Ryan Knutson

He's also been expanding the list of who is deportable by going after people with a variety of legal statuses, including some with green cards or visas. As part of that expansion, the administration is targeting an obscure program known as humanitarian parole. Humanitarian parole is a part of immigration law that's historically been used for special situations when someone can't get a visa.

So the idea is kind of like the U.S. will let in some people under certain circumstances out of the kindness of America's heart. But it's only supposed to be temporary.

And specifically, he said he was going to deport immigrants who had committed crimes.

Humanitarian parole has also been used during emergency evacuations, like after the Vietnam War and after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan. But humanitarian parole really expanded under the Biden administration, specifically after Russia invaded Ukraine.

So the Biden administration decided to expand the use of humanitarian parole and use it as the basis of a program called Uniting for Ukraine.

Ultimately, more than 200,000 Ukrainian refugees moved to the U.S. via this program.

It would solve the Ukrainian immigration issue. Exactly. The program worked so well to get Ukrainians off the U.S. southern border that Biden decided to expand it to other countries in Latin America.

So Biden decided to offer humanitarian parole to people in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Once these immigrants had this status and got into the U.S., they're only supposed to be here for two years. What's the next step? Is it just two years and goodbye? Or was there something else that the immigrants could do once they're here to gain more long-term status?

More than half a million people entered the U.S. from Latin American countries under the program. And Biden's decision to do this was very controversial.

That's our colleague Michelle Hackman, who covers immigration. And she says that since Trump took office, the mass deportations have not yet been as mass as he promised.

So it's sort of like a way to bring people into the United States legally, so they're not just lining up in this giant queue on the southern border. But the fact is that they're now here illegally.

When Trump took office, he immediately ended the parole program for Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. And no new applicants are being considered. And immigrants who came to the U.S. under the program from Ukraine are now left in limbo.

When President Trump was on the campaign trail, he made a lofty promise. He said he was going to deport millions of illegal immigrants.

We'll be right back. Katarina Kirilova grew up in Mariupol, a city in southern Ukraine.

In February 2022, her hometown came under siege as part of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Katarina says she was an orphan and that her grandmother was the only family she was close to. So she had to find a new place to go. She eventually found the Uniting for Ukraine program and was accepted. What did you bring to the U.S. when you left Ukraine?

What was in your backpack?

Katarina found a sponsor in Texas, a retired military couple, and moved in with them for a few months. They're really special people for me.

After Trump took office, Katarina says she got laid off from the non-profit agency where she worked, which lost its government funding. And now, the future of the Uniting for Ukraine program is unclear. Katarina said she hoped her status would be extended until the war ends, but that seems unlikely.

Our colleague Michelle, who covers immigration, says Trump has done more than just end the program. For immigrants who came from Latin America, the Trump administration is revoking some people's status early.

So to increase the number of deportations, the Trump administration is targeting a new group of people, people who came to the United States legally under certain programs.

And so what happens to these people once their status expires? Are they expected to just leave on their own? Or is the administration fighting them and deporting them?

Are there any court challenges to these moves by the Trump administration?

How do you feel about America right now?

Katarina is planning to stay until her parole runs out. Then, she says she'll probably go back to Ukraine, despite the risks.

How do you feel right now?

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Wednesday, March 19th. Coming up on the show, a new phase in Trump's immigration fight. In recent weeks, the Trump administration has been turning up the heat on deportations. Over the weekend, his administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans without giving them hearings, citing an 18th century law.

That's all for today, Wednesday, March 19th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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So what's Vail's reputation now in the ski industry and amongst skiers?

All right, Gray Day Shredder.

Thank you so much for your time.

That's all for today. Wednesday, February 5th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Denny Jacob. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Vale has amassed a large customer base over the years. But as that customer base has grown, things have gotten a bit icy.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Wednesday, February 5th. Coming up on the show, the problems snowballing at Vail Resorts.

Uh-huh. So you don't go out there and, like, shred the gnar?

For decades, skiing in America was pretty straightforward. Ski slopes were largely independent operations. In the business model, it was pretty simple. You bought a day pass, and you went up and down the hill.

I remember kids in high school that skied. They'd wear their winter coats and have their ski pass on it growing up in Oregon at Mount Hood.

For most independent ski resorts, which were privately held, this volatility was a headache. But for Vail, it was a big problem. Vale is the only ski resort company in the U.S. that's publicly traded on the stock market. It listed in 1997, meaning the company's sales have to be publicly disclosed each quarter to investors. And investors don't like volatility.

They just want to see growth all the time. So in 2008, Vale came up with a solution, the Epic Pass.

Wow. This is definitely going to make it into the podcast.

So at the time that this came out, it was like an incredible deal.

For consumers, not only was the Epic Pass a good deal at the time, owning a pass meant that if snow conditions were bad at one resort, you could just take your skis or snowboard to one of Vail's other mountains. And over time, Vail kept making its Epic Pass even more epic.

Vail's entire business became about selling the Epic Pass. And at the same time, it dramatically raised the price of a single-day pass, which made the Epic Pass look like an even better deal in comparison.

Grade A Shredder, or Allison as she's more commonly known, knows the biggest name in skiing is Vail Resorts. Vail started out as just one resort near its namesake in Colorado. But over the years, it's grown into a behemoth and now owns and operates 42 ski resorts around the world. And the company has completely revolutionized the business.

Just for a one-day pass.

This is like got to be one of the most expensive hobbies that exists.

And what did the introduction of the Epic Pass mean for Vale's business?

The other day, I caught up with my colleague, Allison Polly. Lately, she's been writing about the ski industry. Do you ski?

The Epic Pass revolutionized the ski industry. And by the late 2010s, other ski companies introduced their own versions, in many cases by partnering with other ski resorts. Now, two alternatives are the Icon Pass and the Indy Pass, but neither have been able to reach Vail's scale. And when the pandemic hit, tons of people caught the skiing bug. And Vail suddenly had a lot more potential customers.

Right, here's the perfect thing I can do when I'm stuck at home, just go outside and ski.

The price of the Epic Pass went from $979 down to $783. And it was a huge hit. A lot of people bought it. And what was the sort of peak of this business strategy? Uh...

Is the downslope going to be a black diamond, a double black diamond, a blue maybe, or a green? Or is that Bunny Hill?

Before we hit those moguls, we're going to take a quick break in the lodge. After Vale dropped the price of the Epic Pass in 2021, the company saw an avalanche of new customers.

Vail said the crowding wasn't because more people bought the pass. It was due to a global labor shortage that prevented it from opening all the lifts across Vail's resorts. Regardless, many skiers and snowboarders were not happy.

Let's cut the crap. Let's get straight into A Hater's Guide to Vail.

After bringing in all these new customers, Vale started raising the price of the Epic Pass again. This season, it reached the most expensive it's ever been, at $1,107. Then, at the end of last year, Vale's reputation took another blow. On December 27th, during one of the busiest ski periods of the year, there was a strike at Park City, Utah, Vail's largest resort.

Ski patrollers walked off the job in a dispute over wages. Okay, one track!

During the strike, a significant percentage of runs had to be shut down. But customers said that it wasn't clearly communicated.

The strike ended after 12 days when Vail agreed to increase union member wages by an average of $4 an hour and added other benefits like parental leave. Vail apologized to its customers and offered credits to people whose skiing experience was negatively impacted. But Vail's labor struggles didn't end with Park City. There have also been issues at Vail's Crested Butte and Breckenridge locations.

The company says it's working to resolve them. Now, for Vale, after years at the top of the mountain, things are sliding downhill. This season, for the first time ever, sales of the Epic Pass fell by 2%. And the company's stock has dropped by half since its peak at the end of 2021. And then, last week, one of the company's minority shareholders publicly called for big changes.

I mean, I feel like even just like in pop culture, almost just... The name Vale, like I'm going to Vale, is like, ooh, that's a really high-end, classy thing you're going to go do.

The investor also called for Vail's CEO, CFO, and executive chairman to be replaced, and its dividends to be cut by 80%. A Vail Resorts spokesperson said the company engages frequently with shareholders and values their feedback. The company attributed the decline in Epic Pass sales to a quote, post-COVID normalization and to light snowfall in some areas.

And they said the company still believes in the Epic Pass model. To turn things around, Vail has been exploring some new ideas. It's trying to get customers to spend more on ski lessons and gear rental, and it's looking to expand its footprint in Europe. It's also cutting costs and says it plans to shrink its corporate workforce by 14% over the next two years.

Hey, Kate.

Please do.

What are Idol's plans for the company now? Like, where do you think this company might go?

Well, I'm glad that we have you for a few more weeks. And I want our listeners to know that the show is not changing. Co-host Jessica Mendoza and I will still be here telling the most important money, business, and power stories out there.

Before we go, do you have any questions about the Trump administration? Like about Trump's order to dismantle the Department of Education or the war plans that were accidentally leaked over a group chat? Email us and let us know. Please send a recording of your question to thejournalatwsj.com. That's thejournalatwsj.com. That's all for today. Tuesday, March 25th.

Special thanks to S&P Global Market Intelligence for investor meeting audio. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Aw. Aw. Well, thank you, Kate. It's been a pleasure.

All right, now on to today's episode, which is fittingly about another icon handing off something that she helped build. Here it is. The high-end Italian fashion brand Versace is known for its dramatic clothing.

That's our colleague Suzanne Kappner, who covers the fashion industry. And she says people on the internet still talk about some of Versace's most famous looks.

I can't say that I do personally. Yeah.

The only piece of Versace that I think that I know or remember is the J-Lo dress, that green one with like the plunging neckline.

Thanks for popping in the studio.

Yeah, I think I was in seventh grade when she wore that dress.

But the era of such bold Versace designs might be over. Recently, the fashion house made a big announcement. Donatella Versace, who'd been the creative mind behind her family's brand for nearly three decades, is stepping down as creative director. The news followed growing tensions between her and the brand's American corporate owner.

And now, with Donatella stepping aside, Suzanne says Versace is at a turning point.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, March 25th. Coming up on the show, the end of the Versace era at Versace. Donatella Versace has been part of the brand's identity since it was founded in Milan by her older brother, Gianni Versace, almost 50 years ago. How central is Donatella Versace to this Versace brand?

Congratulations. Thank you. How does it feel?

Donatella's celebrity status was integral to the brand's early growth. She made important relationships with fashion editors and celebrities to help build the brand's profile.

July 15th, the fashion world is rocked by the murder in Miami Beach of Italian designer Gianni Versace. After Gianni's death, Donatella took his place as creative leader of Versace. In that role, she went on to create some of the brand's most iconic looks and ad campaigns, featuring stars like Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Beyonce.

But by the early 2000s, Versace the business was having a hard time. It was struggling to compete against bigger brands like LVMH and Kering, which were starting to acquire family-run fashion houses like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent, and Gucci.

Despite its troubles, Versace wasn't really looking to sell. But then, Donatella Versace met John Idol.

How did he do that?

With Michael Kors, Idol had bought a small business and turned it into a global multi-billion dollar company. And in 2018, he tried to persuade Donatella that he could do the same for Versace.

Michael Kors bought Versace for just over $2 billion. Idol took over the business side of things, and Donatella stayed on as the brand's creative director. After the sale, Idle changed the name of his company from Michael Kors to Capri, named after an island off the Italian coast.

But not long after the acquisition, a seam started to tear in their relationship. An early warning sign was that the American executives and Italian designers had a hard time even talking to each other.

They're using some business terms, your KPIs.

We sure do.

And then, Idol and Donatella started butting heads on the brand's creative vision. That's next. After the pandemic, the luxury fashion market started to change.

I understand that you have something that you want to share with our listeners.

It's been so much fun to work with you, Kate, over the last six years on this show. And I know that I can speak on behalf of everybody when I say we're going to miss you a lot. I don't know who's going to miss you more, me or our listeners.

One estimate shows that between 2022 and 2024, the number of luxury goods sold globally collapsed by more than a fifth. At Versace, the pressure was on. And John Idol stepped in and started weighing in on designs. What was Idol's vision for Versace?

