Senate Republicans are moving forward with a plan to mask the $3.8 trillion cost of extending expiring tax cuts in President Donald Trump’s signature economic legislation. GOP senators voted Monday in favor of a plan that says renewing the party’s 2017 tax cuts, which are set to expire, somehow costs nothing.

What’s seen by Democrats as a brazen attempt at accounting sleight of hand allows the GOP to both mollify Trump with more of his populist wish list and satisfy the party’s self-described fiscal conservatives. The renewal of tax cuts that largely go to the rich and corporations will come at the expense of millions of lower income and disabled Americans who will no longer have healthcare of assistance buying food.

“Even a preschooler knows this is magic math,” said Patty Murray of Washington State, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. She accused Republicans of “trashing the rules” to pass the bill. South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham pledged there was nothing “sneaky” about the maneuver. 

Senator Patty Murray of Washington Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg

As it stands, the Republican bill could push America’s national debt beyond $40 trillion. By late this afternoon, Senate Republicans were still at odds over just how many Americans would lose access to Medicaid, food assistance and other social safety-net programs, as well as how fast to kill off clean energy tax breaks.

Global markets are less than pleased at the prospect of a massive new injection of US debt. Larger budget gaps would require an increase in bond issuance, something that’s expected to weigh on Treasuries, particularly those with the longest maturities.

A Bloomberg index of that debt has underperformed therest of the market this year, and the yield on 30-year Treasuries in May briefly rose above 5%. Investors have grown wary of lending to the US government for such extended periods, demanding higher yields as a result and increasing a cushion known as the term premium. —Natasha Solo-Lyons and David E. Rovella

What You Need to Know Today

The Trump White House is moving at a far faster clip in 2025 to remake the federal government and American life, in large part because Stephen Miller has put the agenda on steroids. Miller, 39, has amassed power and influence through nearly a decade in Trump’s orbit, and is long seen as the driving force behind the West Wing’s immigration policies.

Now, NPR reports the administration is laying the groundwork for potentially deporting more naturalized citizens—people from all over the world who came to the US legally and are now American citizens. While the new guidance to federal prosecutors seeks to tie such “denaturalization” efforts—which are relatively rare—to specific wrongdoing, NPR reported that legal experts worry the language used could allow Trump’s Justice Department to initiate proceedings against a much broader swath of the 25 million Americans born elsehwere.

Stephen Miller Photographer: Francis Chung/Politico

Norway’s largest private pension fund has excluded two defense companies from its portfolio, citing their ties to the Israeli military and the war in Gaza. KLP Pension, which oversees about $114 billion, said in a statement on Monday that it won’t invest in Oshkosh Corp. or ThyssenKrupp AG because they sell weapons to the Israeli military. The fund said the decision followed a report from the United Nations last June that identified companies supplying the Israel Defense Forces with weapons that ended up being deployed in Gaza. After talks with the companies, KLP said it concluded they were “contravening” the fund’s investment guidelines.

In Gaza Monday, the Associated Press reported that Israeli forces killed at least 67 Palestinians, including airstrikes that killed 30 at a seaside cafe and 22 killed by gunfire as they sought food aid, according to witnesses, hospital officials and the Hamas-run health ministry. Recent Israeli strikes have pushed the Palestinian death toll in the war beyond 56,000, the AP reported, citing Hamas health officials, who don’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. The war began in October 2023 when Hamas and other groups launched an attack on southern Israel, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to Israeli officials.

Emergency personnel search for survivors in the ruins of a residential building following an Israeli airstrike in the al-Sabra district of Gaza City on Sunday. Photographer: Ahmad Salem/Bloomberg

Moderna said its experimental flu shot met its goal in a late-stage trial, clearing the path for its broader strategy of selling combination vaccines. The shot’s efficacy was 27% higher than a licensed influenza vaccine in adults 50 years and older, the company said. The trial enrolled more than 40,000 adults across 11 countries. The results set the stage for Moderna to offer a single shot that protects against Covid and flu.

But in the US, regulators under Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently told the company it needed to produce flu vaccine efficacy data—and not just data on the immune response—delaying a potential approval for a combination shot until next year. Under Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, US health officials have rolled back long-standing recommendations around Covid shots for children and pregnant women, approved Moderna’s updated Covid shot for a narrower group of people and terminated the company’s contract to develop bird flu vaccines.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, and Donald Trump Photographer: Chris Kleponis/CNP

The US Supreme Court agreed to consider Republican calls to strike down federal caps on the money political parties can spend on advertisements in coordination with congressional candidates. Heeding requests from two GOP campaign committees and the Trump administration, the justices said they will review a federal appeals court decision that upheld the 51-year-old spending limits. 

The case may provide a fresh opportunity for Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s Republican-appointed supermajority to remove more limits on campaign spending, a jurisprudential trend whose highlight was the landmark Citizens United case, where the Roberts court remade the landscape of US politics, birthing the now-famous catchphrase “money is speech.” 

European stocks outperformed their US peers by the biggest margin on record in dollar terms during the first half, the most dramatic sign of how the region’s markets are staging a comeback after more than a decade in the doldrums. The rebound isn’t confined to stocks: the euro is up 13% against the dollar in the six months through June.

Meanwhile, the chaotic rollout of US tariffs wiped some of the shine off Treasuries. German bunds have outperformed them since April even as the government braces to issue more debt. Assets in emerging European markets like Poland and Hungary are also rallying sharply.

Middle management is eroding across the US—and not just at large employers like Amazon and Meta where reducing bureaucracy has become corporate doctrine. The management ranks have also been thinned at small and midsize businesses, where supervisors now have twice as many direct reports on average as they did five years ago, up from roughly three in 2019 to six in 2024.

Nintendo pulled its products from Amazon’s US site after a disagreement over unauthorized sales, meaning the e-commerce company missed out on the recent debut of Nintendo’s Switch 2—the biggest game console launch of all time. The Japanese company stopped selling on Amazon after noticing that third-party merchants were offering games for sale in the US at prices that undercut Nintendo’s advertised rates.

What You’ll Need to Know Tomorrow

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