Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that the U.S. is in talks with Iran and that Tehran has agreed to negotiate parts of its nuclear program it had previously refused to discuss, as lawmakers pressed the Trump administration for a strategy to end the war.

“Talks with Iran are not like talks with Switzerland,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “They require the use of intermediators.”

Rubio said there is a chance “today,” “tomorrow” or “next week” that Iran could engage on nuclear issues that it had refused to discuss “just a month ago, just a year ago.”

That does not guarantee a deal “acceptable to the Senate or acceptable to the American people,” Rubio said, but it would let the U.S. “truly test” how far Iran is willing to go.

The comments amounted to a striking shift in tone from the administration’s position a day earlier, when Trump told CNBC he did not care if Iran talks were over.

Rubio, who also serves as President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, appeared before the panel for his first public testimony on the Iran war since U.S. and Israeli strikes began Feb. 28.

He defended Trump’s decision to launch the war, saying Iran had been trying to build a “conventional shield” of missiles, drones and naval assets around its nuclear program.

“If you come and do anything about our nuclear program, we will overwhelm you with missiles, we will overwhelm you with drones, and we will overwhelm you with our navy,” Rubio said, describing Iran’s posture.

Rubio said Iran was seeking a “point of immunity” that Trump acted to deny.

He said Operation Epic Fury had been “highly successful,” dramatically reducing Iran’s ability to build missiles and drones, though he acknowledged Tehran “still [has] a lot of drones” because they are “easy to make.”

Rubio said reopening the Strait of Hormuz remains central to any de-escalation.

“They need to announce that they will no longer fire on commercial ships that are going through or threaten to fire on ships,” Rubio said.

He said Iran must declare the strait open, stop charging a toll, help remove mines and pledge not to fire on commercial vessels.

The hearing comes as Congress has grown increasingly uneasy over the war, its economic fallout and Trump’s authority to continue the conflict without authorization from lawmakers.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the committee’s top Democrat, accused the administration of avoiding congressional oversight.

“When I talk to my constituents, they asked for economic relief at home, not regime change in Havana or Caracas or Tehran,” Shaheen said.

She said the administration’s war powers notification was “not consultation” but “an attempt to avoid answering to this committee and this Congress about this war.”

The hearing — about the State Department’s budget —…

President Donald Trump‘s face should not be printed on a special edition U.S. passport, a group led by Democratic senators said in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday.

The group, led by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., in the letter shared first with CNBC, called on Rubio to halt plans to issue a limited number of passports featuring Trump to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.

“The U.S. passport has never — and should not now — feature an image of a sitting U.S. president. We ask you to halt these plans given the anti-democratic impact this decision will have,” the group wrote.

The letter was signed by Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Angus King, I-Maine, who caucuses with Democrats.

The State Department announced via X in April that it would release the limited edition passports and included a “sneak peak,” which featured Trump’s likeness superimposed over the Declaration of Independence.

Trump, with support from his congressional allies, has made a point of putting his name and likeness on a variety of things in his second term.

His image appears on the 2026 America the Beautiful National Parks annual pass and will appear on a 250th anniversary gold coin, while another effort is afoot to get his face on a special edition $1 coin. Also in honor of America’s 250th, Trump’s signature will appear on dollar bills, the first time a sitting president will leave such an imprint on paper currency in the history of the U.S. Federal departments around Washington, including Agriculture, Justice and Labor, have hung banners from their facades featuring Trump’s likeness.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are on a path toward unprecedented economic growth, lasting dollar dominance, and fiscal strength and stability,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement announcing the currency plan in March. “There is no more powerful way to recognize the historic achievements of our great country and President Donald J. Trump than U.S dollar bills bearing his name, and it is only appropriate that this historic currency be issued at the Semiquincentennial.”

Meanwhile, GOP lawmakers this Congress have introduced legislation to put his image on Mount Rushmore, rename Dulles International Airport in his honor and declare his birthday a national holiday. And Trump is pressing for a 250-foot “triumphal arch” to be built near Arlington National Cemetery and a $40 million “statue garden” of “American heroes” near the National Mall.

