Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson. And today is Friday, July 18th, 2025. This is USA Today is the exit.

Today Congress finalizes new cuts. Plus we check in on anti-Trump protests and how House lawmakers this week approved due crypto legislation.

President Donald Trump's push for $9 billion in spending cuts crossed the congressional finish line just after midnight and will now head to his desk for a signature.

The House approved the measure in response to Trump's official request.

Legislation cuts into public broadcasting

stations, PBS, and NPR, as well as the United States foreign aid efforts. Office of Management

and Budget Director Russell Votes said the amounts being slashed represent wasteful and unnecessary

spending in the White House's formal request to Congress. Lawmakers barely met a July 18th deadline

to get the bill approved. Otherwise, the current funding would have remained in place.

The Senate passed its version of the spending cut bill earlier in the week.

President Trump is denying a report in the Wall Street Journal that claims he wrote a letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.

Trump called the letter a fake in a social media post and said the story is false, malicious, and defamatory.

He's threatening to sue the newspaper.

Shortly afterward, Trump announced in another social media post that he's directing Attorney General Pam Bondi

to produce more Epstein documents amid public clamor for the records.

According to the journal, Trump's letter was part of a leather-bound birthday book with dozens of other letters that was presented to Epstein in 2003.

The Trump letter ends with happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret, according to the newspaper.

Trump's signature on the letter was written in the form of text inside a hand-drawn outline of a nude woman, the journal wrote.

Polling shows, voters aren't happy with how the president's team is dealing with the controversial

Jeffrey Epstein case. A new Kinnipiac University survey released on July 16th shows almost

two-thirds of voters disapprove of the administration's handling of the case. A week after

the Justice Department and the FBI released no new files and concluded that the convicted sex offender died by suicide in his jail cell.

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