Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer argues in his first TV ad of the New Jersey governor's race that he is ready to fight President Donald Trump — and he's using artificial intelligence to make his case. Gottheimer, who is in his fifth term, portrays himself as a boxer in the ad, shared first with NBC News, which uses AI to show him sparring with Trump in a boxing ring. The spot appears to be one of the first TV ads in a major race to lean significantly on AI. "He's a born fighter. Josh Gottheimer's been fighting for people all his life," a narrator says as images of a young Gottheimer wearing boxing gloves play on screen and as a disclaimer reads, "AI Generated Imagery."

A growing number of Americans are using buy now, pay later loans to buy groceries, and more people are paying those bills late, according to new Lending Tree data released Friday. The figures are the latest indicator that some consumers are cracking under the pressure of an uncertain economy and are having trouble affording essentials such as groceries as they contend with persistent inflation, high interest rates and concerns around tariffs. In a survey conducted April 2-3 of 2,000 U.S. consumers ages 18 to 79, around half reported having used buy now, pay later services. Of those consumers, 25% of respondents said they were using BNPL loans to buy groceries, up from 14% in 2024 and 21% in 2023, the firm said. Meanwhile, 41% of respondents said they made a late payment on a BNPL loan in the past year, up from 34% in the year prior, the survey found. Lending Tree’s chief consumer finance analyst, Matt Schulz, said that of those respondents who said they paid a BNPL bill late, most said it was by no more than a week or so. “A lot of people are struggling and looking for ways to extend their budget,” Schulz said. “Inflation is still a problem. Interest rates are still really high. There’s a lot of uncertainty around tariffs and other economic issues, and it’s all going to add up to a lot of people looking for ways to extend their budget however they can.” “For an awful lot of people, that’s going to mean leaning on buy now, pay later loans, for better or for worse,” he said. He stopped short of calling the results a recession indicator but said conditions are expected to decline further before they get better.

The 36-page official national strategy document bears the presidential seal and involves 10 agencies from across the federal government. It isn’t the government’s policy on tariffs or border security. It’s President Trump’s master plan to eradicate paper straws and bring back plastic. “My Administration is committed,” the document declares, to “ridding us of the pulpy, soggy mess that torments too many of our citizens whenever they drink through a paper straw.” It’s a shot in the culture wars, critics say, and another example of the haphazard policies of an administration guided by Mr. Trump’s whims and dislikes, whether for paper straws, wind turbines or low-flow shower heads. But there’s a twist: It complicates another, bigger public health question in the administration’s drive to roll back regulations. In its attack on paper straws, the document devotes a robust eight pages to highlighting their health and environmental dangers. It points out, in particular, the dangers of PFAS, a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals that are used to make paper straws and other everyday products water-resistant but are also linked to serious health problems and are turning up in tap water around the country. The Biden administration set strict new federal standards last year that tightened restrictions on PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down easily in the environment. But industry and utility groups sued, calling the standards “unattainable” and “onerous,” and have urged the Trump administration to roll them back. It’s unclear whether Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency, will oblige. The administration faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue to defend the standards in court.“Is Zeldin going to roll back PFAS drinking water standards when there’s this anti-PFAS screed out of the White House?” said Matthew Tejada, who leads environmental health policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If the White House is concerned about PFAS in straws, then can Zeldin pretend there’s no problem with PFAS in drinking water?” Under Mr. Zeldin, the agency has embarked on a deregulatory push, targeting for repeal dozens of environmental regulations that limit toxic pollution. And he has filled the agency’s leadership ranks with lobbyists and lawyers from industries that have opposed environmental regulations. At a news briefing with reporters on Monday, Mr. Zeldin said that the science on PFAS “was not declared as settled.” “We’ve figured out some of the questions related to PFAS, but the research is important to continue,” Mr. Zeldin said. And regulations needed to be based on “less assumptions and more facts,” he said. Yet Mr. Trump’s anti-paper-straw strategy document is more explicit about the chemicals. “Scientists and regulators have had substantial concerns about PFAS chemicals for decades,” the White House paper says. “PFAS are harmful to human health, and they have been linked to harms affecting reproductive health, developmental delays in children, cancer, hormone imbalance, obesity, and other dangerous health conditions.” This week, the White House repeated those warnings. “Paper straws contain dangerous PFAS chemicals — ‘forever chemicals’ linked to significant long-term health conditions — that infiltrate the water supply,” the administration said on Monday in an Earth Day statement.Another wild card is the secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Addressing a forum on the health and the