Democrats have attempted to push back on these proposals. Merkley in December introduced legislation with Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., to block placing Trump’s face on a $1 coin. In January, he teamed up with Rep. Sarah Elfreth,…

Congress members would be permanently banned from becoming lobbyists after they leave office under a new bipartisan bill, first reported by CNBC.

The legislation would not only ban senators and U.S. House members from being registered lobbyists, but would also prevent then from being compensated for trying to influence lawmakers and staff on behalf of companies or groups — closing a loophole that would allow former lawmakers to lobby without being a registered lobbyist.

The effort, from Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla. and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., comes as a growing number of lawmakers are speaking out against profiting from their elected positions. Numerous bipartisan bills have been introduced this Congress to ban things like members owning and trading stocks, or banning themselves from betting on prediction markets.

The new bill, which is unlikely to become law, would hold violators to a penalty of $50,000 per violation or up to five years in jail.

“Trust in our institutions is at an all-time low, and the revolving door between Capitol Hill and K Street is a big part of that,” Scott said in a statement to CNBC. “We need to restore the American people’s trust in their government, and that’s why I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan bill to put government clearly back on the side of the people.”

The U.S. Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a rule barring senators from trading on prediction markets effective immediately.

The move came amid rising concern about insider trading on prediction market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket, and about event contracts that can involve death or violence.

On April 22, Kalshi said it had suspended and fined one U.S. Senate candidate and two candidates for the House of Representatives for political insider trading on their own campaigns.

On April 23, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke, was arrested on an indictment accusing him of classified information to make bets on Polymarket related to the American military mission that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Van Dyke, who was involved in that mission, won nearly $410,000 on those wagers, according to the Department of Justice.

Earlier on Thursday, a group of Democratic members of Congress called on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to issue a rule “that prevents insider trading and corruption in the market and prohibits event contracts on the outcome of elections, war and military actions in the U.S. or abroad, sports, and government actions without a valid economic hedging interest.”

Disclosure: CNBC and Kalshi have a commercial relationship that includes a CNBC minority investment.

Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch are calling for a halt to the new version of ByteDance’s artificial intelligence app, Seedance, which generates videos of real people and licensed characters, raising copyright and intellectual property concerns.

Seedance 2.0 “is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs,” Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Welch, D-Vt., wrote in a letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo that was first obtained by CNBC.

Their letter is a sign of growing concerns on Capitol Hill about how AI companies are developing and using their models and whether proper protections are in place for those who generate the materials the models train from.

“Responsible global companies follow the law and respect core economic rights, including intellectual property and personal likeness protections,” Blackburn and Welch wrote. They cited examples of Seedance 2.0 creations, made after the platform went live Feb. 12, that included actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt and the Netflix show “Stranger Things.”

A ByteDance spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC that “ByteDance respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0. We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users.”

Lawmakers aren’t the only ones concerned. Hollywood groups including the Motion Picture Association sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance. The Information reported that ByteDance has paused its global launch of Seedance 2.0.

So far, Congress has largely taken a hands-off approach to regulating AI. Lawmakers say they do not want to create guardrails that would limit the ability of U.S. companies to innovate and remain ahead of foreign competitors. Several lawmakers said that because the industry is moving so quickly, legislation they were considering a few years ago would already be out of date and inadequate in covering advances such as agentic AI.

Yet senators including Blackburn and Welch have introduced targeted bills on AI. In August, the duo unveiled a bill to help artists protect their copyrighted works from being used to train AI.

Federal Reserve chairman nominee Kevin Warsh‘s chances of getting quickly confirmed by the Senate looked as gloomy as the weather in Washington on Thursday as he met with more senators in a bid to bolster his chances.

“It doesn’t look like such a nice day today,” Warsh quipped to a CNBC reporter in the Hart Senate Office Building, as heavy rain poured outside, on his way to a chat with Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D.

“Things are progressing well, good to see you,” Warsh said when asked how the meetings were going.

Warsh’s nomination by President Donald Trump is bogged down because of an effective blockade imposed by Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who sits on the Banking Committee. That panel is the first hurdle for would-be Fed board members such as Warsh.

