Preview: The S&P 500 has fallen more than 10% from its record high, entering a correction and shedding trillions of dollars in market value.

Preview: Wall Street had very different expectations for the tech trade following President Trump's election victory in November.

Preview: Russia struck a sedate tone on Friday but acknowledged grounds for cautious optimism, after only backing the "idea" of a U.S. brokered 30-day ceasefire with firm caveats.

Preview: BMW's net profits slumped by more than a third in 2024 as weaker demand in China and Germany weighed on the high-end car manufacturer.

Preview: Trump said he would not change his mind about imposing "reciprocal tariffs" on other countries that have their own tariffs on U.S. goods.

Preview: "You need to have your private markets beating your public market," Gaia Investment Partners' Serena Tan said.

Preview: New leadership in Washington has prompted questions about Social Security's future. Some experts say privatizing the program could be the answer.

Preview: From California almonds to Tennessee whiskey and Michigan auto parts, some states and sectors will be hit hardest by U.S.-EU 'tit for tat' tariffs war.

Preview: Shares of Kering plunged on Friday after the firm announced that Demna Gvasalia would take the reigns as new artistic director of its ailing Gucci fashion line.

Preview: Spirit Airlines emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week, meeting its target to exit in the first quarter.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: GOLD CROSSES $3,000 FOR FIRST TIME... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: Market Indicator From Early 1900s Blaring Alarm... The Upside-Down Line That Tells Story of Stocks... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: Market Indicator From Early 1900s Blaring Alarm... (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: GOLD CROSSES $3,000 FOR FIRST TIME... The Upside-Down Line That Tells Story of Stocks...

Preview: The Upside-Down Line That Tells Story of Stocks... (Top headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: GOLD CROSSES $3,000 FOR FIRST TIME... Market Indicator From Early 1900s Blaring Alarm...

Preview: HOUSE REPUBLICAN TORCHED AT TOWN HALL (Main headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: VANCE MERCILESSLY BOOED AT KENNEDY CENTER DEMS PLAN NATIONWIDE BLITZ OF RED DISTRICTS Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: VANCE MERCILESSLY BOOED AT KENNEDY CENTER (Main headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: HOUSE REPUBLICAN TORCHED AT TOWN HALL DEMS PLAN NATIONWIDE BLITZ OF RED DISTRICTS

Preview: DEMS PLAN NATIONWIDE BLITZ OF RED DISTRICTS (Main headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: HOUSE REPUBLICAN TORCHED AT TOWN HALL VANCE MERCILESSLY BOOED AT KENNEDY CENTER

Preview: Buffett selling real estate empire? (First column, 1st story, link) Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: TESLA PAYS ZERO FEDERAL INCOME TAX! (First column, 2nd story, link) Related stories: EVs Targeted In Berlin Arson Attacks... How to lose $148B in less than two months... Elon Visits NSA... Top IRS lawyer pushed aside as DOGE seeks sensitive records... Protesters storm Trump Tower...

Preview: EVs Targeted In Berlin Arson Attacks... (First column, 3rd story, link) Related stories: TESLA PAYS ZERO FEDERAL INCOME TAX! How to lose $148B in less than two months... Elon Visits NSA... Top IRS lawyer pushed aside as DOGE seeks sensitive records... Protesters storm Trump Tower...

Preview: How to lose $148B in less than two months... (First column, 4th story, link) Related stories: TESLA PAYS ZERO FEDERAL INCOME TAX! EVs Targeted In Berlin Arson Attacks... Elon Visits NSA... Top IRS lawyer pushed aside as DOGE seeks sensitive records... Protesters storm Trump Tower...

Preview: A 17-vehicle crash involving a semi-truck along I-35 in Austin, Texas, left five people dead, including a child and an infant, first responders say.

Preview: Get all the stories you need-to-know from the most powerful name in news delivered first thing every morning to your inbox.

Preview: Former U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic Robin Bernstein, who served between 2018 and 2021, has a warning for spring breakers in light of the disappearance of Sudiksha Konanki.

Preview: The February 2025 death of Anne Marie Hochhalter, who was partially paralyzed when she was shot during the Columbine High School massacre, has been ruled a homicide.

Preview: Columbia University's interim President Katrina Armstrong said that she was “heartbroken" by Homeland Security agents searching two students' rooms on campus Thursday night.

Preview: A retired FBI agent discussed the disappearance of University of Pittsburgh student Sudisha Konanki as the investigation heads into it's eighth day.

Preview: Guatemalan national, Stivenson Omar Perez-Ajtzalan, 19, was arrested on Jan. 30 for aggravated rape of a child 10 years younger than him, according to ICE Boston.

Preview: Law enforcement officials reveal details about the arrest of a young father accused of beating his 2-month-old baby to death on Long Island.

Preview: New details have been revealed in the case against a Connecticut stepmother accused of holding a man, now 32, in captivity for 20 years.

Preview: An American Airlines flight caught fire at Denver International Airport on Thursday.

Preview: Senate works to avert partial government shutdown ahead of midnight deadline  The Associated Press Schumer backs down on fight against GOP’s government funding bill as Democrats face reckoning over Trump strategy  CNN First Thing: Chuck Schumer to back Republican funding bill to avoid shutdown  The Guardian US Senate Dems brace to vote for a bill they hate — to block Elon Musk  POLITICO As Congress Weighs a Spending Bill, Earmarks Are a Casualty  The New York Times

Preview: Second federal judge orders temporary reinstatement of thousands of probationary employees fired by the Trump administration  CNN Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Orders Thousands of Federal Workers Reinstated  The New York Times Judges rule against mass firings and Tricare bills couple over $100K: Morning Rundown  NBC News Judge orders Trump administration to reinstate thousands of fired employees at VA, Defense Department and other agencies  CNN Judge orders thousands of federal workers reinstated; slams ‘sham’ government declaration  ABC News

Preview: ‘Deep sense of outrage and betrayal’: House Democrats react to Schumer announcement  NPR Ocasio-Cortez on Schumer saying he’ll vote to advance CR: ‘Deep sense of outrage and betrayal’  The Hill House Democratic leaders reiterate opposition to Republican funding bill as shutdown deadline looms – live  The Guardian US Schumer’s shutdown ‘surrender’ sends the left into a rage  POLITICO Chuck Schumer's 'Surrender' Sparks Fury From Democrats  Newsweek

Preview: What to know about the Conn. woman who allegedly held her stepson captive for 20 years  Boston.com How a man used printer paper and hand sanitizer to escape an alleged 20 years of captivity by his stepmother  CNN Video New details after man allegedly held captive by stepmother for 2 decades is rescued  ABC News ‘Not one soul forgot about you': Fellow schoolmate recalls boy next door  NBC Connecticut Connecticut's 'lax' homeschooling rules could have aided boy's abuse, some education advocates say  NBC News

Preview: Big March storm system threatens U.S. with tornadoes, blizzards and wildfire risk  NPR Big March storm system threatens US with tornadoes, blizzards and wildfire risk  Yahoo 100 million at risk from severe weather, tornadoes Friday, Saturday  Axios A strengthening storm threatens intense, long-lasting tornadoes, hurricane-force winds and a wildfire outbreak starting today  CNN Severe Outbreak Could Spawn Several Tornadoes, Widespread Wind Damage  The Weather Channel

Preview: Trump's Court Rulings: Here's Where Trump And Elon Musk Are Winning And Losing  Forbes Trump asks Supreme Court to allow him to end birthright citizenship  CNN Trump asks Supreme Court to curb judges’ power to block policies nationwide  POLITICO Trump takes birthright citizenship to the Supreme Court  NPR Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order Reaches the Supreme Court  The New York Times

Preview: Kremlin Says Putin Met With Trump’s Envoy, Steve Witkoff  The New York Times Here’s what Russia has demanded to end its war in Ukraine  The Washington Post Kremlin response to Ukraine ceasefire hints at Putin's dilemma  NBC News Trump’s Ukraine Peace Strategy Put to Test After Putin Balks at Cease-Fire  The Wall Street Journal Russia 'cautiously optimistic' over Ukraine ceasefire but keeps caveats  CNBC

Preview: Dr. Mehmet Oz heads to the Senate with pitch to oversee America's health insurance programs  The Associated Press Dr. Oz Is About to Take Over Medicare. Expect a Show.  The Wall Street Journal What to Know About Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s Pick to Lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services  TIME Oz to face Senate hearing to lead Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services  The Washington Post Dr. Oz Faces Senators at Confirmation Hearing to Oversee Medicare and Medicaid  The New York Times

Preview: How Education Department layoffs hit student loans, testing, civil rights  The Washington Post Education Dept. cuts are here. What happens now to student loans, FAFSA and IEPs?  USA TODAY Letters to the Editor: Readers give good and bad marks to Education Department cuts  Los Angeles Times The Education Department is being cut in half. Here's what's being lost  NPR Democratic Attorneys General Sue Over Gutting of Education Department  The New York Times

Preview: Trump says a 200% tariff on European alcohol would be 'great' for American businesses  Fortune Late Night Takes Shots at Trump’s Liquor Tariff Threat  The New York Times Almonds, whiskey, auto parts: EU's retaliatory tariffs set up these U.S. states and local products as the biggest losers  CNBC US wine shops and importers say Trump's threatened 200% tariff on European wines would kill demand  The Associated Press From Champagne to Bourbon, Alcohol Lands on Front Lines of Global Trade War  The Wall Street Journal

Preview: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) slammed Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for saying he would vote to advance the House-passed continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government, which was largely opposed by Democrats in the lower chamber. “There is a deep sense of outrage and betrayal,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters late Thursday, referring to Schumer’s decision....

Preview: Russia surely did not anticipate the events that followed the aid cutoff.

Preview: A second federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from firing federal workers, issuing an order Thursday that probationary employees be reinstated weeks after their dismissal. The ruling, from U.S. District Court Judge James Bredar in Maryland, echoed an order from another federal judge in California on Thursday. “In this case, the government conducted massive...

Preview: Whether or not they vote to shut down the government today, Democrats have proven one thing: They are really bad at messaging.

Preview: Tornadoes can (and have) hit every U.S. state, but the area nicknamed Tornado Alley is probably where your mind goes when you think of dangerous twisters. This year, that's not be the region of highest concern, according to a severe outlook released this month.

Preview: Experts say President Donald Trump's proposed tariff on European Union alcohol would be disruptive to the U.S. market and consumers.

Preview: Tariffs, tariffs, tariffs. That is all the media talks about these days

Preview: Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) is accusing President Trump of seeking to start a civil war. The California Democrat, a long-time adversary of Trump, said the early flood of presidential policies — the disruptive tariffs, mass firings of federal employees and empowerment of Elon Musk to gut the government and the services it provides — may...

Preview: President Trump's tariffs on imported goods are causing prices to rise, resulting in American taxpayers paying the ultimate cost of the tariffs.

Preview: In today’s issue:   Senators are working down to the wire to avoid a midnight funding lapse in Washington that would carry major ramifications. Despite widespread Democratic criticism of the House’s stopgap bill, a number of Democrats are expected to vote today to pass the legislation. They argue that keeping the lights on in Washington is...

Preview: The Republican senator condemned college protesters opposed to Israel's war in Gaza on Wednesday and brazenly argued "all of them" belong behind bars.

Preview: The new report says at least 112 North American bird species have lost more than half their populations in the past 50 years.

Preview: The move was done quietly and just ahead of a key legal battle for the Trump administration.

Preview: Graham is taking over a role made famous by stars like Pam Anderson, Melanie Griffith, Christie Brinkley and Brooke Shields.

Preview: “She was an excellent dog owner, excellent caretaker to those dogs,” the couple's vet said.

Preview: Robert Preston Morris, 63, has been charged with five counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child in Oklahoma.

Preview: When asked whether Democrats or Republicans are historically better for the U.S. economy, X's Grok didn’t mince words.

