President Donald Trump signed his massive spending and tax policy package on Friday. It includes new tax policy aimed at achieving his campaign promise of no tax on tips.

What does it mean for tipped workers?

Tipped workers can now deduct up to $25,000 of tipped income from their taxes. The amount someone can deduct phases out after the individuals income exceeds $150,000 or $300,000 for a couple filing together.

The deduction only applies for federal income tax, so tipped workers will still owe payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare taxes and state income taxes.

Who does it help the most?

The tax policy changes apply to just a sliver of the workforce.

There were about 4 million tipped workers in the U.S. in 2023, or about 2.5% of the workforce, according to the Yale Budget Lab.

Of those workers, 37% dont earn enough to face federal income tax.

That means the new policy may not have a major impact on lower-income tipped workers.

Among tipped workers, those who are earning relatively significant amounts of income, you know, maybe north of $40,000 or $50,000 will benefit significantly, said Daniel Bunn, the president and CEO of the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes tax policies that lead to greater economic growth and opportunity. But if you're earning less than that, you might have very little tax liability to utilize this benefit.

Who supports it?

Limiting taxes on tips has received bipartisan support among lawmakers, and many tipped workers are excited about the money they could save.

It definitely would be a couple (extra) hundred dollars in our paychecks, which goes far right now, Nichole Stoke, a hospitality worker in Las Vegas, told Scripps News Group Las Vegas.

But some industry groups say they oppose the change because it would tax people who work together differently.

The legislation around no tax on tips is problematic because it leaves out a huge portion of restaurant workers. notably everyone who works in the kitchen and is not customer facing, said Anne McBride, the vice president of impact at the James Beard Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works on behalf of chefs and the culinary industry.

The foundation sent a letter to members of Congress in opposition to the entire piece of legislation and highlighted the no tax on tips section.

Bunn says he thinks it complicates tax policy.

When I think of smart tax policy, I think of policies that create neutrality, simplicity, stability, and transparency, and this policy cuts against several of those principles, he said. I think, honestly, the complexities of figuring out who's eligible and who's not will probably mess with some of the elements of transparency and neutrality.

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When does it take effect?

The changes apply to the 2025 tax year and tipped income that has already been earned during it qualifies for the deduction.

The law is set to end after 2028 unless Congress renews it.

Where did President Trump get the idea for it?

President Trump has said he got the idea for no tax on tips from a waitress he met in Las Vegas.

During the Republican National Convention last year, he said, a waitress told him the government is after me all the time on tips.

He says he suggested not taxing tips, to which he says the waitress responded, what a great idea.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell defended the central bank's decision to not cut interest rates so far this year and said it would have already cut rates if not for tariffs.

At a forum put on by the European Central Bank on Tuesday in Sintra, Portugal, Powell was asked if the Federal Reserve would have cut rates if not for President Donald Trump's tariffs.

"I think that's right," Powell said. "In effect we went on hold when we saw the size of the tariffs, and essentially all inflation forecasts for the United States went up materially as a consequence of the tariffs. So, we didn't overreact. In fact, we didn't react at all. We're simply taking some time."

Powell also repeated his wait-and-see approach when it comes to interest rate cuts and how tariffs could impact the economy.

"As long as the U.S. economy is in solid shape, we think the prudent thing to do is to wait and learn more and see what those effects might be," he said.

Powell's latest comments come as President Trump has intensified his attacks on the Fed chair and continued to push for a rate cut.

On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president sent a note to Powell criticizing his decision not to lower the interest rate.

"Jerome, you are as usual too late," it said. "You have cost the USA a fortune and continue to do so. You should lower the rate by a lot."

The Fed cut interest rates in each of its final three meetings last year, but it has maintained rates between 4.25% and 4.5% through its first four meetings of this year.

The central bank meets again at the end of July, but Powell has not committed to what the bank will do.

"It's going to depend on the data," Powell said Tuesday. "We are going meeting by meeting."

At its June meeting, the bank's Federal Open Market Committee projected two rate cuts later this year.

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If the Fed decides to maintain rates again in July, it will mean the cost of borrowing money will remain high for consumers.

In making the decision, Powell has to consider the "trade-offs", says Thomas Stockwell, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Tampa.

"If you lower interest rates, that's going to increase economic growth, but it will also put upward pressure on prices," Stockwell said. "If you raise interest rates or keep them level, that's going to either keep growth the same or maybe lower growth, but it will keep inflation under control. So, we're in kind of a pick-your-poison mode here."

The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate to keep unemployment low and prices stable. It targets 2% inflation. In May, core inflation was at 2.7%.

The Supreme Court wrapped up its term Friday, releasing decisions in five cases.

