President Donald Trump shakes up Capitol Hill while pushing forward on his tax cuts and budget. A new bombshell Senate report claims former President Joe Biden’s federal health agencies were aware of COVID vaccine dangers — including myocarditis — but intentionally delayed alerting the public. And, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is blaming Trump for the Golden State’s $12 billion deficit — but are Newsom’s own spending decisions to blame?
It’s Wednesday, May 21, and this is the news you need to know to start your day.
Morning Wire is available on video! You can watch today’s episode here:
If you’d rather listen to your news, today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below:
Trump On Capitol Hill
Topline: President Trump traveled to Capitol Hill Tuesday, where he pushed GOP members of Congress to pass his “big, beautiful” budget bill.
President Trump’s budget has been moving through Congress for months and is now approaching the finish line. Rather than breaking the bill up into smaller pieces to be voted on piecemeal, the president has urged Congress to pass the whole thing at once — in “One Big Beautiful Bill.” This law would amount to what the White House calls the largest tax cut in American history.
Among other things, it would codify his plan for no taxes on tips, overtime, or Social Security payouts. It would also increase child tax credits, remove more than a million illegal immigrants from Medicaid, increase funding for border wall construction, overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration, and make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. Without this bill, the tax cuts would expire this year. According to the White House, Americans earning between $30,000 and $80,000 a year would pay around 15% less in taxes, with a projected increase of around $5,000 to median household income.
At the moment, the House plans to vote on the bill by Thursday, although it’s uncertain whether it will pass. Because House Republicans hold such a slim majority (220-213), they’ve got to have almost total unity to get anything passed – President Trump has only signed five new laws since taking office, which is the fewest by a president at this point in their term since 1953. On Tuesday, Trump took a rare trip across town to the Capitol, where he delivered a blunt message to House Republicans: Get in line.
“Anybody who didn’t support it as a Republican, I would consider to be a fool,” Trump said. “It’s a great bill.”
“The high level message is, ‘Hey, you all have done a lot of work,’” Congressman Blake Moore (R-UT), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Daily Wire. “If you force this perfect world that you have in your vision, you’ll actually get nothing. Let’s go out, move the ball forward, get something.”
COVID Lies Exposed?
Topline: A bombshell report released from the Senate says federal health agencies were aware of COVID vaccine risks for months prior to alerting the American people.
Morning Wire got an early look at a report from by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which claims that Biden-era federal health agencies were aware of severe adverse health reactions associated with these COVID vaccines, but they downplayed health concerns and delayed alerting the public about these risks for months. Specifically, they allegedly knew about risks like myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, which is inflammation of the thin sac surrounding the heart. The report includes more than two thousand pages of documents allegedly showing evidence of this apparent cover-up.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the investigations subcommittee, will hold a full hearing on Wednesday at 2 p.m.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has revised its guidance on COVID vaccination. The FDA says that it will continue to approve COVID vaccines for seniors and people at high risk, but the agency is now requiring vaccine makers to conduct new clinical trials before approving these vaccines for the wider public. These companies will have to conduct “randomized, placebo-controlled trials” before the FDA will approve their shots for healthy Americans between the ages of 6 months and 64 years old.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who leads the National Institutes of Health (NIH), upset some bureaucrats at the agency when he said at a town hall event that he believes the COVID pandemic was likely started by research that the NIH funded. “If it’s true that we sponsored research that caused a pandemic, and if you look at polls of the American people, that’s what most people believe,” Bhattacharya said. “What we have to do is make sure that we do not engage in research that’s any risk of opposing any risk to human populations.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also made news this week talking about the origins of the COVID pandemic. He scolded the World Health Organization at the group’s annual meeting over its ties to China.