How did Donatella Versace respond to these ideas?

In one instance, Idol had men's silk shorts removed from mannequins and Versace store windows because he thought they were too flamboyant. Why? Why did he want to get involved in the sort of creative side if he had sort of pitched the deal as business?

Eidel also wanted Versace to add a new insignia, similar to Michael Kors' MK or Louis Vuitton's LV. So the design team came up with a Baroque V that Versace then started putting on handbags.

Yeah. It's going to be the listeners because I'm going to be in your office every day.

What did all this flip-flopping mean for Versace's sales?

The company's stock is down, too. Since Capri acquired Versace in 2018, its stock has fallen about 40%. So, Idol is now looking for another merger. He tried combining Capri with the fashion house Tapestry, but that deal got blocked by regulators. Now, Suzanne says he's been having talks about possibly selling Versace to Prada. And then, a few weeks ago, came the big announcement.

What did Donatella Versace say about why she decided to leave?

So it sounds like she might have felt a little bit like her hands were tied creatively. Yeah.

After Donatella stepped down, Idol told the Wall Street Journal that he's confident in the vision he'd set for Versace. He said, quote, I guess it's the end of an era for Donatella Versace.

All right, let's go back in time for a second. Why did Donald Trump want to ban TikTok in the first place when he first brought this up back in 2020?

Basically that the Chinese government could use the TikTok algorithm to push content that's more favorable to China or its worldviews. Yeah, that too. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, has said it would not comply with such requests from the Chinese government and that it protects user data.

After calling out TikTok, Trump tried to use his presidential powers during his first term to bring the app under U.S. control.

In an effort to head off concerns, TikTok implemented a plan known as Project Texas. The idea was that U.S. user data would be walled off by TikTok and stored on servers in the U.S. owned by Oracle, a U.S. tech company. And did Project Texas work in the way that it was envisioned?

Wasn't it President Trump who, back in 2020, was the person who sort of kicked off this whole effort to ban TikTok in the first place? Yes, the very same President Trump. Our colleague Georgia Wells reports on TikTok.

And then when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel in October of 2023, the pressure on TikTok picked up again.

Is that a proven fact, or was that just a feeling that some lawmakers had, that there were more pro-Palestinian views on the platform?

That bill, which had overwhelming bipartisan support, sailed through Congress and was signed by then-President Biden last April. It gave ByteDance a deadline for divestiture, January 19th, 2025. Meanwhile, Trump started signaling that he had changed his mind about TikTok. He warned that banning it would only serve to help Meta, a company Trump had been critical of after it kicked him off Facebook.

Trump also joined TikTok this summer, and he has said it helped him win support among young voters. Regardless, the options for TikTok were dwindling. The Chinese government kept signaling that any deal was off the table. TikTok and a group of creators challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, but the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the ban could go ahead. And then a twist.

As Biden's presidency wound down, officials signaled that they didn't intend to enforce a ban. They said that it would be up to the Trump White House to implement the legislation. And Trump said he'd like to give the company more time to find a solution that would keep TikTok in the U.S. It was sort of like a game of chicken, almost, where it seemed like the U.S.

On Monday, just hours after he was sworn into office, President Donald Trump signed a stack of executive orders. One of them delayed enforcement of a ban on TikTok in the U.S.

government wanted to put maximum pressure out to try to get a deal done.

But on Saturday, a day before the January 19th deadline, TikTok shut down anyway. When TikTok users opened the app on Saturday afternoon, they got a message that said TikTok was no longer available. And the quote, we are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned.

If it seemed like the Biden administration was saying that they weren't going to enforce it, Trump was sending very strong signals that he also wanted to try to figure out a way to save the app. Why did TikTok go dark then over the weekend temporarily?

But then, on Sunday, about 14 hours after it went away, TikTok was back. That's next.

When TikTok came back online on Sunday, TikTok users rejoiced.

So TikTok is still functioning. It's thanking President Trump. But is the story really over? Is it really actually saved now?

Now, when users opened the app, they were greeted with a new message with another nod to Trump. It said, quote, as a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.

But the drama still isn't over. Trump's executive order just gave the company more time to strike a deal, and it's still not available for download in the app stores.

Yeah, I mean, I'm honestly very confused about this. I mean, Congress overwhelmingly passes a law. It's challenged at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court upholds it. How can then one person, the president of the United States, just sort of say, yeah, I know that two other branches of government have said this needs to happen, but I'm going to try to make it not?

Trump has said he wants TikTok to be owned 50-50 between U.S. and Chinese companies.

Last week, the Chinese foreign ministry said that any deal should, quote, be decided by the companies on their own, indicating that the Chinese government might now be more open to a deal than it was in the past. So we're...

And right now it looks like it's going to be saved. But like a deal of some sort still does need to happen. The can has just been very firmly kicked down the road, but it's still been kicked.

What do you think that this whole saga says about how important TikTok has become and also what the relationship is like at this moment between the U.S. and China?

That's all for today, Tuesday, January 21st. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Elizabeth Woolman. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Tuesday, January 21st. Coming up on the show, the TikTok ban that wasn't?

This is one of the most important pieces of legislation that Congress has passed in decades to help the American worker, to help grow the American economy. This is profound change and this is change that is going to put our country on the right path.

7-Eleven was founded in Texas in 1927. It was originally called Southland Ice Company. In the 1940s, it changed its name to reflect its hours, 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and the chain went on to become a convenient American icon. But there's a country that loves 7-Eleven even more than Americans do. Japan. If you could describe 7-Eleven and Japan in one word, what would it be?

That's our colleague Jinju Lee. Even though 7-Eleven started in the U.S., it's been a Japanese company since the early 1990s. And Japan has more 7-Elevens than anywhere else in the world.

No offense to the hot dog, but food at Japanese 7-Elevens is much better.

And that brand love and great food is one of the reasons another company is trying to buy 7-Eleven. That company is a Canadian one, another convenience store giant called Alimentacion Couchetard. In the U.S., Couchetard owns the convenience store chain Circle K, which is the second biggest chain in the U.S. behind 7-Eleven.

And Jinju says that right now, convenience stores are having a bit of an identity crisis.

It's just better margins. For Kushtard, this is where 7-Eleven would come in, specifically Japanese 7-Eleven.

Definitely lots of soda and stuff that you'd expect in a normal 7-Eleven. And like these, I don't even know what you call them, like taquitos or something, like crunchy with like cheese or chicken inside. And then you got your big gulp options here. My gosh, the Big Gulp is so big. I decided to pick up a classic Slurpee. I went with Coke-flavored with some cherry mixed in there as well. Wow.

Couchetard buying 7-Eleven would be a massive merger, and it would allow Couchetard to dramatically increase its market share. 7-Eleven has more than 80,000 stores worldwide. So, with this one move, Couchetard would become five times bigger than it is today. Couchetard began its pursuit of 7-Eleven in August, when it made an offer to 7-Eleven's parent company, a company called Seven and I.

Isn't it like regulators aren't going to let these two giants, number one and number two, combine in the U.S. ?

When 7-Eleven turned them down, Couchetard came back and sweetened the deal by $8 billion, upping their offer to $47 billion. Seven and I is a publicly traded company, and Couchetard's new offer excited some of its investors.

Seven and I didn't respond publicly to the second CouchTard offer. But then, in a new twist, management within Seven and I teamed up with Japanese investors and three Japanese banks to come out with a competing offer to keep 7-Eleven in Japanese hands.

7-Eleven. In America, it's home of the Slurpee. The Big Gulp, coming in a rainbow of artificial colors. The Big Bite Hot Dog, rotating under a heat lamp. Bright yellow nacho cheese. Rows of chips. Shelves of candy bars. Yesterday, I popped into one by the office. All right, I'm in lower Manhattan and I'm about to go into a 7-Eleven.

$58 billion. If that deal went through, it would be the biggest leveraged buyout of all time. It was so big that it made Jinju wonder.

That's next.

When a company goes private, it means it's taken off the stock market and shareholders get a big payout. But for 7-Eleven, going private comes with a big downside, debt. To take 7-Eleven private, its new owners would have to take on a lot of debt. Out of the $58 billion they're offering to pay, around two-thirds of the money would come from loans.

And that debt will have to be repaid by 7-Eleven, meaning it might make it harder for the company to succeed. So why would they want to do it?

This year, here in the U.S., the Biden administration opposed a deal for a Japanese company to buy U.S. steel. But historically, Japanese businesses have been much more skeptical of foreign acquisition offers, especially with a brand as beloved as 7-Eleven.

It's really sugary and... Hmm. I mean, it tastes good, I'm not going to lie. But I don't think I could have more than one of these a decade, honestly. But I wasn't at 7-Eleven for culinary reasons. I was there for journalism. Because right now, 7-Eleven is the subject of a major bidding war. A Canadian company really wants to buy it, and they're offering to pay a lot of money for it.

But this culture of protecting Japanese companies can sometimes result in bad business and poor returns for investors. And so, in recent years, the Japanese government has tried to make some changes.

Why would the stock exchange want that?

What happens to 7-Eleven will be a big indicator of how well these reforms are working. Right now, the ball is in CouchTard's court. The company has to decide whether to increase its offer even more or drop the idea altogether. So what does all that say then?

Given that background, the fact that Japanese companies tend to just sort of wave off takeover offers and that the government is trying to bring about these changes, what does that say? Does that tell us anything about the fact that 7-Eleven's parent company put in this private bid?

So what do you think is going to happen next?

That's all for today, Tuesday, November 19th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Megumi Fujikawa, Adriana Marchese, and Kosako Narioka. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

But 7-Eleven is playing hard to get. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, November 19th. Coming up on the show, why 7-Eleven doesn't want to sell.

Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company, they're pulling their cars from the streets. General Motors, which owns Cruise, says it's moving away from the robo-taxi business.

Additional reporting in this episode by Dylan Tokar and Ken Thomas. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, February 11th. Coming up on the show, is this the end of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?

After the 2008 financial crisis, now Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who back then was a law professor at Harvard, led a push to create an agency that would serve as a consumer watchdog on financial institutions.

In 2010, Democrats in Congress passed a suite of new regulations on the banking industry, without much Republican support, that included Warren's CFPB idea. And in 2011, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau got up and running. So what has it been doing over the course of its life? How has it been regulating the banks?

Over its roughly 14-year lifespan, the agency has passed a number of regulations aimed at protecting consumers and issued billions of dollars in fines.

For instance, in 2022, the CFPB reached a settlement with Wells Fargo that included a $1.7 billion fine and that required the bank to give $2 billion back to consumers after the agency said the bank wrongfully foreclosed on homes, illegally repossessed vehicles, and incorrectly charged fees and interest.

The CFPB says it's returned nearly $20 billion to consumers through things like principal reductions, canceled debts, and direct compensation to consumers. But pretty much ever since its founding, Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns about the agency and tried to get rid of it.

Here's Republican Senator Tim Scott grilling the former head of the CFPB at a hearing in 2023.

The CFPB doesn't get its funding from Congress. Its money comes from the Federal Reserve, meaning lawmakers aren't as easily able to influence it. Its critics have also said that it relies too heavily on enforcement actions rather than setting regulations, which creates uncertainty for the banking industry.

Over the years, Republicans have introduced bills to limit the CFPB's power, but the agency has so far remained intact. Until Trump appointed a man named Russell Vogt as acting director of the agency. Tell me about Russell Vogt.

Vogt served in Trump's first administration as the head of the Office of Management and Budget, a powerful agency that helps the president manage government spending.

Boat was also one of the co-authors of Project 2025, a conservative plan for reshaping the federal government. Boat wrote a chapter on how the executive branch should have much more authority to control federal spending.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration continued taking a buzzsaw to the federal government. After largely dismantling USAID, a $40 billion agency focused on delivering foreign aid, President Trump's sights are now set on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB. It's an agency that was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

And after Trump won the election, he put vote back in charge of the OMB. And not only that, he also became the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That's after the break. When Russell Vogt became acting head of the CFPB on Friday, employees there had already received a memo ordering them to pause ongoing investigations, litigation, and the implementation of new rules.

