For generations, students and researchers from around the world have flocked to Boston, drawn not just to a college or university but to a region where high-minded intellectual life was part of its brand. The Boston area has thrived from their presence, its many schools and top-ranked research hospitals keeping its economy strong and its living standard largely unmatched in the United States. “It’s the densest concentration of academic talent in the world,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, who served as president of Harvard University from 2018 to 2023 and as president of Tufts University from 2001 to 2011. “Universities and teaching hospitals are to Boston what cars are to Detroit, what energy is to Houston or finance is to New York.” Now, though, the city is seized with anxiety. The Trump administration’s assault on funding for higher education poses a bigger threat to Boston and the surrounding region than perhaps anywhere else in the country. Harvard is facing a government review of $9 billion in federal grants and contracts, several universities are freezing hiring and rescinding admissions offers, research labs are closing, and international students are being targeted for deportation. And Boston is confronting a once-implausible question: Will its core identity survive? “Boston is the target in this fight,” Mayor Michelle Wu said in her State of the City speech last month. “We were built on the values this federal administration seeks to tear down.”There has rarely been cause to question that key component of the city’s identity, since John Harvard donated some 800 pounds of sterling, and his library of 400 books, to the fledgling college that would bear his name, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1636. The first public school in the country, Boston Latin, was founded in Boston a year earlier; the state’s constitution required every town to establish grammar schools. In the centuries since, that formative focus on education has shaped nearly every aspect of the city and state — Massachusetts consistently ranks near the top in national test scores and health measures — contributing to its politically liberal identity, and an ingrained sense of superiority that has long been a target of anti-elitist fervor. Beyond the bragging rights they afforded the city, colleges and universities brought enduring economic stability. Enormous investments in research by the federal government, going back to its collaboration with university scientists who helped develop weapons during World War II, fueled decades of technological and biomedical advances, and steady growth in Boston’s educational and medical sectors, where federal research funding built a bedrock foundation. In the last fiscal year, Harvard alone received $686 million in federal research grants, while as a group, Massachusetts universities took in more than $2 billion. That does not include separate funding for Boston’s research hospitals: In fiscal 2024, Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham took in more than $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health. Altogether, Massachusetts receives more federal research funding per capita than any other state.Research discoveries have spurred private investments that define the city’s landscape, in flourishing neighborhoods like Kendall Square in Cambridge, where the biotech company Biogen has long been an anchor, and in Boston’s Seaport District, where Vertex Pharmaceuticals built its headquarters. In recent weeks, the jolting disruption to complex funding cycles has caused growing concern about a wave of departures by academic researchers, who may choose to seek more stable funding and job prospects in the corporate world, or at universities abroad. “Some will leave their science behind, and it will end — after a huge investment, it just falls off a cliff,” said Dr. Wendy Chung, chief of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital. “The instability is very hard for people who are so hard-working and dedicated to their mission — they can only be pushed so far before they break.” Detainments and deportations of international students from campuses including Tufts and Harvard have sent another surge of fear through a statewide education ecosystem in which 80,000 students, and as much as a third of the faculty on some campuses, have international backgrounds. Fewer may come in the future; others may return home sooner than planned.“It makes no sense,” said Gov. Maura Healey, a Democrat, of the federal crackdown. In a statement, she cited negative impacts for cancer and Alzheimer’s patients, and for the country’s competitiveness, “with tens of thousands of international students second-guessing coming to school here, and China and other countries recruiting our talented faculty and researchers.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Friday, Massachusetts led a coalition of 16 states in suing the Trump administration “over its unlawful attempt to disrupt grant funding issued by the National Institutes of Health.” The Trump administration has said that to keep their funding, universities must move aggressively to curb campus antisemitism. In a letter to Harvard, officials demanded that the university review programs that “fuel antisemitic harassment” and “commit to full cooperation” with the Department of Homeland Security. Hundreds of Harvard faculty have signed a letter urging the university to resist the demands. Vice President JD Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, has praised the prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, for aggressively using funding cuts to stamp out certain curriculums and rein in “left wing domination” of universities. “We should be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas,” Mr. Vance said in an interview last year. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT As deeply felt as the cuts could be in Massachusetts, where colleges provide 320,000 jobs and $70 billion in annual economic impact, the pain would extend far beyond New England, city and campus leaders said. Patients around the world would wait longer for lifesaving medical breakthroughs, they warned; towns around the country would lose opportunities to manufacture products invented in Boston and neighboring Cambridge. At M.I.T., for example, years of groundbreaking research into fusion energy led to recently announced plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Va., an investment of billions. “It matters to us here because it’s our economy and employment, but it benefits everyone, in red states and blue states,” Mayor Wu said in an interview. Ms. Wu, a progressive Democrat, is among the high-achieving Boston transplants who came to the city because of its colleges: The valedictorian of her high school class in Chicago, she enrolled at Harvard to study economics, then returned to attend Harvard Law School. In Harvard Yard on a recent Saturday, there was little outward sign of the turmoil behind the scenes, as tourists waited in a long line to pose for photos with a statue of John Harvard. The university attracts 650,000 visitors each year, a boon to local tourism; one study found that all the college commencements held across the state each spring deliver a combined economic boost roughly equivalent to two Super Bowls. