.

“This Department of Justice will defend women and does not tolerate state officials who ignore federal law,” Bondi said in a statement. “We will leverage every legal option necessary to ensure state compliance with federal law and President Trump’s executive order protecting women’s sports.”

Bondi noted that the Department of Justice has already sued other states for defying federal orders. Earlier in February, they sued Illinois and New York, accusing the states of defying federal immigration policy.

On Feb. 12 the U.S. Department of Education started investigating Minnesota and California high school sports organizations because they planned to go against the federal government’s new policy.

Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Earlier this month the Minnesota State High School League, the governing body for state school athletics, said following the order likely would violate the state Human Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause of the state Constitution, which includes protections for different sexual orientations and gender identities. Though the group said it would cooperate with the Title IX investigation.

The league sought advice from Ellison, who later issued an opinion supporting their stance. In a Wednesday statement he maintained that Bondi and Trump are “wrong on the law” and said he was ready to defend the state against federal challenges.

“I think it’s morally wrong to persecute a small minority group, transgender youth, with the full weight (of) the U.S. Department of Justice just to express prejudice against a vulnerable and often persecuted group of students,” he said in a statement. “I do not believe the best use of the Department of Justice’s limited resources is to sue Minnesota over this.”

Athletic associations have 60 days from the executive order to take action on transgender athletes, according to the Minnesota State High School League, which has said it’s rules allowing transgender student participation currently remain in place.

The Minnesota Legislature is currently considering a bill to ban transgender athletes in school sports. The measure backed by Rep. Peggy Scott, R-Andover, has been receiving committee hearings in the House, where Republicans currently have a one-seat majority but not enough votes to pass bills.

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ASHLAND CITY, Tenn. (AP) — A Tennessee man has been charged with an act of terrorism after he threatened to burn down an xAI facility because he was upset with its founder, Elon Musk, and President Donald Trump, authorities said.

Ethan Paul Early, 25, of Ashland City, was arrested and charged on Feb. 20 after he spoke with a police officer about the threats, according to an affidavit. He was booked into jail on $500,000 bond, court records show. A lawyer listed in court records for Early did not immediately return a call seeking comment Wednesday.

A police officer in Ashland City, located northwest of Nashville, said he received a call from a friend of Early’s who was concerned after Early said he wanted to burn down one of Musk’s data centers because he was upset with the tech billionaire and Trump, the affidavit says.

The caller advised that Early said he intended to use thermite and had already begun buying the material to make the compound, which causes intense heat.

The officer went to Early’s home and asked him what he was thinking of burning down, the affidavit says. Early said Musk had an “AI factory” in Memphis. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, operates a supercomputer in Memphis, located about 200 miles west of Ashland City.

Early told the officer that he was no longer thinking about going through with the idea “and that he had good friends that had talked him out of it,” the affidavit says.

“The Defendant admitted that he had gotten too wrapped up in politics and had went ‘too far down the deep end,’” the affidavit says.

Early told the officer that he felt he “had to do something” and was “ashamed of himself to get so carried away,” according to the affidavit.

The affidavit does not say what exactly Early was upset about. Early told the officer that he had thrown the material away.

Musk, through the Department of Government Efficiency, has been working to cut the size of the federal government under Trump’s administration. Those cuts include layoffs of government workers.

Simley wrestling coach Will Short can envision a world where his Spartans win a seventh consecutive Class 2A team state title Thursday evening in St. Paul.

He also could see Simley getting bounced in the morning quarterfinals.

The latter is something that, frankly, hasn’t been a legitimate possibility for the Spartans in 15-plus years. But it’s part of the intrigue of this year’s Class 2A tournament. The single day, three-round event figures to be as unpredictable as never before.

Simley (19-6) is the No. 3 seed. Kasson-Mantorville (20-5) is seeded second and Watertown-Mayer (19-1) is the top seed and presumptive favorite. All three could win state. Potentially fifth-seeded Marshall could, as well.

But even more teams are capable of pulling off first-round upsets. Simley, for example, will duel an unseeded Grand Rapids (20-1) team that figures to have decisive matchup advantages in at least five of the matches.

But Simley could win three rounds and hoist the trophy at day’s end. The Spartans enter state with top-six ranked wrestlers in six classes but without a ranked grappler at any other weight.

Short is proud that his team is even in that conversation at this point in the campaign. The Spartans returned just three starters from last year’s title team. They start two or three seniors, depending on their lineup decisions. Certainly, senior Vristol Short is a nice pillar of the lineup at 189 pounds.

But they’ve developed a number of wrestlers, as they always do. Jake Kranz was a JV wrestler a year ago who is now the No. 3 seed in this weekend’s Class 2A, 114-pound individual tournament. Eighth-grader Adrian Mincey has grown into a state title contender at 107 pounds.

“It’s a testament to our kids and our program,” Short said. “I’m so proud of the young kids and their growth and how far they’ve come this year. … The improvement that they’ve made, the toughness that they have gotten over the year wrestling the ridiculously tough schedule that they wrestled.”

That schedule beat up some of the Spartans’ individual records but helped them prepare to at least have a shot at defending their crown on Thursday.

“We’re excited to put ourselves on the line, we really are,” Short said. “We’ve kind of got this nothing-to-lose attitude. … Nobody expected us to be in the conversation to win, and yet, here we are. We’re in the conversation.”

Now, how much of a long shot have they really been all season? The Guillotine — Minnesota’s preeminent wrestling new source — has ranked the Spartans in the top three all season. But they aren’t the favorites to win on Thursday, and that in itself is a change from recent years.

The field is open. Who wins and advances may be determined by how the bracket unfolds, with some teams matching up at certain weights far better against some foes than others.

There figure to be a number of duels that are determined by a swing match here or there.

“It’s going to be a fun tournament,” Short said. “A lot of fun happening in 2A.”

OTHER CLASSES

St. Michael-Albertville (24-0) is the top seed and heavy favorite to defend its title in Class 3A. Shakopee is the No. 2 seed and biggest challenger to the Knights, while Stillwater is seeded third. … In Class A, top-seeded Chatfield is also favored to repeat.