“While the United States has provided the lion’s share of the organization’s funding, historically other countries, such as China, have exerted undue influence over its operations in ways that serve their own interests and not particularly the interests of the global public. This all became obvious during the COVID pandemic when the WHO, under pressure from China, suppressed reports at critical junctures of human-to-human transmission and then worked with China to promote the fiction that COVID originated from bats or pangolins rather than from a Chinese government-sponsored research at a biolab in Wuhan. Not only has the WHO capitulated to political pressure from China, it’s also failed to maintain an organization characterized by transparency and fair governance by and for its member states. The WHO often acts like it has forgotten that its members must remain accountable to their own citizens and not to transnational or corporate interests.”
California Fiscal Crisis
Topline: Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced his state faces an astounding budget deficit next year — $12 billion.
The economic outlook for the so-called Golden State has darkened since January, when the budget looked almost balanced. Newsom is blaming the budget hole on a “Trump slump” brought on by the president’s tariffs, as well as Washington’s “attack” on California’s economy. But according to the budget document Newsom released, less than half of the deficit is from reduced tax revenue.
“California is increasing their spending faster than they expected,” Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute, told The Daily Wire. “And the big driver of that higher spending is Medicaid, or Medi-Cal as it’s known here, the health insurance program for the poor. In the rest of the country, Medicaid covers about 20% of people. But in California, it’s about a third, and has been growing very rapidly. One of the reasons it’s been growing is more coverage for illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers.”
Medicaid is supported both by the federal government and the states, and the federal government has made clear it doesn’t pay for insurance for illegal immigrants. But starting in the 2010s, several states, including California, began using their own money to cover some illegal immigrants, and those states have kept expanding that coverage. Just last year, California became the first state to offer Medicaid coverage to all illegal immigrants, of any age.
“Just a few months ago, Newsom announced that the state needed to borrow an extra $2.7 billion because more immigrants were enrolling in the new program than expected,” Glock told The Daily Wire. “The previous estimate was that the program for illegal immigrants would cost about $10 billion a year. Now the estimate’s gone up again. One could say this entire budget problem could be solved just by stopping this one medical program for illegal immigrants.”
[#item_full_content]
[[{“value”:”
President Donald Trump shakes up Capitol Hill while pushing forward on his tax cuts and budget. A new bombshell Senate report claims former President Joe Biden’s federal health agencies were aware of COVID vaccine dangers — including myocarditis — but intentionally delayed alerting the public. And, California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is blaming Trump for the Golden State’s $12 billion deficit — but are Newsom’s own spending decisions to blame?
It’s Wednesday, May 21, and this is the news you need to know to start your day.
Morning Wire is available on video! You can watch today’s episode here:
If you’d rather listen to your news, today’s edition of the Morning Wire podcast can be heard below:
Trump On Capitol Hill
Topline: President Trump traveled to Capitol Hill Tuesday, where he pushed GOP members of Congress to pass his “big, beautiful” budget bill.
President Trump’s budget has been moving through Congress for months and is now approaching the finish line. Rather than breaking the bill up into smaller pieces to be voted on piecemeal, the president has urged Congress to pass the whole thing at once — in “One Big Beautiful Bill.” This law would amount to what the White House calls the largest tax cut in American history.
Among other things, it would codify his plan for no taxes on tips, overtime, or Social Security payouts. It would also increase child tax credits, remove more than a million illegal immigrants from Medicaid, increase funding for border wall construction, overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration, and make Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. Without this bill, the tax cuts would expire this year. According to the White House, Americans earning between $30,000 and $80,000 a year would pay around 15% less in taxes, with a projected increase of around $5,000 to median household income.
At the moment, the House plans to vote on the bill by Thursday, although it’s uncertain whether it will pass. Because House Republicans hold such a slim majority (220-213), they’ve got to have almost total unity to get anything passed – President Trump has only signed five new laws since taking office, which is the fewest by a president at this point in their term since 1953. On Tuesday, Trump took a rare trip across town to the Capitol, where he delivered a blunt message to House Republicans: Get in line.
“Anybody who didn’t support it as a Republican, I would consider to be a fool,” Trump said. “It’s a great bill.”