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Thrust into uncertainty, scientific researchers around the city said their ability to plan ahead has been decimated. Dr. David Corey, a Harvard neurobiologist seeking treatments for Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes blindness and deafness, said he had been making rapid progress, and aiming to launch clinical trials of new therapies, when the funding shake-up began. “Now, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “Every day the news is different. I have to pay people who work in my lab, so if I don’t know if a grant is coming, do I let people go? I have people who have been with me for 25 years, 10 years. There’s institutional memory there that is important.”Dr. Chung, of Boston Children’s, has already felt the brunt of the cuts. A former Columbia University faculty member who came to Boston two years ago, she lost a major funding source for her long-term autism research last month when the Trump administration canceled $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia, alleging that the school had failed to adequately fight antisemitism. Dr. Brittany Charlton, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, started the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence a year ago to research health disparities. She has lost nearly all of her funding to federal cuts, and said she has terminated staff, given up her salary and may have to shut down the center, based at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute in partnership with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. A plaintiff in a separate lawsuit challenging the cuts, she said the damage will ripple forward for years to come, as early-career scientists reconsider their options. “Some of the brightest minds may abandon their work,” she said. Growing up in a small town in Alaska, Alyssa Connell had dreamed of a career as a doctor and researcher in Boston. She cried when an email arrived in December, offering her a coveted spot in a dual degree program at the UMass Chan Medical School, an hour west of the city. Ms. Connell cried again last month when another email upended her plans: The university was rescinding all offers of admission to Ph.D. programs for this fall “due to ongoing uncertainties related to federal funding of biomedical research.” “It was a gut punch,” said Ms. Connell, 23, a teaching assistant and research technologist at Penn State University, where her work is focused on neurodegenerative disease. So far, only her Ph.D. program acceptance has been rescinded, so she still plans to enroll this fall at the UMass medical school. But her financial aid package, which would have covered the cost of both degrees, was canceled, she said. “I don’t know how I’m going to pay rent, but hopefully I’ll figure it out, and still find a way to participate in research,” she said. “I’m still very excited about moving to Boston.”

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. Donald Trump lives in the here and now. A performance artist at his core, the President has vamped his way through eight decades to often contradictory verdicts: bankruptcies and divorces matched with the White House and an improbable comeback. But here’s the thing about this devil-may-care approach to life: it may reward the hedonistic present but it fails to consider the inevitable future. The immediate incentive and the down-the-course payoff are often mismatched, and legacies are not launched in short order. On top of that, negative outcomes tend to linger longer in the public’s mind than the positive ones. That’s why the game Trump is playing with the economy is so abjectly dangerous to his legacy. When the Dow opened on Monday, it was off some 6% from Trump’s first full day in office—and that was an improvement from last month. The markets have been rocked by the sheer uncertainty being unleashed from this White House as he threatened an across-the-board tariff regime globally, targeted China with even steeper import taxes that he is now hinting may evaporate in short order, and teased trade deals as soon as this week with other nations. The tumult has left the economy in turmoil, and Americans are noticing. Which explains why he keeps blaming Joe Biden for all of the country's economic troubles, even as the idea that his predecessor is at fault becomes more absurd with every passing day. Last week, after Trump’s Commerce Department released a report showing the U.S. economy shrank in the first three months of the year—before Trump unleashed the tariff taunts—Trump took zero responsibility. “This is Biden, and you can even say the next quarter is sort of Biden,” he said during a Cabinet meeting. At other points, he seems content to cast blame at Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, although that has not moved the needle, either. But the worries about a recession are growing, and Trump’s best efforts to dodge responsibility are seemingly not working. “I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy,” he told “Meet the Press” on Friday. Asked by moderator Kristen Welker if he was willing to send the economy into a recession as part of a longer-term fix, he dodged. “Look, yeah, it’s—everything’s OK,” he said. “What we are—I said, this is a transition period. I think we’re going to do fantastically.” Asked if a recession was coming, Trump seemed indifferent: “anything can happen.” Recessions don’t come out of nowhere. They are often the byproduct of a shaky consumer confidence and increasing anxieties, whether those sentiments are justified or not. Right now, consumer confidence is lower than even during the Great Recession, and scared consumers mean sidelined consumers. Their dollars fuel about 70 cents of every dollar in the economy, and right now they’re keeping their wallets closed. To listen to voters, they’re putting this squarely on Trump in a way they never have before. Take the latest NPR-PBS-Marist poll: 60% of Americans said the current economic situation is a result of Trump’s policies. Compare the same survey’s results at this point in Barack Obama’s first term, when he took the whacking from just 14% of voters amid a full-blown recession. Trump likes to cast himself as an all-powerful master of the universe, a titan who can bend reality to his whims. A masterful salesman, he has convinced legions of Americans of that false reality. But those same Americans are looking around and seeing some pretty grim truths staring them down as stocks sink, supply chains begin to falter, and prices keep going up. They’re worried and they are looking for someone to blame. If Trump wants to be the omnipotent colossus, then he also has to be the culpable party when Americans want to find a vessel for their unease. Trump wanted the big prize back. Now he has to carry it for a second term.