environmental effects of plastics on Wednesday, Mr. Kennedy listed PFAS among the chemicals he hoped to eliminate from the food system. “We’re going to get rid of whole categories of chemicals in our food that we have good reason to believe are harmful to human health,” he said. Both the White House and the E.P.A. said there was no gap between their approaches to PFAS. “President Trump and Administrator Zeldin are working lock-step to remove harmful toxins from the environment,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said. “The Trump administration, including Administrator Zeldin, has made it clear that PFAS are harmful to human health and further research on the danger of PFAS is critical to ensure we are making America healthy again.” Molly Vaseliou, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A., declined to comment specifically on whether the agency would seek to roll back PFAS drinking water standards, but she pointed to Mr. Zeldin’s long experience with PFAS issues. Before joining the Trump administration, Mr. Zeldin served four terms as a congressman from Long Island, which has struggled with PFAS contamination. In 2020, he was one of 23 House Republicans who voted to pass the PFAS Action Act, a sweeping bill championed by Democrats that required the Environmental Protection Agency to limit the chemicals in drinking water and hold polluters responsible for cleanups. “He was, and remains, a staunch advocate for protecting Long Islanders and all Americans from contaminated drinking water,” Ms. Vaseliou said. Mr. Zeldin is correct that more research is needed to pin down the health effects of exposure to PFAS. Still, the evidence of the chemicals’ harm is mounting, especially for the most-studied kinds of PFAS. The White House strategy on straws lists that evidence, backed up by a seven-page bibliography. “The E.P.A. conducted an analysis of current peer-reviewed scientific studies and found that PFAS exposure is linked to concerning health risks,” the document says. They also include, according to the White House: decreased fertility, high blood pressure in pregnant women, low birth weight, accelerated puberty, behavioral changes in children, diminished immune systems and increased cholesterol. Plastic also contains harmful chemicals. Microplastics are everywhere, polluting ecosystems and potentially harming human health. And critics point to how promoting plastic helps the fossil fuel industry, which produces the building blocks of plastic. Still, Linda Birnbaum, a toxicologist and a former director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences who has been sounding the alarm on PFAS for decades, agreed with aspects of the White House document. “Their statements of all these adverse effects are well founded,” she said. But if the Trump administration was concerned about the health effects of PFAS, they should be concerned about the chemicals’ presence all around us, she said, in food and food packaging, for example, and in drinking water. “Instead they’re spending all this effort trying to rally people around straws,” she said. The debate over plastic straws reaches back to the mid-2010s, when they suddenly became a pariah for their role in an exploding plastic waste crisis. Some cities and retailers banned plastic straws, and a few states imposed restrictions. (Disability rights groups have expressed concerns about the bans, noting that some people need straws to drink safely.) Alternatives to plastic proliferated: stainless steel or glass straws, as well as lids with spouts. But paper straws quickly became the main replacement. And, just as quickly, they were derided for their tendency to disintegrate into a mushy mess. Around the same time, scientists started detecting PFAS in a variety of paper and plant-based straws, raising concerns that they were exposing people to harmful chemicals and that they were becoming yet another source of water pollution. The president has portrayed the Biden-era measures as “a paper straws mandate,” though those plans didn’t specifically require a switch to paper straws. His disdain for paper straws goes back years. His campaign for the 2020 election sold packs of 10 branded plastic straws for $15 with the tagline, “Liberal Paper Straws Don’t Work.” In his grand strategy, Mr. Trump orders federal agencies to “be creative and use every available policy lever to end the use of paper straws nationwide.” Moreover, “taxpayer dollars should never be wasted, so no federal contracts or grants should fund paper straws or support any entities that ban plastic straws.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Christine Figgener, a marine conservation biologist (who, a decade ago, posted a viral video of a sea turtle with a plastic straw stuck in one of its nostrils), said pitting paper against plastic ignored the easiest solution of all: Avoid straws. Straws have become “the symbol of everything that’s unnecessary that we use in a society so dictated by convenience,” she said. “Why is America so obsessed with straws? Most people don’t need them.”

Slate Auto, a firm backed in part by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is unveiling a low-cost electric truck that can also change into an SUV. Its starting price point: $20,000 after federal EV incentives. "A radically simple electric pickup truck that can change into whatever you need it to be — even an SUV," the Slate Auto website says. "Made in the USA at a price that’s actually affordable (no really, for real)." The two-door version can be changed into a 5-seat SUV. The baseline truck is small: About two-thirds the size of a Chevy Silverado EV and about seven-eights the size of a Ford Maverick. It has a payload capacity of 1,400 pounds compared the Maverick's 1500 pounds. At less than 15 feet long, Slate says its more akin to a 1985 Toyota pickup.