That's our colleague Brian Schwartz. He says Republicans have been railing against the agency for years.

And staffers from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, were inside the agency's internal computer systems. Around the time Vogt took over, Musk posted on X, CFPB RIP, with an emoji of a tombstone.

And then on Sunday, employees got another memo.

So basically at this point, the CFPB is an agency that is like frozen in place. It is not really doing anything.

Boat also said in a post on X on Saturday that the agency would stop taking in money it had previously been allocated. Now, there's a 404 Page Not Found banner across the agency's website, and its X account has been deactivated. What has the response been so far to these actions against the CFPB?

In fact, a group of Republican lawmakers, led by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, proposed legislation last month that would effectively defund the CFPB. So what do you think? I mean, ultimately, the CFPB was created with a vision to protect consumers, protect the little guy from the big banks. So if this agency gets largely diminished, what would that mean for consumers?

So we have these two powerful Trump allies in Elon Musk and Russell Vogt, both working to dismantle parts of the federal government at Doge and the Office of Management and Budget. Can you help me understand how they're working together? What is the difference between them?

Here's Vogt a few weeks ago, talking about the work that Doge has been doing.

I want to go back to this fact about Russell Vogt and how he was one of the co-authors of Project 2025. Didn't Trump try to distance himself from Project 2025 during the campaign? And I recall the Wall Street Journal even reported that the administration was trying not to hire people who are connected to Project 2025.

So technically, this action with the CFPB is a freeze. But how far could this go? Do you think this could be the end of the agency as we know it?

On Sunday, the National Treasury Employees Union filed a lawsuit against Vogt, aiming to prevent the shutdown of the CFPB. The union said that, quote, "...Congress, not the president, has the power to create or destroy executive branch agencies."

Before we go, do you have any questions about what the Trump administration is up to? Please send us a voice note to thejournalatwsj.com. That's thejournalatwsj.com. We'll try to answer them in our special series, Trump 2.0, which comes out every Friday morning. That's all for today, Tuesday, February 11th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

Mm-hmm.

UnitedHealth said last week that its priorities were supporting Thompson's family and ensuring the safety of its employees. The company said it will, quote, continue to be there for those who depend upon us for their healthcare. What questions do you still have about Mangione in this incident?

What do you think the reaction and the moment of all this frustration and rage that we've seen from people online toward the health insurance industry and the healthcare industry say about America right now?

That's all for today. Tuesday, December 10th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Scott Calvert, Jim Carlton, Alyssa Luckpat, Ana Wildey-Matthews, and Ginger Adams-Otis. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Tuesday, December 10th. Coming up on the show, the murder of a health insurance CEO and what we know about the alleged killer. The CEO of UnitedHealthcare was a man named Brian Thompson. He was 50 years old, had two kids, and he'd been in the role for about three years.

Last week, he was in New York for a big investor conference. Around 6.45 a.m. on Wednesday, he was walking outside the Hilton Midtown Hotel when a man in a dark jacket and a hood shot him in the back multiple times. So after Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was murdered, What clues did the police have to go off?

And at the scene, police found these three bullet casings with the words deny, defend, and depose written on them. What's the significance of that phrase?

But to be clear, nobody actually knew what the killer's motivations were.

And what were New York police doing to try to catch him?

What were they able to piece together about the alleged killer's movements after the shooting?

And while the police were searching for the killer, there's this other thing happening, which is this outpouring of anger from the public at the health insurance industry.

That's our colleague Joshua Chaffin, who's been covering the story.

Did any of this broader sentiment have an impact on the manhunt?

Last week, the CEO of United Healthcare, a major insurance company, was shot and killed in midtown Manhattan. And the story, in subsequent search for his killer, has captivated the nation.

Did Brian Thompson's family or the company say anything about this reaction from the public?

Ultimately, it was a member of the public who noticed the suspect and turned him in.

And then what happened next?

Here's New York City Mayor Eric Adams at a press conference yesterday.

Coming up, what we know about the suspect. All right, so tell us everything we've learned so far about the man who was arrested yesterday, the alleged killer, Luigi Mangione.

Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate, was arrested hundreds of miles away from the scene of the crime, at a McDonald's in Altoona, Pennsylvania. He's been charged with murder. But the story is far from over.

In a statement, Mangione's family said, quote, "...our family is shocked and devastated," and that they, quote, "...offer prayers to the family of Brian Thompson." What else did you learn about his personality? What makes you think he was idealistic?

Mangione appeared to review lots of books on the Goodreads website, and in January, there was a notable entry.

According to friends, Mangione had back surgery, and then at some point this year, he lost contact with some of his friends and family.

This afternoon, while being escorted into a courthouse in Pennsylvania, Mangione shouted at reporters.

It's not exactly clear what he was referring to, but he appeared to say, Mangione is currently being held without bail in Pennsylvania and is contesting extradition back to New York, where he faces a murder charge, among other criminal charges. Now, a judge set a schedule for legal proceedings in Pennsylvania that could take weeks to resolve.

So at this point, it seems like his frustration with the health insurance industry might actually be a factor that motivated him. So what does that mean for the health insurance industry?

Coming up on the show, a conversation with Gap CEO Richard Dixon on how he's bringing the roughly 55-year-old company back to life and the challenges that still lie ahead. Richard, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Ryan, for having me. So my first question is, how much of your current wardrobe is Gap?

So how are you doing that? Are you importing more products right now, more materials? No, no, no, no.

There are reciprocal tariffs that are being talked about being put in place. It's not like this is necessarily targeted on one place. So are you thinking about moving your supply chains anywhere? I mean, you have to be preparing for a world where places like Vietnam and Bangladesh do start to see import tariffs. Yeah.

So is there any chance that Gap will start making jeans in the United States?

The other thing that's happening in the economy right now is that there is consumer sentiment has been nosediving over the past few weeks. It's now the lowest that it's been since 2022. Are you seeing any changes in consumer behavior across your brands?

So you're not seeing your customers sort of move down to the more affordable end anymore?

The last question I have for you is one that I'm just genuinely very curious about, which is that Zach Pozen, your chief creative officer, said in an interview not too long ago, he was quoting you, so this is a bit of hearsay. You said, I've been a Willy Wonka at Mattel, and I need to find my Willy for Gap. What did you mean by that?

What does it mean to be the Willy Wonka of Mattel, and why is that something that you needed at Gap?

You do kind of remind me of like a young Gene Wilder a little bit. So I think you can, I think you fit the bill. I just need a top hat. You just need a top hat, but you got the hair already. You got the big smile. I'm holding on. I'm holding on. I'm holding on. You've got the hair. I'm holding on. All right, great. Well, Richard, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

That's all for today. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Rout every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Did you own any denim shirts before you became the CEO of Gaps?

All right. So we could talk about denim all day, but I want to talk about your job and the challenges that you've been facing and the work that you've been doing as a CEO of Gap. So I want to start just when you took over the brand. When you became CEO of Gap Inc. in August of 2023, what did you see as the biggest challenge the company was facing?

Why did that happen? Why did they lose their relevance?

But for the last two decades, things were not looking too good for the Gap Inc., the parent company, which includes Gap and sister companies Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta. Its sales slumped as it faced stiff competition from rival mall chains like American Eagle and fast fashion brands like H&M and Zara. To illustrate just how stagnant the company has been, consider this.

So how did you set about trying to make Gap more culturally relevant? How do you do that for a brand that used to be cool but isn't that cool anymore?

So at your last job as the chief operating officer of Mattel, you got a lot of credit for reinvigorating the Barbie brand. Can you draw some comparisons? Were there comparisons that you can draw between what you did at Barbie and Mattel for what you're now doing at Gap?

Gap stock has been essentially flat over the last 20 years, while the S&P 500 is roughly quadrupled. But recently, things have begun to turn around. Over the last two years, as of March, gap stock is up over 130%. And the person behind that turnaround is CEO Richard Dixon. Dixon joined the company in 2023 after working at Mattel, where he helped revitalize another beloved American brand, Barbie.

A pair of khakis that comes to life, perhaps.

So do you think that Gap needs to have its own music streaming service now to get back to the music roots? Look, I think it's possible.

In the 1990s, the Gap was cool. So cool that supermodels wore shirts and jeans by the retailer on the cover of Vogue magazine. Actress Sharon Stone wore a Gap mock turtleneck to the Academy Awards. And then there were those popular commercials with all the dancers bopping around in khakis and t-shirts.

I wanted to talk with you about your decision to bring in the fashion designer, Zach Posen, who a lot of people have talked about having a big influence on the brand. He's Gap's creative director. He's been described as a boy wonder in the fashion world. He's well known for his role as a judge on the reality show Project Runway. Why did you want to hire him?

One of the things that he's been doing is, you know, he dressed Timothee Chalamet at a red carpet event. He dressed Divine Joy Randolph for the Met Gala. How important are things like that? This sort of like little collaborations, little partnerships with celebrities to try to make the brand feel cooler and more relevant?

And he was at the helm during Barbie's big Hollywood debut, having served as executive producer on the Barbie movie. Now, Dixon is trying to find the same success at Gap. But with the economy facing new headwinds and consumer confidence taking a nosedive, can Dixon pull off the comeback? Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson.

Um, how much is Gap benefiting right now from the fact that the 90s are kind of back in style again? Like, how much do you think that this is what you're doing versus just the fact that trends are cyclical? Maybe there's some nostalgia for Gap, and therefore it's putting some wind in your sails?

All right, we're going to take a short break. And when we come back, we're going to talk more with Gap Inc. CEO Richard Dixon on how to ensure the momentum doesn't fizzle out and what he sees in the broader economy. What gives you confidence that this turnaround won't fizzle out? I mean, Gap had a little over $15 billion in net sales last year, which is an improvement.

It's more than 2023, but it's still less than where the company was in 2018. So what work do you feel like still needs to be done?

Speaking of tariffs and economic uncertainty, one of the big stories this year has been the tariffs the Trump administration is putting on countries around the world. Is there anything that concerns you about this business environment and tariffs specifically?

And to get these letters, one after the other, saying, you know, we're just as angry as everyone else you're seeing on the internet, and we don't understand it either, and this entire industry is a total black box, and it's taking away our will to continue to be doctors, that was really troubling to me as someone who knows that this industry desperately needs more doctors.

My takeaway is that if the health insurance industry is working, it is unclear to Americans what it's supposed to be doing, why it makes the decisions it does, it's just become so complicated that people don't understand why they're getting charged what they're being charged, why they're being denied what they're being denied.

And I think any attempt by the health insurance companies to pull back that curtain a little bit and let the public understand why these decisions are being made and how, would really change the future of this industry.

Incredibly complicated. As anybody who has tried to understand it knows, this is a Byzantine world that only a select few number of people really understand. And it is even, you know, confounding to doctors.

This is something that really seems to have struck a chord with almost everyone. It is this singular moment where literally everyone is talking about the same thing.

I mean, ultimately, I think that, you know, the system was set up for a society that truly believes in, you know, that the cheapest, best way to run things is through a marketplace. Right. And checks and balances. I mean, this is the way this was set up originally. I mean, the insurer in some ways is it is the check and balance of the system itself.

so that doctors can't sort of run amok and rack up a lot of medical expenses that are unnecessary, tests that are unnecessary just to get themselves paid.

Sometimes there are a number of cheaper options available to a patient that they should be trying first before they skip right to, you know, a really expensive test, for instance, like an MRI, or even after the MRI that they continue in physical therapy before they get surgery. There's a stepwise process that, you know, health insurers use to try to keep costs down.

They say that what happens is that patients who might really need treatment sort of now end up either waiting for treatment or sometimes the delay to get that treatment means that the patient's condition worsens or that they actually lose that patient.