Preview: Weldon was considered to be closely aligned with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Preview: The "Late Night" comedian also had an NSFW vanity plate suggestion for Donald Trump's new Tesla.

Preview: The former transportation secretary, who ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is raising speculation that he may seek a 2028 White House run instead.

Preview: Fabrics giant Joann is closing, and the store has stopped taking gift cards — upsetting many customers. Here’s what shoppers should know.

Preview: Markets are able to rally even before periods of intense angst end, notes Tom Lee

Preview: Oil futures rose Friday, with Brent crude pushing back above the $70-a-barrel threshold as investors monitored talks to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

Preview: “He claims to be a nihilist. I don’t see how one can identify as a nihilist and also try to save the environment.”

Preview: Why government — not business — will see that AI startups get the money they need.

Preview: Tesla has lost share to Chinese competitors, while Elon Musk’s political activities have led to steep declines in Tesla sales in Europe.

Preview: Players won’t receive any of the prize money themselves, but their schools’ athletic departments and sports programs reap the rewards.

Preview: “The stock market is in a downward spiral.”

Preview: If this downturn is typical, the S&P 500 will lose 13.6% in total, bottom in mid-May and be recovered by September.

Preview: Foreign investors reallocating money away from the U.S. could fuel a $1 trillion sell order on U.S. equities, a UBS strategist said Friday.

Preview: Sen. Chuck Schumer joins Chris Hayes to explain why he will vote to advance the GOP funding bill, helping Republicans avert a shutdown.

Preview: The D.C. judge who presided over Trump’s federal election interference case gave Musk and DOGE three weeks to produce documents and respond to questions.

Preview: President Donald Trump, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Secretary of State Marco Rubio claim Mahmoud Khalil is a national security threat.

Preview: Elon Musk's baseless claims about Social Security seem designed to undermine trust so that he can implement cuts.

Preview: Trump officials detained and deported a 10-year-old girl receiving brain cancer treatment and her family after they were detained at an immigration checkpoint.

Preview: The Trump administration recently denied a funding request from the city of Asheville, North Carolina, to help its recovery from Hurricane Helene, telling the city it must cut a program meant to aid female and minority contractors.

Preview: A group of Democratic attorneys general are suing the Trump administration over its attempts to dismantle the Department of Education.

Preview: Just more than a dozen years ago, Republicans' talking point was that the president of the United States should not have promoted a politically connected but troubled company.

Preview: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Trump wants to see "a total collapse of the Canadian economy." He's probably right about that.

Preview: President Donald Trump used a phrase I coined in 2008 in his joint address to Congress, but he clearly doesn't understand it.

Preview: "I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish," one former colleague told On The Money. "Who's going to hire him?”

Preview: Take advantage of Bet365 Sportsbook’s bonus code NYPOST365 and get a $150 bonus for betting $5 on Auburn vs. Ole Miss.

Preview: Bock told Decider she thinks Miss Huang's departure is "heartbreaking."

Preview: A California government watchdog group is demanding that the Department of Justice probe more than $7 million in taxpayer that went to the Council on American-Islamic Relations to resettle immigrants in California

Preview: “We’re writing season 4 now. That’s the official word,” said Jason Sudeikis.

Preview: Earlier this month, Garner and Affleck raised eyebrows when they were photographed laughing and hugging while celebrating their son Samuel's 13th birthday.

Preview: "In their world, this is like a 'Truth or Dare' thing but also, like, losing that could mean that you die."

Preview: The future Mrs. Zach Wilson is having the time of her life in Mexico — and the newly signed Dolphins quarterback has taken notice. On Thursday, Nicolette Dellanno took to Instagram to share a series of snapshots from her bachelorette party in Cabo San Lucas, which caught the eye of her future husband. “Wow wow,”...

Preview: After 50 years as a faceless bank branch, it’s time for the precious corner space on the ground floor of 785 Fifth Ave. to finally welcome a retail tenant.

Preview: "The graffiti and the homelessness is almost like that movie 'Escape from New York,'” he said, referencing the 1981 film starring Kurt Russell.

Preview: On spending, oversight and other issues, Republican lawmakers have willingly ceded power traditionally reserved for Congress to the Trump White House.

Preview: The stopgap measure the G.O.P. is pushing to avert a government shutdown omits billions of dollars in member-requested projects, another way in which Congress has ceded its power on federal spending.

Preview: The president, once the target of federal prosecution, is likely to announce steps to combat “weaponization” of the department, even as he uses its powers to punish enemies and reward allies.

Preview: Plus, two astronauts’ long wait for a ride home.

Preview: The Russell 2000, which includes small companies that are more sensitive to downdrafts in the economy than those in the S&P 500, appears likely to enter a bear market.

Preview: When President Trump entered his first term, stocks were steadily marching upward. This time, the trajectory has inverted.

Preview: China’s exports to developing markets have soared, opening indirect routes to the U.S. market that officials in Beijing worry may be closed under pressure from President Trump.

Preview: The Hong Kong conglomerate CK Hutchison’s planned sale of ports in Panama to a group led by BlackRock, the American finance giant, is under fire from Beijing.

Preview: The talks in Moscow with Steve Witkoff indicated that Russia was keen to keep negotiating with the United States over Ukraine.

Preview: Steven Witkoff, a real estate developer and friend of the president’s, lacks diplomatic experience, but the new administration might view that as a plus.

Preview: And now all hell’s broken loose.

Preview: Test your knowledge of this week’s big stories.

Preview: Take a quick break with our daily 5x5 grid.

Preview: The Electric State is from the directors of Avengers: Endgame and costs about as much. Yikes.

Preview: Cash Jordan made a name for himself showing off New York apartments. Now his YouTube channel is all crime and conspiracy. What happened?

Preview: Why everyone gives you thumbs down when they see you in your Cybertruck.

Preview: Actress and comedian Heather McMahan joins guest Prudie Kristen Meinzer.

Preview: No one observing the past few months could question that the Trump administration is intent on dismantling DEIA programs and civil rights in the process.

Preview: The website is attacking the users that made it the front page of the internet.

Preview: The value of being prepared is only obvious when something goes badly wrong.

Preview: From a statement released Tuesday by the Cornell Interim President: The Pathways to Peace event Monday night provided an educational discussion on… The post Cornell Students and Student Group Suspended for Disrupting Event appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: "even though that necessity wasn't fully apparent in the moment."

Preview: We rely on Canadian energy and lumber, and Canadians rely on our products. It's the proverbial win-win.

Preview: 3/14/1932: Justice Benjamin Cardozo takes oath. The post Today in Supreme Court History: March 14, 1932 appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: “Environmental justice” has no place at a regulatory agency. But the EPA was already a problem.

Preview: Chaos Comes Calling unsympathetically characterizes activism springing from COVID lockdowns as a far-right takeover.

Preview: The "In Slavery's Wake" exhibit celebrates black Americans' resistance to slavery and Jim Crow.

Preview: During the Palisades fires earlier this year, private firefighting companies were credited with saving several structures. But some state lawmakers… The post Brickbat: Burn, Baby, Burn appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: What's on your mind?

Preview: On Thursday, the Acting Solicitor General filed emergency applications in three birthright citizenship cases (24A884, 24A885, and 24A886). These are… The post Neutral Principles for Birthright Citizenship on the Emergency Docket appeared first on Reason.com.