Tillis has vowed to vote against passing along Warsh’s nomination or any other Fed nominee to the full Senate for a confirmation vote as long as a criminal investigation into Fed Chair Jerome Powell remains in progress.

Powell has said the criminal probe by the Department of Justice is the result of him and other Fed board members refusing to cut interest rates as quickly and as drastically as Trump has demanded.

Tillis’ stance could prevent Warsh from getting a vote by the Senate to confirm him as head of the central bank until he retires at the end of his term in January.

A bipartisan group of senators on Wednesday called on the Government Accountability Office to investigate the Department of Justice‘s release and redactions of documents related to disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The letter, signed by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, alleges the DOJ did not comply with a law that aimed to compel the release of the Epstein files while protecting victims.

“Contrary to Congress’s explicit directive to protect victims, these records included email addresses and nude photos in which the names and faces of publicly-identified and non-public victims could be identified,” the lawmakers wrote. “But when it came to information identifying powerful business and political figures who are alleged coconspirators or material witnesses, DOJ appears to have heavily redacted those records.”

The GAO is an independent, non-partisan legislative branch agency with authority to audit and investigate the federal government.

The DOJ has been repeatedly criticized for withholding parts of the Epstein files from the public in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which President Donald Trump signed in November after months of opposition. That law mandated the full release of documents by Dec. 19.

While the DOJ has released millions of documents to date, it blew past the December deadline and many more Epstein files entries have not yet been made public, prompting outcry from both Republican and Democratic members of Congress.

Lawmakers in both the House and Senate have called for the DOJ’s Inspector General to investigate the department’s handling of the Epstein files. The House Oversight Committee last week voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi as part of its probe into Epstein, who died in 2019.

The letter asks Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown to review the “protocols and practices” the DOJ used for the review, redaction and release of the Epstein files and to report back to Congress. It specifically asks the GAO to investigate whether the release of the “files has served to cover up child sexual abuse.”

“This horrific scandal is one where powerful, wealthy men groomed, abused, and raped young women, men, and children,” the senators wrote “It is critical to understand what led to DOJ’s failure to redact the victims’ information and re-victimize those individuals while violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act in its redactions of information related to their alleged abusers.”

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Shelley Moore Capito and ranking Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse are meeting to discuss reforming the federal energy permitting process, American Petroleum Institute president Mike Sommers told CNBC.

“We have both the Republican in the United States Senate … Shelley Moore Capito, and the Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, who [are] responsible for permitting reform, finally meeting again to discuss how we get this done this year,” Sommers told CNBC.

A person familiar with the negotiations, granted anonymity to discuss the details, said they “will be talking frequently this week about permitting since negotiations are back on,” but was unaware of any designated meeting time. The person noted committee staff are negotiating regularly.

Capito, R-W.V., and Whitehouse, D-R.I., talking regularly comes after Democrats publicly announced a thaw in permitting talks. Democrats walked away from talks last year after the Trump administration ordered work to stop on a slew of fully permitted offshore wind projects, but announced they would resume talks last week after “recent developments [that] are indicative of a positive direction from the Trump administration.”

Permitting reform has been a long-running saga on Capitol Hill. Republicans have long wanted to speed up permitting for building energy infrastructure and blunt environmental safeguard laws. Democrats want to make it easier for renewable energy projects to get built out. A bipartisan compromise fell apart at the end of the last Congress.

Capito, through a spokesperson, declined to comment. Whitehouse did not respond to a request for comment.

The term “permitting reform” has become a catchall phrase for a bevy of bills and proposals that would cut red tape to speed the building of energy infrastructure. Any deal would likely include changes to longstanding environmental laws, along with expedited approvals for both oil and gas and renewables.

The tech industry, meanwhile, wants permitting reform to accelerate the buildout of energy that feeds power-hungry data centers. And with energy costs skyrocketing due to strain from data centers, building more energy capacity in the U.S. has become a key priority for lawmakers hoping to tackle affordability.

The House last year passed a permitting bill called the SPEED Act to blunt the National Environmental Policy Act. The Senate is negotiating separately from the House.

