Presented by BP.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Playbook Deputy Editor Zach Stanton. It is finally Friday, February 7th, and here's what's driving the day.

Despite holding the Senate floor for 30 hours, Democrats weren't able to stop Republicans from confirming Russell vote as the director of office and management and budget. Last night, in a 53-47 vote, the Senate-confirmed vote, returning him to the

influential office he held during President Donald Trump's first term. In the time since then,

of course, a lot has happened. And where he earned a reputation in the Trump 1.0 era for his

desire to take a wrecking ball to the administrative state,

critics worry that this time he'll be emboldened, with fewer guardrails stopping him and a more

experienced administration working in concert with him. Stay tuned for that to develop as a major

news story in the days and weeks ahead. But what is primarily driving the day to day is a high-speed

race between House and Senate Republicans as they scramble to roll out competing plans to enact Trump's agenda and to win over Trump's favor for their own side of the Hill's way of doing business.

Joining me now to talk about that is the one and only senior Congress editor, Mike DeBonez.

Good morning, Mike.

Good morning, Zach. Thank you for remembering the senior.

It's an important part of the title. It's a vital modifier. So there was a major meeting at the White House yesterday, a bit of a marathon meeting between House Republicans and Donald Trump. What went down and how does that set the stage for what's going

to happen today? Well, we don't exactly know what went down, which is how we know that it was

actually might have been a productive meeting and not just something that people say as a

productive meeting because the sort of like, you know, rule, you know, the the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the

effortistic rule of Washington meetings is, uh, the more you know about what happened in

them, probably the less fruitful it was. So, um, they were in there for five hours. So what

we understand is that they went in a little bit before noon. Trump came in top of the meeting, said,

you guys have a lot to talk about.

I got other meetings to do.

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