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

Preview: The Crossword

Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: China introduced the invite-only AI agent Manus this week. Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of basic tasks, especially in the “personal assistant” realm, that the most highly trained AIs in the world remain hopeless at.  You can’t ask ChatGPT or Claude “order me a burrito from Chipotle” and get one, let alone “book me a train from New York to Philadelphia.” OpenAI and Anthropic both offer AIs that can view your screen, move your cursor, and do some things on your computer as if they were a person (through their “Operator” and “Computer Use” functions, respectively). This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. That such “AI agents” sometimes work, sort of, is about the strongest thing you can say for them right now. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) This week, China launched a competitor: the AI agent Manus. It produced a blizzard of glowing posts and testimonials from highly selected influencers, along with some impressive website demos. Here is Manus building an excellent personal website with almost no prompting. Here is Manus creating a detailed personal itinerary for a trip. Manus creating animations and a lesson plan for a middle school science class.  Manus is invite-only (and while I submitted a request for the tool, it hasn’t been granted), so it’s hard to tell from the outside how representative these highly selected examples are. After a few days of Manus fervor, though, the bubble popped a little and some more moderate reviews started coming out.  Manus, the growing consensus holds, is worse than OpenAI’s DeepResearch at research tasks; but better than Operator or Computer Use at personal assistant tasks. It’s a step forward toward something important — AIs that can take action beyond the chatbot window — but it’s not a shocking out-of-nowhere advance. Perhaps most importantly, Manus’s usefulness for you will be sharply limited if you don’t trust a Chinese company you’ve never heard of with your payment information so it can book things on your behalf. And you probably shouldn’t.  The agents are arriving When I first wrote about the risks of powerful AI systems displacing or destroying humanity, one very reasonable question was this: How could an AI act against humanity, when they really don’t act at all?  This reasoning is right, as far as current technology goes. Claude or ChatGPT, which just respond to user prompts and don’t act independently in the world, can’t execute on a long-term plan; everything they do is in response to a prompt, and almost all that action takes place within the chat window. But AI was never going to remain as a purely responsive tool simply because there is so much potential for profit in agents. People have been trying for years to create AIs that are built out of language models, but which make decisions independently, so that people can relate to them more like an employee or an assistant than like a chatbot.  Generally, this works by creating a small internal hierarchy of language models, like a little AI company. One of the models is carefully prompted and in some cases fine-tuned to do large-scale planning. It comes up with a long-term plan, which it delegates to other language models. Various sub-agents check their results and change approaches when one sub-agent fails or reports problems. The concept is simple, and Manus is far from the first to try it. You may remember that last year we had Devin, which was marketed as a junior software engineering employee. It was an AI agent that you interacted with via Slack to give tasks, and which it would then work on achieving without further human input except, ideally, of the kind a human employee might occasionally need.  The economic incentives to build something like Manus or Devin are overwhelming. Tech companies pay junior software engineers as much as $100,000 a year or more. An AI that could actually provide that value would be stunningly profitable. Travel agents, curriculum developers, personal assistants — these are all fairly well-paid jobs, and an AI agent could in principle be able to do the work at a fraction of the cost, without needing breaks, benefits or vacations.  But Devin turned out to be overhyped, and didn’t work well enough for the market it was aiming at. It’s too soon to say whether Manus represents enough of an advance to have real commercial staying power, or whether, like Devin, its reach will exceed its grasp. I’ll say that it appears Manus works better than anything that has come before. But just working better isn’t enough — to trust an AI to spend your money or plan your vacation, you’ll need extremely high reliability. As long as Manus remains tightly limited in availability, it’s hard to say if it will be able to offer that. My best guess is that AI agents that  seamlessly work are still a year or two away — but only a year or two. The China angle Manus isn’t just the latest and greatest attempt at an AI agent. It is also the product of a Chinese company, and much of the coverage has dwelled on the Chinese angle. Manus is clearly proof that Chinese companies aren’t just imitating what’s being built here in America, as they’ve often been accused of doing, but improving on it. That conclusion shouldn’t be shocking to anyone who is aware of China’s intense interest in AI. It also raises questions about whether we will be thoughtful about exporting all of our personal and financial data to Chinese companies that are not meaningfully accountable to US regulators or US law.  Installing Manus on your computer gives it a lot of access to your computer — it’s hard for me to figure out the exact limits on its access or the security of its sandbox when I can’t install it myself.  One thing we’ve learned in digital privacy debates is that a lot of people will do this without thinking about the implications if they feel Manus offers them enough convenience. And as the TikTok fight made clear, once millions of Americans love an app, the government will face a steep uphill battle in trying to restrict it or oblige it to follow data privacy rules.  But there are also clear reasons Manus came out of a Chinese company and not out of, say, Meta — and they’re the very reasons we might prefer to use AI agents from Meta. Meta is subject to US liability law. If its agent makes a mistake and spends all your money on website hosting, or if it steals your Bitcoin or uploads your private photos, Meta will probably be liable. For all of these reasons, Meta (and its US competitors) are being cautious in this realm. I think caution is appropriate, even as it may be insufficient. Building agents that act independently on the internet is a big deal, one that poses major safety questions, and I’d like us to have a robust legal framework about what they can do and who is ultimately accountable.  But the worst of all possible worlds is a state of uncertainty that punishes caution and encourages everyone to run agents that have no accountability at all. We have a year or two to figure out how to do better. Let’s hope Manus prompts us to get to work on not just building those agents, but building the legal framework that will keep them safe. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Preview: Few individual animals have ever been more important to their species than 2323M — a red wolf, dubbed Airplane Ears by advocates for his prominent extremities, who spent his brief but fruitful life on North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Red wolves, smaller, rust-tinged cousins to gray wolves, are among the world’s rarest mammals, pushed to the brink of extinction by threats such as habitat loss, indiscriminate killing, and road collisions. By 2019 fewer than 15 were known to survive in the wild. Against that grim backdrop, 2323M offered hope. Born at a federal site in Florida, he was released in 2021 onto the Alligator River refuge, a swath of coastal plain on North Carolina’s eastern shore. Over the next two years, he and a female known as 2225F raised 11 pups. Alas, in September 2023, Airplane Ears was killed by a car on US 64, the highway that runs through the refuge. One of the world’s rarest species had lost its most prolific member. Airplane Ears was an extraordinary animal who suffered a common fate. Around one-fifth of red wolves meet their end on a bumper, many on US 64, a primary route that vacationers take to the Outer Banks, the picturesque chain of barrier islands that line North Carolina’s seaboard. Black bears and white-tailed deer, and even alligators fall victim to collisions that kill animals and result in “significant harm to humans and vehicles,” according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Even the occasional alligator blunders onto the highway.   While US 64’s roadkill rates are exceptional, it’s far from the only perilous highway in the United States, where animal crashes annually cost society more than $10 billion in hospital bills, vehicle repairs, and other expenses.   For species from Florida panthers to California tiger salamanders to North Carolina’s red wolves, collisions pose an extinction-level threat.  After 2323M perished, a coalition of conservation groups began pushing the North Carolina Department of Transportation to retrofit the highway with fences and underpasses — essentially spacious tunnels that would allow red wolves and other animals to slink safely beneath US 64. “We knew that something had to be done, quick,” says Ron Sutherland, chief scientist at the Wildlands Network, a conservation group that focuses on habitat connectivity throughout North America. Otherwise, wild red wolves could be lost.  Drumming up millions of dollars for wildlife crossings has always been a tall order. In December, however, North Carolina received $25 million from the US Department of Transportation to build underpasses on Highway 64. Combined with $4 million that Wildlands Network and the Center for Biological Diversity raised in donations, as well as state funds, it was enough to make a stretch of Highway 64 safe for wolves. “It felt really good to know that something had gone right for the red wolf, for once,” Sutherland says.  That the transportation department invested in animal underpasses may come as a surprise — its primary mission, after all, is to facilitate human movements, not the peregrinations of wolves and deer. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), however, contained an initiative called the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, which allotted $350 million in competitive grants for animal passage,  the largest pot of federal funding ever earmarked for the cause. In addition to North Carolina’s red-wolf crossings, the program has awarded grants for nearly three dozen projects — some of which will aid imperiled species such as ocelots and desert tortoises, many more that will seek to avert dangerous crashes with large mammals like deer, elk, and moose. “This is not ornamental,” Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, told Vox of the wildlife crossings program in an interview earlier this year. “This is something that ties into the very core of our mission, which is to secure the safety of the American traveling public.”  Unfortunately for the red wolf and many other species, President Donald Trump’s administration may not agree.  The future of the wildlife crossings program, and many similar initiatives that the BIL supports, is uncertain. Shortly after taking office, Trump suspended the disbursement of BIL funds, leaving hundreds of Biden-era initiatives twisting in the political wind. Will animal passages, traditionally an overwhelmingly nonpartisan solution, endure? Or will the Trump administration stymie crossings, and a plethora of other BIL projects, before they ever truly get off the ground — perhaps dooming red wolves, and many other animals, in the process?  A tenuous renaissance for wildlife-friendly infrastructure The Pueblo of Santa Ana is an approximately 79,000-acre shard of New Mexican desert that’s criss-crossed by roads. Highway 550 plows below the southwestern edge of the Pueblo, known to its Native inhabitants as Tamaya; to the east and south, I-25 barrels along from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, impeding the movements of elk, pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, and other species. As in North Carolina, constructing wildlife crossings and fences along these highways, says Myron Armijo, the Pueblo’s governor, will save the lives of both drivers and wild creatures. “These animals are part of our culture and tradition, and we have very high respect for them,” he said.  It’s thus only fitting that the Pueblo is where Buttigieg chose to launch the wildlife crossings program. On a windy day in April 2023, Buttigieg spoke with tribal leaders, made a brief speech backdropped by one of the Southwest’s busiest interstates, I-25, and toured a concrete underpass, its walls scrawled with graffiti, through which animals already cross the interstate. “You couldn’t help but be struck by the deep connection that these tribal communities have with wildlife and the natural environment,” Buttigieg said. “And at the same time, this is not just a spiritual concern, because they’ve also tallied up the car crashes that are caused by these wildlife-vehicle collisions that we can prevent with better roadway design.” Over two rounds of grants since, the wildlife crossings program has awarded an eclectic array of crossings. Western states, where animals often move along clearly defined migration routes, have historically built more passages than Eastern ones, and the wildlife crossings program has duly channeled money to states like Colorado, for a major overpass on I-25 south of Denver, and Utah, for underpasses on Highway 89.  But the program has also funneled money eastward. Maryland, New York, and Georgia are among the states that received relatively modest planning grants in December, and Maine earned $9.3 million to build a passage for moose and deer.  “If you look at a map that overlays the projects from the first two rounds of funding, you will see coast-to-coast diversity,” said Renee Callahan, executive director of ARC Solutions, a group that studies and supports animal passages. In today’s politics, wildlife crossings may seem like a flight of fancy, but in reality, they’re critical safety infrastructure. Deer collisions alone kill an average of 440 drivers annually, making white-tailed deer deadlier than bears, alligators, and sharks combined. One study found that underpasses in Wyoming prevented so many perilous, expensive crashes that the state was on pace to recoup their costs in just five years. If the program has a shortcoming, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough. In 2024 alone, applicants requested $585 million in federal funding, nearly five times more than the transportation department made available that round. That left lots of worthy crossings unbuilt, like passages on Highway 191 south of Bozeman, Montana, that would have spared elk, deer, and grizzly bears. Callahan, like many conservationists, hopes that the pilot program will eventually be made permanent, ideally at a minimum of $1 billion over five years. “There are thousands of projects where today, based on a flat-out cost-benefit analysis, we’re going to save money in the long term by investing in this infrastructure,” Callahan said.  In Callahan’s view, the pilot program has another flaw: The states and other entities that apply are required to bring up to 20 percent of their project’s costs to the table, a serious obstacle to Native tribes, which, in Callahan’s view, shouldn’t be subject to the matching-funds obligation. That didn’t dissuade the Santa Ana Pueblo, who drummed up their share through a separate state grant. In December, the Pueblo learned that it had received close to $6.4 million to design passages on the highways bordering their lands. “I was totally elated,” Armijo said. No longer would the Pueblo be an ecological island in an ocean of asphalt.   What will Trump mean for infrastructure?  As John Oliver once observed, rarely is infrastructure sexy — and neither is retrofitting it for nature. Consider the National Culvert Removal, Replacement, and Restoration Grant Program, which allocated $1 billion over five years to fix decrepit culverts, the unglamorous pipes that funnel water beneath roadways. Derelict culverts both threaten the integrity of roads and block fish migrations; on one stream in western Washington, for example, a series of too-narrow, impassable culverts prevent salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, violating the fishing rights of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe.   When the first round of culvert funding was announced in August 2023, the Jamestown S’Klallam received $4.2 million to replace a pair of outdated culverts and thus restore nearly four miles of salmon habitat.  “It doubles as two things — it opens up blocked fish passage, and we’re repairing road infrastructure,” said LaTrisha Suggs, the Jamestown S’Klallam’s restoration planner.  Now, however, such initiatives are in jeopardy. In his first month in office, Trump has proposed slashing budgets, environmental protections, and the federal workforce alike. Among his first acts was to sign an executive order, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” that instructed agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, pending review within 90 days.  How Trump’s policies imperil wildlife Though Trump has only been in office for a few months, already his executive actions are putting more vulnerable animals and ecosystems at risk. Read these recent Vox stories to learn more: This animal is on the edge of extinction. Trump just fired the people trying to save it. The tiny lizard that will test Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda Scoop: Leaked emails show the nation’s leading wildlife agency has halted critical funding for conservation A “wholesale decimation of expertise” threatens the natural resources we all rely on According to a January 29 memo from new Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, that executive order has led the agency to evaluate and potentially revoke many of its existing funding agreements, including any that mention climate change or environmental justice. The order could violate the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which prevents presidents from withholding congressionally authorized funds. On February 13, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration, arguing that its funding freeze broke the federal government’s contract “to provide billions of dollars in congressionally approved funding,” and in late February the administration restored more than $2 billion to the state. The wildlife crossings program is among the many confronting uncertainty.  According to Erin Sito, US public policy director for the Wildlands Network, a number of states have been told by the Federal Highway Administration (FAA) that their grants are “on hold,” without any clear next steps. (The agency did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s definitely caught up with all the transportation projects that are not getting funded or administered at the moment,” Sito said. The Santa Ana Pueblo is among the affected recipients: Glenn Harper, the Pueblo’s wildlife biologist, said that the FAA informed the tribe that its grant was “on pause,” though Harper remains optimistic that the Santa Ana’s crossings will eventually move forward. Delays notwithstanding,  conservationists still have ample reason to hope that the program will ultimately endure. As Deb Kmon Davidson, chief strategy officer for the nonprofit Center for Large Landscape Conservation, puts it, wildlife crossings tend to be “super bipartisan.“The preservation of migration routes enjoys broad support in red-swinging Nevada and in blue Oregon, and in conservative states like Wyoming, hunters are among the issue’s staunchest champions. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) included a forerunner to the wildlife crossings program in a 2019 highway bill, and US Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as interior secretary during Trump’s first term, implemented a secretarial order directing Western states to protect big-game habitat and migration pathways. With Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), Zinke is also cosponsor of the Wildlife Movement Through Partnerships Act, a bill that would help states, tribes, and federal agencies study and protect animal corridors, which was reintroduced to Congress in January. Animal passages may be that most endangered of Washington species: a relatively nonpartisan issue. “Frankly, when we launched this program, I was ready for folks from the other side of the aisle to pounce and say, ‘Oh, you’re building highways for bunny rabbits,’ … when actually some of the strongest and most enthusiastic responses we got were from Republican legislators from states that have confronted wildlife-vehicle collisions on a daily basis,” Buttigieg told Vox. “My hope is that this will be a proverbial bridge-building exercise that enjoys support, whoever’s in charge.” In the meantime, many states are just hoping they receive the funding they’re due. In North Carolina, the state’s transportation department is still figuring out precisely what its red-wolf crossings will look like and how many to build. (Although its grant application included a conceptual map with potential passage locations, a spokesperson from the agency said that “no additional analysis” has since been conducted.) But that planning and implementation can’t take place until the federal government releases money to the state. “NCDOT has yet to receive any guidance on the status of the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program,” the spokesperson told Vox in an email.  The fate of that funding could mean the difference between life and death, both for red wolves and the many other species that call the Alligator River refuge home.  In August 2024, Wildlands Network launched daily roadkill surveys along US 64, cruising the highway and counting dead deer, bears, snakes, turtles, otters, bobcats, and other critters. In February the researchers counted their 3,000th animal — and though the survey hasn’t yet documented a dead red wolf, it seems only a matter of time. In an email, Sutherland said that federal turmoil was likely to “induce some delays” in building crossings, “which is sad for the wolves and other wildlife.” Delays are the one thing red wolves can’t afford.

