Business

Trump suggests ‘warrior dividends’ will be partly paid for by tariff revenue, $100B below goal

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1 day ago

December 18, 2025

President Donald Trump will dole out more than one million checks to American military personnel as the administration seeks to address Americans’ growing cost-of-living concerns.

Trump announced in a primetime address on Wednesday a “warrior dividend” for 1.45 million U.S. military personnel to be distributed ahead of the holidays. The announcement of the checks comes as Trump grapples with diminishing approval ratings on the economy and rising concern of an affordability crisis, in part because of the inflationary consequences of his sweeping tariff policy.

As Trump works to assuage economic anxiety—blaming the state of the economy on the Biden administration while simultaneously saying the economy has never been better—Trump alluded to lower mortgage rates and housing reform in addition to his decision to send checks to military members.

“Military service members will receive a special—we call warrior dividend—before Christmas—a warrior dividend,” Trump said. “In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”

The president said the administration has been able to raise a significant amount of money as a result of levies put in place earlier this year.

“We made a lot more money than anybody thought because of tariffs, and the [One Big Beautiful] Bill helped us along,” he said. “Nobody deserves it more than our military.”

A senior administration official told Fortune the one-time “warrior dividend” checks will cost $2.6 billion and act as a housing supplement to eligible service members, including 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 reserves. Through the One Big Beautiful Bill, Congress appropriated $2.9 million to the Department of Defense for supplements for basic housing allowances.

The White House did not address Fortune’s inquiry about how tariff revenue would finance the checks.

Lagging tariff revenue

The nearly 1.5 million checks are the latest economic relief effort Trump has associated with tariff revenues, including a $12 billion aid package for tariff-roiled farmers and $2,000 rebate checks for Americans. The president also claimed the income could be used to slash the ballooning $38 trillion debt. However, despite the president touting the import taxes as a stream of government income, actual revenue brought in from the levies fall far below White House estimates.

Economists reduced projected tariff revenue after the Trump administration scrapped tariffs on grocery staples like bananas, coffee, and beef last month in an affordability scramble. Pantheon Macroeconomics analysts wrote in a recent report the custom duties are bringing in about $400 billion annually, $100 billion less than the half-a-trillion dollars Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent forecasted in August.

The analysts attributed the more modest revenue in large part to plummeting Chinese imports, which fell 7.5% year-over-year in October, and 7.8% in November, according to supply-chain software company Descartes Systems Group, as U.S. companies sought products from countries like Vietnam, where tariff rates are lower. The weaker imports follow a surge in shipments earlier this year as businesses stockpiled products in an attempt to dodge the brunt of the levies.

Indeed, tariff revenue may have already peaked, with the Treasury Department’s monthly statement released last week showing the government collected $30.75 billion in customs duties in November, down from $31.35 billion collected in October. From April, following the announcement of “Liberation Day” tariffs, until October, revenues have been increasing month-over-month.

Trump’s lofty idea of redistributing tariff revenue to Americans has previously been caveated by his own cabinet. Bessent told Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures in mid-November “we will see” about tariff-funded rebate checks.

The Treasury secretary said earlier last month in an interview on ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos the $2,000 dividends could instead take the form of tax breaks that have already been signed into law.

“Those are substantial deductions that, you know, are being financed in the tax bill,” Bessent said.

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Business

Epstein files: Trump, Clinton, Summers, Gates not returning any results in search bar

Published

1 hour ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

The Justice Department released a massive trove of files related to the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, but the site housing the information was failing to turn up any results.

The data dump came on the deadline that Congress established last month for disclosing the highly anticipated information, though a top Justice official suggested that not all the documents would come out at once with more due in the coming weeks.

While President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and scores of other powerful men have been linked to Epstein, their names failed to come up in a search of DOJ’s “Epstein Library.”

“No results found. Please try a different search,” the site says after queries for their names.

The site adds that “Due to technical limitations and the format of certain materials (e.g., handwritten text), portions of these documents may not be electronically searchable or may produce unreliable search results.”

However, Clinton also appears in photos that were released as does the late pop singer Michael Jackson. Other records were heavily redacted.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the Justice Department had identified 1,200 victims of Epstein or their relatives and redacted materials that could reveal their identities, according to the New York Times.

Last month, an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in Congress produced legislation to force the Trump administration to release the DOJ files, though emails and photos from Epstein’s estate had already come out.

One of the sponsors of that legislation, Rep. Ro Khanna, warned on Friday that if DOJ doesn’t show that it’s complying with the law, Congress could hold impeachment hearings for Attorney General Pam Bondi and Blanche.

Earlier on Friday, Blanche told Fox News that “several hundred thousand” pages would be released on Friday. “And then, over the next couple of weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” he added.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Want a job in AI-era tech? Forget prestigious degrees—tech leaders want to see your GitHub projects and internships

Published

2 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

For decades, computer science has been sold as one of the surest paths to economic security. And leaders across politics and industry—from former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates—have at times urged students not to overlook the field, framing coding skills as the secret to stable, high-paying jobs.

But as artificial intelligence rapidly reshapes the workplace, that promise is starting to look less certain.

A new survey of more than 200 engineering leaders, conducted by tech training nonprofit CodePath and shared exclusively with Fortune, shows entry-level tech hiring is slowing. More than one-third of respondents, 38%, said their company has reduced the number of entry-level hiring over the past year, and nearly 1 in 7 reported pausing Gen Z hiring altogether.

At the same time, 18% said hiring had stayed the same, and 8% reported an increase. Despite the overall slowdown, CodePath CEO Michael Ellison—a Y Combinator alum—argues telling people to avoid tech right now would be a mistake.