Rivers rose rapidly across much of the Midwest and the South on Saturday, prompting water rescues, evacuation orders and road closures as a relentless storm dumped rain on the region. The increased flooding, which was happening from Texas to Ohio, came after days of heavy rains and tornadoes that killed at least 16 people, including a 5-year-old in Arkansas and a firefighter in Missouri. Forecasters warned of more flooding, saying that some rivers were not expected to crest until Tuesday or Wednesday. “We’ll be dealing with the river flooding the next couple days, even the next couple weeks in some places,” said Colby Pope, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Little Rock, Ark. Emergency workers reported water rescues in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Texas. Officialsissued evacuation orders for two small Kentucky towns, Butler and Falmouth, along the Licking River, and for the city of Shelbyville, Ind., along the Big Blue and Little Blue Rivers. Residents along the Kentucky River have also been evacuated. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT On Saturday, the National Weather Service issued flash flood emergencies for Memphis and the Little Rock area. A tornado touched down near the city of Florence, Ala., the agency said. And flooding and flash flood warnings were in place for a region stretching from Louisiana to Indiana, with up to 15 inches of rain having fallen in the worst hit areas. Another two to four inches of rain was expected to fall in some places on Sunday. The storm has killed people across four states, including a 9-year-old boy who was swept away by floodwaters in Frankfort, Ky., and Chevy Gall, a firefighter with the Beaufort-Leslie Fire Protection District in Missouri, who died in a crash while driving to help rescue people from the floods. At least nine weather-related deaths have been reported in Tennessee. Some of the heaviest rain so far has fallen in Arkansas and in southern Missouri. In Lonsdale, Ark., firefighters said on Saturday that they were trying to help 10 people and 65 horses evacuate a flooded horse training center. In West Plains, Mo., Mayor Mike Topliff said that some buildings had taken on water after several inches of rain fell in a few hours. He said there were nine water rescues in his city, and at least one person had died. Across Arkansas, where trees and power lines had been toppled, and where a train derailed when a bridge collapsed, many residents were hunkering down. In Cabot, in rural Central Arkansas, some homes had become small islands, surrounded by floodwaters on all sides. More than 100,000 customers were without power in the state as of Saturday evening, according to poweroutage.us. In Jacksonville, not far from Little Rock, Tonya Coosenberry stood on her front porch wrapped in a blanket, watching the road in front of her house disappear beneath the water. “This is probably the worst flooding we’ve had in nearly 15 years,” she said. On Saturday, wet weather stretched from East Texas to New York, and federal data showed rivers rising rapidly in some parts of the region. The Black River near Poplar Bluff, Mo., surged from four feet to a flood stage of nearly 17 feet overnight. The river is expected to continue rising there through Sunday morning, with an evening crest expected just below record levels. Emergency responders, including an urban search and rescue team, were waiting in Poplar Bluff on Saturday, preparing to help evacuate people if needed. Elsewhere, water levels were increasing quickly on the Kaskaskia River in Illinois, the Mississippi River along the Missouri-Kentucky border and the Ohio River along the Illinois-Kentucky border. Many highways have closed in Indiana and Ohio, though some rivers there are not expected to reach peak levels for several more days. The Spring River in Hardy, Ark., was already at a major flood stage on Saturday, reaching the second-highest crest ever recorded there. The ground is saturated and can no longer absorb the rain, which means it “has nowhere to go and it runs off and creates more flooding,” said Frank Pereira, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center. The stormy weather is expected to shift east on Sunday, giving the central United States a break. While there’s a chance for rain along the East Coast, the heaviest rains are expected in the southeast from the Gulf Coast to the Southern Appalachians. In northern Kentucky, another inch or two of rain is still expected before the long stretch of bad weather finally clears, said Nate McGinnis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Wilmington, Ohio. But the flood risk is not as high as it was on Friday and Saturday. Still, places across the storm’s path, including Louisville, Ky., and Memphis, have prepared for conditions to worsen. In Tyrone, Ky., where both roads into town were flooded, residents were evacuating on Saturday by boat as the waters rose. Bud and Tammy Morgan, who were waiting with their pets for an evacuation raft, planned to spend the night at a hotel and hope their home would survive. . Elsewhere, people were contending with damage that had already been done. In Hopkinsville, Ky., in the southwest of the state near the Tennessee line, floodwaters had inundated some homes, leaving mud on the floors and overwhelming losses. “Everything is just destroyed,” said Brittanie Bogard, a city councilwoman, who began to cry as she described what she encountered when visiting flooded homes. Though the rain slowed overnight, allowing the level of the North Fork Little River to drop several feet, it was still raining on Saturday morning and the river was beginning to rise again. Jerry Gilliam, the judge executive for Christian County, which includes Hopkinsville, said emergency responders performed about 20 rescues from residences, and moved 40 dogs from a pet boarding service near the river. The county jail also sits right next to the river. “We were just inches away from evacuating around 550 inmates,” he said. “But fortunately last night, that’s when the water started receding.” Many of the towns experiencing flooding are accustomed to high water and seemed to be taking the conditions in stride. In Cairo, Ill., which sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, pumps were placed around town and a levee gate was barricaded as a moderate, steady rain fell on Saturday morning. Some streets were flooded, but no property damage had been reported. “Everybody within the city is working around the clock to make sure we keep the water out,” said Romello Orr, a member of the City Council and a restaurant owner in Cairo. Outside Winchester, Ky., where the Kentucky River runs, Karl Crase said the lower-floor dining area at his restaurant, Hall’s on the River, was underwater on Saturday. He was hopeful that this flood would not be as bad as some in the past. “We get the beauty of being on the river and the benefits and the uniqueness that comes with that. Then we become Hall’s in the River,” Mr. Crase said. “It’s part and parcel of the life we lead.”

