The Senate on Thursday confirmed Alex Acosta as secretary of Labor, filling out President Trump's Cabinet as he approaches his 100th day in office.

The 60-38 vote confirms Acosta to the post. Once sworn in as the nation's 27th secretary of Labor, the son of Cuban immigrants will lead a sprawling agency that enforces more than 180 federal laws covering about 10 million employers and 125 million workers.

Acosta has been a federal prosecutor, a civil rights chief at the Justice Department and a member of the National Labor Relations Board. He will arrive at the top post with relatively little clear record on some of the top issues facing the administration over key pocketbook issues, such as whether to expand the pool of American workers eligible for overtime pay.

President Trump on Thursday handed over to Argentine President Mauricio Macri a trove of declassified documents from the South American nation's military-led "dirty war."

The documents contain hundreds of pages of presidential notes, CIA memos, FBI reports and other records that in many cases chronicle human rights atrocities committed by Argentine military officials when they ruled the country from 1976 to 1983.

The dirty war was backed at least tacitly by U.S. officials during that era, historians say. An estimated 30,000 dissidents were killed, and untold thousands of children were kidnapped.

Congress hopes to avoid a government shutdown by swiftly approving a stopgap spending bill Friday to allow negotiations to continue for another week on a longer-term funding deal.

Progress continued in the talks to finalize the must-pass legislation and avert a crisis as President Trump prepares to mark his first 100 days in office.

The deal is likely to include a sizable boost of about $15 billion in defense spending supported by both parties, about half the amount Trump was seeking for the rest of the 2017 fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

To read the polls and hear the pundits, President Trump’s first 100 days have been an utter disaster, ranking among the worst in history. But that’s not how Karen Malady sees it.

The 59-year-old accountant was drawn to Trump’s unconventional candidacy from the start, unlike other Republicans who came around reluctantly. She saw him as an outsider and disrupter, and his first months in office proved her right, she said, about that and other things too.

Like no matter how much he tries, some won’t ever give Trump a fair shake.

The Pentagon said two American troops were killed and a third wounded Wednesday night during a raid against Islamic State’s affiliate in eastern Afghanistan, near the site where an 11-ton U.S. bomb was dropped earlier this month.

The service members were conducting an operation alongside Afghan forces in Nangarhar province, where a U.S.-backed offensive is underway against Islamic State-Khorasan, or ISIS-K. Khorasan is the historic name for a region that encompassed parts of modern-day Afghanistan.

"The fight against ISIS-K is important for the world, but sadly, it is not without sacrifice,” said Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “On behalf of all U.S. forces and our coalition partners, I offer our deepest sympathies to the families, friends, and fellow service members of our fallen comrades.”

In proposing to slash business taxes and enact a tax reform of historic proportions, Trump administration officials say they will rely largely on economic growth to make up for the trillions of dollars of lost tax revenue.

But hardly any economist or tax policy analyst outside the administration thinks that the core business piece of President Trump’s plan — a reduction in the corporate income tax rate to 15% from the current 35% — will generate anywhere near the growth, job creation and investment needed to pay for itself.

That economic reality makes it highly unlikely that Trump will be able to get his tax proposal in its current form through Congress, even with support from his fellow Republicans. And it exposes some inherently contradictory elements in the president’s approach.

Bracing to convey a sense of momentum to President Trump’s sluggish legislative agenda, the White House unveiled a plan for what it called “one of the biggest tax cuts in American history” Wednesday, just ahead of the administration's first 100 days in office.

The one-page outline, touted as an overhaul of the tax code, bears the hallmark of other early Trump proposals: a broad-brush overview of bold goals that is intended to serve as an opening bid with Congress rather than a fully baked policy proposal.

The plan was immediately met with skepticism from budget groups and faces a daunting future on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers from both parties are wary that the White House hasn’t said how it would pay for the cuts, which likely would provide the greatest benefits to higher-income earners and corporations.

Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn's legal troubles worsened Thursday when a House committee disclosed that the Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether the retired Army three-star general violated military rules by accepting foreign payments.

Flynn was warned in 2014, when he was retiring from the military, not to accept payments from foreign governments without advance approval from the Pentagon, according to documents released Thursday by a House committee.

Flynn subsequently accepted more than $500,000 from a Russian government-owned broadcasting company and from a lobbying company representing Turkey, according to the committee.

Republicans controlling the House have unveiled a stopgap bill to keep the government open past a shutdown deadline of midnight Friday. 

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) says the one-week measure would buy time to wrap up talks on a $1-trillion-plus catchall spending bill that's the center of bipartisan talks on Capitol Hill. He says those negotiations are going well. 

The temporary bill is likely to come to a House vote Friday in the expectation the Senate would immediately send it to President Trump for his signature.