By MARY CLARE JALONICK

WASHINGTON (AP) — The massive tax and spending cuts package that President Donald Trump wants on his desk by July 4 would loosen regulations on gun silencers and certain types of rifles and shotguns, advancing a longtime priority of the gun industry as Republican leaders in the House and Senate try to win enough votes to pass the bill.

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The guns provision was first requested in the House by Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Republican gun store owner who had initially opposed the larger tax package. The House bill would remove silencers — called “suppressors” by the gun industry — from a 1930s law that regulates firearms that are considered the most dangerous, eliminating a $200 tax while removing a layer of background checks.

The Senate kept the provision on silencers in its version of the bill and expanded upon it, adding short-barreled, or sawed-off, rifles and shotguns.

Republicans who have long supported the changes, along with the gun industry, say the tax infringes on Second Amendment rights. They say silencers are mostly used by hunters and target shooters for sport.

“Burdensome regulations and unconstitutional taxes shouldn’t stand in the way of protecting American gun owners’ hearing,” said Clyde, who owns two gun stores in Georgia and often wears a pin shaped like an assault rifle on his suit lapel.

Democrats are fighting to stop the provision, which was unveiled days after two Minnesota state legislators were shot in their homes, as the bill speeds through the Senate. They argue that loosening regulations on silencers could make it easier for criminals and active shooters to conceal their weapons.

“Parents don’t want silencers on their streets, police don’t want silencers on their streets,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

The gun language has broad support among Republicans and has received little attention as House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., work to settle differences within the party on cuts to Medicaid and energy tax credits, among other issues. But it is just one of hundreds of policy and spending items included to entice members to vote for the legislation that could have broad implications if the bill is enacted within weeks, as Trump wants.

Inclusion of the provision is also a sharp turn from the climate in Washington just three years ago when Democrats, like Republicans now, controlled Congress and the White House and pushed through bipartisan gun legislation. The bill increased background checks for some buyers under the age of 21, made it easier to take firearms from potentially dangerous people and sent millions of dollars to mental health services in schools.

Passed in the summer of 2022, just weeks after the shooting of 19 children and two adults at a school in Uvalde, Texas, it was the most significant legislative response to gun violence in decades.

Three years later, as they try to take advantage of their consolidated power in Washington, Republicans are packing as many of their longtime priorities as possible, including the gun legislation, into the massive, wide-ranging bill that Trump has called “beautiful.”

“I’m glad the Senate is joining the House to stand up for the Second Amendment and our Constitution, and I will continue to fight for these priorities as the Senate works to pass President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who was one of the lead negotiators on the bipartisan gun bill in 2022 but is now facing a primary challenge from the right in his bid for reelection next year.

If the gun provisions remain in the larger legislation and it is passed, silencers and the short-barrel rifles and shotguns would lose an extra layer of regulation that they are subject to under the National Firearms Act, passed in the 1930s in response to concerns about mafia violence. They would still be subject to the same regulations that apply to most other guns — and that includes possible loopholes that allow some gun buyers to avoid background checks when guns are sold privately or online.

Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, who supports the legislation, says changes are aimed at helping target shooters and hunters protect their hearing. He argues that the use of silencers in violent crimes is rare. “All it’s ever intended to do is to reduce the report of the firearm to hearing safe levels,” Keane says.

Speaking on the floor before the bill passed the House, Rep. Clyde said the bill restores Second Amendment rights from “over 90 years of draconian taxes.” Clyde said Johnson included his legislation in the larger bill “with the purest of motive.”

“Who asked for it? I asked,” said Clyde, who ultimately voted for the bill after the gun silencer provision was added.

Clyde was responding to Rep. Maxwell Frost, a 28-year-old Florida Democrat, who went to the floor and demanded to know who was responsible for the gun provision. Frost, who was a gun-control activist before being elected to Congress, called himself a member of the “mass shooting generation” and said the bill would help “gun manufacturers make more money off the death of children and our people.”