Preview: Canadanian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks, flanked by Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly (left) and Minister of Finance and Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic LeBlanc, during a news conference February 1, 2025, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada. |  Dave Chan/AFP/Getty Images The US and Canada are meant to be the best of friends, but they’re in the midst of a pretty ugly fight.  It began with President Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, when he began referring to his outgoing Canadian counterpart as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.”  Things escalated from there, with heated meetings and calls leading to the US enacting (then retracting, then enacting, then retracting) tariffs on its northern neighbor, and Canada responding in kind. Province leaders got in on the action as well, perhaps most notably Ontario Premier Doug Ford: “If they want to try to annihilate Ontario,” he said early on in the tariff saber-rattling, “I will do everything — including cut off their energy with a smile on my face.” This week, he took steps to make good on that threat, announcing a 25 percent tax on electricity exports to New York, Minnesota, and Michigan. The US responded by promising to increase tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent. That led to both sides reversing course, and a fresh round of ongoing talks. (Though Trump maintained on Thursday that “Canada only works as a state.) I wanted a firsthand account of how all this is affecting normal Canadians and Canadian politics. So I dialed up Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who lives in Canada, to get the scoop.  Zack told me that “Canadians are angry — just out-of-this-world angry about what the United States is doing to them.”  Here’s what else he had to say. (Our conversation was edited for length and clarity).  What’s going on in Canada right now?    Well, for over a century, the US-Canadian border has been one of, if not the, most peaceful borders in the entire world.  There have been extremely strong relations between the two countries and extremely tight economic ties between them. For a long time, it’s been extremely easy to travel back and forth between the United States and Canada. Even before NAFTA, there was open trade for some goods.  There’s a way in which the economies are so intertwined that it’s not crazy to think about Canada and the US as having a broadly integrated economic system, even if it’s totally wrong to call Canada the 51st state.  I’ll give you an example.  The US is a big farm country. Canada is too. Farming requires fertilizer, and the US imports 80 percent of its potash — an important fertilizer — from Canada. Then it sells some of the products that it grows back to Canada. When I go to the grocery store, I often find “Product of the USA” and “Product of Canada” in the produce aisle. By putting tariffs on agricultural products on both sides, you’re making things more expensive in multiple ways.  The potash becomes more expensive to import, which also means that farmers have to pay more. It also means consumers in the United States have to pay more, and so do Canadians, because Canada’s putting reciprocal tariffs on the United States.  So not only are goods more expensive to begin with, but Canadian tariffs on American imports would make my groceries more expensive. By going after this very tight economic integration, Trump is likely to wreak havoc on both economies, but especially the Canadians. The tariffs on various goods threaten one of the foundations of the Canadian economy, which is trade with its much larger southern neighbor. Now, it’s not like Canada will collapse all of a sudden, but the country will experience pretty significant pain if it’s having trouble exporting or importing from the US.  With the caveat that there’s a lot of back-and-forth on this, can you tell us a bit more about what’s going on with the tariffs?  I can, but I don’t know how much good it will do by the time this gets published! But right now [as of late Thursday, March 13], we’re at a pause because of both sides backing down.  Earlier this week, the premier of Ontario — the Canadian equivalent of a governor — threatened to put significant export taxes on electricity sent to the United States, which would basically jack up electrical prices for Americans.  Trump threatened some significant tariffs and retaliation. He got really mad.  They both sort of backed down. Lots of other tariff-related negotiations are going on. And though all this changes constantly, meaning, again, this unfortunately may not be the case when people read this, but the next big date is April 2, which is when the next round of American tariffs on Canadian-related goods will go into effect.  Canada doesn’t want to be the aggressor. What Canadians say, and that includes all sorts of different politicians, is that they want the Americans to stop doing this, because economic warfare isn’t helping anybody. Essentially, “We want our things to go back to the way they were, but you keep threatening us, and so we have no choice but to fight back.”  The Canadian position is this is a defensive form of economic warfare, and they’re right to be clear. Trump started this for no reason. And I mean no reason. There was no justification given that makes any sense. Our own Eric Levitz wrote a piece looking at Trump’s various different justifications, and they contradict each other.  Let’s explore that a bit. It’s a mystery what Trump wants from all this?  I truly don’t know what Trump wants, and I’m not sure Trump knows.  After the election, Trump made some comments about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being Governor Trudeau. And at first they seemed like jokes, like, “Hahaha, Canada, right? It’s small America,” just the sort of thing Canadians hate, but Americans engage in sometimes. It was insulting but ultimately harmless.  But it seems somewhere along the way, inside Trump’s head, this went from being a joke that he made to insult and bully somebody into a serious thing that he actually wanted, to the point where he began to link it explicitly to harmful policies. And now you have Trudeau saying — and this is the official line of the Canadian government as well — that Trump is trying to bully us into becoming part of the US.  I just didn’t believe Trump would do that at first, because it’s so stupid. It doesn’t make any sense. The United States, for all of its power, does not have the capacity to force Canada to become part of America through economic coercion. That would require an invasion or require war, and that’s not happening, right? Trump is not going to invade Canada. (Though if he does, and I eat my words, I will be next speaking to you from the front lines of the Battle of Windsor, Detroit.) The only way it makes sense to me is to think of Trump as a mad king. Like the archetype from fantasy literature, who just starts ordering his subjects to do all sorts of crazy things that don’t make any sense in real life. I think Trump somehow got it in his head that it would be really cool if Canada was part of the US. It would be great. It would make him look awesome. I can’t make any sense out of it otherwise. The relationship between the US and Canada prior to Trump, was as good as any two countries that live next to each other could hope to be right, nearly open trade, no threat of war. There’s literally a bridge that you drive over from Buffalo called the Peace Bridge. And all of a sudden, Trump has antagonized the Canadians for no discernible purpose, and disrupted what was the most peaceful and mutually beneficial border on Earth. Of course, there’s the explanation that this is all a negotiating stance, and that Trump wants to seem crazy. I find that ridiculous at this point, because it’s not clear what negotiating benefits we’re supposed to be attaining. What can Canada give the US? I don’t know, and from what I understand, the US hasn’t articulated anything privately, other than, “You can make it stop when you become the 51st state.” Tell me more about how that 51st state rhetoric is playing in Canada. Everything Trump has said and done has led to a level of rage and defiance that I think very few Americans fully appreciate. People hear that 51st state stuff, and say, “America is literally attempting to annex us. They’re trying to coerce us into becoming Americans. And we hate that.”  Yesterday, I was walking around my neighborhood, and there were three shops in a row on the main drag in my neighborhood, and every single one of them listed the Canadian-made goods that they were selling.  There’s a widespread boycott of American-related goods here in Ontario, which is not only Canada’s largest province, but where state-run liquor stores have a semi-monopoly on alcohol sales. And they have taken all American-made products out of those stores. That’s a government initiative, not a citizen boycott. There’s both: Consumers don’t want to buy American goods, and the government is limiting access to certain American goods.  Ontario is currently governed by a conservative government, one that you would think would have more ideological affinities with the Trumpers. The fact that they’ve been so aggressive is demonstrative of where public opinion is in Canada. Canadians are so insulted, so infuriated because they have their own real sense of nationhood. One of the pillars of Canadian national identity is being not American, is that Canada is different from the other country near them. To say “You should just become part of the US” is to assail one of the foundations of what makes Canada Canada.  Being so infuriated has led to a backlash against the United States and against the Trump administration, unlike anything in recent memory, dwarfing even the anti-Americanism you saw in Canada during the Bush administration around the Iraq War. So all this is making Canadians very angry. What’s it doing to Canadian politics? It’s transforming Canadian politics. I’ve never seen anything like this. So to back up, Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister, and his Liberal Party have been in power for a really long time. On Friday, he’s stepping aside in favor of Mark Carney, his successor at the top of the Liberal Party.  It was widely thought that the Liberals were done, that Trudeau would resign, there would be a new Liberal prime minister for a little bit until Canada has elections, and then the Conservative Party, which is their main rival, would end up winning the elections and be in charge because Trudeau was very, very unpopular — as leaders tend to be after 10 years in power. All of a sudden, though, the polling dramatically reversed. What had been a consistent Conservative lead for years became almost a dead heat, and has stayed that way for the past few months.  Trudeau stepping down is part of that. But it really is about America for two reasons.  First, people like the way that the Liberals have handled the United States. Trudeau and the rest of the Liberal Party have been defiant, aggressive, willing to push back, not giving any ground, calling on Canadians to stand together and stand up for their country in the face of American bullying. And that’s been hugely popular. Trudeau’s approval rating is still negative, but it’s gone up by 10 points, which is striking,  Second, the Conservative Party made a choice to elevate a guy named Pierre Poilievre to leadership. Poilievre is about as close to a Trump-style conservative, as you can get in Canada. He’s not a danger to Canadian democracy in the same way that Trump’s a danger to American democracy, and he’s less right-wing on a lot of issues, including some big cultural war ones. But he has a penchant for a kind of aggressive policy rhetoric and conspiracy theorizing to the point where he’s developed a bit of a fan club among American conservatives, who praise him.  That may have seemed like an asset for Poilievre at one time, certainly in his primary race. But now being close to the US or American-style in any way is like a death sentence in Canadian politics. The US government is the one who’s literally trying to destroy your country. It’s not helpful if you’re seen as somebody who can’t stand up to the Americans. It’s not that Poilievre hasn’t been trying. He’s been making statements about how he’s willing to push back on the US. But the Liberals are seen as the much more naturally antagonistic party against a Republican-led United States.  Now what was once a shoo-in election for the Conservatives is now a toss-up. And if trends continue, it may even turn into a Liberal favorite election, but that will take some time. Are we seeing something of a long-term reorientation in US-Canada relations here? There are two ways to think about it, both of which could be equally valid.  The first one is one that I’ve heard from European diplomats and the people who talk to them: One Trump term can be dismissed as a fluke, but two Trump terms suggest that the United States might be like this in the future. That is, every four years you have the possibility of facing an antagonistic, aggressive right-wing, nationalist government that wants to bully you and undermine the foundations of your shared diplomatic relationship. If you take that view — that Trump is just what the Republican Party is, and we need to readjust our politics around the fact that America might often be like this — that would lead to a long-term strategic reevaluation of the relationship and a transformation of what the nature of the US-Canadian border is going to look like, what trade is going to look like, what economic ties between the two countries are going to look like.  The second school of thought is that that’s all really costly. The relationship takes a lot of work to change, and there’d be a lot of short- and long-term pain.  The US-Canada relationship developed as it did for a reason. Geographic proximity makes it easy to trade, and it makes sense that these big markets with different climates that can grow different crops and easily support different industries would cooperate. It is a naturally congenial economic and political relationship. It would be to everyone’s detriment if the politics were more hostile. So it might be that you start seeing a policy that acknowledges the long-term risks and takes some steps to ameliorate them, while attempting to leave the door open for a return to the pre-Trump status quo. Those schools of thought aren’t mutually exclusive, and you can see elements of both in a Canadian strategy. What I can say for sure is the odds that there will be some kind of political or economic rupture between the US and Canada that lasts decades into the future have gone up substantially just over the course of the past few months.