Wednesday was “liberation day” in the U.S. as President Trump took to the White House Rose Garden to announce tariffs on U.S. allies and competitors alike. Like clockwork, traders sold off stock in markets across the globe, and economists warned that inflation will be higher than anticipated a few months ago. The likelihood of a recession has grown. It would be understandable for a climate concerned person to fear that economic headwinds will be yet another force that slows climate action. Indeed, it’s inevitable that this chaotic moment for markets will push executives to train their eyes on stopping financial bleeding. But that doesn’t mean that businesses will deprioritize or cancel their climate programs. Over the past few years, many firms have transitioned their environmental commitments from long-shot investments or marketing schemes to financially motivated efforts with short-term returns. The economic anxiety ahead poses a crucial test. Has understanding of sustainability’s financial opportunity grown such that companies lean into their climate work, or will executives slip into thinking that climate programs are simply too expensive? The textbook first thing that businesses do in response to economic uncertainty is to protect their balance sheet to hold onto as much money as possible for a rainy day down the road. There was a time when climate programs might have seemed like easy things to cut to save money, but that’s not how things are situated today. In the years following the COVID-19 pandemic, companies very publicly doubled down on measures aimed at addressing climate change and investors poured funds into so-called ESG funds (short for environmental, social and governance). Just as the zero interest rate era fueled bold and often nonsensical investments, so too did the trillions in ESG dollars lead companies to make aggressive environmental commitments that, in some cases, were untethered from financial reality. The last few years have forced companies to get serious. Some have looked under the hood and determined that they, in fact, can’t meet their targets, leading them to backtrack. Others have doubled down with an understanding that sustainability programs can help the bottomline. Every company and every sector is different, but the most obvious value of sustainability initiatives in a moment of economic uncertainty is efficiency. Simply put: efficiency brings down costs—and emissions. The other textbook recession advice to businesses is that well-positioned firms should look for opportunities for strategic investment. Study after study has shown that strategic investment during a recession—while some competitors are cutting wantonly—positions companies to outperform when economic conditions normalize. For forward thinking firms, climate and sustainability is an area ripe for strategic investment. Companies are increasingly facing the real costs of climate change—from facilities hit by extreme weather to supply chain disruptions—which will need to be addressed. And, while the regulatory pressures have faded in the U.S., climate rules remain significant and growing in many of the key geographies around the world, meaning that multinational companies still need to pay attention to sustainability. Advertisement If this all sounds a little too optimistic, it’s worth looking at what happened during the past two economic downturns. In 2011, as the global economy was still recovering from the Great Recession, a widely cited paper from researchers at Harvard Business School found that “high sustainability” firms financially outperformed their “low sustainability” counterparts over the previous 20 years including the recent downturn. Then in 2020, as the world recovered from the COVID-induced recession, trillions flowed into funds that claimed to prioritize ESG. Of course, there is one elephant in the room that makes circumstances slightly different in this case: the economic certainty today is entirely the result of U.S. policy. In this column, I deliberately avoided trying to parse out the specific impacts of Trump’s tariff regime. While there is some good early analysis out there already, it is too soon to tell exactly how the new taxes will reshape the global clean technology supply chain—even if we know that a reshaping is inevitable. Advertisement Amid all of this, the companies that find ways to make climate action financially advantageous may not only weather this storm but emerge positioned for long-term success in a world where both climate impacts and climate solutions continue to reshape markets.

On Wednesday, a stablecoin bill called the STABLE Act advanced through the House Financial Services Committee, increasing the likelihood that Congress will pass a law this year cementing stablecoins' as a global financial tool. Proponents argue that stablecoins help the U.S. preserve the global centrality of the dollar, while allowing people worldwide to transact more freely, cheaply and securely. But while stablecoin legislation has received bipartisan support, it has also faced targeted pushback, particularly from Democrats concerned about systemic risks and conflict of interest—especially since the Trump family’s crypto company announced the creation of its own stablecoin. Critics also warn of another potentially significant side effect: that such legislation could open the door for Big Tech players like Meta, X, and Amazon to create their own privatized forms of money, further consolidating corporate power. Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Image: Lukasz Radziejewski/Pexels via Canva) On Wednesday, a stablecoin bill called the STABLE Act advanced through the House Financial Services Committee, increasing the likelihood that Congress will pass a law this year cementing stablecoins' as a global financial tool. Proponents argue that stablecoins help the U.S. preserve the global centrality of the dollar, while allowing people worldwide to transact more freely, cheaply and securely. But while stablecoin legislation has received bipartisan support, it has also faced targeted pushback, particularly from Democrats concerned about systemic risks and conflict of interest—especially since the Trump family’s crypto company announced the creation of its own stablecoin. Critics also warn of another potentially significant side effect: that such legislation could open the door for Big Tech players like Meta, X, and Amazon to create their own privatized forms of money, further consolidating corporate power. “This is being framed as a crypto bill, and in some ways it is. But it has not reached most people’s radar that its biggest beneficiary is likely to be large tech platforms,” says Hilary Allen, a professor at American University Washington College of Law and a vocal crypto skeptic in D.C. Both the House and Senate have passed stablecoin bills—the STABLE and GENIUS Acts, respectively—out of committee. The bills lay out guidelines for how stablecoins will be regulated, and the amount and types of reserves stablecoin issuers