So one doctor I talked to had someone who was, they really needed an MRI that day, but because they were waiting for the pre-approval process, they had to send that patient home, wait 10 days, then, you know, her son had to try to get time off to bring her back for the MRI treatment. Often it's in that gap that patients just disappear.

And what that's supposed to mean is that your doctor is matched up with a doctor inside the health insurance company to review your case and determine whether or not that care is needed.

Now, some of these doctors are frustrated because the peer that they might be matched up with might not be someone who is in their specialty at all. So you might have an oncologist who's trying to have a peer-to-peer review with someone who's a family doctor or general practitioner, for instance.

Let me pull up my very crowded inbox. Just give me one second. Okay, here's one that says medical insurers are out of control. Regulators are worthless.

leaves countless patients and doctors outraged. The brazen techniques of UnitedHealthcare, which deny and delay approval and payment, that this is insurer misbehavior at its worst. And it's good to know people are becoming aware of the dangers of over-prioritizing profit over people.

Health insurance companies have said that, you know, they play a really important role in the healthcare system, that, you know, they're all trying to do the right thing here, that some of these complaints that come from patients and doctors are unjustified. You know, there's a lot of really important reasons that claims get denied.

Often it's because, you know, there's not enough work being done to back up the claims that are being sent. You know, they're lack information that would help them make a determination that would allow them to, you know, support a claim.

I think I actually, you know, I cover health care. I don't think I had I don't think I realized how angry doctors were at health insurers. You know, I thought that they sort of understood that system more than I do as a patient or even as a reporter.

The planned deal between Israel and Hamas is set to go into effect on Sunday. It would proceed in three phases. The first phase is a temporary ceasefire. As part of this phase, 33 Israeli hostages will be exchanged for a number of Palestinian prisoners. During phase two, there will be a negotiation about a permanent end to the war and the release of any remaining living hostages.

The third phase focuses on rebuilding Gaza.

That's our colleague Anat Pellid, who's based in Tel Aviv. She's been covering the negotiations. How many hostages are left, and what do we know about the hostages that they say that'll be released?

And so just to understand, there are 98 total hostages and roughly 30 of them are dead.

And is Israel going to release any Palestinian prisoners?

And what about stage two, which sounds like possibly the most difficult stage, which is actually negotiating a permanent end to the war rather than just the temporary one?

I know that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been very insistent that, as have other Israeli politicians, that they want total victory over Hamas. So does this deal allow for Hamas to continue to exist?

So you're in Tel Aviv. What's the reaction been like in Israel?

Israeli officials delayed a vote on the deal. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Hamas of reneging on parts of the agreement. A Hamas official told a news outlet that Netanyahu's accusation was, quote, baseless. The drama underscored how tenuous this historic deal is. So we seem to have an agreement for a ceasefire, but do you think we really have an end to this war?

What are you seeing in Gaza right now?

Coming up, why a deal came together now, and can it last?

For months, Israel and Hamas had failed to reach a ceasefire deal. And many blamed the leaders of the two sides, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar.

But since then, a lot has changed. In October, Israeli forces killed Sinoir, weakening Hamas. And Israel also scored major victories against Hamas's allies, like Hezbollah and Lebanon.

And also, President-elect Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, played a role in these negotiations. How is he able to be involved if Trump still hasn't taken office yet?

During a press conference on Wednesday, a reporter asked Biden whether he or Trump could take credit for reaching this deal. So Trump has also taken credit for this deal on Truth Social. Biden clearly seems to disagree with that. But does Trump actually deserve some credit here?

Yesterday, after more than a year of devastating war in Gaza, a ceasefire was announced between Israel and Hamas. News of the deal prompted celebrations in the rubble-filled streets of Gaza and relief in Israel. But the ceasefire isn't a done deal yet. The agreement was announced by Hamas and by U.S., Qatari, and Egyptian negotiators. But Israel hasn't officially approved it.

So this deal was agreed to and announced on Wednesday, but the drama isn't quite over yet. Can you describe what's happened since this announcement was made?

Why is Israel delaying? What's the holdup?

Today, Netanyahu's office said in a statement that negotiations were continuing and that a deal would be announced once they were complete. Arab mediators said they were working to resolve the remaining issues, including a disagreement over which Palestinian prisoners Israel would release. What does this deal mean for the future of the people in Gaza?

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Thursday, January 16th. Coming up on the show, a fragile ceasefire deal in Gaza.

So what are your biggest questions as we head into this ceasefire?

That's all for today, Thursday, January 16th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Rory Jones, Summer Saeed, Jared Malson, and Shandy Rice. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Of course, this will all change again at some point. The EU is going to have strict rules. So how much of this stuff applies to the EU is kind of still to be determined. Like whether getting rid of fact checkers is something that the EU will tolerate. And I think something else that is a question is what the user experience is.

I think something that a lot of people who worked at Facebook on integrity issues have long believed is that as much as the company resented basically having this sort of bunch of safety-minded nerds telling them, you know, you shouldn't do that, that the safety work was essential to making the platform, like, a livable place.

Not necessarily always clean and well-lit and, you know, perfectly civil, but livable. And I think that it will be interesting to see to what degree they were correct and to what degree this was all just sort of vanity and ineffectual. I think we'll certainly see what Facebook and Instagram look like in this new era as well and see how far it goes and what that means for users.

It's a very sad phenomenon, Ryan.

I mean, in any truly substantive sense, it was post-2016. So there was this succession of scandals and crises from fake news in the United States.

To Russian election interference.

I don't have an in and out list for myself.

To the genocide in Myanmar.

All of these things were sort of pointing in the direction of the company needs to do more. And for a few years, the company really did.

A few things. There was first just an army of human moderators, mostly outsourced. Then there was efforts to improve the quality of news on the platform, like to sort of weight the system in favor of outlets that users said they trusted rather than like kind of random fly-by-night headlines.

And there were also automated systems sort of scouring the platform for things that were violations of the platform's rules and demoting them, if not outright removing them.

fact-checkers were in some ways the beachhead for all of this stuff. And ironically, I think it was one of the things that they felt was the least controversial originally, which is that they were going to contract with respected known entities that adhered to journalistic standards, had accreditation. News organizations like the Associated Press and others.

In would be getting along with the new administration, and out would be content moderation.

Yeah, like the Associated Press, like PolitiFact. Reuters, I believe, was for a while in there, Snopes. So these were all entities that were basically supposed to just find viral content that was false and flag it. And that would serve two purposes. One is it would notify users who saw the post that there were at the very least some serious reservations about its accuracy.

And the second thing is that it was going to get used by Facebook to sort of slow down the spread of things. Didn't mean it would go away or, you know, they'd take it down. It just meant that, like, they weren't going to actively promote it. And so this was, like, I think a big part of the company's efforts to deal with fake news on its platform was this initiative.

There's two ways to answer that, right? The first one is that, no, it never worked great. The second answer is that it was all the platform had, and it was therefore invaluable. Fact checks were always slower than virality.

By the time a fact checker got around to like publishing something saying like, this is false, here are the citations, usually that thing had gotten most of the traffic it was going to get.

And the lie travels a lot faster when it's running on, you know, a social media platform's recommendation system, right?

It still did... This was the core of the defense. Yeah.

adjudicating this stuff was like really difficult and also whatever a human might decide about things like that trying to get an algorithm to make a similar decision is like was like nearly impossible so it was this i think a very frustrating process for particularly for a bunch of very tech-minded people um because these were not problems that lent themselves to like

just building a solution, a technical solution, and like setting it loose and moving on to the next problem. They were like kind of chronic, societal, context-based, all the things that tech does not succeed at, if that makes sense.

There's the question of like, why are Christian posts about abortion getting taken down by fact checkers? Why are so many conservative news outlets being penalized for false news? Why wasn't I allowed to say this particular word about that particular group when I can say it on the street and it's perfectly legal? And so there was a lot of concern that Facebook was over-enforcing on the right.

And every time there was a moderation mistake, and a lot of them happen, you know, there was the implication that this was Facebook acting to harm conservatives.

Facebook had purposely and routinely suppressed conservative stories from trending news.

Mark never loved this stuff. Mark, I think, was always deeply skeptical of human intervention of any variety in the system.

I think it's kind of part of an overall, I would say, shift in Silicon Valley in which dominant companies have all been making extremely nice with the incoming administration.

And obviously, Donald Trump had made clear that he very much cared about whether Facebook was stacked against him and that he did not trust the company and its liberal employee base, to be fair, and that he might go after Mark Zuckerberg personally if Mark Zuckerberg didn't oblige.

Again, I don't know that, you know, that anyone had to twist Mark Zuckerberg's arm about this. He was personally aggrieved by it. He didn't, you know, it was costly and expensive, and he never had an interest in doing it in the first place. So, you know, what about the content moderation system was there to like?

And he is explaining that the company spent a number of years trying in good faith to placate its critics in the legacy media over things like fake news, etc. And that, you know, it did its best, but that it really went too far.

There are some very specific changes to rules that are hard to read as anything other than the company trying to get out of the way of future controversies. So, for example, the question on whether you can call transgender people it. That is specifically a carve-out that you can now do. It doesn't violate the hate speech rules on Facebook anymore.

Yeah, it used to. Likewise, you can say that homosexuality is a mental illness. That previously would have been a violation. Likewise, you can liken women to household objects and liken them to personal property, right? And you can see where some of the cultural fights are that the company is very directly responding to in those specific rule changes.

And the specific rule changes are like the least important part of all of this. But I think they're a pretty good indication of the idea that the company is very happy to sort of bend not just its moderation structure, but also the rules themselves to this new era, as Mark Zuckerberg referred to it.

I mean, it's obviously difficult and these are not, you know, you don't solve misinformation, right? You know, trying to like somehow make the internet always factual is like clearly not going to work out. But you know, there's the question of like, do you keep trying at this stuff? Like, does the platform sort of like take some responsibility for efforts to mislead and try to address those?

Or like, is that just kind of not in scope? So I think this is like less of a question of like the feasibility of doing it than it is a question of whether anyone wants to do it at all.

Cutting out fact-checking, getting away from content moderation, prioritizing not making false moderation calls, overdoing effective moderation in the first place. These are things that Mark actively wanted to do. Honestly, from the first Trump term, this wasn't a new sudden desire or willingness. It was that I think the circumstances were such that it was time to make this happen.

So it's sort of this wholesale departure slash rejection of the idea that the platform should even govern itself, rather than a question of, is it doing a good enough job? It's like, nah, this isn't our job.

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Target. No, it ain't. It's Target. Look at the tones.

Manipulating the IRRs meant that Neom's executives didn't have to confront their higher-ups, MBS in particular, with the realities of cost. An added dollar of projected cost could just be balanced out by another dollar of expected profit. They could keep the Neom dream going, buoyed by fuzzy math. Elliott says it's an arrangement that seemed to suit both MBS and the people working for him.

— Eliot calls it a mutual dance of delusion. Tony Harris has another term for it. The emperor has no clothes. To Tony, MBS was the emperor in the fable, parading around in the nude while his advisors complimented him on his new suit. And nowhere was this dynamic more evident than with the line, MBS's plan for those massive parallel skyscrapers running 106 miles into the desert.

Tony didn't work on the line, but the schools he was building were supposed to be housed in it. From the beginning, people at Neom had concerns about the line. You get a flavor of them in an internal document Rory and Elliot saw. They collected staff feedback on the design after MBS first proposed it.

People also singled out practical issues. The line would negatively affect Neom's wind farm.

According to Rory and Elliot's reporting, the answer is not so much. Instead, MBS's executives shielded him from the full scope of Neom's challenges and costs. To Tony, it was baffling.

Did you have an urge or any ability to be the one to say that?

By witnessing people who were fired Elliott and Roy's reporting confirms that employees were often fired for challenging higher-ups on Neom's costs and feasibility. A Neom spokeswoman said that Neom, quote, champions excellence, professionalism, diversity, and ethical conduct, end quote, and requires staff to uphold those values. Did anybody around MBS play the role of bad cop?

