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Senate GOP Agenda Derailed by Revolt Over $1.8B DOJ Fund; Trump: A.I. Exec. Order Should not be a "Blocker" for Technology; White House Postpones A.I. Executive Order, Again; Airline Passengers Flying into the U.S. from Areas Affected by Ebola Must Land at Dulles Airport; Harvard to Make it More Difficult for Undergrads to Earn A's; 3-3:30p ET

Aired May 21, 2026 - 15:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[15:00:32]

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: Republican Revolt: Frustration on Capitol Hill over the so-called anti-weaponization fund is derailing attempts by Senate GOP lawmakers to move forward on their agenda.

Plus, searching for answers after: After months of delaying its release, a version of the Democratic National Committee's long-awaited autopsy on the 2024 election is finally out. We'll speak with a Democratic lawmaker about the findings.

And Summer Sticker Shock: Just as millions of Americans prepare to hit the road for Memorial Day weekend, gas prices climbed to their highest in almost four years. We're following these major developing stories and many more, all coming in right here to CNN NEWS CENTRAL.

BORIS SANCHEZ, CNN HOST: We start this hour with breaking developments from Capitol Hill where Senate Republicans are revolting over the Trump administration's new anti-weaponization fund. It appears that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche could not stem mounting opposition over this fund despite meeting with members of the Senate GOP today. The pushback so intense apparently that Senators have now canceled votes for the rest of the week and left early for the Memorial Day recess derailing plans for a major legislation including a reconciliation bill that would have funded ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Let's get right to CNN's Manu Raju who's live on Capitol Hill for us.

Manu, just this week Trump proved how much power he has over the Republican Party when he got several Republican elected officials that were running for re-election ousted in primaries. It's notable to now see some of the members of his party now defying his wishes.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes, and some of the members who actually he pushed out of office including Senator Bill Cassidy, the one who lost his primary on Saturday night over a Trump- backed challenger among the many Republican senators voicing serious objections to this $1.8 billion fund that the DOJ announced earlier this week to pay out people who claim that they have been aggrieved by the Biden Justice Department.

Many Republican senators say that that money, you know, question why the money is there to begin with and say they should be limited in a number of ways, namely that January 6th rioters, particularly people who are convicted of assaulting law enforcement, that they should not have access to taxpayer money as part of this settlement fund. Many of them questioned very sharply Todd Blanche in a very tense closed-door meeting.

I'm told by the people who attended that meeting that for more than two hours he was grilled by one Republican senator after another asking for more details. Blanche was not -- his answers were not satisfactory to these members and many of them said they could not move ahead with this major bill, dealing with separate issues altogether, 10s of billions of dollars for immigration enforcement, that they could not move ahead with that because there were still questions about how to deal with this $1.8 billion fund and whether they needed to add provisions in that bill to rein in the administration's handling of that $1.8 billion funds.

Given that they were at odds, they decided to leave town until June with this issue hanging over their head. And I caught up with a number of Republican senators, including ones like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who were up for re-election and they made very clear that they opposed the administration's plans.

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SEN. SUSAN COLLINS (R-ME): I do not support the weaponization fund as it has been described. I do not believe that individuals who were convicted of violence against police officers on January 6th should be entitled to reimbursement for their legal fees.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R-LA): I just don't know how this puppy dog will work. I'm not sure where the money's coming from. I'm not sure who's going to decide. I'm not sure how this works with respect to our court system. I don't know -- I don't know anything about anything.

RAJU: And you think this weaponization fund is a waste of taxpayer dollars?

REP. KEVIN KILEY (R-CA): I think that would be putting it mildly. Very unclear what, if any, oversight there's going to be as far as how this money gets dispersed. So, yes, I'm going to be using every tool of oversight I have to, you know, make sure that this does not go forward.

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[15:05:00]

RAJU: And with the margins so narrow in the House and Senate, the Republican leaders simply calculated that they could not move forward because they didn't have the votes to proceed. Not just because of this issue, but also because of the additional $1 billion in money to pay for security dealing with the new ballroom that President Trump wants built on White House grounds. Many of them say that simply did not belong in a bill dealing with immigration enforcement.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told me, he said, "somebody described it as a galactic blunder and I think that's probably true."

SANCHEZ: Wow. A galactic blunder. Manu Raju live on the Hill for us. Thank you so much.