Preview: Donald Trump and Elon Musk promoting Teslas at the White House on March 11, 2025. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images In the past week, Donald Trump announced that he would buy a Tesla and advertised the company’s vehicles at an event that turned the White House lawn into a showroom benefitting his ally, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He also said that vandalizing Tesla cars — as some demonstrators have done to protest Musk — will be labeled an act of “domestic terrorism.”  It’s the latest and perhaps most egregious example of the conflicts of interest that have ensnared both Trump and Musk, who is leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a role that has given the world’s richest man the ability to target and gut any government agency that draws his ire.  This isn’t anything new. Trump’s first term was riddled with unprecedented conflicts of interest. Yet this time around, Trump came into office with even more business entanglements and ways to use the presidency to enrich himself. His social media company, Truth Social, is now a publicly traded company, giving anyone the ability to become a shareholder in the president’s business. He and his family members have launched crypto coins. And Trump also has a new set of merchandise licensing deals.  But when it comes to just how unprecedented the conflicts of interest are in this administration, the Tesla incident shows that Musk is the new elephant in the room. The businessman, who became one of the president’s closest advisers after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help Trump win, is now directly influencing agencies tasked with regulating his own companies. And of course other Trump appointees and nominees — from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — are not free from conflicts of interest either. At this point, the public seems resigned to the fact that people in power also have massive incentives to enrich themselves. But in truth, there are people and processes that are supposed to protect us from this kind of abuse. What are they, how have they broken down, and how can we get them to work? How the government polices itself A conflict of interest arises when an official’s personal interests can cloud their judgement when making decisions on behalf of the public. When foreign officials, for example, spend money at Trump’s businesses, they create a conflict of interest for the president because he materially benefits from his relationship with them. And while some conflicts of interest are inevitable and not inherently corrupt, they do increase the risk of corruption, where officials intentionally advance their own personal interests instead of national ones. Every branch of government has ethics standards and conflict of interest rules. Though as the ethics scandals with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have shown, they’re not always enforced. In the executive branch, conflicts of interest are determined by statutes that apply to all federal employees — like the law prohibiting someone from working on matters where they have a financial interest — and ethics rules that are set up by the White House.  One major limitation, though, is that these conflict of interest laws do not apply to the president or vice president, which is why Trump is allowed to maintain all of his businesses while serving in the White House. As for Musk, there’s a reason he hasn’t been subject to the same ethics standards as most other government employees. “The administration has taken pretty significant steps to insulate Mr. Musk from accountability,” said Donald Sherman, the executive director and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “So they made him a special government employee instead of a permanent employee, so he’s working for the federal government while also maintaining his day job.” The administration has pointed to that special status —  usually given to short-term advisers who sit on temporary advisory committees or task forces — as a reason why Musk doesn’t have to make his financial disclosure form public, limiting scrutiny into his businesses’ entanglements. (Past administrations have also dubiously granted people special government employee status, as was the case when Huma Abedin worked as an aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while maintaining an outside consulting job.) So who is responsible for actually enforcing existing conflict of interest rules where they can be applied? “Primarily that has been — within the executive branch — the Office of Government Ethics,” said Eric Petry, who serves as counsel in the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. “There’s also a robust system of inspectors general, who are supposed to expose fraud and waste and conflicts.” The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) was formed after the Watergate scandal. Before then, conflict of interest cases were mostly handled through criminal investigations and proceedings, but OGE was established to help prevent conflicts of interest from arising in the first place. Tasked with scrutinizing the president’s political appointees, the office reviews their financial disclosures, identifies areas where conflicts of interest might arise, and proposes ethics agreements to address those conflicts, including by requiring appointees to sell assets. OGE also maintains a database of officials’ disclosures, which are generally available to the public.  Inspectors general also play an important role. They are an independent watchdog within a given agency and conduct audits and investigations to ensure that the agency and its employees are complying with the law and to prevent fraud and abuse. While their investigations usually come in the form of a public report, inspectors general can also make referrals to the Department of Justice, where criminal violations can be prosecuted.  “But,” as Petry notes, “you’ve seen the Trump administration has really been putting those systems under stress or just outright ignoring them.” Indeed, Trump has engaged in a full-on assault on these watchdogs, firing the director of OGE as well as at least 17 inspectors general across various federal agencies. Trump’s moves also underscore the potential conflicts of interest at play. At least one of the inspectors general he fired was overseeing an investigation into one of Musk’s companies. To put it mildly, these firings — which are potentially unlawful — are a major setback for the executive branch’s ability to police itself. Obviously, that’s by design. From day one, Trump has shown little interest in promoting ethical conduct. One of his first executive orders, for example, rescinded Biden-era ethics rules that prohibited employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists. To be sure, while other administrations haven’t exactly been squeaky clean, the way the Trump administration has handled ethics concerns is a departure from its predecessors. “Unfortunately within the executive branch, some of the tools that we typically look to to police conflicts are not going to be effective,” Petry said. “So that means we look to the other branches of government.” Congress and the courts need to step up This administration’s flagrant disregard for ethics rules underscores that the regulations we already have are clearly not enough. “It’s a real problem that federal conflicts-of-interest laws don’t apply to the president and vice president,” Petry said. “That’s something that Congress can and should change. There are problems here that are sort of systemic that require reform.” After Trump left office in 2021, there were some efforts to bolster ethics standards and oversight, and ensure that the president and vice president are no longer exempt from conflict of interest rules. But those efforts largely failed. Still, the different branches of government have to make an active effort to hold each other accountable. Since Trump has undermined the ability of the executive branch to hold itself accountable, the Congress and the courts have to be more vigilant. It might seem like it’s expecting too much of a Republican-controlled Congress to investigate potential conflicts of interests, but that’s the legislative branch’s job. It’s also not unheard of. During Trump’s first term, Republican lawmakers oversaw inquiries into the president’s appointees. Former US Rep. Jason Chaffetz, of Utah, for example, called out Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, for potentially violating the law for not properly disclosing payments from foreign governments. (Flynn pleaded guilty for lying to law enforcement, but the Department of Justice eventually dropped its case against him and Trump granted him a pardon in 2020.) Where Congress falls short, the courts can step in. Trump’s firing of the inspectors general, for example, is improper because he neither gave Congress a 30-day notice, as required by law, nor provided a substantive reason for the inspectors general dismissals. So some of those inspectors general have filed a lawsuit against Trump, saying their firing was “contrary to the rule of law.” “Unfortunately this moment of chaos could be really painful for a lot of people, but hopefully it will generate the backlash and public momentum for changing the system that we saw following the Gilded Age, following Watergate, following other periods of crisis and constitutional uncertainty,” Petry said. That’s why the last line of defense against the conflicts of interest plaguing the Trump administration is important. And that is the role of the press and government watchdog groups.  Trump has been able to evade accountability in part because he is more immune to public shaming than other public officials. His corruption has always been brazen and often out in the open. As a result, many people seem desensitized to this kind of abuse of presidential power.  But while public shaming might not work as effectively on Trump, it can pressure other officials and institutions to take action. Even when there aren’t specific remedies to Trump’s or Musk’s conflicts of interest, shedding light on them for the public to see is an important accountability mechanism because people can demand more of their representatives in government and put pressure on the administration. So the public shouldn’t be resigned to the idea that ethics rules are somehow moot under Trump.  After all, that’s who lawmakers will have to answer to come election time. And it’s likely that voters will have some questions about who this administration is really serving. “You don’t need to be an ethics expert,” Sherman, of CREW, said, “to have significant questions about how this administration is operating and whether or not conduct rises to the level of a violation of federal or criminal law.”

Preview: A coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. | Visions of America/Joseph Sohm/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to the Logoff: Today I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle a slew of environmental regulations, a development only relevant to people who breathe air or are concerned about humanity’s future. What’s the latest? The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday evening that it was starting the process of unwinding 31 regulations aimed at protecting air quality, water quality, and the climate. This includes rules on pollution (mercury, soot, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases) from many sources, including power plants, automobiles, and oil and gas refineries.  What about climate rules? Perhaps the most significant regulation on the chopping block is the EPA’s 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases threaten public health and must be regulated. It’s the underpinning of the most important climate regulations, including rules aimed at dramatically lowering greenhouse gas emissions from the energy and transportation sectors. Can the administration do this? This is the start of a lengthy process of rewriting federal rules. Environmental groups are also planning to sue, which will tie up these rule changes in court for months or even years, my colleague Umair Irfan explains. Why is the administration doing this? EPA administrator Lee Zeldin framed the changes around “unleashing American energy” (in this case, he’s primarily talking about coal, oil, and natural gas) and “lowering the cost of living.” The EPA’s mandate, the New York Times notes, is to protect the environment and public health. What’s the big picture? These regulations — alongside financial support for clean energy development — are the backbone of federal efforts to address climate change, an undeniably real environmental problem that’s on track to deeply degrade the planet’s capacity to host human life. Federal policy is not the sole driver of our efforts to address climate change, as technological breakthroughs, market forces, and state rules all play a role. But if the EPA is successful in finalizing the rule changes it’s proposing, the administration will have succeeded in severely undercutting the nation’s ability to hit its climate goals. And with that, time to log off: I got a lot of great emails about the Good Robot podcast on artificial intelligence that I shared yesterday, so if you missed it, it’s available here on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’re looking for something a touch more outdoorsy, I had a lot of fun with this National Park Service tool that tells you about the parks nearest you. It’s good inspiration for a future trip — or maybe even a weekend hike. Thanks, as always, for reading.