“That’s just kind of like taking crazy pills if you end up choosing not to invest in the tools that make you the most powerful—of telling computers what you want them to do in an age where computers are becoming exponentially more powerful,” Ellison told Fortune. “So to me, it’s like saying, ‘don’t learn how to use the internet.’”

Ellison’s argument reflects a broader shift in how computer science fits into the AI economy. As generative AI tools become more capable, understanding how software works—and how to direct, customize, and integrate AI systems—is increasingly seen as a foundational skill rather than a specialized one.

That demand is already showing up in the labor market. AI literacy topped LinkedIn’s list of the skills professionals are prioritizing and companies are hiring for right now. And a Lightcast analysis of more than 1.3 billion job postings in 2024 found roles advertising at least one AI or generative AI skill offered an average of $18,000 more in annual compensation that those that did not.

Notably, the majority of those roles were outside the tech sector. Some 51% of jobs requiring AI skills were in non-tech industries, up from 44% in 2022—a sign coding and AI fluency are becoming relevant far beyond Silicon Valley.

The new secret to landing a tech job

Still, slowing hiring doesn’t mean aspiring technologists should give up. Instead, the CodePath data suggests candidates may need to rethink what they emphasize—and what they leave off—when applying for tech roles.

When asked which signals matter most outside the interview process, engineering leaders indicated proof of real-world skills matter far more than formal credentials. Side projects or portfolios topped the list, cited by 38% of respondents, followed by internship experience (35%), and public code portfolios like GitHub (34%).

Traditional markers of achievement, by contrast, carried far less weight. Just 4% of leaders said credentialing programs were a top influence in hiring decisions, while only 23% cited a candidate degree or academic focus and 17% pointed to school prestige.

The shift away from pedigree suggests employers are seeking evidence candidates can actually do the work. Greater fluency with AI tools and frameworks was the most common skill expectation for early-career hires, followed by faster time to writing production-ready code and the ability to learn new tools or programming languages quickly.

And despite buzz about tech layoffs, job opportunities do still exist. The U.S. federal government, for example, recently announced it would be hiring about 1,000 new engineers, data scientists, and AI specialists. No degrees or work experience is required—and salaries will range from $150,000 to $200,000. Meta has also still been hiring young talent in recent weeks, with job postings for roles such as product software engineers.

Ellison’s advice for those seeking roles is simple: Opportunities are out there as long as you are willing to dig in deeper—and build a portfolio that hiring managers are looking for.

“People are rewarded for being aggressive and for going after what they want,” he said. It’s surprising the opportunities that are hidden in plain sight.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Published

3 hours ago

December 19, 2025

Jace Porter

You’re not imagining it: The AI job squeeze isn’t some future apocalypse, it’s already quietly underway.

Professor Yoshua Bengio spent four decades building the technology that is now coming for your job. He is a computer science professor at the Université de Montréal, a Turing Award winner, and one of the most-cited scientists in the world on Google Scholar—and now he’s turned his back on his life’s work to warn that your job is probably already under threat.

Desk jobs, or as Bengio called them, “cognitive jobs, the jobs that you can do behind a keyboard,” will be the first casualties of automation.

“It’s just a matter of time,” the AI pioneer stressed on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast.

“Unless we hit a wall scientifically, like some obstacle prevents us from making progress to make AIs smarter and smarter, there’s going to be a time when they’ll be doing more and more, able to do more and more of the work that people do … And then, of course, it takes years for companies to really integrate that into their workflows, but they’re eager to do it. So it’s more a matter of time than, is it happening or not?”

And he admitted that it’s Gen Z new-hires who are currently being hit hardest by AI, as junior roles are the easiest to cut, consolidate, or backfill with software—but eventually everyone’s jobs will be impacted within five years.

It’s not just office jobs that are at risk; even trade jobs and democracy itself are threatened

For years, degrees were pushed as the key to success for the young and aspirational looking to nab well-paying and stable jobs. But now, even highly educated students are finding themselves “unemployable” as employers launch a “wait-and-watch strategy” in the midst of AI. Graduates in the U.K. are facing the worst job market since 2018. And companies like Intel, IBM, and Google have been freezing thousands of would-be new roles that AI is expected to take over in the next five years.

But it’s not just a blip or a reflection of the current economy, Bengio warned. As more firms lean on AI and eventually robots, too, the technology will only get smarter, he said.

“As companies are deploying more and more robots, they will be collecting more and more data. So eventually, it’s going to happen,” Bengio said when asked whether AI will be able to wipe out all work. Even young people trying to outsmart automation by ditching degrees or upskilling into trade jobs are destined for the same dead end.

“So if you do a physical job—as Geoffrey Hinton is often saying, you should be a plumber or something—it’s going to take more time [for AI to replace your job], but I think it’s only a temporary thing.”

Now, knowing the devastation AI could cause, Bengio said he regrets his life’s work.

“I should have seen this coming much earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention to the potentially catastrophic risks,” the 61-year-old admitted. “But my turning point was when ChatGPT came, and also with my grandson, I realized that it wasn’t clear if he would have a life 20 years from now, because we’re starting to see AI systems that are resisting being shut down.”

He’s since founded LawZero, a nonprofit organization focused on building safe and human-aligned AI systems. But at the current rate of change, his warning is clear: It’s not just jobs, even democracy could collapse in as little as two decades.

His message for CEOs? “Step back from your work. Talk to each other, and let’s see if together, we can solve the problem. Because if we are stuck in this competition, we’re going to take huge risks that are not good for you, not good for your children.”

Join us at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit May 19–20, 2026, in Atlanta. The next era of workplace innovation is here—and the old playbook is being rewritten. At this exclusive, high-energy event, the world’s most innovative leaders will convene to explore how AI, humanity, and strategy converge to redefine, again, the future of work. Register now.

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