must have on hand. The House and Senate will now have the opportunity to reconcile the two bills in the hopes of getting a unified bill onto President Trump’s desk by the summer. Several banks, including Bank of America, have expressed interest in launching their own stablecoin, should a law pass. But under the current language of the two bills, non-financial companies would also be able to create their own stablecoins via subsidiaries. While previously proposed stablecoin bills prohibited non-banking companies from doing so, neither the STABLE nor the GENIUS Act contain such a provision. In fact, the STABLE Act says that any nonbank can issue a stablecoin as long as they acquire approval from a federal regulator. Allen says that this would open the door for Big Tech moguls like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to create their own stablecoins. Both have long been interested in the payments sector—Musk’s X has acquired money transmitter licenses in many states, while Facebook tried to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra, in 2019 before facing stiff criticism and regulatory scrutiny. “These big tech platforms have been very interested in doing payments because they're in the data collection and monetization business—and payments data is particularly valuable because it shows what you’re actually buying,” Allen says. “The more people's transactions migrate onto these big tech platforms, that will really beef up what are already incredibly systemically important actors in our society, and put them at the center of our financial system.” Allen lays out a hypothetical scenario in which Amazon issues stablecoins. They could then conceivably scale its usage among Amazon employees and users, Whole Foods shoppers, and Washington Post subscribers, to the point that many people start relying on stablecoins as opposed to bank accounts. “That’s really bad news, because banks take the money deposited with them and loan them out into the economy, while stablecoin reserves just sit there,” Allen says. “So money that had been used productively in our economy is now just sitting with Amazon.” Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, made a similar point at the STABLE bill’s markup on Wednesday, warning his colleagues that stablecoins would “compete with bank deposits and undermine the ability of banks to make loans to consumers and main street businesses.” In October 2023, Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Biden, warned that if Big Tech firms assumed control of banking operations, they would “have a strong incentive to surveil all aspects of a consumer’s transactions.” He added that they could also develop personalized pricing algorithms. Arthur Wilmarth, a professor emeritus at George Washington University Law School, tells TIME that people paying for goods with stablecoins would lack fraud protection. He also points to China as a cautionary tale, where Tencent and Alibaba became dominant payments players and gained undue influence over regulators—which then led Beijing to tighten its grip and gain sway over those businesses’ decisionmaking. At the markup on Wednesday, Rep. Maxine Waters pushed for an amendment that would maintain the separation of commerce and banking, claiming that the bill as written could enable Elon Musk, Walmart, and others to create their own currencies. Wisconsin Republican Bryan Steil, a co-writer of the bill, responded that the amendment would lead to a “stifling of innovation.” Co-writer French Hill, a Republican from Arkansas and the House Financial Services Committee Chair, said that he hoped Congress could work out a “thoughtful solution” to Waters’ concerns while considering a larger crypto market structure bill. The amendment was then rejected. “I view this stablecoin legislation as presenting a very dangerous opening for big tech to get into banking in a big way,” Wilmarth says. “Once that happens, I think it will be almost impossible to ever close the door again.”

Southeast Asians expressed an increased level of trust in the U.S.—and more said they would align themselves with the U.S. over China if forced to choose, a reverse of last year’s aggregated results—according to the latest State of Southeast Asia Survey Report by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, a Singapore-based think tank, published Thursday. That was, however, before President Donald Trump unveiled a slate of new tariffs yesterday that hit the region hard. Experts caution that results could look different if polled today.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. A fast-spreading panic hit Capitol Hill on Thursday, as President Donald Trump’s trade war prompted markets to suffer their worst day since the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and analysts were predicting the worst was yet to come. While most Hill Republicans tried to avoid criticizing their party’s leader, frustrations were being laid bare as their talking points didn’t match those coming out of the White House. Lawmakers were insisting Trump’s new tariffs are a starting point for a negotiation while the White House said they’re actually the end of the discussion. Frantic calls to Cabinet agencies about home-district impacts were yielding platitudes and not promises. Even give-Trump-a-chance Republicans began losing patience as their office phone lines were on fire. Trump’s stated goal is to force businesses to make their wares on U.S. soil, in theory sparking a renaissance in domestic manufacturing. Economists are highly skeptical, but even Trump’s apologists worry that the short-term ramp-up is going to be rough. Midterm elections seldom reward the party holding the White House even in the best of times, and Republicans are quickly realizing that Trump's kitchen-table chaos may end up tanking their hopes for retaining control of Congress next year. “None of this was thought through,” says one Republican lobbyist who is trying to tell her association’s members not to panic. “The math doesn’t work. The end game doesn’t work. The politics doesn’t work. This is just a mess and it is going to cost Republicans seats.” Not too long ago, Congress would have had some say in the tariffs levied on other countries. But Trump is calling the trade imbalance between domestic markets and its international partners as a national emergency to avail himself of powers that allow him, without any real check, to impose these tariffs. The result is set to be a minimum 10% tax on most goods coming into the country and climbing to a net 79% charge on some stuff coming in from China. Put plainly: this was not the trade rebalancing Hill Republicans would have drafted had they been consulted. Just don’t expect things to move in any meaningful way against Trump’s orders any time soon, no matter how steamed they are. A handful of Republicans were motioning to curb Trump’s capricious trade war, but not in a way that anyone in Washington expects will go anywhere. As TIME’s Nik Popli reports from the