Preview: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, speaks during a news conference following the weekly Senate Democrat policy luncheon at the US Capitol on March 11, 2025. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images Once again, the country is on the brink of a government shutdown.  Unless the Republican-controlled Senate passes a spending bill, the government will shut down on Friday at midnight, when last year’s appropriations run out. The House has already passed a bill to fund the government through September on a nearly complete party-line vote. The bill keeps most spending stable, but it includes boosts to defense spending and cuts to domestic projects, one-time grants, and programs like a federal rural broadband initiative. It also restricts the District of Columbia’s locally funded budget. It faced critics on both sides of the aisle: Conservative Republicans argued the bill didn’t do enough to cut spending, and disliked the legislative method used to fund the government, while Democrats balked at the cuts. But eventually, all but one House Republican supported the party’s legislation, while all but one House Democrat opposed it. To pass the bill in the Senate, Republicans stand to need the help of eight Senate Democrats to clear the 60-vote filibuster hurdle. The GOP holds a 53-seat majority, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has already said he will not support the plan. So far, one Senate Democrat has come out in favor: John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who said he refuses “to burn the village down in order to save it.” The stakes are high for a few reasons. This “continuing resolution” (as it’s called in Congress) is Democrats’ first high-profile chance at a stand-off with Republicans in Donald Trump’s second term — their chance to try to negotiate for some oversight and accountability over the White House, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” and their cuts across the government. And the Democratic base is furious at its leaders; to help Republicans keep the government open would send yet another message to Democrats that their party isn’t confronting Trump the way they want them to. But shutdowns are never popular — and the risks of forcing one are real: Designating a score of government employees as nonessential could facilitate the work of Musk and DOGE, while giving Trump a foil as his own approval ratings fall. There’s no easy answer here. There are legitimate reasons to oppose and support the stopgap effort — and time is running out to make a choice. The case for letting the government shut down Democrats have plenty of reasons to oppose the Republican spending plan. And there’s a whole assortment of folks pushing them to do so, including most House Democrats, some safe-seat Senate Democrats, progressive activists, both liberal and moderate Democratic strategists, and your average resistance liberal.  Democrats preferred a 30-day stopgap spending bill so that they could have longer negotiations over cuts to government spending. But they were largely ignored as House Republicans led the effort for a six-month-long extension. Going along with a plan they were left out of, some Democrats say, could incentivize Republicans to keep governing without the opposition party’s input in the future — which isn’t usual for government spending bills like this. Some also see the opportunity to force Republicans to make concessions in order to keep the government open at a time when they control both chambers of Congress and the White House.  Democrats wanted a spending bill that included safeguards for how government funding would be spent and administered: Namely, they wanted guarantees that the White House would spend the money Congress had appropriated, protecting the legislative branch’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse. Those concerns grew after a report from the news outlet NOTUS that Vice President JD Vance told House members to vote for the bill and suggested that Trump would refuse to spend allocations that the White House thought were harmful. Safeguards against such spending blocks are not included in the House bill. Nor are more oversight of and limits on DOGE and Elon Musk, another Democratic priority. Other Democrats point out that Trump is already effectively shutting down parts of the government through DOGE’s major cuts to federal agencies: Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, for example, pointed to the mass firings at the Department of Education this week as evidence that Trump and Musk “have been shutting down our government piecemeal, illegally shuttering programs, agencies, and now attempting to close entire departments.” So the case for allowing a shutdown is also that Democrats would be taking a stand against a presidency that has already challenged legal and constitutional norms, dismantled parts of the federal government and its workforce, and, they say, poses a threat to democracy. That’s at least the case that anti-CR Democrats, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have made: “The bill that was strongly opposed by House Democrats is a power grab that further unleashes and entrenches Elon Musk’s efforts,” Jeffries said yesterday. He and other House Democratic leaders have been urging Senate Democrats to “stand” with them and oppose the CR. Even those wary of a shutdown are making the same case about the separation of powers: “The problem I have with the bill is that I think it advances this project that we’re seeing come from the executive branch, this power grab that does not respect that the power of the purse is with the Congress,” Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia told reporters on Wednesday. In that way, they’d not only be ideologically consistent with the case they’ve been making against Trump, Musk, and DOGE for the last two months, but also be feeding the burning appetite for obstruction and resistance that their base has been craving since Trump took office.  Shoring up Democratic support, unifying the party, and beating back the “do-nothing” Democratic brand that has taken root are all clear political benefits. And though it’s unclear now who the public would primarily blame for a shutdown, this faction argues that there’s enough time for public sentiment to recover if it ends up primarily hurting Democrats. The case against a shutdown More moderate and swing-state elected officials, like Fetterman, centrist commentators, and strategists are pushing against a shutdown — and Senate Democrats have been receptive to their case. They seem to be particularly wary about the economic effects on their states should the government close for an extended period. Aside from it being a basic congressional duty, there are concerns that those worried about the work DOGE is doing to downsize the federal government cut staff would be boosted by the sudden designation of federal workers into “essential” and “nonessential” categories. Wired, for example, has explained one theory: that Musk and DOGE would welcome a shutdown since it not only makes it easier to pick which workers to fire, but could make it easier for DOGE to identify programs and agencies that can be completely folded. After 30 days of a government shutdown, the executive branch also gets larger legal abilities over how the government can operate and whether to pay back workers at all if they return from furlough. There is also a whole mess of political risks in play if Democrats are cast as the facilitators of a government shutdown.  At the moment, Trump, Republicans, and Musk are the primary villains and main characters of the political ecosystem. Trump’s favorability and approval ratings are declining, his handling of the economy and the confusion over tariffs are the major story of the day, and the risk of a recession is all over the media.  To have Democrats trigger a shutdown would functionally be a major distraction — an own goal — in the face of Republicans’ self-engineered spiral. Should economic conditions deteriorate quickly, and the shutdown last long, Trump could also end up spinning fallout on Democrats; the executive branch has some leeway in implementing a shutdown, so there would be plenty more opportunities to create bad news cycles for the Democrats. It’s partially why shutdowns get blamed not on the party in power, but on the party that causes them to happen; up until now, that’s been the Republicans. That was one of the fears Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who seemed to be waffling on opposing the bill, laid out to CNN yesterday: “It does seem the lesser of two very serious evils to go along with the CR. Shutting down the government it’s always a last resort; in this case, it’s even more than that,” he said. “Who knows how long it stays shut down? Who knows how long the president decides that he likes making all the decisions for the government? You can imagine him saying, ‘Congress has failed, Congress can’t help you. It’s up to me to save everyone.’”

Preview: EPA administrator Lee Zeldin says the agency is “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it’s starting the process of undoing 31 environmental regulations, including a ruling that’s foundational to US climate policy. But undoing any regulation is a cumbersome process, and with the climate rule in particular, the EPA may end up painting itself into a corner.  The big target here is the 2009 endangerment finding, in which the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, therefore the agency must limit them. The finding is the foundation for regulations that ensued, like requiring power plants and vehicles to cut their emissions of gases that are heating up the planet. Without the endangerment finding, these regulations could be rescinded.  The rollbacks are yet another manifestation of the Trump administration’s longstanding antipathy toward all things related to climate change. “By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, the social cost of carbon and similar issues, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in the Wall Street Journal.  But it will take more than press releases and editorials to get rid of greenhouse gas rules. The endangerment finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that says greenhouse gases are covered under the Clean Air Act and the EPA has to figure out whether these gases could endanger public health or welfare.  Endangerment endangered Based on science alone, the endangerment finding is on solid ground. The evidence is overwhelming that rising temperatures are worsening problems like heat stress and facilitating the spread of diseases carried by insects, which poses a threat to public health. And on welfare, the text of the Clean Air Act specifically says it includes “effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate.” So to undo the endangerment finding, the EPA would have to establish a factual record that climate change isn’t happening due to burning fossil fuels, and that even if it is, it doesn’t hurt anything.  Trump administration officials have hinted that they are indeed making the case that efforts to limit climate change are worse than its harms and that warming might benefit humanity on balance.  “This is truly ridiculous,” said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project and one of the attorneys who litigated Massachusetts v. EPA. “I could go into the DC Circuit and argue against this in pig latin and win it.” It’s likely that states led by Democrats, particularly California, as well as environmental groups, will sue to stop the EPA’s efforts to repeal the endangerment finding, but a lot has to happen before it even gets to that point. The EPA has to make another factual determination, write a proposed rule, provide a justification, and invite public comments, all before they issue a final rule.  “Nothing they’ve done so far on the endangerment finding counts as a final agency action that can be challenged in court, so there’s really nothing to sue on yet,” said Shaun Goho, legal director for the Clean Air Task Force.  The Trump administration may also face an unexpected complication in its efforts, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that many conservatives cheered. In the 2024 Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, the Court overturned “Chevron deference,” a legal doctrine that lets federal agencies figure out the particulars of implementing complicated laws like the Clean Air Act when the wording is vague. The Loper Bright decision gave courts much more authority to second-guess an agency’s decision by claiming that the agency’s action is not consistent with a federal statute. But Bookbinder argued that this actually works against the Trump administration’s climate rollbacks. Since the EPA can’t easily make its own determinations anymore about whether climate change is a threat, it has to stick to the letter of the law, and the law unambiguously says that “climate” is included in the obligation to protect welfare under the Clean Air Act.   “Now we’re in a better position legally with the end of Chevron,” Bookbinder said. The other hurdle for the EPA is that with so many layoffs and job cuts across the agency, it will be much harder to find the staffing power to put together all the paperwork and argue the legal case for reversing the endangerment finding.  The litigation around the endangerment finding may wend its way back to the Supreme Court, where Republicans have a 6-3 majority, but historically courts have backed it and the case may not be the layup that the Trump administration may be anticipating.   “The endangerment finding has been implemented by multiple administrations and both parties,” Goho said. “It’s been upheld in the courts repeatedly. The science and then the law are really clear. It would be very misguided for the EPA to try to move forward with repealing it.”

Preview: Traders watch as then-President-elect Donald Trump walks onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on December 12, 2024, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Candidate Donald Trump promised an economic renaissance. President Donald Trump is delivering economic turmoil.  The US stock market, once the only measure of economic performance that the president cared about, has seen a significant selloff amid fears of an impending recession — and the US is underperforming relative to its global peers. Other indicators look brighter, but there are troubling signs on the horizon. February’s jobs report said the labor market was holding steady, but the report did not yet capture the full extent of Trump’s mass layoffs of federal workers. Inflation came down slightly in February, but price stability is in trouble as Trump’s tariffs touch off a global trade war. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the administration is focused on the “real economy,” tracking Treasury yields as an indicator of its health. Declining Treasury yields could help bring down borrowing costs across the economy, spurring investment and leading to economic growth. But amid the chaos created by Trump’s policies, it’s not clear that strategy will work. The future looks rocky enough that Trump last weekend refused to rule out a recession. Trump’s defenders say the pain is temporary and that good times are ahead: “I’d kind of suggest people keep their powder dry and pay attention to a well-thought-out economic plan that will indeed make America great again,” Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business pundit and former Trump adviser, said Monday. But the American public remains skeptical: A March Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of Americans think Trump’s economic policy has been too erratic. Other recent polls similarly show his approval ratings on his handling of the economy tanking.  Here’s what the economy looks like right now, in four charts. US stocks are underperforming Investors might have hoped that Trump’s second term would be a boon for the stock market. Trump certainly gave the markets a lot of attention during his first term, when he frequently touted the record highs the stock market reached under his tenure, appearing to view it as a direct reflection of the strength of his economic policies. In his second term, the markets have instead been roiled by his tariff policies, which threaten to raise prices for Americans and have set off a trade war, Meanwhile, he has dismissed concerns about a potential recession.  “I don’t see it at all,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday when asked if he thinks there will be a recession. Major US stock indices closed higher on Wednesday following the inflation report. But they are still posting losses this year to date. That has put them behind global stock indices. Some of those that exclude US stocks have even posted gains so far in 2025.  Job growth is steady but precarious  Though hiring has remained strong, there are some signs that the labor market is cooling down. The US added 151,000 jobs in February, but the unemployment rate increased to 4.1 percent from 4 percent.  That uptick might be a sign of a slowdown to come. In February, US employers announced job cuts on par with what was seen during the last two US recessions. The February jobs numbers also do not fully reflect the impact of cuts underway at the federal government. On Wednesday alone, the Trump administration slashed more than 1,300 jobs at the Education Department, practically halving its size. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has also claimed to have made over $100 billion in spending cuts, but his team has been unreliable in their accounting. Those cuts could also affect jobs at businesses that contract with the federal government. Trump is eyeing Treasury yields Trump officials have signaled that they’re closely monitoring a benchmark known as the 10-year Treasury bond yield. That yield is the interest rate that the federal government pays to Treasury bondholders each year on loans that mature after 10 years. It affects borrowing costs for everything from the $12.6 trillion mortgage market to $5.8 trillion in bank lending. The current yield is about 4.2 percent. That rate isn’t determined by the government but rather set by market forces. If financial institutions are feeling good about the US’s financial outlook, their bids at these bond auctions may be lower. If they’re predicting economic turbulence, as is currently the case, those bids may be higher. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s reelection, the 10-year Treasury rate rose sharply. It’s come down since peaking in January, but rose again amid the uncertainty and fear created by Trump’s tariffs. Bessent has said that lowering the Treasury yield could bring financial relief to struggling Americans, and Trump heralded a “big, beautiful drop” in Treasury yields during his recent address to Congress. However, there are some snags in his plans: For one, Germany has triggered a global bond selloff with its recent announcement of major infrastructure and defense spending, causing US Treasury yields to rise. And Trump’s tariffs may actually lead to more inflation, making it difficult for borrowing costs to come down.  Inflation is expected to creep up again New data from the federal government published Wednesday shows that inflation cooled to 2.6 percent in February, exceeding some analysts’ expectations. But it might be premature to celebrate.  That’s because Trump’s tariffs may have not yet been fully priced into consumer goods. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on all aluminum and steel goods on Wednesday, and the European Union and Canada have responded with retaliatory tariffs on a host of US products ranging from bourbon to motorcycles. Trump has also imposed a 20 percent tariff on Chinese goods and 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and New Mexico, though has exempted broad categories of goods including goods imported by US automakers.  If inflation ticks back up again, the concern is that the Federal Reserve might not be able to use the lever of interest rates to respond to a potential recession. The Fed has come closer to its target rate of 2 percent inflation, but might not be willing to introduce further interest rate cuts if that number starts rising again.