Among other concerns, control advocates say less regulation for silencers could make it harder for law enforcement to stop an active shooter.

“There’s a reason silencers have been regulated for nearly a century: They make it much harder for law enforcement and bystanders to react quickly to gunshots,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety.

Schumer and other Democrats are trying to convince the Senate parliamentarian to drop the language as she reviews the bill for policy provisions that aren’t budget-related.

“Senate Democrats will fight this provision at the parliamentary level and every other level with everything we’ve got,” Schumer said earlier this month.

By JACK BROOK, Associated Press/Report for America

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre doesn’t know how to tell his children where their mother went after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her last month.

When his nearly 2-year-old son Noah asks for his mother before bed, Clouatre just tells him, “Mama will be back soon.” When his 3-month-old, breastfeeding daughter Lyn is hungry, he gives her a bottle of baby formula instead. He’s worried how his newborn will bond with her mother absent skin-to-skin contact.

His wife, Paola, is one of tens of thousands of people in custody and facing deportation as the Trump administration pushes for immigration officers to arrest 3,000 people a day.

Even as Marine Corps recruiters promote enlistment as protection for families lacking legal status, directives for strict immigrant enforcement have cast away practices of deference previously afforded to military families, immigration law experts say. The federal agency tasked with helping military family members gain legal status now refers them for deportation, government memos show.

To visit his wife, Adrian Clouatre has to make an eight-hour round trip from their home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to a rural ICE detention center in Monroe. Clouatre, who qualifies as a service-disabled veteran, goes every chance he can get.

Paola Clouatre, a 25-year-old Mexican national whose mother brought her into the country seeking asylum more than a decade ago, met Adrian Clouatre, 26, at a southern California nightclub during the final months of his five years of military service in 2022. Within a year, they had tattooed each other’s names on their arms.

After they married in 2024, Paola Clouatre sought a green card to legally live and work in the U.S. Adrian Clouatre said he is “not a very political person” but believes his wife deserved to live legally in the U.S.

“I’m all for ‘get the criminals out of the country,’ right?” he said. “But the people that are here working hard, especially the ones married to Americans — I mean, that’s always been a way to secure a green card.”

Detained at a green card meeting

The process to apply for Paola Clouatre’s green card went smoothly at first, but eventually she learned ICE had issued an order for her deportation in 2018 after her mother failed to appear at an immigration hearing.

Clouatre and her mother had been estranged for years — Clouatre cycled out of homeless shelters as a teenager — and up until a couple of months ago, Clouatre had “no idea” about her mother’s missed hearing or the deportation order, her husband said.

Adrian Clouatre recalled that a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services staffer asked about the deportation order during a May 27 appointment as part of her green card application. After Paola Clouatre explained that she was trying to reopen her case, the staffer asked her and her husband to wait in the lobby for paperwork regarding a follow-up appointment, which her husband said he believed was a “ploy.”

Soon, officers arrived and handcuffed Paola Clouatre, who handed her wedding ring to her husband for safekeeping.

Adrian Clouatre, eyes welling with tears, said he and his wife had tried to “do the right thing” and that he felt ICE officers should have more discretion over arrests, though he understood they were trying to do their jobs.

“It’s just a hell of a way to treat a veteran,” said Carey Holliday, a former immigration judge who is now representing the couple. “You take their wives and send them back to Mexico?”

The Clouatres filed a motion for a California-based immigration judge to reopen the case on Paola’s deportation order and are waiting to hear back, Holliday said.

Less discretion for military families

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Paola Clouatre “is in the country illegally” and that the administration is “not going to ignore the rule of law.”

“Ignoring an Immigration Judge’s order to leave the U.S. is a bad idea,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a June 9 post on X which appeared to refer to Clouatre’s case. The agency added that the government “has a long memory and no tolerance for defiance when it comes to making America safe again.”

Adrian Clouatre said the agency’s X post does not accurately reflect his wife’s situation because she entered the country as a minor with her mother, seeking asylum.

