Good morning and welcome back to The Elective. We hope you had a blast on Independence Day and enjoyed the weekend that followed. It’s probably safe to assume we all had a better time on Saturday than “weiner king” Joey Chestnut did after eating 71 hot dogs in 10 minutes on Friday.

Looking forward, you’d better get started planning next year’s barbecue for America’s big 250th birthday bash. Or, you know, you could attend a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House instead.

LAW

😕 What’s in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill?

Look out, Moby Dick. Whaling captains just got a nice tax break thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries gave a record-breaking (for the House, at least) eight-hour speech opposing the bill, but he didn’t have the votes to stop it.

• To recap: The House passed the bill. The Senate changed it. The House rolled with the changes and passed it again. The president signed it into law on Friday.

Other than the weird whale thing — you can thank Alaska for that one — what exactly is in this thing? The short answer: a lot.

• The number nerds at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) say the bill will jack up federal budget deficits by $3.3 trillion over the next decade.

• But the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) claims the law will grow the economy and shrink the debt, at least as a percentage of the overall economy.

Babies: Babies born through 2028 just got their first paychecks. The government is contributing $1,000 to a "Trump account” pilot program that gives kiddos an investment account tied to gains in the U.S. stock market.

Immigration: Border agencies are getting a $170 billion funding boost to help them reach Trump’s target of 1 million deportations per year. That money will go toward hiring hundreds of new immigration judges, along with 10,000 ICE agents and 6,000 for the Customs and Border Patrol. It’ll also fund completion of Trump’s border wall, expand detention capacity, and buy some new equipment for the oft-overlooked Coast Guard.

Taxes: Trump’s across-the-board 2017 tax cuts were set to expire this year, but the new law makes those rates permanent. Additionally, the first $25,000 you earn from overtime pay and tips won’t be taxed now. And, thanks to tax deduction changes, the number of seniors exempt from paying taxes on their Social Security benefits will rise from 64% to 88%.

Medicaid: The bill forces able-bodied, childless adults to prove they work at least ~20 hours per week if they want to stay on Medicaid (the government’s low-income health insurance program). It also forces states to pay a larger share of Medicaid costs. Some estimates show this resulting in 11 million people losing their coverage.

SALT: No, not pepper’s best friend. The bill boosts the State and Local Tax Deduction from $10,000 to $40,000. That lets you deduct the taxes you pay to your state and city from your income before calculating how much you owe the feds each year. Raising the limit was key to winning the critical votes of a handful of moderate Republicans from high-tax states like New York.

Gambling: Professional gamblers aren’t happy. Instead of offsetting 100% of their losses against their gains when determining their earnings come tax time, gamblers can only deduct 90%. That could result in some bettors owing more in taxes than they actually earned.

College: It's still open season with private loans, but student loans from the federal government will be capped for most grad students going forward. The annual cap is $20,500 with a lifetime limit of $100,000. Law and medical students can borrow up to $50,000 per year, or $200,000 total.

K-12 education: As long as their states opt in, non-wealthy parents of K-12 students can get tax credits to help cover the cost of sending their kids to private schools.

Cars: If you buy an American-made car, you can now write off up to $10,000 in interest paid on the auto loan. Biden-era tax credits for buying electric vehicles are going bye-bye, though. And the bill also nixes 50-year-old fines for car companies whose vehicles don’t meet certain high gas mileage standards (currently 55 mpg).

Space: The FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation will charge launch and reentry fees to private spaceflight companies. Elsewhere, the old Space Shuttle Discovery will move from a museum in Virginia's D.C. suburbs to one in Houston.

GOVERNMENT

🐊 The first detainees have arrived at Florida’s new 3,000-bed immigration facility. Dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, the center was built using mostly temporary buildings on top of an old runway tucked deep in the Everglades. Florida is operating it and paying $450 million to build and run the thing while hoping for reimbursement from the feds. Officials say it’s safe, hurricane-ready, and enables them to efficiently carry out deportations thanks to the on-site runway. But critics have denounced it as inhumane and an environmental disaster. Meanwhile, other Republican-led states are hoping to build similar facilities to speed up deportations.

⛑️ The death toll from Friday’s catastrophic floods in central Texas reached 82 on Sunday. Search and rescue efforts are still underway for survivors. The National Weather Service (NWS) is defending itself today against accusations that budget cuts and layoffs affected its ability to respond to bad weather events. The agency says it sent flood watch warnings on Thursday and followed with “life-threatening flash flooding” warnings early on Friday morning. But the area is prone to flash flooding, and the waters rose in a matter of minutes at the worst possible time: the middle of the night.