Hill, Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican whose home-state farmers will pay dearly if the export markets close, is backing a measure that requires Congress to approve tariffs within 60 days of a White House announcement. But there is almost zero chance the bill will get sufficient backing—let alone a vote—in the GOP-led House. Grassley’s move tweaked the White House, but is just that: an annoyance. It’s the same fate that awaits a small-scale, symbolic version to undo the penalties against Canada that immediately cleared the Senate on Wednesday. For now, the Senate map in 2026 still favors Republicans, with retirements of Democrats in toss-up states like New Hampshire, Michigan, and Minnesota giving GOP strategists optimism about adding to their majorities. But the argument for electing Republicans becomes tougher once clothing and grocery bills spike, and housing starts plummet because Canadian lumber is too expensive to frame up a new development. This tit-for-tat trade retribution is an impulse that has long been part of Trump’s worldview. He thinks the United States is getting ripped off, plain and simple. He sees a deck stacked against American manufacturers, and he has the power to remedy this for what he calls the little guy. It’s all guaranteed to be bad politics for a President who returned to office on promises of curbing inflation, driving down costs, and fixing Washington—and his fellow party members who are fine going along. Republicans at the Capitol understand this is going to hurt not just Americans, but their own political futures. It’s why, in a low-key fever, they’re freaking out. But here’s the rub: while they know this is bad for just about everyone, don’t expect them to exercise their congressional authority to get Trump to back off. Their prospects may be bad right now, but they view crossing a President who leads a vindictive movement as even worse. This is not a moment where anyone in Washington is expecting political bravery. Far from it. The question many Republicans in the Capitol are asking themselves: which path will yield the least pain for selfish spoils? It’s a pretty weak way to run a superpower.

When President Donald Trump initially announced his new tariffs in February, he proposed them as a “fair and reciprocal plan on trade.” And so it was assumed that these reciprocal tariffs, as they are known, would be equal in value to the taxes that foreign countries have set against U.S. goods. In fact, the tariffs unveiled on Trump’s April 2 “Liberation Day” were slightly more complicated—and for some economists, more worrying. Trump first slapped a 10% blanket tariff on all imports into the U.S., including from uninhabited islands, such as the Heard and McDonald islands, and on places with which the U.S. runs a surplus, such as the U.K. “To all of the foreign Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings, Queens, ambassadors and everyone else who will soon be calling to ask for exemptions from these tariffs, I say: ‘Terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers, don't manipulate your currencies,’” Trump said while speaking from the Rose Garden at the White House. On top of this baseline 10% charge, Trump held up a cardboard chart and announced additional tariffs for some countries, calculated by “tariffs charged to the USA.” The Trump Administration ended up using a simple calculation: Each country’s U.S. trade deficit divided by its exports to the U.S.. The final reciprocal tariff was then divided by 2, with a minimum of 10%. Before the Trump Administration confirmed this method, prominent economist James Surowiecki received attention for reverse-engineering the explanation of the tariff pricing on X. “Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us,” the former financial columnist for the New Yorker posted on X. “What extraordinary nonsense this is.” The Office of the United States Trade Representative confirmed Trump’s tariff math in an explainer, stating: “Reciprocal tariffs are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners….To conceptualize reciprocal tariffs, the tariff rates that would drive bilateral trade deficits to zero were computed.” Though the explanation uses Greek letters and formulas, Politico notes that it is essentially the same formula that Surowiecki posted. Using this formula, the Trump Administration calculated extremely high rates for certain countries, including a new 34% tariff imposed on China, 46% for Vietnam, and 20% for the European Union. Felix Tintelnot, associate professor of economics at Duke University, sees major problems with this method of calculation—notably that the trade deficit is “normal” and “can change.” “Let's say the trade deficit in Vietnam shrinks over the next year. Well, then the tariff rate also should change. But now market participants need to forecast how much the trade deficit with individual countries will change,” Tintelnot says. “And that’s not straightforward, because we are changing so many tariffs at the same time, and ultimately, the aggregate trade deficit of the U.S. is largely determined by other macro decisions, like aggregate savings and aggregate investment, that have nothing to do with tariff rates.” He also points out how for certain countries, it does not matter whether they actually have tariffs on the U.S. Israel eliminated tariffs on U.S. goods on April 1, in preparation for Trump’s tariffs, but were still hit hard by a 17% tariff in the April 2 announcement. “The fact that countries that charge zero tariffs on the U.S. have been hit with tariffs illustrates that these are not reciprocal tariffs in their true meaning,” Tintelnot says. “It is perfectly normal in an integrated global economy for a bilateral trade deficit to exist. A little introspection helps: You have a bilateral trade deficit with your grocery store, but a bilateral trade surplus with your employer. Why would you put a tariff on your local grocery store?” Brian Bethune, professor of economics at Boston College, argues that the Trump Administration should have never calculated these tariffs for countries with such vastly different economic standings and relationships to the U.S. while utilizing the same formula. “Treating all of the small developing countries the same way as you're treating the European Union… that seems to be outrageous,” Bethune says. “Some of these countries with relatively small and more fragile economies may have somewhat of a different approach to trade. This is the problem when you lump them all together.” Trump’s new tariffs have prompted renewed fears that a U.S. recession could be on the horizon. Today, an immediate impact has been felt as a result of Trump’s “Liberation Day.” The U.S. dollar has fallen to a six-month low against the EURO and Dow Jones has plunged over 1,500 points. Trump has previously said that “some pain” could be encountered as a result of the tariffs. Bethune predicts that the Trump Administration is preparing people for a recession that is, in his professional opinion, “inevitable.”