Ski executive Andy Wirth again. So that must have been a strange position for you to be in working in this. Like your job is to build out this resort, but like it's only a few months in where you're starting to see, well, this isn't possible.

Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia's crown prince, was on a mission to construct what amounted to a brand new futuristic city-state within his country. Neom was his vision, his baby. But every visionary needs a right-hand man. MBS's was Nadmi. Nadmi, everyone we talked to called him by his first name, became Neom's CEO in 2018.

But so what do you do as an executive who has a history of getting things done in an environment where you don't think the goals are achievable?

Did you try to change it?

How that went is after the break.

One of Andy's favorite things to do at Neom was go hiking up in the mountains.

Sometimes he'd camp overnight. One of his favorite spots was a literal oasis with palm trees jutting out of the desert rock. The hikes irked his boss, Nodmi.

Andy was quickly souring on Neom. The plans for Neom Mountain just didn't make sense to him. And he was increasingly worried about their impact on Neom's pristine mountains.

Andy spent much of his career running ski resorts, so he's definitely not the kind of environmentalist who wants to shut people out of nature. He wants them in it, but not at the expense of destroying a place. He believes development can and should be balanced with conservation. And he was not seeing that balance at Neo Mountain.

And then Andy learned that MBS himself knew these mountains.

Andy's proposal was essentially to throw out the master plan for Neom Mountain. There would be no vault, no lake. Instead, they'd play up the natural beauty of what they had. The plan would be much cheaper, and in Andy's view, still achieve Neom's goals. He began developing his pitch in secret. And then he says, Nodney got wind of it.

He's an engineer by training, with round glasses and a trim salt-and-pepper mustache. He came to the CEO job with a track record of delivering on big projects. He'd expanded Saudi Arabia's biggest oil field in the 90s and built a new university complex on the Red Sea. And according to Rory's reporting, he made no apologies for his, let's call it aggressive, management style.

At you.

Andy'd known from his earliest days on the job that the plans for Neo Mountain were ambitious. But he'd hoped he'd be able to change things on the ground. So you sort of thought going into it, like, okay, even the sort of crazy ideas you heard about, you thought, well, I get in there, we'll steer this in the right direction. Yeah.

And you found you weren't able to do that?

All of this made him think about something some of his colleagues told him a couple months into the job.

Andy left Neom in September of 2020. He just got on a plane. He didn't tell Nadmi he was quitting until he was out of the country. He lasted five months. Tony lasted a bit longer. The illicit wine might have helped.

How would you doctor the fruit juice? By like letting it ferment or something?

For Tony, the bucket of gold still outweighed that second bucket, at least for a time. And that wasn't just true for him. Another former Neom employee told Elliot, people are there, quote, for the income, not the outcome.

What else other than the money was keeping you going?

Tony and his wife left Neom in May 2021. They'd lasted a year.

Nadmi would last another three years at NEOM. And the story of his departure starts with what should have been a major moment for the project. The grand opening of its very first development, Sindala, that island with a cluster of resorts and parking for your yacht.

Sindala was running three years late and $3 billion over budget. The pressure was growing for Nadmi to finally deliver. And so, in October, he launched Sindala with a big, glitzy party. Will Smith and Tom Brady attended. Alicia Keys performed for an audience of business executives. Super yachts floated in the water nearby.

But the spectacle couldn't entirely distract from the embarrassing truth about Zendala.

And still more damning was who hadn't shown up for the launch. What did MBS make of this?

When they drop down dead, I celebrate, said Nadmi in a private meeting. We reached out to him for an interview, but he didn't respond. People like Tony and Andy, the ski executive, had moved thousands of miles from home to the middle of the desert to help build Neom. But they were quickly realizing that there was something strange about this place. It wasn't just the project's screaming CEO.

Nodmy had presided over years of ballooning costs, staff churn and push deadlines. The dance of delusion had thrived on his watch. But when the time came to deliver, the music stopped, and Nodmy, the man who once declared that he drives people like slaves, was out. There are many stories of visionary CEOs who drive their employees incredibly hard and get miracles out of them.

So why don't you think it worked for Nodmi?

Since Nadmi's departure, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the PIF, has taken more direct control of Neom, and they're finally coming to grips with the project's true cost.

Eight trillion dollars. I mean, I feel like I already know the answer to this question, but can Saudi Arabia afford that?

Not even close. A NEOM spokeswoman said the journal was incorrectly interpreting the numbers in that presentation. As for NEOM's progress, she said, quote, In some ways, MBS in Saudi Arabia may not need NEOM anymore. Remember that when MBS first came to power, he enacted a bunch of social reforms. And Rory says they've had a huge impact.

Saudi Arabia now has an entertainment sector and a tourism industry. Most importantly, it's less dependent on oil. In 2023, for the first time, 50% of Saudi Arabia's real GDP came from sources other than oil. It's sort of like as MBS was trying to build Neom, this new place where anything was possible, the rest of Saudi Arabia has actually become more like Neom, the place that he was dreaming of.

What do you think it'll become?

Meanwhile, construction on Neom continues. Head over to Google Maps and click toward the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia, and you'll see it, an over 60-mile-long gash cutting through the desert. It's a trench marking the future path of the line. The current plan is for Neom to finish the first mile and a half of the line in the next 10 years or so.

Neom was also bleeding money, dysfunction reigned, and very little was actually being built. How long did it take you before you started to think, this is not something that I want to be part of?

The rest probably won't be completed for decades, if ever. Even within Neom, people worry that that 60-mile trench is a literal money pit. Performative progress leading to nowhere. MBS once said that he wanted to build his pyramids. Only time will tell whether it's a monument to a young leader's vision or his failed ambition.

Before we go, I just want to say that this will be my last Journal episode for a while. I'm going out on paternity leave through the summer, but I'll be back on the show this fall. See you then. That's all for today, Saturday, April 26th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. This episode was produced by Annie Minoff and edited by Catherine Brewer.

I'm Ryan Knudsen. Additional reporting in this episode by Stephen Kalin and Summer Saeed. Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher. Sound design and mixing by Griffin Tanner. Music in this episode by Emma Munger, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Griffin Tanner. Special thanks to Alex Frangos, Kate Lambaugh, Laura Morris, Sarah Platt, and Tatiana Zamise.

Thanks for listening. See you Monday.

That quickly?

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Saturday, April 26th. This episode is the second in our two-part deep dive into Neon. Today's episode, The Emperor's New Clothes. To Tony, one of the most surprising things about Neom was how people approached spending.

The denizens of NEOM piled into the camp's cafeteria. Saudis, expats.

Were you spending enough money?

Tony recalls one project he worked on, a hackathon and online leadership program for kids. The idea was to promote Neom's education efforts. There really weren't any kids at Neom yet, since it was still mostly a construction site, so the leadership program was online. And when Tony learned how much he'd been authorized to spend on it, he was flabbergasted. Half a million dollars.

Half a million dollars for some online webinars. For Andy, over at Neom's mountain development, it was the same story.

As Andy remembers it, Nadmi had called all of Neom's sector heads together. Andy, plus the heads of the sports sector, the health sector, biotech, energy. Nadmi's message?

Andy says he'd only managed to spend $200,000 or $300,000.

Why did they want you to spend so much money?

Money is being spent, and therefore we are working. Yes.

What were you spending money on in the time that you were there?

In 2024, Neom would conduct an internal audit, and the auditors would call out this culture of spending. They described Neom's CEO, Nadmi, as having a, quote, spend-the-budget strategy. But very little of that budget was actually going to build stuff. Instead, it was going to consultants. Remember, consultants had played a key role in the early days, coming up with ideas for Neom.

But years into the project, Neom had its own staff of experts, people like Tony and Andy. And still, Neom's executives leaned heavily on consultants. According to people familiar with Neom's spending... In a single year, Neom paid McKinsey $130 million and PricewaterhouseCoopers $260 million. Here's Tony again.

One reason, Tony eventually concluded, was that it was a way for Neom's bosses to protect themselves.

Make a mistake, and you might just find yourself being berated by Nadmi. According to people who worked with him, Nadmi once told an executive in a meeting to walk out into the desert and die so that he could urinate on his grave. Another time, after a deal fell through, he gathered his staff and demanded to know why he hadn't been given a heads-up.

He said, quote, If you don't tell me who is responsible, I'm going to take a gun from under my desk and shoot you. This is according to people with knowledge in the meeting.

As one of NAMI's direct reports, Andy says he both witnessed and was on the receiving end of the CEO's wrath.

What impact do you think that his style had on the overall project and the people who worked there?

Neom says employee welfare is a top priority, and that workers are encouraged to anonymously voice concerns. A spokeswoman also said the project has a, quote, robust governance framework, unquote, and takes expert advice into consideration when making decisions. Neom's designs were ambitious, and that was also true for Neom Mountain.

Soon after joining the project, Andy got his first real peek at the plans for the mountain region. And they were an eye-fall.

They included plans for something called The Vault, a glittering glass building filled with stores and hotels that Andy said they were going to have to dynamite part of a mountain to build.

The master plan also called for an artificial lake with a dam that bowed outward in defiance of traditional engineering. Plus that desert ski resort Andy was trying to build. And that wasn't all.

Tony Harris, the education expert you heard from in the last episode, was just a few months into his job at NEOM when he got his first real impression of the project's CEO, Nadmi al-Nasser.

The Wall Street Journal obtained some early concept art for these mansions and palaces, and the designs are wild. One palace looks like a ribbon of molten metal suspended over a canyon. Another reminded me of the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings, a pointy black tower with a red light beaming out the top.

To Andy, the mansions and palaces just didn't make sense.

Neo Mountain was getting more expensive. It's a trend that would continue long after Andy left the project. Reporter Elliot Brown saw some internal NEOM documents from 2023. By this time, NEOM Mountain had been renamed Trojena.

But as Neom's costs ballooned, it didn't seem to change the project's course. That 2024 audit Neom conducted suggests one reason why. Elliot got a look at a version of that audit. It was labeled Final Draft. And it's pretty damning. According to Neom's auditors and Elliott's own reporting, as costs rose, rather than push for cutbacks to Neom, executives sometimes just fudged the numbers.

IRRs are basically the percentage of a project's costs that come back to you every year as profit. Now, a lot of what Saudi Arabia was spending on at Neom wasn't supposed to make money. It was infrastructure, stuff like roads and utilities. But other stuff definitely was supposed to be profitable, like the hotels or the apartments they were going to sell on the line.

As Neom's costs grew, Elliott's reporting shows that executives manipulated the IRRs to keep them around that 9% sweet spot.

Glamping, like this is sort of, you know, what do they call it? Glamorous camping, like sort of fancy tents.

Hey, it's Ryan. We'll be back on Thursday with a new episode to start off 2025. But until then, we wanted to remind you of this series we made earlier this year. It's a story about the mysterious downfall of China's missing foreign minister. Kate and our reporting team take you through one of the most intriguing political mysteries to come out of China in years. I think you'll find it fascinating.

There are three episodes and they've all been linked in the show notes. I hope you'll give it a listen. Here's episode one.

Celebrate their story. Tonight at the Olympic Games.

We are ready to defy gravity here in Paris as we welcome two stars of the highly anticipated movie musical Wicked.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Monday, March 24th. Coming up on the show, why Colombia gave in to Trump. Columbia University got into Trump's crosshairs last year when protests broke out over Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza. Students camped out for weeks. At one point, some of them occupied a school building.

They were calling for a ceasefire and for the university to divest from companies doing business with Israel. And even some faculty joined in.

But the protests made other students uneasy.

The school's leadership came under intense criticism, especially from conservatives, like then-candidate Donald Trump, who said Columbia didn't do enough to rein in the protests and crack down on anti-Semitism.

Columbia's president, Manoush Shafiq, ended up resigning. And Trump seized on the protests as evidence that college campuses are too left-leaning.

Now that Trump's in office, he's putting his money where his mouth is. And he started withholding federal funding at colleges across the country, including Columbia.

