Jul 26, 2019

Supreme Court sides with admin to spend $2.5B from Pentagon for border wall

A US flag at the border wall next to Rio Grande on June 9, 2019. Photo: Herika Martinez/AP/Getty Images

The Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 vote on Friday that the Pentagon can redirect $2.5 billion to build President Trump's long-promised southern border wall.

The big picture: Trump wants roughly $8 billion to build a wall on U.S.-Mexico border, $3.6 billion of which he plans to access with emergency powers.

How we got here: Last month, a federal judge blocked the administration from transferring the $2.5 billion that had been previously reallocated from the Pentagon under Trump's national emergency declaration.

Flashback: In the 2016 election cycle, Trump campaigned on making Mexico pay for the border wall.

Go deeper: What the fight over Trump's border wall is really about

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Axios
Updated 2 mins ago - Politics & Policy

Coronavirus dashboard

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

  1. Global: Total confirmed cases as of 9 a.m. ET: 33,138,963 — Total deaths: 998,380 — Total recoveries: 22,953,639 — Map.
  2. U.S.: Total confirmed cases as of 9 a.m. ET: 7,116,455 — Total deaths: 204,762 — Total recoveries: 2,766,280 — Total tests: 101,298,794 — Map.
  3. States: 3 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week
  4. Health: The childless vaccine — Why kids get less severe coronavirus infections.
  5. World: India the second country after U.S. to hit 6 million cases
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Ashley Gold
11 mins ago - Technology

Exclusive: Where Trump and Biden stand on tech issues

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Getty Images photos: Win McNamee and Saul Loeb/AFP

Joe Biden has laid out a more concrete tech agenda whereas President Trump has focused on tax cuts and deregulation while criticizing tech firms for anti-conservative bias. That's according to a side-by-side analysis of the two candidates' tech records by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation shared exclusively with Axios.

Why it matters: The tech industry needs to prepare for either four more years of Trump's impulsive policy approach or for a Biden administration that's likely to be critical of tech but slow to take action.

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Dion Rabouin, author of Markets
1 hour ago - Economy & Business

Big Tech's share of the S&P 500 reached record level in August

Expand chart
Reproduced from The Leuthold Group; Chart: Axios Visuals

The gap between the weighting of the five largest companies in the S&P 500 and the 300 smallest rose to the highest ever at the end of August, according to data from the Leuthold Group.

Why it matters: The concentration of wealth in a few massive U.S. tech companies has reached a scale significantly greater than it was before the dot-com bubble burst.

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