Trump v. CASA, Inc.

In one of the most watched decisions of the term, the bench limited the scope of nationwide injunctions by lower courts in a case involving President Donald Trump's executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship.

The court did not rule on the constitutionality of President Trump's executive order. But the ruling effectively allows President Trump to begin enforcing his executive order, pending legal challenges at the lower court level. The court ruled by a 6-3 majority, with the court's three liberal judges in the minority.

The case could have implications far beyond the birthright citizenship case.

The ruling not only has effect on birthright citizenship, it has effect basically on any policy of the executive branch that people think is unconstitutional, said Seth Chandler, a law professor at the University of Houston.

Mahmoud v. Taylor

In a case involving religious rights, the justices sided with Maryland parents who sued to be able to opt their children out of lessons involving LGBTQ-inclusive storybooks.

The decision came in a closely watched case involving Montgomery County Public Schools, which introduced the books in 2022 to reflect its diverse student body, but it could have ripple effects.

"School boards are on notice that when they're introducing controversial curriculum, they need to be aware that parents have rights, said Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Whether that will affect evolution, or let's say Quakers object to war. Can you teach the history of war? I don't know. Theyll have to look at it case by case.

Chandler says it could spark a huge litigation industry between schools and parents wanting their students to opt out of certain lessons.

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. V. Paxton

In a case focused on free speech rights, the court upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for access to online pornography.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices ruled that the interest in protecting children online outweighed the potential burdens placed on adult websites and their users. The majority opinion emphasized that the law targets commercial distributors of explicit content and does not ban access.

The justices essentially upheld age verification requirements onlinefor accessing any site that has morethan two-thirds of itsmaterial (as) sexual material thatwould be obscene as tominors, said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and the former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc.

The justices preserved a key part of the Affordable Care Acts preventive health care coverage requirements, rejecting a challenge from Christian employers to the provision that affects some 150 million Americans.

The 6-3 ruling comes in a lawsuit over how the government decides which health care medications and services must be fully covered by private insurance under former President Barack Obamas signature law, often referred to as Obamacare.

FCC v. Consumers Research

The bench upheld a fee added to phone bills to provide billions of dollars annually to help subsidize phone and internet services in rural areas.

It's a sort of a technical case about something called the nondelegation doctrine, which most professors have thought is pretty much dead, Chandler said. And this one just hammered another spike into the nondelegation doctrine and says that Congress can really give pretty broad discretion to executive agencies on how to implement the desires of Congress.

A split bench

All of the Friday rulings were decided in 6-3 votes, three along clear partisan lines based on the party of the president appointing each justice.

The pattern shows

 

a conservative majority has taken clear control of the court, according to Chandler.

But others see a less stark divide.

It's really a 3-3-3 court, said Shapiro. You have the conservatives, typically defined as Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch. You have the liberals, the Democratic appointees, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. And then you have three in the middle, that triumvirate, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh and Barrett, who really control the direction and the scope of most politically salient issues.

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Legal experts are questioning President Trump's justification for deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles.

In a memo Saturday, the president announced his decision to deploy 2,000 National Guard members due to ongoing protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the city.

The president cited a section of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, a federal law that allows the president to call in a state's National Guard if there's "danger of a rebellion" against the government.

In his memo, the president claimed that recent protests against ICE "constitute a form of rebellion" against the federal government.

However, multiple legal experts who spoke with the Scripps News Group said that's a weak legal justification.

"This is obviously not rebellion," said Georgetown University law professor David Cole. "This is a protest. People going out into the streets because they don't like what the government is doing. That is as American as apple pie. It is not a rebellion."

But defining what constitutes a rebellion is up for debate, according to Chris Mirasola, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston.

"There is no provision, no section of this statute that provides a definition of rebellion," Mirasola said. "This is a problem for a lot of these statutes that govern how the president can use the military in a domestic disturbance. "

Mirasola says President Trump's memo also leaned into a theory of presidential authority known as the protective power.

"The protective power asserts the president's ability to use the military to protect federal functions, federal property, and federal persons. It's based on an understanding of the president's inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution," Mirasola said.

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The president notably did not cite the Insurrection Act a different mechanism the president can use to activate the military domestically. However, on Monday, President Trump did call some of the demonstrators insurrectionists.

California's attorney general and governor are suing the White House for deploying the National Guard troops.

In a statement, Attorney General Rob Bonta said, "There is no rebellion. The President is trying to manufacture chaos and crisis on the ground for his own political ends."

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As consumers anticipate how U.S. trade policies might continue to impact their economic security, a new report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the unemployment rate remained steady in May while employers continued to add job opportunities in the workforce.