So it seems like he's sort of following through on a campaign promise to kind of smack down colleges a little bit and change their culture.

On March 13th, Trump sent Columbia a list of nine specific demands. If the school complied, it might be able to get its $400 million back. The demands included Columbia disciplining the students that had occupied that building during the protests, banning students from wearing masks to conceal their identity, and giving campus police the power to arrest and detain students.

The Trump administration also wanted Columbia to adopt a formal definition of anti-Semitism and take disciplinary power away from a judicial board and give it to the office of the university president. And there was another demand that made a lot of faculty angry.

That's our colleague Doug Belkin, who covers higher education. Trump's ultimatum put the storied university between a rock and a hard place, and kicked off a big debate inside the school.

How is it even possible that the president of the United States can just unilaterally cancel grants and contracts? Like, on what grounds can he even make demands like this?

Right, the Columbia student who was acting as a spokesman to some of those protests who's now facing deportation.

Which departments at Columbia stood to hurt the most from these funding cuts?

Earlier this month, the Trump administration gave Columbia University an ultimatum. Get tougher on student protests, or else lose hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.

What the impact of their decision might be, that's after the break. So Last week, Columbia outlined its decision regarding Trump's demands in a memo to his administration. And for the most part, it gave Trump what he was asking for. The first thing is that students will no longer be allowed to use masks to conceal their face during an unauthorized protest.

The school also agreed to give campus officers more power.

And then there's the receivership. Columbia agreed to bring in a new administrator to oversee the department that includes Middle Eastern studies, as well as the Center for Palestine Studies.

Columbia said it worked hard to address legitimate concerns from both inside and outside the university, and that it will adopt institutional neutrality, meaning it will stop taking official positions on most political issues. Doesn't Columbia, like a lot of universities, have this massive endowment with billions of dollars in it?

Why couldn't the university find a way to lean on that instead of the federal funding?

That's quite a bit.

But on Friday, after an intense internal debate, Columbia gave in and agreed to make the changes Trump wanted. How big of a deal could this showdown be for America's colleges and universities?

So there's more leverage that he could have applied?

So now that Columbia has acquiesced, are they going to get the funding back immediately? Like, how does that work if the federal government has sort of canceled this stuff?

Huh. So they've given away all these things. There's still no guarantee that they'll get all this money back.

Over the weekend, Education Secretary Linda McMahon was asked about this on CNN.

How has the academic world been reacting to Columbia's decision?

So it's likely that Trump will go after other schools.

Hmm. So this fight almost certainly will change more than just Columbia.

Earlier this month, Trump paused $175 million in federal funds to the University of Pennsylvania for allowing a transgender athlete to compete on the women's swim team in 2022. Do you think this will result in fewer protests on college campuses?

That's all for today, Monday, March 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Sarah Randazzo and Liz Esley White. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Well, Ben, in the description of your podcast, Ben brutally breaks down the culture and never gives an inch. Why brutal?

But do you think your show would be as successful if it had been kindly breaks down the culture?

So where do you – last question. Where do you see this – Where do you see – do you think this is sort of an anomaly where we are with podcasts and the way that media is forming? Or do you think that this is just the beginning of an even bigger change?

Well, thank you both so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for having us. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Special thanks to Ben and Preet for being here today. We'll be back later this afternoon with a new episode of The Journal. Thanks for listening. See you then. Fox News was mentioned in this episode.

And as a reminder, Fox News, parent company, and the parent company of The Wall Street Journal share common ownership.

Mm-hmm. Preet, did you listen to Trump on any of his podcasts? I listened to portions of it.

No, that was just text and timing. You wanted her for three hours.

So you guys both sit on opposite sides of the political aisle. Ben, you're one of the most well-known conservative voices out there. You were previously editor-at-large of Breitbart. You co-founded The Daily Wire. Now you have one of the top conservative podcasts with The Ben Shapiro Show. Preet, you are a former U.S. attorney appointed under President Obama.

Ben, when you had Donald Trump on your show, what were you hoping to get out of that conversation?

It seems like conservatives have done a better job at building and cultivating audiences in the podcast space. Because we had to. I mean, that's the actual reason.

So, Preet, what do you think the left needs to do differently? I mean, people are talking about it needs a Joe Rogan of the left. Yeah, no.

You served as chief counsel for Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer. And on your podcast, Stay Tuned with Preet, you also make no secret about your politics. But I want to talk about the thing you have in common, which is that you're both podcasters in the podcast industry. So the 2024 election, as I'm sure you've heard, has been dubbed by some the podcast election.

I'm curious to get your take on the media landscape as it's evolving. It seems like the most prominent voices that are forming is on the right, on the left, there's sort of these two echo chambers. People are in that for their algorithms, you know, the sort of fed information that they are more likely to believe in.

And a traditional media that tries to position itself as more neutral in the center is shrinking in its influence. What do you think that means for our national discourse?

Welcome to a special edition of the Journal Podcast. We're in Washington, D.C. today on Inauguration Weekend, and we're here to talk about the rise of podcasting and the impact it had on the 2024 election. I'm your host, Ryan Knutson, and I'm joined today by two other podcast hosts, Ben Shapiro and Preet Bharara. Thanks so much for being here. Great to be here. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Both candidates spent a lot of time going on podcasts. Trump appeared on at least 20, including the Ben Shapiro show, and Kamala Harris went on at least eight. So I want to put this question just to both of you. What role do you think this medium played in the 2024 election?

What do you see as your role in the media landscape? I mean –

I want to ask about the economics of this new industry. The economics obviously have shaped everything. The economics of the traditional newspaper business, let's say, over the last, you know, in the 20th century was to have as wide of an audience as possible. That's led to in some ways the rise of objectivity because we're just neutral.

We're just telling the facts so that we can have as many eyeballs on our newspaper. We can get as big of advertising dollars as we can get. What are the economic incentives that push the industry in the way that it's forming now?

When we left, it wasn't so bad. Wow. Our neighbors were like, yeah, we may stay. Yeah. We're like, okay, we're going to go get a hotel room.

And so, the first thing, the heat shattered the glass around 10, and then you can see... AM?

PM. And you can see the progression of things breaking in the house from 10 to 11, whatever. There are all different sorts of alarms going off, like... I'm sure there was... Glass break.

Smoke sensor. This sensor. Yeah. two-heat sprinkler system.

And I'm sitting in a hotel room watching my house get to me.

The irony of my situation is my wife really doesn't like my car. She's like, eh, I don't really want that car anyway. It's fine. It's gone. It's her.

I'm like, if that car survived, I've never given up on that car. It's old as it is, but I'm going to have... It's going to get a sticker that said, I survived the fire, and it's never going anywhere. Literally.

Our insurance has been good so far, but they're like, we need pictures.

We need you to go in. And it's like, my car, my car might be melted right inside. It may not start.

The auto guy's like, your car looks fine. I can't make a claim until you go start it. I'm like, okay, I need to go and start it.

So my car is in there, so I'm getting a ride to drive my car out. I have a picture of it.

That's fine.

My wife didn't even want to come. She's like, why are you going? I feel like I just need to see it myself. Totally. I feel the same way. I just need to see it. It's hard. It's hard.

Numbed. It's like that numb feeling, right? It's like... Defeated. There is no words. No words that really do it justice.

Oh, my God.

Let me know if I can do anything.

That looked emotional.

Yeah, so I'm going to take the left here. Okay, yeah.

That's my car right there.

Exactly. I mean, a lot of people that I talked to complained about that, like we're supposed to be so transparent and that's a key value here. But these changes that they're now making, I think are going to have consequences ultimately.

Think about it as sort of a corporate anti-bureaucracy utopia. So there's a lot of transparency.

It definitely made a splash. I mean, every publication, including the Wall Street Journal, wrote about it because it was so unheard of. And they, you know, they got on and continue to get on all these, like, best places to work lists. And a lot of these publications mention their very generous parental leave policy.

Yeah, I mean, I think the thinking behind it, and I think this did work, was that Netflix also was having more women, particularly entering the senior ranks of the company, and they wanted to continue to be able to recruit and retain women. So, yeah, I 100% think that it worked from that perspective.

Also, at the time when they came out with this policy, Netflix was becoming a global company, and people in other countries look at the parental leave policies in the U.S. and think that We're crazy about how short it is. So the idea was, we want to make this great for our employees, and we want to help recruit and retain the best talent all over the world.

So the section that... I talk about a lot is the freedom and responsibility section because the freedom and responsibility was really probably the most unique thing in the memo. That was this idea of, you know, expensive policies being act in Netflix's best interest. You know, their vacation policy was take vacation.

Like it was this idea of like, we will give you all the freedom and you should have the responsibility to act accordingly.

Everyone could trust. access strategy plans and could weigh in on things. You know, the expense policy was like act in Netflix's best interest. So if that meant flying business class, go do it. If it means taking your team to a five-star restaurant, go do it. Like it was, there was no red tape on anything.

I mean, tech companies tend to be more secretive in their culture. It's very unheard of that you would see a tech company like a Google or Apple share strategic ideas with all of their employees. That would never happen, right? They were much more like, keep things to themselves, do your work.

They very much encourage candid feedback. So if you don't think someone's doing a good job, you are expected to tell them that. When people were fired, they would send emails out explaining why that person was let go and what they did wrong. Yes.

Prior to this, you know, I would talk to people who were going on off-sites to Iceland. Like, they just would spend the max on things. And no one — it didn't seem like anyone was, like, keeping track of how much was being spent on some of these things. But I think that they've reined it in. You know, I've spoken to sources who say that managers are keeping a tighter lid on expenses.

And so all of a sudden you started seeing pay tiers. They introduced pay tiers. They used to tell managers, you know, just pay top dollar, pay whatever you need to get the people you want. The idea was if you were an employee and you went to your manager and could show them how much more you peers at other companies were making, you should be able to get a raise. That shouldn't even be an issue.

And so that has started to shift. We were the first to report that they've now told people to keep salaries within a certain range that's more along with industry peers.

So in the beginning, literally within 24 hours of the policy being announced, a number of people asked for a year off for parental leave. And HR and managers were really surprised because they were not anticipating that. And then people also asked to go back on leave. People who had taken a few months off and returned were like, oh, well, if it's up to a year now, can I go back on leave? Right.

Ryan, this is a really good question. And, you know, I think what they would say is and what they did say when this came up was we never meant for a year to be the starting point. We meant it to be a conversation between managers and employees about what the right amount of time would be.

And the head of HR at the time did tell people, I don't think people are going to actually take a year parental leave. Because Netflix is the kind of place where people throw themselves into the work and are so type A and high achievers that they thought no one would actually take a full year off.

And so by 2018, they sent a memo out first just to executives, managers saying, hey, we're looking at clarifying this policy, you know, not saying that it's unlimited for the first year, but saying, you know, talk to your managers and figure out what's best.

I've reviewed all these employee communications about it. And, you know, one manager said, it feels like we're taking a benefit away without saying that's what we're doing. And that doesn't feel, that feels incongruous with what our culture of transparency is.

Exactly. And they were and still are adamant that the policy is not six months, that there is no set time limit. You just need to talk to your manager.

So the idea behind this was, look, we're looking at tech companies all the time. We're trying to recruit from them. Google was one that they talk about a lot. Google's policy at the time, I believe, was 18 weeks paid leave, which was pretty significant. And they said, let's do better than that. Let's say people can take up to a year unlimited. And so they did.

They say that they have not walked back their parental leave policy and the parental leave policy is still due its best. And they also the other thing that they deny is that there is any set limit. But I have spoken to people who talk to H.R. or their managers and I have a recording of H.R. telling one employee that the policy is actually six months.

In the court documents, she alleges that she was, you know, trying to put in for Brent to leave, and they kept pushing back.

Becca Leckie was an employee and she had written on LinkedIn. The post has since been taken down. But she describes in her LinkedIn post how, you know, one of the reasons she joined Netflix was for this generous parental leave policy. And she, you know, moved from New York to L.A. to work for Netflix and loved it.

