News from the Trump administration

Egypt's president and foreign minister met with White House adviser Jared Kushner hours after the Trump administration cut or delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Cairo over human rights concerns. Kushner, who is also President Donald Trump's son-in-law, was in Cairo as part of a Middle East tour aimed at exploring ways to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Trump's emergency management director said he's pushing for an overhaul of disaster relief so that states, cities and homeowners bear more of the costs, and less of the risk falls on the federal government. Brock Long, the administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said taxpayers shouldn't pay for homes that keep flooding, and the threshold for triggering federal public assistance after a disaster might be too low.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell countered a report that he has not spoken to Trump since Aug. 9 amid heightened tension between them. "The president and I, and our teams, have been and continue to be in regular contact about our shared goals," McConnell said.

The idea that the Republican National Committee would stay neutral in primaries and support the party's nominees was once a given. But Trump has put the GOP in an uncomfortable position with his attacks on fellow Republicans. The president has described one of his own party's most vulnerable senators as "weak on crime" and "toxic." And the RNC chairwoman has warned that Republicans who oppose Trump offer a "cautionary tale." But for all the barbs against Republicans who criticize Trump, the national party is fully prepared to offer them support if they survive their primaries. That includes Sen. Jeff Flake, who even wrote a book that rebukes the president.

More than a quarter of a blue-ribbon panel of experts that advises Trump on infrastructure security submitted a resignation letter to him because, they wrote, his actions jeopardize U.S. security and "undermine" America's "moral infrastructure." Seven Democratic members are leaving the 27-person National Infrastructure Advisory Council.

The emerging tradition of presidential conference calls with hundreds of rabbis in advance of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur was thrown into jeopardy on Wednesday in a sign of the still-intensifying backlash against Trump's response to the violence this month in Charlottesville, Va. Four coalitions of rabbis, hailing from different strains of American Judaism, publicly spurned Trump, denouncing him and announcing that they would not participate in any conference call before the Jewish holidays next month.

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