According to the report, employers added 139,000 jobs in May, and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.2 percent.

I think that we could describe this months jobs report as being not bad but certainly not great, said Abby Hall, an associate professor of economics at the University of Tampa.

Hall said the job numbers may be an indication of a reaction to policy.

The gains that we saw were primarily in health as well as travel and retail. But a lot of other sectors were fundamentally stagnant, she said. Manufacturing, which has been a big emphasis on the part of this administration, actually saw cuts last month of about 8,000 jobs.

A report issued by the Institute for Supply Management found economic activity in the manufacturing sector contracted in May for the third consecutive month.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the health care industry added 62,000 jobs in May, and the leisure and hospitality industry also increased opportunities by 48,000 compared to an average of 20,000 jobs added per month.

In contrast, jobs within the federal government declined by nearly 22,000.

When we start to see that there's one or two sectors that are primarily driving growth, but everybody else is stagnant or cutting jobs, this is not a particularly good sign of an economy that is robust and healthy, said Hall.

She said employers and employees may be less willing to make big changes in their companies and lives right now. A lot of that we can attribute to policy uncertainty with tariffs and with other actions by the administration.

At the end of the day, this was not a bad jobs report, said Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale. I think what this jobs report does is it makes it less likely, much less likely that the (Federal Reserve) entertains any sort of rate cuts at their next meeting.

Tedeschi said economists often call the labor market a lagging indicator of what may be to come.

You usually dont see the effects of economic weakness in the unemployment rate or in jobs growth until a little bit after its soaked into the full economy, he said. What I think will be more interesting this month will be to see the inflation data. Even there, I dont expect to see anything dramatic, like a huge rise in inflation.

Tedeschi said the effects of tariffs will seep into the data gradually over time.

If the retaliatory tariffs that weve seen from places like China and Canada remain, that could put a damper in a lot of our manufacturing exports, he said.

Tariffs are not like COVID. They dont all of a sudden overnight dramatically change the data, he said. I think that there definitely is economic weakness, and we can see in high-frequency data that prices are rising in places like Amazon, especially for imports, but I think its going to take a while still to work its way into official data.

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For the average consumer, Hall said it is important to be aware of these latest economic numbers, which she described as cautious.

What is going on in the overall economy influences directly how much things cost, how much your savings account has in terms of interest. It also impacts things like peoples interest rates on home loans, car loans, and any other thing that you might be going to the bank for, so when we look at these numbers, its not just this overall kind of nebulous macroeconomy thats affected. Its peoples day-to-day lives as well as peoples day-to-day budgets.

The Department of Homeland Security is putting more than 500 so-called "sanctuary jurisdictions" on notice.

The agency published a list of cities, counties, and states on Thursday that it says are "deliberately and shamefully obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws."

The publication of the list comes a month after President Trump signed an executive order targeting undocumented migrants and jurisdictions that protect them. The order directs government agencies to identify potential cuts to federal funds that go to sanctuary jurisdictions, including grants and contracts.

The potential loss of those funds would be "huge," according to Katie Scott, the chair of the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners in Michigan.

"Losing federal funding means that we really have to think about the impact of the services that we're available to provide to people, like community health workers, outreach programs, things that we do with our nonprofit partners to provide food for food banks," Scott said. "All of those things end up needing to be reevaluated."

Meanwhile, the administration says it will double down on its efforts to carry out its immigration policies.

"We're going to flood the zone, and sanctuary cities will get exactly what they don't want: more agents in their neighborhoods, more work site enforcement," White House border czar Tom Homan said Thursday.

The list of sanctuary jurisdictions covers cities and counties across more than 30 states and Washington, D.C.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told Scripps News Group inclusion on the list was based on multiple factors "including self-identification as a sanctuary jurisdiction, noncompliance with Federal law enforcement in enforcing immigration laws, restrictions on information sharing, and legal protections for illegal aliens."

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But leaders from several of the jurisdictions listed said they shouldn't be included.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said in a statement his city is not a sanctuary city, noting it does not have jurisdiction over the jails.

"We follow our limited obligations as defined under federal immigration law," Scott said.

He said Baltimore is a "welcoming city" and will protect the rights of its residents.

Las Vegas Mayor Shelley Berkley told Scripps News Group Las Vegas that her city shouldn't be included, either.

"The entire city of Las Vegas is surprised," Berkley said. "We have never been a sanctuary city. We are not a sanctuary city. We're not ever going to be a sanctuary city, and I'm respectfully requesting that the Department of Homeland Security remove the city of Las Vegas from that list."

The agency did remove some jurisdictions initially listed, including at least two counties and one city in Colorado.

Denver's mayor says that proves the DHS wasn't careful when compiling the list.