President Trump has ordered the U.S. government to take a major step toward mining vast tracts of the ocean floor, a move that is opposed by nearly all other nations, which consider international waters off limits to this kind of industrial activity. The executive order, signed Thursday, would circumvent a decades-old treaty that every major coastal nation except the United States has ratified. It is the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to disregard international institutions and is likely to provoke an outcry from America’s rivals and allies alike. The order “establishes the U.S. as a global leader in seabed mineral exploration and development both within and beyond national jurisdiction,” according to a text released by the White House. Mr. Trump’s order instructs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to expedite permits for companies to mine in both international and U.S. territorial waters. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Parts of the ocean floor are blanketed by potato-size nodules containing valuable minerals like nickel, cobalt and manganese that are essential to advanced technologies that the United States considers critical to its economic and military security, but whose supply chains are increasingly controlled by China. No commercial-scale seabed mining has ever taken place. The technological hurdles are high, and there have been serious concerns about the environmental consequences. As a result, in the 1990s most nations agreed to join an independent International Seabed Authority that would govern mining of the ocean floor in international waters. Because the United States isn’t a signatory, the Trump administration is relying on an obscure 1980 law that empowers the federal government to issue seabed mining permits in international waters. Many nations are eager to see seabed mining become a reality. But until now the prevailing consensus has been that economic imperatives shouldn’t take precedence over the risk that mining could damage the fishing industry and oceanic food chains or could affect the ocean’s essential role in absorbing planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Mr. Trump’s order comes after years of delays at the I.S.A. in setting up a regulatory framework for seabed mining. The authority still has not agreed to a set of rules. The executive order could pave the way for the Metals Company, a prominent seabed mining company, to receive an expedited permit from NOAA to actively mine for the first time. The publicly traded company, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, disclosed in March that it would ask the Trump administration through a U.S. subsidiary for approval to mine in international waters. The company has already spent more than $500 million doing exploratory work. “We have a boat that’s production-ready,” said Gerard Barron, the company’s chief executive, in an interview on Thursday. “We have a means of processing the materials in an allied friendly partner nation. We’re just missing the permit to allow us to begin.” Anticipating that mining would eventually be allowed, companies like his have invested heavily in developing technologies to mine the ocean floors. They include ships with huge claws that would extend down to the seabed, as well as autonomous vehicles attached to gargantuan vacuums that would scour the ocean bottom. Some analysts questioned the need for a rush toward seabed mining, given that there is currently a glut of nickel and cobalt from traditional mining. In addition, manufacturers of electric-vehicle batteries, one of the main markets for the metals, are moving toward battery designs that rely on other elements. Nevertheless, projections of future demand for the metals generally remain high. And Mr. Trump’s escalating trade war with China threatens to limit American access to some of these critical minerals, which include rare-earth elements that are also found in trace quantities in the seabed nodules. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that nodules in a single swath of the Eastern Pacific, known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, contain more nickel, cobalt and manganese than all terrestrial reserves combined. That area, in the open ocean between Mexico and Hawaii, is about half the size of the continental United States. The Metals Company’s contract sites are in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, where the ocean is on average about 2.5 miles deep. The company would be the first to apply for an exploitation permit under the 1980 law. Mr. Barron blamed an “environmental activist takeover” of the I.S.A. for its delays in establishing a rule book that his company could have played by, leading it to apply directly to the U.S. government instead. In a statement provided to The New York Times last month, a NOAA spokeswoman, Maureen O’Leary, said that the existing process under U.S. law provided for “a thorough environmental impact review, interagency consultations and opportunity for public comment.” Under the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, nations have exclusive economic rights over waters 200 nautical miles from their coasts, but international waters are under I.S.A. jurisdiction. Since the Law of the Sea went into effect, the State Department has sent representatives to meetings at the Seabed Authority’s headquarters in Kingston, Jamaica, creating the impression that the United States intended to honor the terms of the treaty, even though the Senate never formally ratified it. More than 30 countries have called for a delay or moratorium on the start of seabed mining. An array of automakers and tech companies including BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, Apple, Google and Samsung have pledged not to use seabed minerals. Representative Ed Case of Hawaii in January introduced the American Seabed Protection Act, which would prohibit NOAA from issuing licenses or permits for seafloor mining activities. I.S.A. negotiators have spent more than a decade drafting the mining rule book, which would cover everything