Over the past few days, more than 30 tornadoes have shredded a vast stretch of the central United States, and relentless rain has pushed creeks and streams beyond their banks. In Kentucky, floodwaters swept away a 9-year-old boy, making him at least the eighth person killed by the violent series of storms. Officials in many storm-battered places beseeched residents on Friday to hunker down and stay vigilant, rather than begin assessing the destruction or cleaning up. The worst may be yet to come as a forecast of heavy rains with the potential for more tornadoes and floods extends through the weekend. “We have a lot of bad weather coming still,” Michael Mueller, the county judge and executive in Franklin County, Ky., said on Friday. “It’s very, very dangerous out there.” The storm had stalled on Friday over a region reaching from Arkansas to Michigan, places where residents and officials were painfully familiar with the perils and hardship that can come from tornadoes and overflowing waterway.The reminders came as the death toll slowly climbed. In Tennessee, at least five people were killed by the storms, including a teenage girl, and several inches of rain that fell throughout Thursday caused major floods and shut down roadways. Garry Moore, a fire chief in Whitewater, Mo., with nearly 30 years serving the local fire protection district, was killed on Wednesday while responding to tornado damage. A 27-year-old man in Danville, Ind., was killed after coming into contact with downed power lines. And in Frankfort, Ky., the body of the 9-year-old boy was found after he had been carried off by floodwaters while walking to a school bus stop, officials said. The anguish was also still fresh in Kentucky, where flash floods in the eastern part of the state killed 11 people and displaced hundreds earlier this year. Gov. Andy Beshear pleaded for people to take the “rising and standing water seriously” and to avoid unnecessary risks on flooded roadways. “It’s how we lost too many people in the past,” Mr. Beshear said. “Just turn around.” In Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana, people were venturing out on Friday to gather supplies and pick up sandbags. But mostly they simply waited, uncertain of what the fate would be for their homes and their communities, with some looking to the rising waters with a sense of unease and resignation. “There’s not much you can do,” said Janice Stegall, the town clerk in the small Indiana community of Medora, situated on the White River’s east fork, where waters were expected to rise to a near-record of 19 feet on Sunday. In Paducah, Ky., the increasing level of the Ohio River prompted the authorities to begin installing floodgates on Friday, they said, a measure local officials last resorted to in 2019 when severe flooding threatened the city. In Hopkinsville, Ky., a city of roughly 30,000 people northwest of Nashville, the first hours of daylight on Friday were spent rescuing about a dozen residents who were trapped in the rising water, officials said. Editors’ Picks His Life Savings Were Mailed to Him by Paper Check. Now, It’s Gone. Is There a Least Bad Alcohol? Rocking Pink and Ready to Party The flooding on Friday and the dangers that could still come were fueled by widespread rain from eastern Texas to Illinois that was expected to continue through the weekend. The National Weather Service warned of a flash flood event that could endanger lives and break records across the Lower Ohio Valley and the Mid-South to Lower Mississippi Valley. In New Madrid, Mo., a city along the Mississippi River at risk from rising water levels, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers brought in sandbag-filling machines, to cheers from city workers. The mayor, Nick White, said on Friday that he worried that the weekend had the potential to bring one of the worst floods in the city’s history and that forecasters had said the river could rise over 40 feet and stay at the level for as long as two weeks. As daunting as the threat was, he believed that New Madrid, a city of about 2,600 perched atop a horseshoe bend in the Mississippi River, was perhaps more prepared than ever. “We’ve got backup generators, we’ve got a backup pump,” Mr. White said, adding, “We’ve been really proactive versus reactive.” In Boston, Ky., roughly 35 miles south of Louisville, Bruce Gooden could see the water creeping up as he cut hair at his barbershop near Lick Creek. The heavy rain swelling the creek could not flow into the nearby Rolling Fork River, which was already above flood stage. Mr. Gooden, 63, had seen the water rise before, but hour after hour of heavy downpours and cracking lightning fed a sense of doom. “The water has never made it into my shop before, but I fear it will happen this time,” he said as he kept clipping. He had sand piled in the bed of his truck, he said, and was ready to bag and stack it if the water rose high enough. “I’ll play it by ear,” he said. “I’ll stay open as long as I can.” On Friday, the bull’s-eye for the heaviest rain that could lead to dangerous flooding fell within a large portion of Arkansas and a sliver of southern Missouri, including the Ozarks. Forecasters expect the threat to spread into the boot heel of Missouri and western Kentucky and Tennessee on Saturday. “I think, unfortunately, the next 24 to 36 hours is when we’re going to start to see the heaviest rain totals of this event,” Frank Pereira, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said on Friday morning. The risk of severe thunderstorms that spawn tornadoes is expected to increase on Saturday in a zone that includes Memphis, Little Rock, Ark., and Jackson, Miss. Powerful and damaging wind gusts and large hailstones — perhaps bigger than limes — are more likely in this area than tornadoes. As people made preparations for possible flooding, anxiety among customers at a grocery store in Boston, Ky., seemed to be rising as gradually as the water. “You have to be ahead of it and aware of it, make plans,” said Steve Fox, 68, whose house is on a hill nearby, high enough that he believes he is safe from flooding. But the hill could become an island, he said, if the water rises enough. “The water will probably get over the roads, and I’ll be cut off for a few days,” he said. For those around long enough to remember, a flood in 1997 — one of the deadliest disasters in Kentucky history — is the yardstick against which events like this are measured, and residents fear the coming days could bring something comparable. Denise Baker has worked at the Boston Food Mart, where Mr. Fox was shopping, for 31 years. In all that time, floodwater has never breached her store, she said, but she knew that was no guarantee that it would not happen this time. She knows how much the community relies on the store, and she was determined to maintain that lifeline — even if the store were to become accessible only by boat. “We’re going to try to keep the store open as long as possible,” she said.