"Considering DHS has removed several Colorado counties from the list less than 24 hours after publishing, it doesn't seem like they even know what their own criteria is," a spokesperson for Denver's Mayor's Office said.

City and county officials also say they have not been formally notified by the agency about their status as a sanctuary jurisdiction and only became aware of it due to the published list on the DHS website.

"We have not been notified by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that Oakland County has any issue or that it is included on any list of so-called sanctuary jurisdictions," Michigan's Oakland County executive David Coulter and Sheriff Michael Bouchard said in a statement. "We are not a sanctuary jurisdiction. We are confident that the county's policies and practices comply with federal law, and we were incorrectly placed on this list."

DHS says that the list can be changed at any time and will be updated regularly.

Pomp and circumstance were everywhere at Columbia University on Wednesday, following another school year that included controversial circumstances on campus.

The school held its main-campus graduation for the Class of 2025 on Wednesday morning.

The school's main commencement ceremony was cancelled last year because of ongoing protests over the war in Gaza.

Dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated outside the university's gates during Wednesday's ceremonies. There was a large presence of New York Police Department personnel around the campus.

The NYPD told Scripps News it arrested two demonstrators. One was charged with resisting arrest, obstructing government administration in the second degree and disorderly conduct; the other was charged with reckless endangerment for lighting items on fire on a public sidewalk.

RELATED STORY | NYPD called to Columbia University after protesters cause 'safety hazard' at campus library

The university has continued to be embroiled in controversy this year.

In March, Columbia announced it was changing some policies after the Trump administration cut some of its federal funding.

Several Columbia students have also been targeted and arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

The Trump administration has accused them of supporting protests aligned with Hamas.

The detentions, like that of Mahmoud Khalil, have been criticized for a lack of due process.

Khalil was detained in March and is being held in a facility in Louisiana.

The Columbia University graduate student was set to graduate on Wednesday. Instead, he awaits an immigration court hearing scheduled for Thursday.

Columbia's acting president Claire Shipman addressed Khalil and other international students during her remarks.

"We firmly believe that our international students have the same rights to freedom of speech as everyone else, and they should not be targeted by the government for exercising that right," Shipman said. "And let me also say, that I know many in our community today are mourning the absence of our graduate Mahmoud Khalil."

Shipman was booed during parts of her speech. She was also booed and shouted down during remarks on Tuesday at another commencement program, with students shouting, "Free Mahmoud."

Students have been critical of the administration's handling of protests over the past year and a half.

"I think you can tell by the heckling and the boos how much of the student body feels regarding the president and some of the other administrators," said Satvic Garg, an engineering graduate student who graduated from Columbia. "But, I would say that overall students want to spend time with each other for the last couple of days that you have with your peers and with some of your professors."

Vice President JD Vance spoke about President Biden's cancer diagnosis on Monday and questioned whether the former president was "capable of doing the job" while he was still in office.

"We wish the best for the former president's health," Vance said aboard Air Force Two. "You can separate the desire for him to have the right health outcome with the recognition that whether it was doctors or whether there were staffers around the former president, I don't think he was able to do a good job for the American people, and that's not politics. That's not because I disagreed with him on policy. That's because I don't think that he was in good enough health."

On Sunday, Biden revealed he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that had metastasized to the bone. His office called it a "more aggressive form of the disease" but said the cancer "appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management." Biden's office said his diagnosis had a Gleason score of 9.

In a post on X on Monday, Biden shared a picture of himself with former First Lady Jill Biden.

"Cancer touches us all," Biden wrote. "Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places. Thank you for lifting us up with love and support."

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In a social media post on Sunday, President Trump wrote that he and First Lady Melania Trump were wishing Biden a "successful recovery."

On Monday, Vance combined his well wishes with questions.

"In some ways, I blame him less than I blame the people around him," Vance said of Biden. "Why didn't the American people have a better sense of his health picture? Why didn't the American people have more accurate information about what he was actually dealing with? This serious stuff. This is the guy who carries around the nuclear football for the world's largest nuclear arsenal. This is not child's play, and we can pray for good health but also recognize that if you're not in good enough health to do the job, you shouldn't be doing the job."

It's "not impossible, but not common" that a patient with this stage of cancer would have had it go undetected until this point, according to Dr. Daniel P. Petrylak, a medical oncologist and Chief of Genitourinary Oncology at Yale Medical Center.

"I've seen patients who have had low PSA values, high Gleason scores," Petrylak said. So, it is possible that this has occurred. I would have hoped that he was monitored medically, that this could have been picked up earlier."

Petrylak said without Biden's medical records it would be speculative to comment on whether Biden's cancer could have been detected earlier.