WSJ What’s News - House Republicans Face Difficult Trade-Offs to Pass Tax Bill

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

P.M. Edition for May 19. To meet their self-imposed deadline of Memorial Day, House Republicans are facing a tug of war over spending cuts. Siobhan Hughes, who covers Congress for WSJ, discusses the major points of contention and where the bill goes from here. Plus, President Trump wants the U.S. to be a manufacturing powerhouse, even though hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled. We hear from Journal economics reporter Chao Deng about what makes those jobs less appealing to workers, and what manufacturers are doing to try to woo them. And the U.S. Supreme Court allows the Trump administration to strip Venezuelan migrants of their legal status. Alex Ossola hosts. Sign up for the WSJ's free What's News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Register today at SunriseChallenge.ca. That's SunriseChallenge.ca. House Republicans' tax and spending bill overcomes a key hurdle, but faces a difficult path to get passed by Memorial Day. Every time people have bet against House Speaker Mike Johnson, they have ended up losing. And a piece of that track record is he has got the very powerful hammer held by President Donald Trump,

who magically, when votes come up on the floor, is able to twist enough arms that bills get through this narrow majority. Plus, why hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs are unfilled. And President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to agree on an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. It's Monday, May 19th. I'm Alex Osoleff for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. House Republicans have set a deadline of Memorial Day, May 26th, to pass President Trump's big beautiful tax and spending bill.

And though the bill passed the critical committee phase in the House last night, there are big parts of it that lawmakers are still hammering out. Siobhan Hughes covers Congress for the Wall Street Journal. Siobhan, like I mentioned, the bill passed a key hurdle. Where does it stand now? It stands where it has stood all year, which is very much in flux. Mike Johnson, the House speaker, eeked out a win when he persuaded some holdout conservatives to drop their resistance, keep going.

But the problem is that there's still very much a live conversation about the big three, the clean energy, the Medicaid work requirements, and the state and local taxes, but that's far from a dispositive list. There are a lot of other little items in the mix, and we're not going to know if all of those are going to be sorted out really until we see that vote on the House floor. Let's say the bill passes this vote in the House. What happens next? So if this bill passes the House,

it next heads to the Senate, where Republican senators and this bill is going to have to pass with only Republican votes and a simple majority. Republican senators have made very clear they have no intention of swallowing whole what the House has produced. There are some Senate Republicans who don't like what they see coming out of the House

in terms of Medicaid. And then, of course, there is the usual wrangling where the senators, each of them realizing they've got a lot of leverage here, is going to try to figure out how much of their own wishlist they can get incorporated into this bill. The way the bill currently stands, it would add trillions of dollars to the deficit. That was one thing that was pretty worrisome for markets this bill. The way the bill currently stands, it would add trillions of dollars to the deficit.

That was one thing that was pretty worrisome for markets this morning. What are Republicans planning to do about that? Well, this is part of the fight that's going on in the House right now. You're seeing the conservatives really want to get some more spending cuts in here. But beyond that, and the Republicans are not tipping their hand here on the specifics, but generally, a lot of Republicans are looking to Trump's budget director, Russ Vote, and what he and his allies over in the Department of Government Efficiency are going to do to try to cut spending, essentially by going around Congress to do it.

And there's always been some sense, kind of latent underneath the surface, that some of the cuts being enacted through the executive branch could potentially be enough to get the country to a better fiscal place. That was WSJ reporter Siobhan Hughes. Thank you, Siobhan. Thanks. Good to be here. Despite the tax bill and a downgrade of the U.S. by Moody's ratings last Friday, U.S. stocks finished the day slightly higher. The Dow rose about 0.3 percent, and the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ edged ahead less than 0.1 percent.

The United Kingdom and the European Union have taken a big step to improve their relationship by signing a deal to ease trade and bolster security cooperation. WSJUK correspondent Max Colchester is here to tell us more. Max, what are some of the practical implications of this deal? The main implication actually is not so much as practical as in as it resets the mood music around the relationship between the UK and the EU. What we're seeing today is a series of agreements on potentially allowing young people to move more freely between the EU and the UK. There's an agreement to try and make it easier to trade food and other agricultural products between the

two. There's access to a big defence fund potentially. So there's a lot of things that are being thrown in here to try and ease tensions and build trust towards potentially a deeper relationship in the future. Max, as you mentioned, the UK could potentially have access now to a big European defense fund. What does this mean for British arms makers in particular? The details are still being hashed out but there's an EU fund being set up where basically finance is being pooled on the EU side and British arms makers would be able to sell to governments using that fund to procure weapons. And there's a greater emphasis also on more talks on security cooperation, being able to move UK troops through the EU and pooling intelligence and data on criminals and the like is also on the table. What are some of the factors pushing the UK and EU to sort of bury the hatchet now?