from environmental rules to royalty payments. Despite a pledge to finalize it by this year, negotiators seemed unlikely to meet that deadline. Nevertheless, other major world powers including China, Russia, India and several European countries — which have generally supported moving quickly to mine in international waters — objected to the Metals Company’s intention to obtain a permit from the U.S. government. Much of the hesitation to mine the seabed comes from how little it has been studied by scientists. Polymetallic nodules in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, for instance, lie in a cold, still, pitch-black world inhabited by organisms that marine biologists have encountered only on infrequent missions. “We think about half the species that live in that area are dependent on the nodules for some part of their development,” said Matthew Gianni, a co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. The ways companies are proposing to mine would essentially destroy those ecosystems, Mr. Gianni said, and the plumes of sediment caused by the mining could spread out over wider areas, smothering others. The Metals Company, which has conducted its own environmental research for a decade, has said those concerns are overblown. “We believe we have sufficient knowledge to get started and prove we can manage environmental risks,” Mr. Barron said in the news release last month. Reaching the deep ocean is expensive and technologically complex, not entirely unlike traveling to another planet. “Mankind has only scratched the surface,” said Beth Orcutt, a microbiologist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. The deep sea covers roughly 70 percent of the Earth. Disturbing deep-sea ecosystems, remote as they may seem, could have ripple effects far and wide. “The ecosystems themselves are really important in the major global cycles that allow the ocean to be productive and to create fish and shellfish and feed people,” said Lisa Levin, an oceanographer at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “And all of those ecosystems are interconnected, so if you destroy one, we still probably don’t even understand what happens to the others in many ways.” The biggest consequence might be losing entire ecosystems before scientists have a chance to understand them. That would be a loss of the kind of science that can fuel unexpected discoveries, like new drugs or new insights into how life formed on Earth or could form on other planets. “If we want to mine the deep sea, we have to be willing to give up those ecosystems,” Dr. Levin said.

BEIJING — In the global race to produce robots that are smarter and faster, China’s humanoids have come a long way. Robots from cutting-edge Chinese companies can dance and spin or do roundhouse kicks, as they have demonstrated in videos that are all over China’s internet. Yet when humanoids and robots were invited to join real flesh-and-blood runners for a half-marathon in Beijing this past weekend, the race garnered attention but also laid bare the challenges still facing the industry as China seeks to dominate technologies of the future. Some of the robots barely got started. One, designed with a woman’s body and face, collapsed moments after getting started, sending a group of engineers rushing to its side with laptops. Another that was mounted to a platform with propellers crashed into a barrier. A robot the size of a young child succumbed to a glitch and simply lay down on the starting line.

LONDON — European Union watchdogs fined Apple and Meta hundreds of millions of euros Wednesday as they stepped up enforcement of the 27-nation bloc’s digital competition rules. The European Commission imposed a 500 million euro ($571 million) fine on Apple for preventing app makers from pointing users to cheaper options outside its App Store. The commission, which is the EU’s executive arm, also fined Meta Platforms 200 million euros because it forced Facebook and Instagram users to choose between seeing personalized ads or paying to avoid them. The punishments were smaller than the blockbuster multibillion-euro fines that the commission has previously slapped on Big Tech companies in antitrust cases. Apple and Meta have to comply with the decisions within 60 days or risk unspecified “periodic penalty payments,” the commission said. The decisions were expected to come in March, but the self-imposed deadline slipped amid an escalating trans-Atlantic trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly complained about regulations from Brussels affecting American companies. The penalties were issued under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, also known as the DMA. It’s a sweeping rulebook that amounts to a set of do’s and don’ts designed to give consumers and businesses more choice and prevent Big Tech “gatekeepers” from cornering digital markets. The DMA seeks to ensure “that citizens have full control over when and how their data is used online, and businesses can freely communicate with their own customers,” Henna Virkkunen, the commission’s executive vice president for tech sovereignty, said in a statement. “The decisions adopted today find that both Apple and Meta have taken away this free choice from their users and are required to change their behavior,” Virkkunen said. Both companies indicated they would appeal. Apple accused the commission of “unfairly targeting” the iPhone maker and said it “continues to move the goal posts” despite the company’s efforts to comply with the rules. Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said in a statement that the “Commission is attempting to handicap successful American businesses while allowing Chinese and European companies to operate under different standards.” In a press briefing in Brussels, commission spokespeople sought to tamp down concerns that the penalties would inflame trade tensions. “We don’t care who owns a company. We don’t care where the company is located,” commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told reporters. “We are totally agnostic on that front from a European Union.”