Let's go to the White House now with CNN Senior White House Correspondent Kristen Holmes.

Kristen, why did the Trump administration decide to reveal this settlement when it did as you know, Congress is already dealing with so many contentious issues?

KRISTEN HOLMES, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: And Boris, that's one question we've been asking all the senior White House officials. And right now, the answer seems to be that they just did not expect this level of blowback. If you just take a look at what the fund is meant to do, they thought that a lot of these Republican senators, Republican lawmakers who had potentially even been caught up in President Trump's legal issues or who had defended President Trump saying that the legal issues brought against him were weaponization, that they would get on board with some kind of payout to people who were, quote-unquote, "weaponized by the Justice Department."

So, it seems as though they were very surprised by this level of pushback from Republicans. And you have to keep in mind that among Trump's immediate circle, this has been something that they had been having conversations about, again, not this fund in particular, but some kind of way to pay back people who they say were these victims of weaponization by the government.

The other thing to note here is what we've already seen from the Department of Justice that hasn't gotten an enormous level of pushback. For example, Michael Flynn, he reached a settlement with the Department of Justice for $1.2 million, saying that he was wrongfully accused by the Justice Department. That in itself kind of went unnoticed. Obviously, there were stories about it, but there wasn't this enormous amount of Republican pushback to the fact that Michael Flynn ended up settling with the Justice Department, Trump's Justice Department, and getting this money in return.

So, they did not anticipate this level of having to wheel and deal. And remember, one of the things the White House does is they often kind of try to talk to the members before something is announced. They try to get ahead of it. The other big question here is if the timing was just decided by the Justice Department, not by the White House, that it's hard to kind of make that claim, given what we've seen with the Justice Department and the White House really operating in lockstep.

SANCHEZ: Kristen Holmes, life force of the White House, thank you so much. So,, we should pull back the curtain, tell our viewers we were expecting a very different 3 P.M. hour than we got. There was supposed to be the signing ceremony at the White House for a new executive order on artificial intelligence until that abruptly got postponed. And the order has now been delayed several times as administration officials seek to oversee the powerful and rapidly developing technology. Many experts continue to insist there does need to be some oversight of A.I.

KEILAR: Sources say that the new executive order eventually will likely include A.I. companies agreeing to share advanced models with the federal government before they're available to the public. But given the timeframe when they would be shared, meaning how long before they become public, that's still being worked out. Here's what Trump said when he was asked why the signing was delayed yet again.

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DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I didn't like certain aspects of it. I postponed it. I think it gets in the way of, you know, we're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of that lead. We have a very substantial on A.I. It's causing -- it's causing tremendous good and it's also bringing in a lot of jobs, tremendous numbers of jobs. Again, we have more people working right now than we've ever had. I really thought that could have been a blocker and I want to make sure that it's not.

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KEILAR: We're joined now by CNN Contributor, technology journalist and host of "The Rip Current" podcast, Jacob Ward. I wonder, Jacob, what this says, this delay, these issues, what all of this kind of says just about what the stakes are here?

JACOB WARD, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Well, it's an enormous reversal, right? This White House has in the past, Brianna, been the -- the -- absolutely, the most sort of anti-regulatory White House we've seen when it comes to technology. They've absolutely -- you know, they tried at one point to outlaw state laws about A.I. And so, this is a big reversal, the idea that they would bring in some sort of federal oversight of the big A.I. models.

I have to say, when I saw the guest list for this executive order signing that include the CEOs of -- of some of these companies, you know, it'd be really hard to clear the calendar for any one or two of those people, much less the incredible list of people. So, I -- I can't imagine that that group is the friendliest to this executive order.

[15:10:04]

And I'm not sure how eager they are to be seen next to President Trump signing the oversight of the core of their business. But, you know, that's -- that's -- we don't know exactly why this thing fell apart. But certainly, this is an enormous about face from where the Trump administration has been on A.I.

SANCHEZ: So, what do you make of the President's explanation that this could hinder specifically American progress when it comes to A.I.? WARD: To be perfectly honest with you, I -- it sounds like he's

winging it. I don't believe that personally. I think that the -- the ways in which -- I mean, it may be that there's something inside his administration, some sort of tension around this stuff. But the -- the -- the assumption I have is that because this is such an enormous change in how A.I. would be governed in this country, that the -- the friction here, I can't imagine, comes from President Trump. I have to assume that the friction comes from the companies themselves, which, you know, as you'll recall, guys, you know, supported President Trump in large part, you know, contributed money to his ballroom, gave him gold statues in the Oval Office because he was essentially promising to stay out of their way. Now, the idea that his administration can get in their way, I can't imagine that the relations are what they were.

