Washington, DC

1. Hegseth in the hot seat
2. Behind aides’ Balkans trip
3. Big names on the trail
4. Trump’s vision for science
5. HHS’ thorny vaccine work
6. Fiery debate night

PDB: ICE shoots man in New York

Trump swears in Sonderling as labor secretary … WSJ: Iran, Houthis launch fresh attacks … South African jurist Navi Pillay wins Nobel Peace Prize

Dems unite around Hegseth impeachment

Congressional Democrats aren’t eager to impeach President Donald Trump. Pete Hegseth is a different story, Semafor’s Nicholas Wu reports. After fighting bruising battles over a Trump impeachment during the president’s first term, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other leaders have been reluctant to talk about another go. But Democrats are increasingly aligning to call for the defense secretary’s ouster or resignation as the Iran war drags on. And targeting Cabinet secretaries could be a pressure release valve for party lawmakers who are itching for action that would animate their base. “I 100% believe Pete Hegseth needs to be impeached and removed from office because not only is he the worst secretary of defense in American history, he is a dangerous war criminal,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., who said it should be one of the caucus’ “top three priorities” next year.

— Nicholas Wu

Trump-tied firm’s role in Balkans trip

Continental, a Washington-based law and lobbying firm with close ties to Trump’s circle, helped arrange his political advisers’ recent trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina, three people familiar with the trip told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller. Republika Srpska, whose Russia-friendly Serbian leaders have sought to align themselves with Trump, agreed earlier this year to pay $35,000 monthly to Continental to organize “meetings and discussions and establish relationships with key stakeholders in the executive and legislative branches,” according to a Justice Department filing. Since then, former Trump campaign adviser Alex Garcia has helped arrange meetings with White House officials like Walker Barrett, Jarrod Agen, and Richard Walters, per another DOJ filing. A Continental spokesperson said Susie Wiles’ daughter Katie, who also works at the firm, traveled to Republika Srpska in August for a separate reason: helping a US-based company complete “a feasibility study.”

Surrogate season hits the midterms

Get ready for the big-name surrogate season of the midterm campaign. Today, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., will be with GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan. Next up, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., will host three big rallies with Maine Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson this weekend, giving Jackson the type of boost that Sanders gave Graham Platner earlier this year. Trump will head to Ohio to rally with Republican Sen. Jon Husted on Monday, then go all the way to Alaska the next day to appear with GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan. (Semafor readers already knew Trump was heading to Alaska, a few days after Vice President JD Vance appeared there.) Further down the line, former President Barack Obama will rally with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan on Oct. 24, an event that comes after CNN reported on El-Sayed’s past dim view of Obama’s presidency.

— Burgess Everett

Semafor has announced new members and co-chairs of the Global Advisory Board for Silicon Valley & The World, a first-of-its-kind, multiyear initiative connecting the leaders building transformative technologies with the policymakers shaping their deployment.

As the board expands, Sam Altman joins Silicon Valley & The World as a co-chair. The expanded board includes more than 50 global figures, among them Olugbenga “GB” Agboola, Bhavish Aggarwal, Pedro Azagra, John Ketchum, Pratyush Kumar, Yann LeCun, Fei-Fei Li, Amjad Masad, Penny S. Pritzker, Kevin Rudd, Eric Schmidt, KR Sridhar, Mati Staniszewski, and Raj Subramaniam.

Designed to move the conversation beyond debate and toward action, Silicon Valley & The World will convene more than 350 founders, CEOs, investors, and policymakers in November, bringing together leaders with the ability to fund, scale, and implement new ideas.

Trump seeks to reshape tech R&D

A White House science summit on Wednesday gave Trump his latest opportunity to align with the AI industry. Trump and other administration officials touted announcements that included $2.4 billion in industry commitments to provide AI tools and compute for the Energy Department’s Genesis Mission. The White House also launched regional AI computing hubs; the department and the National Science Foundation added $100 million for AI work. It’s all part of Trump’s goal to reshape US science and tech research after university funding cuts and high-skilled visa curbs fundamentally shifted R&D — a trend that some have argued threatens US dominance. “We ended DEI through scientific grants from the federal government, and we now support only the gold standard of science,” Trump said at the US Institute of Peace. Earlier, he posted that anyone not using “super intelligence” to refer to AI is considered an “enemy.”

— Ashley Gold

HHS makes fresh vaccine safety push

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is fulfilling a longstanding goal of boosting federal scrutiny of vaccine injuries just weeks before the midterms, despite Trump polling firm Fabrizio Ward’s warning that “vaccine skepticism is bad politics.” The new HHS push, reported by Bloomberg, includes a new National Institutes of Health clinic for the study and care of patients with post-vaccine health problems and a new proposal to reimburse doctors for reporting suspected vaccine-related injuries. In August, Trump reignited his effort to overhaul which vaccines are recommended for young Americans, but the White House referred questions about this latest effort to HHS. American Medical Association President Willie Underwood said the physician group “strongly supports legitimate, ongoing vaccine safety monitoring,” but cautioned that such efforts must remain “free from political influence.”

Democrats punch hard in Senate debates

Democrats in Thursday’s Senate debates accused their opponents of graft, war profiteering, and racism, bringing the topic back to Trump whenever they could. In Michigan, El-Sayed blamed Rogers for NAFTA’s job losses and reminded voters that he’d called the Iran war a “win-win-win.” Rogers called El-Sayed a “con man” with family ties to terrorism, a reference to his mother’s work for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which the Democrat countered was investigated because of Bush-era surveillance abuses. In their second debate, Maine hopeful Jackson accused GOP Sen. Susan Collins of personally benefiting from the Iran war; she asked for an apology, which never came. In Georgia, Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff accused his opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, of hiring “half the Third Reich” for his office, a reference to former staffers’ white nationalist posts.

— David Weigel

Debatable: Deepening Canada-EU ties

Canada is searching for a new best friend amid its trade spat with the US, and it may have found one in Europe — but there are practical barriers to expanding the relationship. “The desire is there, but I think a lot of it is going to take numerous years before it becomes anything meaningful to ice out or block out the US,” said Jacob Jensen of the right-leaning American Action Forum. Work is already happening on that front; the European Union has offered to make Canada its first-ever “associate member.” Canada and Europe have also been looking to deepen trade and strategic ties across the Atlantic, with a focus on critical minerals and other issues. But Philip Luck of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that Canada’s distance from and regulatory differences with the EU mean the partnership can only have a “relatively minor” impact on trade.

— Morgan Chalfant

After four decades at Honeywell, Vimal Kapur was an unlikely CEO to break up the 140-year-old conglomerate, even with the activist investor Elliott at its gates. But he concluded that no common strategy could hold together a group serving such diverse markets, he tells Penny Pritzker and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson on The CEO Signal show.

Kapur spun off his company’s aerospace and chemicals divisions to leave himself in charge of Honeywell Technologies, which focuses on mission-critical automation. But he says the acquisitions he made through that process were every bit as important as the process of simplifying an overly complex corporate structure. A focused business won’t work without scale, he says — “and we need to scale from here.”

White House

• Vice President JD Vance said he didn’t “love” the conduct of US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle, as outlined in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio has refused to comment.

Congress

• Democrats are planning to scrutinize defense contractors if they win control of Congress. — Bloomberg
• Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats believe Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, should apologize to former special counsel Jack Smith on behalf of the panel for GOP Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s false insinuations about Smith’s attendance at a