“She was not aware of the removal order, so she was not knowingly defying it,” he said. “If she had been arrested, she would have been deported long ago, and we would never have met.”

Prior to the Trump administration’s push to drive up deportations, USCIS provided much more discretion for veterans seeking legal status for a family member, said Holliday and Margaret Stock, a military immigration law expert.

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In a Feb. 28 memo, the agency said it “will no longer exempt” from deportation people in groups that had received more grace in the past. This includes the families of military personnel or veterans, Stock said. As of June 12, the agency said it has referred upward of 26,000 cases to ICE for deportation.

USCIS still offers a program allowing family members of military personnel who illegally entered the U.S. to remain in the country as they apply for a green card. But there no longer appears to be room for leeway, such as giving a veteran’s spouse like Paola Clouatre the opportunity to halt her active deportation order without facing arrest, Stock said.

But numerous Marine Corps recruiters have continued to post ads on social media, geared toward Latinos, promoting enlistment as a way to gain “protection from deportation” for family members.

“I think it’s bad for them to be advertising that people are going to get immigration benefits when it appears that the administration is no longer offering these immigration benefits,” Stock said. “It sends the wrong message to the recruits.”

Marine Corps spokesperson Master Sgt. Tyler Hlavac told The Associated Press that recruiters have now been informed they are “not the proper authority” to “imply that the Marine Corps can secure immigration relief for applicants or their families.”

Brook is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

By TOM MURPHY, AP Health Writer

The nation’s major health insurers are promising to scale back and improve a widely despised practice that leads to care delays and complications.

UnitedHealthcare, CVS Health’s Aetna and dozens of other insurers say they plan to reduce the scope of health care claims subject to prior authorization, standardize parts of the process and expand responses done in real time.

Prior authorization means insurers require approval before they’ll cover medical care, a prescription or a service like an imaging exam. Insurers say they do this to guard against care overuse and to make sure patients get the right treatment.

But doctors say the practice has grown in scope and complication, leading to frequent care delays. The fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December prompted many people to vent their frustrations with coverage issues like prior authorization.

Dr. Mehmet Oz called prior the practice “a pox on the system” that hikes administrative costs during his Senate confirmation hearing in March to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Insurers said Monday that they will standardize electronic prior authorization by the end of next year to help speed up the process. They will reduce the scope of claims subject to medical prior authorization, and they will honor the pre-approvals of a previous insurer for a window of time after someone switches plans.

They also plan to expand the number of real-time responses and ensure medical reviews are done for denied requests.

Researchers say prior authorization has grown more common as care costs have climbed, especially for prescription drugs, lab testing, physical therapy and imaging exams.

“We’re sort of trapped between care being unaffordable and then these non-financial barriers and administrative burdens growing worse,” said Michael Anne Kyle, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies how patients access care.

Nearly all customers of Medicare Advantage plans, the privately run version of the federal government’s Medicare program, need prior authorization for some services, particularly expensive care like hospital stays, the health policy research organization KFF found in a study of 2023 claims. The study also found that insurers denied about 6% of all requests.

Dr. Ashley Sumrall of Charlotte, North Carolina, says she has seen an increase in prior authorizations required for routine exams like MRIs. An oncologist who treats brain tumors, Sumrall said these images are critical for doctors to determine whether a treatment is working and to plan next steps.

Doctors say delays from requests that are eventually approved or coverage rejections can harm patients by giving a disease time to progress untreated. They also can spike anxiety in patients who want to know whether their tumor has stopped growing and if insurance will cover the scan.

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“There’s a term that we use called ‘scanxiety,’ and it’s very real,” said Sumrall, a member of the Association for Clinical Oncology’s volunteer leadership.

Different forms and varied prior authorization policies also complicate the process. Sumrall noted that every insurer “has their own way of doing business.”

“For years, the companies have been unwilling to compromise, so I think any step in the direction of standardization is encouraging,” she said.