KEILAR: Well, explain why there is an interest in the government regulating this and this idea of having them show them sort of the models, having -- giving them a look under the hood before those advanced models become public. Why would they want to do that? And why does the time span of, say, 14 days versus 45 days matter so much?

WARD: Well, the -- the -- I think, the -- the precipitating event seems to be a couple of things. One is the departure of David Sacks, who was the A.I. czar at the White House. He was still very closely connected and, according to lots of reporting, still closely invested in A.I. as an industry. He has stepped away as the A.I. czar and has been replaced now by the treasury secretary and the chief of staff.

And so, that change may have something to do with this. And you have to remember Anthropic's release of Mythos, this new model it created and gave to a very small group of companies and some government officials to show off this very frightening capability. It seems to have, according to the company, to penetrate all sorts of cybersecurity, basically can -- can find the weakness in any digital armor.

That I think, combined with this change of -- of leadership when it comes to A.I. at the White House, has to have something to do with this. The frightening prospect of a private company owning a piece of software that can basically blow open any password you have. I'm sure that had a lot to do with this.

SANCHEZ: That is no doubt unsettling, as is the idea that A.I. is going to remake the economy, remake jobs and make graduate and college degrees worthless. Perhaps that's why we're seeing students at several colleges booing commencement speakers talking about the growing impact of A.I. I wonder what you make of these repeated episodes of the boo birds coming out at these commencement speakers.

WARD: I mean, you really can't blame these kids, right? Everybody in the world is telling them right now that their jobs are coming apart. Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic, saying that perhaps as many as half of their capabilities will somehow be blown apart. Sorry, guys, I lost my camera there for a second. You know, the idea that -- that as much as half of white-collar jobs may disappear, according to the founder of one of these companies, I mean, you know, who's to -- who wouldn't be starting to boo the commencement speaker that says, hey, kids, you should adapt to this.

You know, it's like saying you should adapt to some sort of pestilence or to, you know, suddenly losing your house. And so, you know, the -- over and over again, we've seen it at an arts and humanities graduation. The only place I didn't see anyone boo was at the Carnegie Mellon graduation, where Jensen Huang, the head of NVIDIA, spoke. But those are the kids that are probably going to work for him someday.

So, yes, it makes perfect sense to me that -- that these kids would not want to hear from their -- their commencement speakers that this job killing technology, as it's been described to them, is suddenly going to be an irrefutable part of their future, you guys.

KEILAR: Yes. Just think about it. They've all been through COVID as students. And now they're being told, hey, you're going to go through A.I. in your professional lives. Like, it's really going to be unsettling.

SANCHEZ: Plus, the degree ...

WARD: That's right. Get used to it, right? And get used to it is their -- is their thing.

KEILAR: Yes.

WARD: That's right.

SANCHEZ: The degree that you spent all these years working on, that you're being celebrated for today, may literally go up in flames in a matter of years.

KEILAR: Yeah. That -- it's a bummer.

SANCHEZ: Maybe not literally, but figuratively.

WARD: Like -- and no one asking -- and no one asking your permission, right? No one's saying, hey, how do you guys feel about this? Do you want to vote on this? No presidential candidate, you know, offering a change of that. No Senate candidates offering a change on that. There's no Democratic input here. So, what do they have to do but boo.

KEILAR: Yes. And they're letting their voices be heard.

[15:15:00]

Jacob Ward, always great to speak with you. Thank you so much.

Still to come, some new screening measures to curb the spread of this deadly Ebola outbreak that we're monitoring. U.S.-bound flights with passengers who visited the affected region will have to land at a specific airport. And we're going to take you there.

SANCHEZ: Plus, fighting grade inflation. Why Harvard is making it more difficult for students to get straight A's.

And later, millions of Americans traveling this Memorial Day weekend are going to have to pay the highest price for gas in almost four years. We've got the details for you after a quick break.