Sommers said the restarted talks are indicative of a potential breakthrough on permitting this year.

“We actually have a lot of confidence that we can get it done this year, because I believe it is a political imperative for politicians to finally get this done because energy prices are rising, and the only thing that they can do to get…

Six Democratic senators told the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in a previously unreported letter that they have strong concerns about prediction market contracts “that incentivize physical injury or death,” saying the contracts “present dangerous national security risks.”

The senators urged CFTC Chairman Michael Selig in the letter sent Monday to “clearly reiterate that the CFTC will categorically prohibit any contract that resolves upon or closely correlates to an individual’s death.”

The letter notes that under federal commodity regulations, the CFTC already “categorically prohibits” contracts that involve or reference terrorism, assassination, war or similar actions.

The letter was sent as prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi have become increasingly popular and as questions have been raised about how those markets should be regulated, whether they are contributing to a rise in gambling addiction, and about the risk of people with inside information taking positions on contracts.

The letter notes that the CFTC “has cleared the way” for Polymarket to reenter the U.S. market after U.S. users being ostensibly blocked from accessing contracts on the company’s offshore exchange.

The Democrats who signed the letter are Sens. Adam Schiff of California, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Tim Kaine of Virginia, and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen.

The CFTC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the letter, which cites three contracts offered by Polymarket in recent months relating to a NASA spaceship launch, the fate of Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“These recent events highlight the lack of internal controls and safeguards to prevent insiders from profiting off of non-public information, and direct profiteering off of human suffering,” the letter said.

The CFTC last week filed a legal brief in a federal appeals court asserting that the commission has exclusive jurisdiction over the U.S. commodity derivatives markets and that individual states had no role in exercising such oversight.

“The CFTC will no longer sit idly by while overzealous state governments undermine the agency’s exclusive jurisdiction over these markets by seeking to establish statewide prohibitions on these exciting products,” Selig wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed about the filing.

The senators’ letter noted that one of Polymarket’s contracts asked if Artemis II, the upcoming NASA crewed spaceflight mission, would explode.

That contract, which Polymarket listed on Jan. 20, saw the bet “Yes” trading as high as 8% before it “was subsequently renamed and ultimately withdrawn due to public…

Three Democratic senators are calling on Apple and Google to suspend the X and Grok apps from their stores, at least until owner Elon Musk disallows them from letting users create and share nonconsensual, explicit images and depictions of child sexual abuse.

In an open letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Friday, Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico said the tech giants should, “immediately remove the X and Grok apps from their app stores until the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk, addresses these disturbing and likely illegal activities.”

“Turning a blind eye to X’s egregious behavior would make a mockery of your moderation practices,” they wrote, adding that a failure to take action would “undermine your claims in public and in court that your app stores offer a safer user experience than letting users download apps directly to their phones.”

Musk’s xAI, the developer of Grok and parent of social media platform X, responded to CNBC’s request for comment with an automated reply. Google and Apple didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Grok and X have been letting users easily generate and widely share “deepfake” explicit, sexualized content that includes people who never gave permission for their images to be used in such manner. Grok has also been used to generate images that denigrate people on the basis of their race or ethnicity.

In one recent example, as The Times of London reported, “A descendant of Holocaust survivors was ‘digitally stripped'” by Grok after users prompted the AI tool to generate an image of her in a bikini standing outside of Auschwitz.

The issues have sparked widespread criticism and regulatory probes by foreign governments in Europe, Malaysia, Australia and India. However, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice have yet to say whether they will investigate xAI.

On Jan. 3, Musk and X issued statements saying that “anyone using or prompting Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content.”

Apple and Google both have stringent guidelines for app developers that would require them to prevent the uploading and sharing of images depicting child sexual abuse, and other explicit or harmful content.

Social media and messaging apps including Tumblr and Telegram have been previously suspended by the Apple app store for failures to filter a variety of inappropriate content.

On Friday, X reportedly made Grok AI image generation features available for use by paying subscribers only. However, Grok’s standalone app and website still allowed users to prompt Grok to digitally undress, sexualize or degrade people without first obtaining consent to use their photos or clips.

CNN…