Preview: President Donald Trump speaks to the press as he signs an executive order to create a US sovereign wealth fund, in the Oval Office of the White House on February 3, 2025, in Washington, DC.  President Donald Trump’s first weeks back in the White House have been nothing short of dizzying.  He kicked off his second presidency with a fury of policy actions — imposing (then postponing) tariffs on Canada and Mexico; barring transgender people from serving and enlisting in the military; and eliminating many US foreign aid programs. He has revealed plans to purge the FBI of his perceived enemies and provided sweeping pardons to his insurrectionist supporters. And he’s vowed to launch the “largest deportation program in American history.”  Trump appears intent on remaking the executive branch as he sees fit — empowering ally Elon Musk to push aside civil servants, wind down entire agencies, and generally strike terror into the federal workforce.  The news is changing rapidly. Follow here for the latest updates, analysis, and explainers about Trump’s first 100 days in office. Trump’s precarious economy, in four charts Trump is torching his greatest political asset What dismantling the Education Department means for kids with disabilities Is the US headed for a recession? Trump’s gutting of the Education Department, explained Conservatives’ decades-long quest to destroy the Department of Education The right’s new embrace of an old idea about race Trump is running from his biggest health care success What’s mattered most amid Trump’s chaos so far Trump is shredding the First Amendment under the guise of “national security” Killing PEPFAR means killing millions of people This isn’t the economy Trump promised Trump’s petty revenge on the Kennedy Center Trump is on track to ditch a time-tested approach to combating homelessness Two numbers that explain why Trump can’t make up his mind about tariffs Why Trump keeps talking about an obscure Venezuelan prison gang Republicans have a sneaky plan to cut Medicaid. Here’s what Americans actually want. Did Trump just rein Elon in? What Americans really think of Trump’s Ukraine policy Seven ways of looking at Elon Musk Trump’s lawyers just made a $2 billion mistake Trump’s (very long) speech to Congress, explained in 500 words The Democrats’ response to Trump is splintered — but getting better Trump doesn’t seem to know why he launched a giant trade war How scared should you be about tariffs? Two hugely important questions about Trump’s trade war Economic growth is slowing — so Trump wants to redefine “economic growth” Why Trump’s embrace of Putin is different this time Trump’s honeymoon is over The weirdness around Trump’s “US Crypto Reserve” announcement, briefly explained How Trump upended the world order, over one weekend The twisted appeal of Trump’s humiliation of Zelenskyy How the Epstein Files blew up in Trump’s face Who needs weather reports anyway? The AI that apparently wants Elon Musk to die How Andrew Tate’s release is splintering the American right Elon Musk is coming for our weather service Trump’s EPA wants to undo the Roe v. Wade of climate policy Trump’s biggest power grab just reached the Supreme Court Andrew Tate, the accused human trafficker with Trump’s support, returns to the US What happened to the Gays for Trump? The Trump revolution will be podcasted Elon Musk’s big mistake with the IRS, explained in 3 charts This animal is on the edge of extinction. Trump just fired the people trying to save it. The Supreme Court is in “radical agreement” that a bizarre DEI rule needs to go The man trying to turn prosecutors loose against Trump’s enemies Will the backlash to Elon Musk hurt Republicans? Three reasons why American democracy will likely withstand Trump What Trump’s military purge was really about What happens if Trump successfully pushes our closest allies away? Trump urged Musk to get more aggressive. 48 hours of chaos followed. Elon Musk is trying to make sleep deprivation cool again 4 conspiracy theories that have driven policy under Trump One agency that explains what the government actually does for you Elon Musk’s worldview is eerily similar to his authoritarian granddad’s The Supreme Court hears a challenge to a DEI rule that genuinely needs to go Is Kim Kardashian actually going MAGA? Trump’s job cuts at this overlooked agency put every American at risk The MAGA loyalist running the FBI Slack chat: Trump’s first month in office Trump makes another power grab We’re about to learn just how eager the Supreme Court is to help Trump The deeply online origins of MAGA 2.0 The obscure manifesto that explains the Trump-Musk power grab The Trump administration told a judge Elon Musk does not head DOGE. Huh? What’s keeping Trump popular? I work in global health. Trump ditching the World Health Organization might be the wake-up call it needs. The attack on USAID portends a war on the welfare state The roots of Donald Trump’s fixation with South Africa How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEI The key question for Democrats hoping to take down Trump The lawsuit seeking to kick Elon Musk out of government, explained Trump’s new passport rules are trapping transgender Americans in bureaucratic limbo How to stop Trump’s power grab What does it mean to be in a “constitutional crisis”? Trump’s shocking purge of public health data, explained How to make sense of all the court orders against Donald Trump The big question looming over Trump’s executive orders This Trump policy didn’t work in his first term. He’s trying again. The fight for the future of the CFPB, explained Trump’s Guantánamo plan is an old idea — with an ugly history The tiny lizard that will test Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda Why the Trump administration is fixated on Latin America Don’t expect the courts to save us from Donald Trump The real lesson of the DOGE racist tweets scandal The blatant lie behind Elon Musk’s power grab What a wild conspiracy theory about Politico tells us about how Trump governs All the ways Elon Musk is breaking the law, explained by a law professor What’s behind Trump’s colonial dreams? The anti-Trump opposition might finally be waking up Does Trump mean what he just said about Gaza? Elon Musk’s secretive government IT takeover, explained It’s about to get harder to find your prescription drugs The legal theory that would make Trump the most powerful president in US history America’s constitutional crisis could come to a head in four months The worst thing Trump has done so far Is Trump’s trade war with Mexico and Canada over? Trump’s attack on the FBI What Trump and Musk are doing could change the American system forever He was created to be a bloody monster. Now he’s an internet hero. Are America’s four main adversaries really in cahoots? Did the Trump prosecutions backfire? Brett Kavanaugh has very bad news for Donald Trump Trump’s foreign aid freeze has deadly consequences Trump’s immigration policy is already terrifying America’s kids Why Big Tech turned right The Logoff: Trump’s plan to send deportees to Guantánamo, explained The astonishing conflict of interest haunting RFK Jr.’s health secretary nomination How Trump is laying the groundwork for another travel ban Inside Trump’s purge at the agency that saves millions of lives The Logoff: The government purge, explained Trump and Musk’s plan for a massive purge of the federal workforce, explained Trump is already acting like a king The Logoff: What is up with Trump’s plan to freeze federal spending? The thin evidence behind Trump’s new ban on trans service members Why Trump pardoned the creator of “the Amazon of drugs” The one big question looming over Trump’s power grabs This obscure budget procedure could be Trump’s biggest weapon Researchers are terrified of Trump’s freeze on science. The rest of us should be, too. The Logoff: Trump fires the watchdogs Trump rescinded a half-century of environmental rules. Here’s what that could mean. How Greenland feels about Trump, explained by a Greenlander Mass deportations aren’t here — yet The Logoff: The truth about “mass deportations” Trump’s attack on EVs is just theater — so far A federal judge already blocked Trump’s single most unconstitutional action Trump’s crypto grift is a warning The Logoff: Trump’s anti-DEI blitz Trump’s January 6 pardons were democratically legitimate — and dangerous Candidate Trump was an abortion moderate. What will President Trump be? Trump’s sweeping new order tries to dismantle DEI in government — and the private sector Elon Musk and Bernie Sanders are both right about immigration How Trump will hide his anti-democratic politics in plain sight What Trump’s executive orders tell us about the future of immigration The Logoff: Trump attacks birthright citizenship What did Trump just do to the environment? 6 things we learned from Day 1 about how Trump will govern Why Wall Street found Trump’s first day reassuring Is Donald Trump’s agenda actually popular? The Trump executive orders that threaten democracy Trump’s real inaugural address started when the teleprompter stopped Covering a second Trump presidency Why Trump’s second inauguration isn’t like the first The law is clear on birthright citizenship. Can Trump end it anyway? 6 factors to watch in the incoming Trump administration The broligarchs have a vision for the new Trump term. It’s darker than you think. Trump’s “shock and awe” approach to executive orders, explained