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KEILAR: Flights into the U.S. with passengers who have recently been in the part -- the part of Africa where Ebola has been spreading are now required to land at Dulles International Airport just outside of Washington, D.C., where we are. At least 10 CDC staffers will be deployed to screen them on arrival. The World Health Organization says the outbreak is a public health emergency with nearly 600 suspected cases and nearly 150 deaths across the DRC and Uganda. We have Brian Todd who is live for us there at Dulles Airport.

Brian, what will these screening measures involve and -- and when do they start?

BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Brianna, there are several different steps involved in this screening. This operation pretty much just ramping up right now. A person at the CDC with knowledge of the plan tells CNN that at least 10 CDC staffers are either on hand or are going to be on hand here at Dulles Airport to help with the screening. That according to one person at CDC who spoke to CNN.

Now to emphasize again this directive that has just come down. This is from the State Department, CDC, and the Department of Homeland Security. All U.S.-bound flights carrying passengers from an Ebola- infected region of Africa now have to land here at Dulles where some of those passengers will undergo screening. This requirement, according to the State Department, applies to all passengers including U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who have been in one or all three of these countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan.

Now, we have to emphasize these are not necessarily people who have been exposed or infected with the Ebola virus that we know of, just people who have been flying in from that region just to make sure that there is no issue. Now, the CDC just moments ago, guys, issued us a statement saying this, quote, "To date, no suspected, probable, or confirmed cases of Ebola have been reported in the United States, and the risk of Ebola domestically is low. However, public health entry screening is part of a layered approach that, when used with other public health measures already in place to detect symptomatic arriving passengers, can slow and reduce the spread of disease into the United States."

Now, as far as the different steps, there are several steps that they're going to be basically employing to screen possible people who have possibly been exposed but have certainly been flying in from that region. (INAUDIBLE) passengers are going to be escorted to screening areas here at Dulles Airport near the international arrival and customs area. They're going to have to answer a questionnaire about their travel and about possible symptoms. Then, they're going to be observed by CDC staff for signs of illness. The staff is going to take their temperatures and, again, do some other screening there. So, these are measures really just to, you know, make sure that people

flying in from the region are all coming into one place here at Dulles International Airport. And, again, it's just from those three countries that Ebola-infected region, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda. And as of now, an important fact from the CDC, no suspected, probable, or confirmed cases of Ebola have been reported in the United States.

KEILAR: Yes.

TODD: Brianna, Boris.

KEILAR: Important to be very careful with this disease. Brian Todd, live for us from Dulles, thank you.

Well, if you think getting straight A's at Harvard is tough, it's actually about to get a lot harder. Why the university's faculty voted to change the way that students are graded next.

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SANCHEZ: Earning an A could soon get much harder for Harvard undergrads. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences says it will cap the number of A's awarded to no more than 20 percent of students in any class plus four additional students. And there will be no limits on grades of A minus or lower. This is set to go into effect beginning in fall of 2027. And according to university data cited by faculty who supported this measure, more than 60 percent of all undergraduate grades awarded in recent years were A's. Let's discuss with history professor at Harvard University, Alison Frank Johnson.

Professor, thank you so much for being with us. I understand that when this came up for a vote, you voted no. Why?

ALISON FRANK JOHNSON, HISTORY PROFESSOR, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Well, that's true. I thought that it distorted the purpose of teaching and is placing too much emphasis on comparing students to one another and not enough emphasis on what they actually achieve in the classroom.

SANCHEZ: So, when you say it places too much emphasis on students compared to one another, why is that -- what is it truly that this measure is trying to achieve?

JOHNSON: So, I think what this measure is designed to achieve is to allow us to compare our students against one another more effectively. So, when 60 percent of students are getting A's, that doesn't mean that they're not doing truly superlative work. They are probably actually getting fewer A's than they did in high school before they came to Harvard because of the kinds of students that we end up admitting. But it makes it very difficult to rank them against one another.

So, if you have a prize that's supposed to go to the student with the highest GPA, it's difficult when too many students are eligible. And so, communicating how our students have performed in a given class relative to other students is important if you think that our primary goal as educators is to rank our students against one another and come up with a list that an employer could use or a graduate school could use.

But if you think that what we're trying to do is teach them and get them all to achieve whatever our course goals are to master the subject material and to produce work of extraordinary distinction, then we can't really predict how many students will be able to do that in any given classroom. And in fact, it might be that in classrooms with the best teaching, that number will be higher than in classrooms with less effective teaching.

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SANCHEZ: That's an interesting point, I did not think about. So, how are you ...