Megabill Set for Final Vote as GOP Holdouts Relent
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President Trump's mega bill steams toward a final House vote as GOP holdouts relent. We'll look at how the law could affect the national debt. Plus...

Plus, the Pentagon puts its setback of Iran's nuclear program in the years. And sports' biggest events become showrooms for big tech. You know, not out here where fans are roasting in the heat, but you go into the Tony boxes where they're sipping champagne. That's where deals are being done. It's Thursday, July 3rd. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM edition of What's News? The top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

The U.S. House of Representatives is heading toward a final vote in the coming hours to pass President Trump's tax and spending bill. That is after party leaders worked through the night to change the minds of a handful of rank-and-file Republicans, allowing the bill to clear a procedural vote at 3.23 a.m. On this vote, the ayes are 219, the nays are 213. The resolution is adopted.

With that objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. House Speaker Mike Johnson said that Trump, Vice President Vance, attorneys and federal agencies were involved in conversations with holdouts on the bill, though he offered no details about the discussions. Johnson predicted that a final vote would happen by about 8 a.m., potentially teeing up the legislation to be signed by the president before his self-imposed July 4th deadline.

Before the overnight wrangling on Capitol Hill, I caught up with the journal's chief economics commentator, Greg Ip, to learn about the bill's effect on the U.S. deficit and what the process of negotiating it signals about Washington's approach to fiscal policy. Greg, the last estimate that we got from the Congressional Budget Office on this bill came in last week. Remind us what that estimate showed.

Well, it suggests that over the next 10 years, relative to current law, this bill would add about $4 trillion to the national debt, which is about a trillion dollars more than the House version of that bill. Given that we're in a situation now where the deficits are already at a record, except in times of war and emergency, that continues. In fact, it continues to get a bit worse under this bill over the next decade. It still represents a significant deterioration in fiscal performance for the United States. Greg?

We have heard various things about the deficit implications of this legislation, including on yesterday's show from a GOP representative in the House. This was Chip Roy of Texas, who was vocalizing this concern that he had about how the Senate had gone about scoring the impacts of this bill and notably that it abandoned this congressional accounting standard. I'm curious what you made of that.

Well, what we're talking about here is the ongoing erosion of the institutional guardrails that Congresses have put in place over the years to try and prevent legislation from getting a little too reckless.

One of those rules, for example, is that you may not add to deficits after the 10-year window. This version of the Senate bill actually discards that guardrail. It simply asserts we're not going to play by that rule. We're going to basically assume that even though the law says tax cuts would expire this year, we're going to assume they didn't. And therefore, what we're doing doesn't add to the deficit. Now, how bad is that? Well, I suppose since they're still going to get 51 votes in the Senate, it's still like

Congress doing its job. But if you're one of those people that thought that having those rules setting a very high bar for blowing up the debt, if you're one of those people who liked having those things, well, you would look at this and say, well, isn't that a bad thing? Looking beyond Congress, Greg, some of the people who seemingly don't like higher debt are bond investors who you write can basically punish the government when things are getting out of hand.

It's definitely the case that I think that bond yields today are higher than they otherwise would be, given the fiscal trajectory of the country, which is about to be set in stone by this new congressional bill. But the difference is too small to really change the calculus of anybody in office. I mean, if interest rates had behaved like they do sometimes in an emerging market and gone through the roof and capsized the economy, yeah, the government would change. But this is the United States. We have the world's reserve currency. We have the world's most important currency.

safe security, the treasury bond, the rest of the world is not going to panic and dump every dollar asset just because, you know, they don't like the particular direction of our fiscal policy or what Moody's happens to say. All right. So relative strength, kind of the measure you're citing there, perhaps suggesting the floor is not about to fall out here. And yet borrowing now is going to be more expensive in

in the future than some people maybe have reckoned with. We're definitely getting into uncharted territory. I mean, under realistic projections of deficits and debt, the debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to brand new records, higher than it was in World War II when we were borrowing heavily to finance a war, a very big war.

And the annual borrowing is now approaching 7% of GDP. And we have literally never sustained that level of borrowing on a sustained basis ever before in the history of this country. And the United States, being as big as it is, represents so much of the world's borrowing that I don't think anybody has a clue how this pressure is likely to manifest itself on global financial markets.

I think it would be foolish to express conviction one way or the other that it won't have any effect at all or that it will have terrible effects. But I think it's definitely getting into territory where we ought to be worried. That was the journal's chief economics commentator, Greg Ip. Coming up, we've got the rest of the day's news, including a new poll on American views about the economy, a fresh intelligence assessment on damage to Iran's nuclear program, and more after the break.