U.S. stocks tumbled and bonds sold off Monday after President Donald Trump lobbed new insults at Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, pressuring him to cut interest rates while markets are already contending with shocks from his tariff policy. The S&P closed down 2.4%. Since its February highs, the index is now off 16%, approaching bear market territory of a 20% decline. The tech-heavy Nasdaq fell more than 2.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost 1,000 points, or 2.5%. The yield of the 10-year U.S. Treasury note surged to 4.41%, its highest level in more than a week. All three indexes are down more than 9% since Trump's April 2 "Liberation Day" tariffs announcement. In a post on Truth Social at 9:41 a.m., Trump claimed that “preemptive cuts” were being called for “by many” now that the economy was facing what he described as “virtually No Inflation.” He didn’t say who has called for the pre-emptive cuts, which the Fed rarely performs. Without the cuts, Trump said, the economy risks slowing, "unless Mr. Too Late, a major loser, lowers interest rates, NOW." "Powell has always been 'To Late,' except when it came to the Election period when he lowered in order to help Sleepy Joe Biden, later Kamala, get elected. How did that work out?" The Fed most recently cut interest rates on Dec. 18, after Trump was re-elected. Though Trump has long criticized Powell, whom he appointed during his first term, his complaints have ramped up in recent days amid a major market reaction to his tariffs shock.

The Trump administration is set to cancel tens of millions of dollars in grants to scientists studying environmental hazards faced by children in rural America, among other health issues, according to internal emails written by senior officials at the Environmental Protection Agency. The planned cancellation of the research grants, which were awarded to scientists outside the agency, comes as President Trump continues to dismantle some of the E.P.A.’s core functions. The grants are designed to address a range of issues, including improving the health of children in rural America who have been exposed to pesticides from agriculture and other pollution; reducing exposure to wildfire smoke; and preventing “forever chemicals” from contaminating the food supply. An email sent by Dan Coogan, a deputy assistant administrator at the E.P.A., on April 15, and seen by The New York Times, said the agency leadership was directing staff to cancel all pending and active grants across a number of key programs, including Science to Achieve Results, known as STAR. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT According to the email, the cuts also targeted the People, Prosperity and the Planet program, or P3, which awards small grants to college students to work on environmental solutions. In the latest funding year, students were developing antiviral face masks from plastic waste as well as 100 percent-compostable packaging film. “We have received direction from Leadership to cancel all pending awards and terminate grants for the following programs,” the email from Mr. Coogan began, followed by a list of programs. In response to inquiries on Monday, the E.P.A. said the grants had not been canceled. “As with any change in Administration, the agency is reviewing its awarded grants to ensure each is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities,” said the emailed statement from the E.P.A.’s press office. “The agency’s review is ongoing.” Still, project officers have started to receive cancellation notices. One such notice seen by The New York Times was sent on Friday stating that the grant “has been canceled” and instructing officers to “begin the process of deobligating funds.” Many grants involve issues that affect regions of the country where voters supported Mr. Trump. One grant funds Oklahoma University scientists researching how to help children in rural America who face increased health risks from pesticide and other pollution, issues that can be compounded by limited access to health care and higher poverty rates. Combined, those factors can cause rural children to miss school days, perpetuating a cycle of sickness and disadvantage, research has shown. The targeted grants, which total about $40 million a year, play an outsize role in advancing research on environmental health, experts said. “This is just terrible,” said Tracey Woodruff, a former senior scientist and policy adviser at the E.P.A. who now teaches at the University of California, San Francisco. “E.P.A.’s research program is already woefully underfunded, particularly when considering the enormity of the health problems faced by environmental exposure to the American public.” The agency’s research is unique “because it focuses on answering questions that will help E.P.A. do a better job of identifying and protecting people from toxic chemicals,” Dr. Woodruff said. “Defunding this research will do the opposite of the administration’s goal of making America healthy.” Many of the grants have their roots in research that emerged in the 1990s that showed children are much more vulnerable to toxic chemical exposure than adults. Congress soon passed the nation’s first law with provisions explicitly designed to protect children’s health, which led to a series of grants, awarded to universities and medical centers, to explore how environmental hazards were affecting infants. “For the past 25 years these grants have generated enormous amounts of new information about children’s vulnerability to toxic chemicals in the environment,” said Philip J. Landrigan, a pediatrician and director of the Program for Global Public Health at Boston College, who led the initial research into children’s health. One exception to the cuts were expected to be grants awarded after Oct. 1, the date when Biden-era