The two big factors are Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the election of Donald Trump. Those are the two factors which really made the EU and the UK realize that actually they needed to band together to weather those two storms. The UK is one of the biggest military spenders in the world and is Europe's biggest military spender. And so it made sense to bring it closer to the EU as the EU and Europe tries to counter Russia. And Trump's trade war means that actual like-minded allies should try and do more business with each other as opposed to just focusing on the U.S., which was the U.K.'s plan after Brexit.

So we've seen a sort of geopolitical reality check on Brexit. That was U.K. correspondent Max Colchester. Thank you, Max. Thank you. Coming up, what U.S. manufacturers are doing to attract more workers? That's after the break. When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners, like that woman over there with the Italian leather

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Start winning. Winners find fabulous for less. President Trump envisions that bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. will make it the manufacturing powerhouse it once was. But according to the Labor Department, the U.S. already has nearly half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs. Chow Dang covers the economy for the Wall Street Journal. OK, Chow, I hear this stat and my biggest question is why?

Why are these manufacturing jobs so hard to fill? Well, if you contrast manufacturing jobs with desk jobs, it's immediately obvious that jobs in manufacturing are tiring, can be dangerous. The economic statistics show that manufacturers actually pay lower today than the private sector on the whole, whereas in the 1980s manufacturing wages were higher. And then finally there are a lot of misconceptions especially amongst young people on what

manufacturing or factory jobs entail. There's a misconception that all of them are dirty and dangerous whereas that's not true all the time unlike decades back modern facilities are incredibly sophisticated with a high level of automation, but some of these misconceptions may still persist. So President Trump wants to bring more manufacturing jobs back to the US. Given these factors, can this actually happen? It's an open question. If the jobs do come back, then companies will certainly have to

raise wages or add other inducements to attract workers, maybe greater levels of scheduling flexibility right now, obviously, with most production shifts on a very rigid work schedule. We have seen companies work with trade schools and community colleges to try to get workers the skills that they need. The problem is that a lot of skills in factory work are really best learned on the job. And we have seen firms do outreach to high schoolers and even middle schoolers. There are some programs to get kids at least aware of manufacturing and trade work.

That was WSJ reporter Chao Dang. Thank you, Chao. Thanks so much. President Trump said he had a, quote, excellent two-hour phone call today with Russian President Vladimir Putin, though the two failed to agree on an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine that the Trump administration and European allies had been pushing for. After their call, Trump said that Ukraine and Russia

will continue their conversations towards a ceasefire and that the Vatican has offered to host negotiations. It's unclear if the US will remain as a broker in the peace process. Moments earlier, according to Russia's state-run task news agency, Putin thanked Trump for his peacemaking efforts and said that a ceasefire for a certain period of time

was possible under certain conditions. After the call with Putin, Trump spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky along with several European leaders. And the US Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from thousands of Venezuelans living in the US, a win for the Trump administration and its mass deportation efforts. The

Supreme Court's short unsigned order noted that legal questions remain on whether the migrants who lost their protected status would still be authorized to work in the US. According to the group of migrants that had brought a challenge against the Department of Homeland Security, stripping the protection would mean nearly 350,000 people would immediately lose the right to live and work in the U.S. MetaPlatforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is increasingly a cornerstone

of the internet fraud economy. That's according to regulators, banks, and internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. WSJ tech reporter Jeff Horwitz, who dug into the story, told our tech news briefing podcast what Meta says it's doing to deal with this. Meta has pointed to the rise of transnational criminal syndicates as something that is a problem for everyone in the industry and that to some degree there's a point meaning like look Metta can't just refer to local police.

And they also say that they have been putting more resources into this problem. One thing that caught my eye was that one document indicates a few years back they actually deprioritized scam enforcement quite significantly. They were focusing on human trafficking and on a few other problems, but the resources came out of the expense of their anti-scam work. And they say that they are making newer, greater efforts at this point. And you can hear more about this in today's tech news briefing. And that's what's news for this Monday afternoon.

Today's show was produced by Pierre Bienamé with supervising producer Michael Kosmides. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.