“The high level message is, ‘Hey, you all have done a lot of work,’” Congressman Blake Moore (R-UT), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Daily Wire. “If you force this perfect world that you have in your vision, you’ll actually get nothing. Let’s go out, move the ball forward, get something.”
COVID Lies Exposed?
Topline: A bombshell report released from the Senate says federal health agencies were aware of COVID vaccine risks for months prior to alerting the American people.
Morning Wire got an early look at a report from by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which claims that Biden-era federal health agencies were aware of severe adverse health reactions associated with these COVID vaccines, but they downplayed health concerns and delayed alerting the public about these risks for months. Specifically, they allegedly knew about risks like myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, which is inflammation of the thin sac surrounding the heart. The report includes more than two thousand pages of documents allegedly showing evidence of this apparent cover-up.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), the chairman of the investigations subcommittee, will hold a full hearing on Wednesday at 2 p.m.
Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has revised its guidance on COVID vaccination. The FDA says that it will continue to approve COVID vaccines for seniors and people at high risk, but the agency is now requiring vaccine makers to conduct new clinical trials before approving these vaccines for the wider public. These companies will have to conduct “randomized, placebo-controlled trials” before the FDA will approve their shots for healthy Americans between the ages of 6 months and 64 years old.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who leads the National Institutes of Health (NIH), upset some bureaucrats at the agency when he said at a town hall event that he believes the COVID pandemic was likely started by research that the NIH funded. “If it’s true that we sponsored research that caused a pandemic, and if you look at polls of the American people, that’s what most people believe,” Bhattacharya said. “What we have to do is make sure that we do not engage in research that’s any risk of opposing any risk to human populations.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also made news this week talking about the origins of the COVID pandemic. He scolded the World Health Organization at the group’s annual meeting over its ties to China.
“While the United States has provided the lion’s share of the organization’s funding, historically other countries, such as China, have exerted undue influence over its operations in ways that serve their own interests and not particularly the interests of the global public. This all became obvious during the COVID pandemic when the WHO, under pressure from China, suppressed reports at critical junctures of human-to-human transmission and then worked with China to promote the fiction that COVID originated from bats or pangolins rather than from a Chinese government-sponsored research at a biolab in Wuhan. Not only has the WHO capitulated to political pressure from China, it’s also failed to maintain an organization characterized by transparency and fair governance by and for its member states. The WHO often acts like it has forgotten that its members must remain accountable to their own citizens and not to transnational or corporate interests.”
California Fiscal Crisis
Topline: Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced his state faces an astounding budget deficit next year — $12 billion.
The economic outlook for the so-called Golden State has darkened since January, when the budget looked almost balanced. Newsom is blaming the budget hole on a “Trump slump” brought on by the president’s tariffs, as well as Washington’s “attack” on California’s economy. But according to the budget document Newsom released, less than half of the deficit is from reduced tax revenue.
“California is increasing their spending faster than they expected,” Judge Glock, director of research at the Manhattan Institute, told The Daily Wire. “And the big driver of that higher spending is Medicaid, or Medi-Cal as it’s known here, the health insurance program for the poor. In the rest of the country, Medicaid covers about 20% of people. But in California, it’s about a third, and has been growing very rapidly. One of the reasons it’s been growing is more coverage for illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers.”
Medicaid is supported both by the federal government and the states, and the federal government has made clear it doesn’t pay for insurance for illegal immigrants. But starting in the 2010s, several states, including California, began using their own money to cover some illegal immigrants, and those states have kept expanding that coverage. Just last year, California became the first state to offer Medicaid coverage to all illegal immigrants, of any age.
“Just a few months ago, Newsom announced that the state needed to borrow an extra $2.7 billion because more immigrants were enrolling in the new program than expected,” Glock told The Daily Wire. “The previous estimate was that the program for illegal immigrants would cost about $10 billion a year. Now the estimate’s gone up again. One could say this entire budget problem could be solved just by stopping this one medical program for illegal immigrants.”
“}]]