As one employee said to me, if you take more than six months, it feels like all eyes are on you. That was just a quote, but many people said that to me. And everyone felt like you can't really take more than six months and otherwise you're in trouble.

As part of that, it has had to re-evaluate its culture memo and specifically around freedom and responsibility. So we were the first to report last spring that Netflix actually took out the freedom and responsibility section out of the memo.

The entire section has been taken out. Now, they would argue that the ideas behind it are still found in pieces of the memo, but that section has been removed.

You know, I think this whole situation kind of raises this question of Can any company really maintain its identity as it grows and becomes a global company? Like, do you have to give up who you are to be successful? And I do think that is what Netflix is going through now because, you know, a lot of people will hear these stories and say, those people make so much money. So it is what it is.

But there is a question like, at some point, Netflix will have another business challenge, right? There will be something else. And will they continue to be able to recruit and retain the best people if their culture is just like everyone else's? I don't know. But Netflix's benefits policy is still more competitive than most companies, right?

Even though they won't say it's six months, but let's just call it six months, that's still very competitive and better than most companies that we know. But the problem is they're not just saying that.

That's all for today. Monday, December 2nd. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

This summer, the FAA rolled out a bold plan in an effort to release this bottleneck. It took oversight of the airspace around Newark Airport, one of the big three airports in the New York area, and moved it to Philadelphia. But things are still a mess. It hasn't fixed the staffing issues yet, and it's introduced some new risks.

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knutson. It's Monday, December 2nd. Coming up on the show, the struggle to fix America's most complex airspace. When you think about air traffic controllers, you probably picture the people up in airport towers. But that's actually just part of the whole air traffic control ecosystem.

There's actually different kinds of air traffic controllers for different layers of airspace. The people in the towers handle the planes that are the lowest altitude, basically right after takeoff or landing. The air traffic controllers that we're talking about today handle the airspace that's just above that, above takeoff and landing, but still below cruising altitude.

And it's a really stressful job.

These controllers don't always work at airports because they don't need to look at planes in the sky. They work mostly off radar screens and other digital equipment. They're part of something called a TRACON, which stands for Terminal Radar Approach Control. There are TRACONs all over the country. For decades, the TRACON controllers in New York worked out of a windowless room on Long Island.

Working at any TRACON can be stressful, but the TRACON in New York stands apart.

Even the FAA's recruitment videos emphasized how tough the place is. There's an incredible operational challenge here.

Rough-and-tumble edge. Just say more about what that means. What was the culture like at this Tracon office?

That's, like, the logo or, like, the mascot for the people that work there is, like, a skull and crossbones with a headset on it. Like, we're, like, the pirates of air traffic control.

The rough-and-tumble culture at the New York TrayCon was even the subject of a 1990s movie featuring John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton called Pushing Tin. Look, it's a bit silly and over-the-top, but it does capture the drama that can be part of the job. There's already a national shortage of air traffic controllers, but the staffing shortage is especially bad at the New York TRACON.

Over the years, its reputation as a particularly tough place to work has made it hard to recruit people.

The Air Traffic Controllers Union declined to comment, as did a union rep for the New York TRACON. Earlier this year, the New York TRACON was running at 60% of its targeted staffing. And as we mentioned earlier, if there aren't enough air traffic controllers, the FAA has to throttle the number of flights.

In an effort to fix the staffing shortages and the delays, the FAA came up with an audacious plan. It carved off oversight of the airspace around Newark Airport and transferred it to Philadelphia. And just to be clear, they aren't moving the actual airplanes, just the air traffic controllers. Basically, the FAA believed it had to break apart the New York TRACON.

The agency hoped that the move would create new workplace dynamics. Philadelphia is also a more affordable city to live in, and the FAA thought that more air traffic controllers would want to live there.

How did the Controllers Union respond to this move?

If you were stranded at an airport over Thanksgiving weekend or sitting on the tarmac for a long time waiting to take off, there's a pretty good chance you can blame New York.

Despite the pushback, the plan moved ahead. Earlier this year, the FAA moved 24 air traffic controllers from New York to Philadelphia. Some went voluntarily, but others were required to relocate. Four months later, the FAA says that by at least one measure, flight delays in the New York City region are down overall. But some things have gotten worse.

For instance, delays have sharply increased around Newark's airspace. United Airlines said that in November alone, travel for nearly 350,000 passengers was disrupted because of the shortage of air traffic controllers. The FAA says that hiring more air traffic controllers is a top priority.

and that relocating Newark's controllers to Philadelphia is a, quote, long-term solution to a long-term staffing challenge. But potentially more alarming are the tech issues that have cropped up, tech issues that have risked some close calls. That's after the break.

And when the airspace in New York is congested, it has an outsized impact on the rest of the country.

So far, moving oversight of Newark's airspace from New York to Philadelphia hasn't yet paid off. The Philadelphia setup is still short-staffed, and controllers are having to juggle multiple jobs. On top of that, the equipment that monitors the airplanes, like the radars, remains on Long Island, and the signal is now being transmitted to Philly. But that transmission hasn't always been reliable.

The first major tech outage happened back in August. On the Tuesday before Labor Day, which is a very busy travel period, a controller overseeing Newark had a harrowing experience.

So what does he do next? His radar screen goes black, and then what?

According to the FAA, the blackout lasted less than a few minutes, during which time the controller had to rely on his memory to guide two planes. And was he able to get the planes down safely?

How is it possible for something like this to happen?

The Federal Aviation Administration has estimated that as much as 75% of the country's flight delays stem from problems related to New York. 75%. The reason there are so many delays around New York isn't just because it's a complicated airspace. It's also because there aren't enough air traffic controllers there.

The blackout was just the first of several tech glitches related to this big move. A few weeks later, in October, the system overloaded ahead of Columbus Day. Radars kept flickering, which confused controllers who saw aircraft bouncing around on their screens. There were also failures of the system that's supposed to warn about potentially dangerous winds. And then, last month, another scare.

Andrew says that after all these safety issues, morale in Philadelphia got even worse.

The FAA says that it's fixed the flickering radar screens and that it's ironed out problems for alerting about dangerous winds. So with all of these issues, how did things go over Thanksgiving weekend when there were more travelers than ever?

Thanksgiving was just the first big test of the holiday travel season, though. So what do you expect over the next few weeks?

So what does this story say about how safe we are as airline passengers in the U.S. ?

What's the best-case scenario for this bold plan to relocate part of New York's TRACON to Philadelphia?

The FAA says it still believes this will work. It says two dozen controllers are either training or about to enter training at Philadelphia to help with staffing. What will happen if this plan ultimately fails? I'm not sure what happens then.

That's all for today. Friday, January 31st. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Vera Bergen-Gruen, Jack Gillum, Gordon Lubold, Alison Sider, and Andrew Tangle.

The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Pia Gadkari, Rachel Humphries, Sophie Codner, Jessica Mendoza, Matt Kwong, Kate Leinbaugh, Colin McNulty, Annie Minoff, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alessandra Rizzo, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singey, Jivika Verma, Lisa Wang, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamise, and me, Ryan Knudsen. with help from Trina Menino.

Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from Katherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapak, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis and Kate Gallagher. Thanks for listening. See you Monday.

So you cover the airline industry. Did this accident, did this tragedy surprise you?

Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. It's Friday, January 31st. Coming up on the show, the warning signs leading up to this week's deadly crash.

That's our colleague Ben Katz. He covers aviation.

Reagan National Airport sits directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. On a clear night, like it was on Wednesday, you can see the glowing white dome of the U.S. Capitol building and the floodlights on the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial during takeoff and landing. What makes this airport and this airspace unique?

Why even are there helicopters that are flying along this route where planes are coming in to land and take off?

Has the DC airspace always been this congested and this crowded, or has it been getting worse?

Flight 5342 was arriving from Wichita, Kansas, and had 64 people on board.

Just in the past few years, the Senate authorized an increase in flights at Reagan National Airport by as many as 10 per day. Senator Jerry Moran from Kansas said yesterday that he had successfully lobbied American Airlines to use one of its existing slots to fly a direct route to Wichita, the same route that had the crash on Wednesday. When he pushed for it, he said connecting Wichita to D.C.

with a direct flight would help local companies get federal work.

The agency charged with overseeing DC's increasingly crowded airspace is the Federal Aviation Administration.

But in recent years, the FAA has been under pressure. It's faced criticism for its oversight of Boeing. It's seen a lot of turnover in its top leadership. And it's struggled to fully staff air traffic control operations, or ATC, around the country. The FAA has acknowledged the staffing shortages and has worked for years to address it.

The agency also says it slows down traffic to maintain safety when there aren't enough controllers.

Wednesday started as a pretty normal day at Reagan National Airport, one of the busiest airports in the nation.

At the same time the FAA has been struggling to staff air traffic control, there's been an uptick in close calls.

In 2023, a study commissioned by the FAA found mounting risks to safety and efficiency in U.S. air traffic. At the time, the agency said it had taken several actions to end serious close calls. Near misses have taken place all over the country, including in D.C., Last spring, a pilot flying into Washington Reagan reported coming dangerously close to a military helicopter when coming in to land.

The alert said the Wichita flight was at risk of colliding with a military helicopter. Air traffic control alerted the helicopter's crew to the plane.

In a report of that incident, the pilot wrote that there needed to be better separation between plane and helicopter traffic. And then, just a day before Wednesday's crash, a jet that was minutes away from landing aborted to avoid a helicopter in its way.

And then, on Wednesday, it did. What we know about the cause of the crash? After the break. 67 people are presumed dead from Wednesday's crash. Among the dead is a group of young figure skaters, their coaches and their family members. They were returning from a training camp for up-and-coming athletes in Wichita, Kansas.

At a press conference outside Boston, where a number of the skaters were based, skating legend Nancy Kerrigan fought through tears to honor the people who died.

In Wichita, a memorial was set up at the airport.

What do we know at this point about why this crash might have happened?

Helicopters aren't supposed to fly more than 200 feet above the ground along this part of the Potomac River. But when the collision happened, it was flying at over 300 feet.

Starting today, the FAA temporarily restricted helicopter traffic over Reagan National Airport. What's next in the investigation?

How unusual is a tragedy of this scale?

The FAA regarded staffing at the tower as adequate at the time of the accident, according to a person familiar with the matter. During a press conference yesterday, President Trump suggested diversity, equity, and inclusion policies were to blame for the accident.

And what do aviation experts think of that assertion?

At a press conference yesterday, NTSB officials were asked about Trump's comments.

How should airline passengers feel? I mean... Would you be comfortable flying into Reagan National Airport after this?

So another thing that happened this week that sort of related to this idea of cutting back on government spending was these buyout offers for federal employees, which is not something that I... I recall seeing much happen in the federal government. You see it in the private sector all the time. But what do you think is going on here?

Is this just sort of like, let's cut back on government spending, let's shake loose the people that are maybe not on board with the Trump administration's vision?

Right, right. Fork in the road, it said.

Great. So Donald Trump has been president for 11 days. Is it just me or does it feel like he's trying to do everything everywhere all at once?

All right, well, before we go, we've got a question from one of our listeners.

Damien, anything you'd like to add to that?

They want disruption. Mm-hmm. Great. All right. Well, thanks so much for your time, Molly, Damien, and we'll see you in a week.

Thanks a lot. Thanks. This episode has been updated. In an earlier version, we incorrectly said there had been seven cabinet positions confirmed, but as of Friday morning, there have been eight. Before we go, do you have any questions about what the Trump administration is doing? How is it affecting you? Email us and let us know. Please send a voice note to thejournalatwsj.com.

That's thejournalatwsj.com. Trump 2.0 is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. This episode was produced by Pierce Singey and edited by Catherine Whalen, with help from Tatiana Zamise. Molly Ball is The Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent. I'm Ryan Knudsen. This episode was engineered by Griffin Tanner.

Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard. Additional music in this episode by Peter Leonard and Griffin Tanner. Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher. Artwork by James Walton. Thanks for listening. Trump 2.0 will be back with a new episode next Friday morning. See you then.

All right, so before we get into this temporary freeze in federal spending, there are a few other things I want to talk about. First, Trump is putting his cabinet together. And this week, a few of his more controversial nominees had their Senate confirmation hearings. There's Keshe Patel for FBI director, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

for health secretary. How big of a battle do you think lies ahead for the administration and these nominees?

It seems like from the hearing so far that most Democrats are most likely to oppose these nominees. But what Republicans do you think might present the biggest hurdles? We saw a few of them flip on Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, who barely cleared his nomination, needing a tie-breaking vote from Vice President J.D. Vance.

All right. Well, we'll keep our eyes on that. Meanwhile, late last Friday night, Trump fired 17 inspectors general. And if you are not a governmental nerd like Molly and I, inspectors general are the internal government watchdogs who are supposed to make sure federal agencies comply with the law and don't misuse their authority or taxpayer money. So, Molly, why do you think Trump did this?

Yeah, with hot dog fingers. Is that coming soon?

Is there any indication that these inspectors general will be replaced quickly, or are these jobs just going to be vacant now for the foreseeable future?

How would you say overall that things are going for him so far with the strategy?

All right. So I also want to talk to you about this deadly plane crash that happened late Wednesday night in D.C. More than 60 people are presumed dead. This is the first tragedy in Trump's second term. And it's actually not something that I would expect that we would be talking about on this podcast.

But President Trump weighed in on it in a press conference on Thursday morning in a way that has drawn a lot of attention. Fake news.

— What did you make of what the president had to say about this?

All right. So one of the big stories of the week was the Trump administration's effort to temporarily freeze a big chunk of federal spending. And we are going to talk about that right after this break. So on Monday, the Trump administration issued a memo that said it was going to pause a big chunk of federal spending, the ballpark of $3 trillion worth of federal grants and loans.

And there has been a whole lot of development since then. So to help us understand it, we brought on Damian Paletta, our Washington, D.C. coverage chief. Hi, Damian. Thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Molly Ball, senior political correspondent. How are you?

So can you walk us through what happened here? What is the Trump administration trying to do and why?

All right. Well, there's a lot to cover here on the show today. So let's get right to it.

So then a federal judge put a pause on this order. And then the Trump administration came out and said they were rescinding the memo.

From the Journal, this is Trump 2.0. I'm Ryan Knudson.

It's Friday, January 31st. Coming up, Trump tries to freeze federal spending. And it doesn't quite go as planned. Or does it?

Had they rolled it out differently, do you think that it might have had a different outcome?

And the Impoundment Act, just to say, is this idea that Congress controls the purse strings. They decide how much money should be spent. But there's a view that the executive branch should say, OK, that's a ceiling, but we'll set the floor. We're going to not spend money that you've allocated.

All right, Nancy has now left the group chat, and it is just you and me, Molly, at least I think. So how have other members of the chat been explaining themselves? There were these hearings this week on Capitol Hill where we heard from two other members of the chat, Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe. What did they say?

Democrats have been expressing a lot of outrage over this, but they don't have the power to open investigations right now, being in the minority. President Trump seems like he's supporting everybody so far. His Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said that a criminal investigation was unlikely. Is there any chance that anyone gets held accountable for this?

And Mike Waltz on Fox said that he was having Elon Musk look into it from a technical perspective, too. So we'll see where that goes.

Some on the right in the Trump administration have been critical of Jeffrey Goldberg, the journalist who was added to this chat. What's your sort of just general take from a journalistic point of view about how Jeffrey Goldberg handled this situation?

From the Journal, this is Trump 2.0. I'm Ryan Knudsen.

I took Jess Braven's advice and put the Supreme Court... I picked them to win, but they haven't played any games, so... What?

Yes, right. You're a baseball fan.

Go Rockies.

Yes. I mean, I am a Seattle Mariners fan, first and foremost, and it has been a very, very sad 25 years. Yeah.

It's Friday, March 28th. Today on the Trump 2.0 group chat, we're going inside the fallout from the private signal conversation that the entire world now gets to be a part of. All right, Molly, so this isn't the first time that handling of classified information has been the subject of political scandal.

Okay, great. Thanks again.

Before we go, do you have any questions about what the Trump administration is doing? Email us and let us know. Please send a voice note to thejournal at wsj.com. That's thejournal at wsj.com. Trump 2.0 is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

This episode was produced by Enrique Perez de la Rosa and edited by Catherine Whalen, with help from Matt Kwong and Alessandra Rizzo. Molly Ball is The Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent. I'm Ryan Knudson. This episode was engineered by Griffin Tanner. Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard. Additional music in this episode by Emma Munger and Griffin Tanner.

Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher. Artwork by James Walton. Trump 2.0 will be back with a new episode next Friday morning. See you then.

President Biden and President Trump each had investigations launched against them because they held on to classified documents after leaving the White House. During the 2016 campaign, Trump and Republicans criticized Hillary Clinton for keeping sensitive information on a private email server when she was Secretary of State. So is this situation any different?

All right, well, to help us understand all of the wrinkles of this situation, our colleague Nancy Youssef, who covers national security in the Pentagon, has entered the group chat.

Hmm. But nothing that you can say.

Nancy, thanks so much for being here.

So you cover national security. What was your reaction when you heard that a journalist had accidentally been added to this highly sensitive group chat?

I accidentally added the wrong person to a group chat once. I meant to include my friend Bjorn, inviting him to... A party that we were having, and I accidentally, as I learned later, added the wrong Bjorn.

In terms of the mission itself, what was the goal of this attack?

The Trump administration in this attack, the U.S. is going after Houthi leadership.

One of the interesting things about this chat is that you get some insight into the policy debate that's taking place between high ranking Trump administration officials. And in there, you can see some debate between J.D.

Vance and other administration officials about whether or not to proceed with this attack, whether or not the attack conflicts with President Trump's policy agenda when it comes to Europe. Can you explain, Nancy, what this debate is about and what you learned from it?

Yeah, I think in the chat, Vance says something like 3% of U.S. trade runs through the Suez Canal while 40% of European trade does.

If you need a Bjorn in your life, I have two people I can introduce you to.

Yeah, I love how, you know, J.D. Vance in that chat says, I'm willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying. Those concerns are no longer being kept to himself.

This group chat has been made public.

Hey, Mollyball.

We are, of course, talking about the group chat heard around the world. The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic was inadvertently included on a signal conversation between Trump's national security advisor, defense secretary, director of national intelligence, secretary of state, and others discussing an upcoming military strike on the Houthis in Yemen.

Is Signal even allowed on government phones? I know there was an alert that went out recently from the Pentagon about Signal being a potential target of hackers.

Where do you want to get lunch later?

All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk more with Nancy about the potential repercussions of the signal leak. So the administration is sort of saying two things in its defense here. One is that these were not war plans. We heard Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth say that in an interview this week.

Nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about that. And two, that it was not classified. Here's Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, talking about that during a Senate hearing.

Have you ever accidentally been added to a group chat?

Molly, what did you think when you saw this story?

Nancy, the Atlantic released the full text thread, so we can see what was actually being discussed here. What do you make of these two arguments that the administration is putting forward?

Oh, she hung up. I guess that's what happens when you are a busy reporter.

Oh, wait. Nancy's back.

This is obviously embarrassing for the Trump administration, but how big of a deal is it, do you think?

Not quite as good as getting added to the group chat, but... I know. All right, I know you're busy, Nancy, so I'll just ask you one more question before we let you go. What's the follow-up been like for Pete Hegseth, who was the one who texted what appears to be the most sensitive information, which is the details about the actual pending attack on the Houthis?

Thanks, Nancy, so much for your time. Appreciate it.

Really, so this time it might be the Democrats that push the government into a shutdown?

Well, Siobhan, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been great to talk to you.

All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the judiciary. Okay, so we've been talking about the legislative branch so far, but let's turn to the judicial branch. There have been a number of rulings on the Trump administration's actions recently. Where do things stand and what kind of challenges are the courts posing for the Trump administration?

Are any of these rulings actually stopping the Trump administration's actions? Have you seen anything actually sort of reverse as a result of this?

All right, so it sounds like the big fireworks are still to come on the judicial front. Let's turn back to the executive branch now. Trump had his first cabinet meeting this week. How would you describe how that went?

Right, who spoke first.

All right, so Molly, let's talk about Congress first. Presidents have always had to work closely with Congress. Some have done it more effectively than others. But tell us about the Congress that Trump is working with.

And Pete Hegseth at the Department of Defense.

There was a moment in the cabinet meeting where Trump turned to everybody in the room and said, is anyone unhappy with Elon? Obviously, this was a rhetorical question. But do you have a sense that there are other cabinet members that are uneasy with what Elon Musk has been doing?

Big surprise. Right now in Washington, it feels like there is just one, and it is named Donald Trump.

Before we go, do you have any questions about what the Trump administration is doing? Email us and let us know. Please send a voice note to thejournal at wsj.com. That's thejournal at wsj.com. Trump 2.0 is part of The Journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal.

This episode was produced by Enrique Perez de la Rosa and edited by Catherine Whalen, with help from Lisa Wang. Molly Ball is The Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent. I'm Ryan Knudson. This episode was engineered by Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard. Additional music in this episode by Peter Leonard, Billy Libby, and Bobby Lord.

Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher. Artwork by James Walton. Trump 2.0 will be back with a new episode next Friday morning. I will be off, though, so you'll be in good hands with Kate Linebaugh. See you then.

So let's talk about arguably the most important person in Congress right now, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson. You published a profile of him recently and spent some time with him. After a year and a half in this role now, how would you say he's settled in?

But he hasn't just been a placeholder, though. He's actually established himself pretty well in this role. So how would you say he did that?

So Trump so far has been doing a lot of things by executive orders and not so much by working with Congress in the way that past presidents have. But there is one thing that he has said that he wants out of Congress, which is a big, beautiful bill. What does Trump want in that bill?

And this was a big week in Congress, right?

So in this race, it seems like the House is ahead at this point because on Tuesday, Johnson narrowly got a budget resolution passed, which is sort of like a first draft of this big, beautiful bill. And to help us understand what was in that resolution, we have our colleague Siobhan Hughes here who covers Congress.

And Congress isn't the only branch of government that's been busy. So has the judicial branch. There's also been some court rulings both for and against Trump's agenda.

Great to see you.

So, Siobhan, tell us about this big, beautiful first draft, this budget resolution. What was in it and what wasn't in it?

So which of these approaches do you think is going to prevail? Well,

From the Journal, this is Trump 2.0. I'm Ryan Knudsen.

The vote on Tuesday being they got it passed.

Hi, Molly.

It's Friday, February 28th. Coming up, what the other two branches of government are up to. And we had our first cabinet meeting, which was dominated by someone who is not actually in the cabinet. Stay with us.

This budget resolution, though, I mean, as you were saying, it was the narrowest of margins, 217 to 215 in the House. How much of a victory is that? I mean, is Mike Johnson going to be able to hold this together to actually get this all the way across the finish line and turn it into law eventually? Or does this say that it actually might be more tenuous?

Hmm. I've also been hearing about these town halls where lawmakers have been going back to their districts and getting an earful from their constituents.

Do you think that this will put pressure on Republicans and possibly have an impact on Trump's agenda?

One thing that some people in these town halls have been bringing up is this idea that the president is overstepping his authority and that Congress is sort of getting steamrolled by all these executive orders. So how does Mike Johnson, as the Speaker of the House, see these separation of powers questions that have been coming up in the Trump administration?

Did you know that there are three branches of government?

One more question for you, Siobhan, before we let you go. There is this big bill that Trump wants, which is all about, you know, the budget. But there's also this other important thing that Congress has to do, which is fund the government, right?

Two weeks. That's pretty soon.

So then it's not just about changing Saudi Arabia or even reinventing the idea of a city. It's also about...