• This week is crucial: the Senate won't vote without a CBO score, which means they need to finalize negotiations this week.
• Behind-the-scenes: McConnell and Senate leaders have been at this for all of May and now first couple weeks of June, turning their weekly lunches into working sessions on various aspects of the healthcare legislation. They've whittled down the stack of items that people don't agree on. I've spoken to a number of people who know McConnell well who speculate that he'll force a vote regardless of whether he knows he has 50 votes. They say he's desperate to move on to tax reform and can't have healthcare hanging around like a bad smell through the summer.

On the House side:

• Following the White House's "Workforce Development Week," House GOP leadership will vote on two workforce bills. The big one: a bipartisan bill to reauthorize the "Perkins Act" for six years — providing more than $1 billion per year in federal support for career and technical education programs.
• Wednesday's conference meeting is expected to be more policy-focused than usual. (They had to cancel Friday's meeting due to the fallout from last week's shooting.) A senior House aide tells me the Wednesday conference will focus on the budget caps and appropriations.
• Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy will both address the National Association of Manufacturers. Ryan pushing tax reform and McCarthy on reg reform and workforce development.

1. Immigration: Cook will participate in the session titled "H-1B/immigration." He's got a long history of arguing for the importance of immigration to the American economy and doesn't agree with the Trump-Bannon-Sessions view that unchecked immigration has been driving down wages and stealing jobs from Americans.
2. Encryption: Cook will "fly the flag" for strong encryption. This has been a controversial issue within the administration and it remains unsettled. Shortly after the San Bernardino shootings, Trump called for a boycott of Apple products because Cook refused to cooperate with the FBI after it requested that Apple create a special version of its operating software that would have given the government a backdoor into the iPhone used by the terrorists. Cook took a lot of incoming after saying it'd compromise customers' privacy and security. Some argue Cook has been vindicated given subsequent leaks from federal agencies.
3. Veterans' affairs: How to better serve vets both in the provision of medical care and in hiring policies.
4. How the administration talks about human rights: Ensuring it remains a priority for the U.S., both domestically and internationally.

Other points on Tech Week:

• I'm told the White House won't be rolling out any new policies or signing any executive orders related to technology.
• Tomorrow: Attendees are expected to include Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, IBM's Ginni Rometty, Oracle's Safra Catz, and venture capitalist John Doerr, among others. Cabinet secretaries will attend and the President will drop by, too.
• Wednesday: Per a White House official: "We're taking the tech conversation to rural America ... [W]e'll be in Iowa talking about agriculture and technology and showcasing the latest technology that is changing the way farmers produce, harvest, and market food." The event will double as a send-off for Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who's heading to China to be the U.S. ambassador.
• Thursday: Breakout sessions focusing on 5G and the Internet of Things, the commercial use of drones, and what the administration can do to spur innovation. The attendees are expected to come together after their more specialized sessions for a meeting with Trump. C-suite level executives and general partners from venture capital firms have been invited. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will play a key role.

What's next: "Energy Week." (These branded weeks are part of the White House's framing of June as "Jobs Month" — focused on public-private partnerships.)

• Short's reasoning, according to sources familiar with his private conversations, is that congressional spending habits got America into this mess and the President has enough on his plate with healthcare, tax reform — not to mention the escalating Russia investigation — and would gain nothing from spending his political capital on the debt ceiling fight.
• Trump will ultimately have to play some role in the debt ceiling debate, but the White House won't have him out there providing cover for congressional leadership to negotiate an unpopular (read: Democratic/moderate-led ) bill.
• The current White House thinking is that Congress should first present solid options to them while the administration focuses on health care, tax reform, and infrastructure.

Why this matters: Presidents have traditionally used the weight of the presidency — in various ways public and private — to push Congress to raise the ceiling. Some in Republican leadership circles are frustrated that the White House has no unified position on the debt ceiling strategy and appears willing to make GOP leadership do the thankless work.

"This is the full faith and credit of the United States of America. It needs presidential leadership," said a source briefed on Short's recommendation. "It is not in a single member's best interest to vote for [a debt ceiling raise] and it has always taken the weight of the presidency behind it."

Current status of the debt ceiling debate:

Nobody agrees on anything. Congressional leadership has done little serious work so far and is nowhere near settled on a strategy.

• The Trump Administration wants Congress to raise the nation's borrowing limit before the August recess.
• But the administration hasn't agreed on how it should be done. Budget Director Mick Mulvaney wants to use the debt limit bill to cut spending. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin just wants the debt ceiling raised without fuss — to avoid a last-minute standoff in September that could crash markets.

Three broad options being informally discussed:

1. The conservative route: the House Freedom Caucus and conservatives in the administration, like Mulvaney, want to attach the debt ceiling raise to reforms that would seriously address the nation's debt crisis. An example would be attaching the debt limit to a balanced-budget amendment. A source close to leadership described this option as a "fantasy" with no hope of passing the Senate.
2. The "clean" option: The conventional wisdom until recently has been that Democrats would support a clean debt ceiling bill, but sources in the White House and in leadership circles have told me they're no longer confident. "Now they're saying we have all the leverage, we should be asking for [progressive] stuff," one source said.
3. The moderate Republican/Democrat option: attaching the debt limit raise to "must-pass" priorities for moderates like reauthorizing CHIP [the Children's Health Insurance Program] or lifting discretionary spending caps. A source close to leadership summarized this option as: "let's look at all the hard stuff that we have to do before the end of the year, and put it all together into one governing package."

Between the lines: Some in the White House believe Republican leadership has already given up on the Freedom Caucus / Mulvaney approach to the debt limit and already concluded the only workable path is to collaborate with Democrats and moderate Republicans. They believe leadership wants cover from the President for this unpopular strategy, which would enrage true-believer grassroots conservatives and figures at right-wing media outlets like Breitbart. Sources familiar with leadership's thinking, however, tell me they're not close to having made such decisions. (That said, a good number have admitted to me privately that they think working with the Freedom Caucus on the debt ceiling is a lost cause.)