changes kicked in making it harder for grants to be clawed back, according to a separate email sent by another senior official. The planned cancellations come on the heels of controversy surrounding $20 billion in grants for climate and clean energy programs that had been funded by Congress but were frozen at the Trump administration’s request. The move has been labeled illegal by nonprofit groups that were supposed to receive the funds. The E.P.A. has also shut down its offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution that poor communities face. And internal documents have outlined plans to eliminate the agency’s scientific research arm, a move that experts have said will hinder clean water improvements, air quality monitoring, toxic site cleanups and other parts of the agency’s mission. That’s even as the current administration has pursued a platform to “Make America Healthy Again,” led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, who has in the past been vocal about dangers posed by pesticides and other pollution linked to agriculture. And Mr. Trump, in appointing former congressman Lee Zeldin to helm the Environmental Protection Agency, promised America would maintain “the cleanest air and water on the planet.” Grant-funded projects have often focused on babies in utero as well as after birth. Scientists now have abundant evidence that a mother’s chemical exposure during pregnancy can result in children who suffer from brain injury, autism, birth defects, cancer, as well as increased risk for heart disease and diabetes in later life. By cutting these grants, “an administration that claims to be anti-abortion is allowing infants in the womb, and young children, to be damaged by increased levels of toxic chemicals in the environment,” Dr. Landrigan said. The retrenchment also targets about $8 million in grants that had been awarded to researchers studying how to prevent harmful per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, from accumulating in crops and the food chain. Concerns have been growing over widespread contamination of American farmland from fertilizer contaminated with PFAS, which are also known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment. PFAS has been linked to cancer and other diseases.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In her 28 years working for the federal government, Shea Giagnorio provided day care for the children of U.S. soldiers, training for employees and oversight for safety net programs. Public service took her from Germany to Alaska to Kansas City, Missouri, where she moved last year for a long-sought promotion. But when she reported to a downtown federal building for work one day last month, her access card did not work. After a co-worker let her into the building, she checked her email: Her entire office had been let go in the latest mass firing ordered by President Donald Trump’s administration. The 46-year-old single mom has canceled her apartment lease, is selling her new furniture and may have to pull her daughter out of college. She wonders what will happen to the at-risk populations her team helped serve at the Administration for Children and Families, a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “Not only me, but all these peoples’ lives are turned upside down,” Giagnorio said. The impact of the cuts by Trump appointees and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency can be found everywhere in the Kansas City metropolitan area, which has long been a major hub for federal agencies about 1,000 miles away from Washington, D.C. Money once promised to the region for public health, environmental, diversity, food aid and an array of other programs has been axed, and thousands of local jobs are in jeopardy. With nearly 30,000 workers, the federal government is the largest employer in the region. One longtime Kansas City economic researcher said he believes the region could lose 6,000 good-paying federal jobs, which in turn would wipe out thousands of others in service industries. An IRS worker said thousands of her co-workers fear they will lose their jobs, even as they put in overtime processing tax refunds in a building so crowded that they struggle to find desks. Under pressure, hundreds more agreed this past week to retire early or take a buyout. “It’s a kick in the stomach to people that are doing everything they can to meet what’s required of them,” said Shannon Ellis, a longtime IRS customer service representative and president of the union representing local workers. By Thursday, at least 238 Kansas City workers had taken the buyout offers and were expected to leave the agency in coming weeks. Ellis noted many of those same workers had been told they were essential and required to work overtime during tax season, some seven days per week. A U.S. Department of Agriculture grant revocation disrupted a historically Black neighborhood’s plan to expand its program growing fresh produce in a food desert. A nearby pantry reduced its monthly grocery allotment for those in need after federal cuts left food banks shorthanded. Urban farmer Rosie Warren grew 2,500 pounds of fruits and vegetables last year in community gardens to help feed the Ivanhoe neighborhood, where many Black families were concentrated under housing segregation policies of much of the 20th century. Warren harvested greens, potatoes and watermelons as part of an effort to address food insecurity and health concerns in a neighborhood challenged by blight, crime and poverty. She was ecstatic last fall when the USDA awarded the neighborhood council a three-year, $130,000 grant to expand the gardens and farmers’ market serving the area. In February, the council received a notice terminating the grant. The USDA had determined the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and activities.”