Less than a day after President Donald Trump imposed a wave of new tariffs on dozens of countries, members of Congress from both parties were grappling with what to make of a trade strategy they fear could tank the U.S. economy, drive up consumer prices, and destabilize global markets. Democrats seized on the market reaction to underscore what they see as reckless economic policymaking. “This is uncoordinated, capricious and simply destructive,” Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, told TIME Thursday morning. “He's going to tank our economy, and he could tank much of the economy around the world.” Those fears were fueling a stronger GOP pushback against Trump than seen in his second term thus far, though those speaking out still represented a minority in their party. Trump’s tariffs quickly triggered a significant sell-off in the stock market, with major indexes on track for their worst day since at least 2022. Economists warn that the volatility may only be the beginning, with some predicting prolonged economic uncertainty if the tariffs remain in place and countries retaliate with additional taxes on American goods. Four Republicans delivered a largely symbolic rebuke to Trump’s trade policy just hours after he announced them, voting Wednesday evening to undo his earlier tariffs on imports from Canada. Republican Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Rand Paul of Kentucky voted with all Democrats to invalidate a national emergency that Trump declared in February that allowed him to impose 25% tariffs on Canadian goods. Murkowski told TIME on Thursday that she generally supports tariffs as an economic principle but doesn’t support the kind of across-the-board tariffs Trump is imposing. The measure is not expected to move in the House, where House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the tariffs as a necessary measure to restore “fair and reciprocal trade” and level the playing field for American workers. Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida was similarly bullish on Trump's latest policy, and dismissed the stock market reaction. "I don't invest in the market directly. I'm focusing on what I like about tariffs. They're focused on American jobs," he tells TIME, adding, "I'm glad we finally have a person that gives a damn about American jobs.” However, others in the GOP were less certain. Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson described Trump’s strategy as “a high-risk bet,” while North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis admitted he was waiting to see how the market and trading partners responded before forming a definitive stance. The most significant GOP opposition to the trade policy on Thursday came from Sen. Chuck Grassley, a senior Republican lawmaker from Iowa, who introduced a bill with Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington to curtail the president’s authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval. The Trade Review Act of 2025, modeled after the War Powers Act, would require Congress to review and approve tariffs within 60 days or allow them to expire. Grassley emphasized the need to “reassert Congress’ constitutional role” in setting trade policy and prevent executive overreach. Hours later, Tillis told reporters he would support the bill. While many lawmakers expressed concern for the economic fallout from the new tariff policies, some Democrats warned that it would be a tool for Trump to further consolidate power and undermine democratic institutions. “Economists were trying to jump through hoops last night to understand it,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told TIME on Thursday. “It's not economic policy, it's not trade policy. It's an attempt to purposely destroy the economy in order for him to cut deals, industry by industry, which gets him both a little bit of economic recovery and a pledge of loyalty from those companies.” While Murphy conceded that Trump advocated for tariffs for decades, he argued that Trump’s current approach far exceeds anything he had previously endorsed. “I think both parties are in a place where they support the targeted use of tariffs,” he tells TIME. “What he announced yesterday is so sweeping and so disconnected from actual trade policy that my conclusion is that it must be part of something else.” Schiff added that by imposing tariffs on every country, Trump is trying to subdue allies and rivals from across the globe from criticizing his actions. “The only nations that seem to be immune from his caprice are the dictatorships like Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” Schiff says. “He's treating countries like he's treating corporations, like he's treating law firms, like he's treating members of the press… It's part of the same caprice that you will often find with a dictator.” Economic experts predict significant fallout from Trump’s tariff policies. Lawrence Summers, former treasury secretary and director of the National Economic Council, estimated that the tariffs could cost the U.S. economy $30 trillion in lost value—roughly $300,000 per family of four. The Yale Budget Lab projects that these tariffs could add $3,800 in annual costs for the average American household, further exacerbating inflation, which could rise above 4% this year. The Trump Administration, however, remains confident in its approach. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick defended the tariffs in an interview with CNBC, arguing that they would ultimately benefit the U.S. by forcing trading partners to renegotiate deals more favorable to American industries. “I expect most countries to start to really examine their trade policy towards the United States of America, and stop picking on us,” Lutnick said. “This is the reordering of fair trade.” West Virginia Sen. Jim Justice, who describes himself as a businessman and not a politician, also defended the tariffs, comparing the current market response to pushing a hand down into a bucket of water. “For a little while it looks ridiculous, turbulent, but just watch it. Long enough, it'll just ease itself out,” he says. “We got to watch this for a little while and see what happens. I think the upside to America really, genuinely starting to make something is much greater than the downside.”