The insurers say their promises will apply to coverage through work or the individual market as well as Medicare Advantage plans and the state and federally funded Medicaid program.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By STAN CHOE, ELAINE KURTENBACH and BERNARD CONDON, AP Business Writers

NEW YORK (AP) — The United States’ bunker-busting entry into Israel’s war with Iran is having only a modest effect on the price of oil and stock markets worldwide Monday, at least for now. The hope is that Iran won’t retaliate in a way that disrupts the global flow of crude, which would hurt economies worldwide but also its own.

The S&P 500 was edging down by 0.1% in early trading, coming off a week where stock prices had jumped up and down on worries about the conflict potentially escalating. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 37 points, or 0.1%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4% lower.

The price of oil did jump 4% shortly after trading began on Sunday night, but it quickly pared back as the focus shifted from what the U.S. military did to how Iran would react.

By Monday morning, the price of a benchmark barrel of U.S. oil was up 0.4% at $74.16 after briefly dipping to a loss. Brent crude, the international standard, edged up by 0.2% to $77.17 per barrel. They still remain higher than they were before the fighting began a little more than a week ago, when a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude was close to $68.

The fear is that a worsening war could squeeze the world’s supply of oil, which would pump up prices for it, gasoline and other products refined from crude. Not only is Iran a major producer of crude, it could also try to block access to the Strait of Hormuz off its coast. Much of the world’s oil passes through the strait each day on ships.

The calming in the oil market came as several analysts said Iran would likely refrain from closing the waterway. Iran itself uses the strait to move its own crude, mostly to China, and it needs the revenue made from such sales of oil.

“It’s a scorched earth possibility, a Sherman-burning-Atlanta move,” said Tom Kloza, chief market analyst at Turner Mason & Co. “It’s not probable.”

Neil Newman, managing director of Atris Advisory Japan, said hope remains that the Israel-Iran war could be a short conflict, with the thinking being “the one big hit by the Americans will be effective and then we’ll get back to sort of business as usual, in which case there is no need for an immediate, panicky type of reaction.”

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said a disruption to traffic through the strait by Iran would be “economic suicide” and would elicit a U.S. response.

When asked about that at a routine briefing in Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that “China is willing to strengthen communication with Iran and relevant parties to continue playing a constructive role in promoting de-escalation” of the conflict.

“The Persian Gulf and its adjacent waters are important international channels for cargo and energy trade. Maintaining security and stability in this region serves the common interests of the international community,” he said.

Of course, not everyone is sure about Iran’s next move.

Andy Lipow, a Houston analyst covering oil markets for 45 years, said countries are not always rational actors and that he wouldn’t be surprised if Tehran lashed out for political or emotional reasons.

“If the Strait of Hormuz was completely shut down, oil prices would rise to $120 to $130 a barrel,” said Lipow, predicting that that would translate to about $4.50 a gallon at the pump and hurt consumers in other ways.

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“It would mean higher prices for all those goods transported by truck, and it would be more difficult for the Fed to lower interest rates.”

The Federal Reserve has been hesitant to lower interest rates, and it’s been on hold this year after cutting at the end of last year, because it’s waiting to see how much President Donald Trump’s tariffs will hurt the economy and raise inflation.

Inflation has remained relatively tame recently, and it’s near the Fed’s target of 2%. A continued rise in oil and gasoline prices would put upward pressure on inflation. That in turn could keep the Fed on hold because cuts to rates can fan inflation higher, along with giving the economy a boost.

In the bond market, Treasury yields eased a little as hopes continue that the Fed may cut interest rates later this year.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.34% from 4.38% late Friday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for the Fed, fell more modestly to 3.89% from 3.90%.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell modestly across Europe after finishing mixed in Asia. France’s CAC 40 fell 1%, and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 0.7% for two of the world’s bigger moves.

Kurtenbach contributed from Bangkok. AP video journalist Mayuko Ono in Tokyo contributed.