Preview: Enjoy the laptop lifestyle while it lasts, folks. | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images My entire job takes place on my laptop. I write stories like this in Google Docs on my laptop. I coordinate with my editor in Slack on my laptop. I reach out to sources with Gmail and then interview them over Zoom, on my laptop. This isn’t true of all journalists — some go to war zones — but it’s true of many of us, and for accountants, tax preparers, software engineers, and many more workers, maybe over one in 10, besides. Laptop jobs have many charms: the lack of a commute or dress code, the location flexibility, the absence of real physical strain. But if you’re a laptop worker and not worried about what’s coming in the next decade, you haven’t been paying attention. There is no segment of the labor market more at risk from rapid improvements in AI than us. The newest “reasoning models” from top AI companies are already essentially human-level, if not superhuman, at many programming tasks, which in turn has already led new tech startups to hire fewer workers. Generative AIs like Dall-E, Sora, or Midjourney are actively competing with human visual artists; they’ve already noticeably reduced demand for freelance graphic design.  Services like OpenAI’s Deep Research are very good at internet-based research projects like, say, digging up background information for a Vox piece. “Agentic” AIs like Operator are able to coordinate and sequence these kinds of tasks the way a good manager might. And the rapid pace of progress in the field means that laptop warriors can’t even take comfort in the fact that current versions of these programs and models may be janky and buggy. They will only get better from here, while we humans will stay mostly the same. As AIs have improved at laptop job tasks, progress on more physical work has been slower. Humanoid robots capable of tasks like folding laundry have been a longtime dream, but the state-of-the-art falls wildly short of human level. Self-driving cars have seen considerable progress, but the dream has proven harder to achieve than boosters thought. While AI has been improving rapidly, robotics — the ability of AI to work in the physical world — has been improving much more slowly. At this point, a robot plumber or maid is far harder to imagine than a robot accountant or lawyer. Let me offer, then, a thought experiment. Imagine we get to a point — maybe in the next couple years, maybe in 10, maybe in 20 — when AI models can fully substitute for any remote worker. They can write this article better than me, make YouTube videos more popular than Mr. Beast’s, do the work of an army of accountants, and review millions of discovery documents for a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, all in a matter of minutes. We would have, to borrow a phrase from AI writer and investor Leopold Aschenbrenner, “drop-in remote workers.” How does that reshape the US, and world, economy? Right now this is a hypothetical. But it’s a hypothetical worth taking seriously — seriously enough that I may or may not be visiting the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ apprenticeship application most days, just in case I need work that requires a human body. Fast AI progress, slow robotics progress If you’ve heard of OpenAI, you’ve heard of its language models: GPTs 1, 2, 3, 3.5, 4, and most recently 4.5. You might have heard of their image generation model DALL-E or video generation model Sora. But you probably haven’t heard of their Rubik’s cube solving robot. That’s because the team that built it was disbanded in 2021, about a year before the release of ChatGPT and the company’s explosion into public consciousness. OpenAI engineer Wojciech Zaremba explained on a podcast that year that the company had determined there was not enough real-world data of how to move in the real world to keep making progress on the robot. Two years of work, between 2017 and 2019, was enough to get the robot hand to a point where it could unscramble Rubik’s Cubes successfully 20 to 60 percent of the time, depending on how well-scrambled the Cube was. That’s … not especially great, particularly when held up next to OpenAI’s language models, which even in earlier versions seemed capable of competing with humans on certain tasks. It’s a small story that encapsulates a truism in the AI world: the physical is lagging the cognitive. Or, more simply, the chatbots are beating the robots. This is not a new observation: It’s called Moravec’s paradox, after the futurist Hans Moravec, who famously observed that computers tend to do poorly at tasks that are easy for humans and do well at tasks that are often hard for humans. Why? Here we’re less sure. As the machine learning researcher Nathan Lambert once noted, Moravec’s paradox is “based on observation, not theory. We have a lot of work to do to figure out why.” But we have some hypotheses. Perhaps human-like motions are harder for robots because we gained them relatively early in evolutionary time, far earlier than our capacity for reasoning. Running on two or even four legs is a very old ability that many animals share; it’s instinctual for us, which both makes it harder for machines without that evolutionary history to learn, and harder for us to articulate to those machines. Harder still is the fact that a robot has to learn to run on two legs by actually running on two legs in real life. This point is key: If OpenAI had its servers pronouncing every sentence that ChatGPT generates, out loud, one at a time, as part of its training process, it probably would’ve taken millennia to get to today’s abilities. Instead, it was able to train the GPT models using millions of CPU cores operating in parallel to analyze vast reams of data, processing trillions of individual words a second. Each new model only requires months or a few years of training because the process happens much, much faster than real time. Historically roboticists’ way around this limitation was to make simulated worlds, sort of purpose-built video game environments, in which to train robots much faster. But when you take the bot out of the virtual playground and into the real world, it has a tendency to fail. Roboticists call this the “sim2real” (simulation to reality) gap, and many a noble robot has fallen into it (and over it, and on it) over the years. The optimistic theory of the case is that, given enough real-world data about movement, the same techniques that have made language models so successful can be used to make robots work well. The most bullish takes on robotics I’ve seen, like this from Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark last year, are based on the idea that if you throw enough data (from stuff like YouTube videos of people walking around, or from actual humans operating the robot with a controller) into well-enough designed and fine-tuned transformer models (using the same learning structure as ChatGPT or Claude etc.), the end result will be a model good enough to govern a robot in the real world.  Maybe! So far we mostly have academic demonstrations rather than the real-world, commercialized products that large language models are today. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) I don’t know the trajectory of cognitive AI and robotics over the next decade. Maybe, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted, this year will “see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies” (referring, presumably, to software workers rather than robots). Maybe, as critics argue, the cost of training these models will prove too immense and the companies developing them, which are burning through billions in VC funding, will fail. Maybe robotics will continue to lag, or maybe people will have Rosie from The Jetsons dusting their furniture next year. I have my guesses, but I know enough to know I shouldn’t be too confident. My median guess, though, is the world outlined above: language, audiovisual, and otherwise non-physical models continue to make very rapid progress, perhaps becoming capable of doing any fully remote job currently done by humans within the next decade; robotics continues to lag, being very useful in advanced manufacturing but unable to garden or change your sheets or empty your dishwasher. Taken to an extreme, this could look like, in the words of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” What does that world look like? The work left for the rest of us One of the more useful pieces examining this idea came out in January from Epoch AI, a small research group that’s quickly become the most reliable source of data on cutting-edge AI models. The author, Matthew Barnett, uses a commercially available AI model (GPT-4o) to go through a US Department of Labor-sponsored database of over 19,000 job tasks and categorize each of them as doable remotely (writing code, sending emails) or not doable remotely (firefighting, bowling). A task, notably, is not the same as a job or occupation. The occupation “journalist” includes specific subtasks like writing emails, composing articles, making phone calls, appearing on panels, reading academic papers, and so on. And an occupation as a whole cannot be automated unless all tasks, or at least all absolutely necessary tasks, can themselves be automated. An AI might be able to do some of the mental labor a surgeon has to perform, for instance, but until it can actually cut and suture a human, the surgeon’s job remains safe. Barnett finds that 34 percent of tasks can be performed remotely, but only 13 percent of occupations have, as their top five most important subtasks, things that can all be done remotely. Thirteen percent can then serve as an (admittedly very rough) estimate of the share of jobs that could, in principle, be fully automated by a sufficiently advanced cognitive AI. Obviously, a world in which 13 percent of jobs are rapidly automated away is one with pretty massive social disruption. But at first glance, it doesn’t seem too different from what’s been happening in many industries over the past couple of centuries. In 1870, about half of United States workers worked in agriculture. By 1900, a third did. Last year, only 1.4 percent did. The consequence of this is not that Americans starve, but that a vastly more productive, heavily automated farming sector feeds us and lets the other 98.6 percent of the workforce do other work we like more. Similarly, manufacturing has become so automated that it now appears global manufacturing employment has peaked — it’s not just that factories use fewer workers in the US compared to poorer countries, but that they use fewer workers everywhere, period. “There’s an upper bound of how much can be remote, and I think we’re kind of at it now.” Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University economist and leading expert on remote work Agriculture and manufacturing are also becoming less important as a share of global economic output over time, not just as shares of employment. So this is one possible future: AI rapidly increases productivity in remote-friendly jobs like software engineering, accounting, and writing for Vox.com, leading to sharp reductions in employment in those sectors. People displaced by this shift gradually shift to harder to automate jobs, becoming masseuses, electricians, nurses, and so forth. Barnett notes that if this happens, the effect on global economic growth could be massive (maybe a doubling of economic output). It would obviously be inconvenient for me, personally, and I would be sad. But it’s basically “the world now, but moreso” — more economic growth and more labor displacement — rather than a brave new world. That said Barnett thinks this is probably underselling what might happen. Yes, automation in agriculture and manufacturing has meant that those sectors gradually decline in importance. That doesn’t have to happen, though. Barnett gives the example of the UK after the invention of spinning jenny and flying shuttle. Those and subsequent cotton-processing technologies massively improved productivity in the textiles industry relative to other sectors of the British economy. Was the result that textiles became less important? Quite the opposite: The sector exploded, and became vastly more important to the British economy. British exports of textiles increased over sevenfold between the 1740s (when those inventions were just being developed and deployed) and the 1750s, and kept growing exponentially from there. The difference between these scenarios is a number that Barnett calls the “elasticity of substitution” — in this case, between remote and in-person work, but in principle between any two kinds of work. For some kinds of work, this number is below 1, meaning that if that work gets much cheaper, it will shrink relative to other kinds of work. The two types of work don’t substitute well for each other, so the elasticity of substitution is low. But if the elasticity is above 1, then the work getting cheaper will become more common and more important. One way to think about this, Barnett told me, whether your demand for something can be saturated. “There’s a sense in which your utility from food saturates, because the amount of utility you get from just getting 2,000 calories per day is not half the amount of utility you get from 4,000.” he told me. “Assuming you can live comfortably on 2,000 calories per day, then it’s going to be almost exactly the same amount of utility, because you’re probably gonna throw away a whole bunch of food.” It makes sense, then, that agriculture shrank in importance once humanity developed the ability to grow more calories than people needed (the world’s farms currently produce about 3,000 calories per person per day, more than enough to feed every human on the planet by sheer quantity). Manufacturing, too, makes some sense in these terms. Most people hit a limit on how much large manufactured stuff they actually are able to use. My first washing machine helped a lot; getting a third or even a second would be pointless. By contrast, the world’s demand for textiles in the 18th century was nowhere near a saturation point. You can, in principle, own a limitless supply of clothes, and especially in the time of hand production, there was lots of pent-up demand, in countries around the world, for fabrics that had previously been prohibitively expensive. That meant that Britain could pour more and more resources into that sector of its economy without having returns diminish too much. What if remote work is more like that? This supposition might seem fanciful, but let’s fantasize. If you had an on-call computer programmer who could make your computer work exactly the way you wanted, wouldn’t you have a lot to ask it? If you had a personal animator who could make on-demand episodes of your favorite type of TV show with your favorite music in the background, wouldn’t you call on her a lot? I have a million deeply weird questions I’m too busy and/or lazy to answer — who invented the “You Can’t Hurry Love” bassline? Why were the witness reports in the Dag Hammarskjold plane crash ignored? — that I wish something smarter than OpenAI Deep Research could give me an answer in seconds. Maybe you would too? If that’s the situation, then things look very different. If the elasticity of substitution between remote and non-remote work is 10, Barnett finds, then you see US GDP grow tenfold over a decade, an average growth rate of 25 percent. That is completely unheard of in human history. But it would also be incredibly weird growth, showing up in increased consumption of AI-generated products, rather than, say, easier access to child care or cheaper housing. Nicholas Bloom, the Stanford University economist and leading expert on remote work, is taking the under on this bet. It’s better, he reasons, to think of remote and non-remote work as complements than substitutes, which makes a scenario with high substitution, like Barnett’s fast growth situation, hard to believe.  “There’s an upper bound of how much can be remote, and I think we’re kind of at it now,” Bloom says. That said, part of Bloom’s skepticism about full-remote work comes from his belief in the importance of mentoring, which is much harder to do in a remote work setup. With AI, presumably the need to mentor in-person becomes moot. What are the most remote-friendly jobs? One can of course reason through which jobs are easy to do remotely (graphic design, telemarketing) and which are impossible (surgery, construction). But is it possible to be more systematic? Several researchers have tried to categorize major occupations as remote-able or not, but I like Matthew Barnett’s approach of simply asking a large language model if certain tasks can be done remotely. Here are some examples of jobs where every single task can be done remotely, per the OpenAI model that Barnett asked (GPT-4o): Bioinformatics scientists Bioinformatics technicians Business continuity planners Business intelligence analysts Clinical data managers Credit analysts Credit counselors Customer service representatives Data warehousing specialists Database administrators Database architects Editors Environmental economists Financial quantitative analysts Geographic information systems technologists and technicians Information security analysts Information technology project managers Insurance underwriters Mathematicians Preventive medicine physicians Proofreaders and copy markers Search marketing strategists Securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents Telemarketers Travel agents Video game designers Web administrators Web developers Writers and authors How doomed are remote workers? Before getting too carried away, it’s worth remembering — we’re not here, yet. At the very least, an AI remote worker will have to use a computer fluently, and perhaps surprisingly, the best benchmarks we have, like OSWorld, do not show AI models doing that. “The fact is right now that models really suck at navigating browsers,” Jaime Sevilla, who runs the Epoch forecasting group, told me. “They’re not at the level of my grandmother currently.” Sevilla suggested that the pace of investment and progress he’s seeing suggests that we might get grandma-level Chrome usage within a year or two. But it’ll be some time from there to actually using Chrome in an economically useful way, or managing a developer team in Slack, or any number of other specific tasks we expect remote workers to do. We’ll also probably learn a great deal about the character of the jobs we’re automating. Tamay Besiroglu, also at Epoch, notes that AI became superhuman at playing chess in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov. Today the top chess engine, Stockfish, is wildly, wildly better than the top-ranked human player, Magnus Carlsen. But chess is arguably more popular than it’s ever been. Carlsen is a global celebrity with more than 1.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he streams matches and analyzes games from shows like The Queen’s Gambit. His job has been automated to hell, and he’s a millionaire. “​​We discovered that, actually, the thing that people pay chess players for isn’t their ability to produce very good chess moves,” Besiroglu concludes. “That’s one thing, but not the entire thing. Things like being entertaining, having charisma, being a good streamer — those things are very important. And we don’t have good benchmarks for how entertaining or charismatic an AI system is.” To be fair, Besiroglu expects AI to gain those capabilities in the next five to 10 years. But even if it does, I think it’s plausible that people will still be willing to pay for a connection to a specific human, a connection that AI, by its very nature, cannot fully replace. Magnes Carlsen the chess player can be, and has been automated; it’s less obvious to me that Magnes Carlsen, the influencer, can be automated as well. So I’m not hanging up my laptop and giving up just yet. Maybe people will still value human-grown hot takes, the way they value Magnus Carlsen’s human-developed chess style. Or maybe not, in which case, electrician school might start looking better. But I keep thinking back to Barnett’s conclusion that human-level cognitive AI could maybe do 13 percent of work out of the box. A world where those are the only jobs that get automated is not a situation where the singularity happens (that is, where AI becomes so good that it is capable of recursively improving itself without human intervention and eventually becomes superhuman in all tasks). But it’s one where society is transformed radically all the same. When I talk to people working in AI, they treat that transformation as nearly inevitable, perhaps a lowball for the changes that might actually be on their way. When I talk to everyone else, I get the sense they have no idea what’s coming.

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