🌍️ Last week, Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense paused some U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine over low-stock concerns. Two days later, President Trump showed strong support for Ukraine after an apparently bad call with his Russian counterpart. Trump said Putin “wants to go all the way” and “keep killing people.” He told Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy that he’d look into any holds and told reporters that Ukraine would need help from America’s famed Patriot missiles.

POLITICS

🎂 Elon Musk launches new political party

Despite recent signs of life, Elonald is officially dunzo over Elon’s opposition to Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. He says the law is fiscally irresponsible and originally promised to fund primary challengers to every Republican in Congress who voted for it. Since that’s basically all of them, Musk shifted strategies: Start a new party.

• He took to X on July 5 to announce the formation of the America Party, saying "we live in a one-party system" when it comes to "bankrupting our country."

The challenge: Third-party efforts are often maligned as just stealing votes from the party they more closely resemble, inevitably throwing elections to the other side. In fact, the two main parties have been known to fund third parties with the express purpose of siphoning votes from the other.

The plan: Musk seems to be aware of this pitfall. He said he’ll use "extremely concentrated force at a precise location on the battlefield" in next year’s midterm elections. To that point, he reposted a tweet indicating he’ll focus his fire on a select few House and Senate races.

• Even so, Republicans are worried that Musk’s new party will only end up helping Democrats in 2026.

This has kinda been done before. Billionaire Ross Perot founded the Reform Party in 1995 after winning 19% of the presidential vote as an independent in 1992. The party eventually won the 1998 Minnesota governor’s race before basically falling apart. In a weird bit of history, “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York” star Donald Trump briefly ran for president under the Reform Party’s banner in 2000.

• Unlike Perot, Musk himself can’t run for president since he wasn’t born a U.S. citizen. Not having a star candidate could hamper his party-building efforts.

• Musk is also busy trying to boost Tesla’s sagging sales, which could keep his eyes off the prize here.

Time will tell if he sticks with this or moves on to a different shiny object. But America’s two-party system has stood since 1860, so toppling it will be tough. Even for Elon Musk.

Elsewhere in politics: Paramount, owner of CBS News, agreed to settle a lawsuit from President Trump for $16 million. Most of that will go toward his future presidential library.

TRIVIA

Launching a new political party over a disagreement with your old one isn’t a new concept. Back in 1912, the bug even infected former President Theodore Roosevelt after he got Big Mad™ at his same-party successor, President William Howard Taft. Teddy split with his old Republican pals and formed the new Progressive Party. By what nickname is Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party more commonly known?

Hint: We’re looking for two words, the second of which is an animal.

BRIEFS

● The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, celebrated his 90th birthday by announcing that he plans to live to 130 and then reincarnate. His office, not China’s government, will then have to hunt down whichever random kid is supposedly his reincarnated form.

● The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) placed 139 employees on administrative leave after they signed an open letter criticizing the agency’s policies under Trump. The EPA said it has “zero tolerance” for employees “unlawfully undermining” its mission.

● President Trump last week announced a mutually agreed-upon trade deal with Vietnam. The deal takes aim at Chinese goods trying to evade tariffs by shipping out of Vietnam. He also sent letters to 12 countries today, pushing them to negotiate.

● OPEC+, a group of major oil-producing countries, agreed on Saturday to boost production in August. About half the world’s oil comes from OPEC+ members. The move is a reversal of previous cuts and could lead to lower gas prices later this year.

● Iran's supreme leader showed his face in public on Saturday for the first time since Israel's attack began on June 13. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei emerged from his bunker for a religious service. A shaky ceasefire has been in effect since June 24.

QUOTE

ANSWER

Theodore Roosevelt ended his eight years in the White House by pushing his protégé, William Howard Taft, to victory in 1908. Four years later, everything had come crashing down between the two. Teddy shrugged off concerns about his health — he was only 53 — by saying he felt as strong and fit as a “bull moose.”

The Bull Moose Party nickname stuck, but the party itself didn’t. He came in second that year, beating out his Republican rival but losing to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. By 1920, the party was toast. More than 100 years later, some Republicans are still sour about the whole thing. Their loss in 1912 ended a legendary 52-year run in which Republicans won 11 of 13 presidential races. They went on to lose 7 of the next 10.