You can Venmo this or you can Venmo that.

Well, with President Trump's tax and spending bill now in the homestretch, one thing is becoming more clear for Americans. Who is responsible for the state of the economy? According to the

According to YouGov survey data gathered for the journal late last month, voters across party lines now say that President Trump is more responsible for the state of the economy than former President Biden, a reversal of findings from May. Though his journal finance editor Alex Frangos told us that hardly means they agree about where things are headed.

The partisan divide is still completely there. So people who voted for Kamala Harris think that Trump's doing a terrible job. People who voted for Donald Trump think that Trump's doing a great job. But the one thing they agree on is that it's Trump's economy. And the question is whether they have an impact on how people behave, how people invest, how people spend.

And in that light, Alex says that investors will be looking closely at today's June jobs report. There's starting to be these little fissures in the job market, and it's not 100% clear why that is. The other thing that's hanging out there with this jobs number is what does the Fed do? The Fed, Jerome Powell is under huge pressure from Trump. Trump's been posting about him again overnight, saying he should resign. And he wants him to cut rates. And

And Powell's been like, well, the economy is pretty good and inflation still hasn't completely gone away. So we don't want to risk it. So this jobs number obviously will feed into that whole argument and dispute. We will get a look at those key figures at 830 a.m. Eastern, ahead of the start of a trading session that will end early at 1 p.m. due to the Independence Day holiday.

The Pentagon says that U.S. strikes on Iran set back the country's nuclear ambitions by up to two years. That assessment by military intelligence officials falls somewhere between President Trump's claim that the attack obliterated Iran's nuclear program and the more cautious view by the UN's atomic agency that Iran could resume enriching uranium in a matter of months.

An on-the-ground report by the International Atomic Energy Agency clearing things up could be a ways off. Tehran yesterday suspended cooperation with the IAEA, leaving its inspectors blind to any renewed nuclear work and unable to verify the whereabouts of Iran's stockpile of already enriched uranium, a decision that the U.S. State Department called unacceptable. And finally...

The Wimbledon tennis tournament got underway in London this week with a notable absence, line judges. After nearly 150 years of calling balls in or out of bounds, their roles have now been automated, one of many tech inroads visible at the tournament.

A few levels beneath center court, IBM's Kevin Farah showed me where staff are aggregating live data coming in from more than a dozen matches. So we have teams collecting the stats, which are the direction of serve, the speed of serve, the rally count, how has the serve returned, is it a forehand, is it a backhand.

how the point is one, is it a forced error, unforced error. After being checked for discrepancies and fed through a hybrid cloud, that data informs graphics for TV viewers and as of this year, an AI chatbot on the Wimbledon app and website. You can ask about the players, you can ask about the stats. A bit at the bottom here, you've got a freeform query box where you can type in a question in natural language and you can get a response back.

That chatbot helped me to pronounce the tricky name of a Swiss player, and it summarized a three-hour match a few courts over where I was hearing a lot of applause. Though it couldn't predict who was beating pre-tournament odds or who was more likely to perform well in the heat. Still, it's an early preview of a future in which fans can get particular information regardless of what announcers happen to be discussing.

Businesses could also be inspired to build chatbots that feed off of live information instead of just static datasets. IBM's SVP of marketing, Jonathan Adeshek, told me that integrating with live sports, which continue to dominate ratings, is a no-brainer. It really enables us to bring to life a better articulation of our technology.

Because let's face it, when you go talk about AI or cloud computing or those sorts of things,

They can be complex topics that not everybody understands how they work and how it could apply to something they're doing. Journal sports writer Joshua Robinson agreed and told me marquee sporting events are increasingly showrooms for the latest B2B offerings from the likes of Oracle, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft. The thing you see about big tech around global sports is they find an incredible opportunity to pay

piggyback on the reach that say tennis or Formula One or soccer has to not just get out in front and raise awareness about their brands, but show what's possible. I haven't bought any of those cloud services recently, but at these sporting events, all you have to do is look around and everywhere you see advertising boards, it means somewhere there's a private box with those kinds of executives populating them and who might be in the market for those types of services.

And that's it for What's News for this Thursday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer was Sandra Kilhoff, and we had help today from Christina Rocca. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Otherwise, have a great weekend. Happy Fourth of July. And thanks as always for listening.