Deep cuts to staff and funding in the Department of Education will deal a major blow to the public’s understanding of how American students are performing and what schools can do to improve. On Tuesday evening, at least 100 federal workers who focus on education research, student testing and basic data collection were laid off from the Department of Education, part of a bloodletting of 1,300 staffers. Outside of government, at least 700 people in the field of social science research were laid off or furloughed over the past week, largely as a result of federal cuts to education research. The layoffs came just weeks after the latest federal test scores showed American children’s reading and math skills at record lows. Trump administration officials have pointed to those low scores as evidence that the Department of Education had failed and needed to be cut. But now the extent of those cuts raises questions about how the federal test itself will continue. Other basic information about schools, along with research about what works to improve them, seems most likely to be degraded or to disappear entirely. Many of those who were laid off worked on projects evaluating math and reading instruction, disability supports and other subjects critical to student learning. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT And some of the data they collected and analyzed played a crucial role in directing federal dollars to schools. “This is bedrock, base-line information for how our society is functioning,” said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. The education department’s data informs knowledge far beyond the school system, he pointed out, and addresses issues related to the economy, the labor market, race, class, gender and inequality. “It’s a common language — a shared reality we all have.” In a written statement, Madi Biedermann, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, said, “We are aggressively auditing our spending to ensure maximum impact for students and responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars.” Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly ridiculed federally funded research that touches on race and gender. But many of the canceled projects were uncontroversial explorations into core questions of student achievement and well-being. The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, had already seen budget and contract cuts that amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Last night, the vast majority of its staff was laid off, according to three former employees and an email sent to I.E.S. staff that was reviewed by The New York Times. That included widespread layoffs to the team that administers several important tests, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment, which measures how competitive U.S. students are globally, and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is considered a gold standard in the industry and is the only national test that compares student performance across all 50 states. Education researchers and even those involved with overseeing NAEP were scrambling to understand what the cuts would mean for the test, which is mandated by Congress and overseen by a separate, independent board. Federal employees who lost their jobs helped administer the test and were “essential” to ensuring it was accurate, said Andrew Ho, a testing expert at Harvard who previously sat on the board that oversees the exam. “If Congress and the department don’t act quickly to bolster national assessment expertise, who could trust that this once ‘gold standard’ test is still fair and comparable?” he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The national test was thought to be a priority for the Trump administration, even as it was possible it could be moved to a different department. Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government, had suggested moving the division that oversees NAEP to the Census Bureau. I.E.S. workers also maintain the Common Core of Data, a rich trove of demographic information about students and educators, which is used in determining how many federal dollars K-12 school districts should receive. Betsy Wolf, an agency research analyst who was laid off yesterday, said that the staff and funding reductions had been so drastic that she believed: “For the most part, federal education research is over.”She has three young children and said she expected to have to make a swift career change, since so many education experts are now out of work, and federal funding has dried up. Referencing a Trump official who said he wanted federal workers to be “traumatically affected” by layoffs, she said, “He had success in that.”The outside workers who lost their jobs were employed by a cluster of independent organizations, including the American Institutes for Research, Mathematica and WestEd, that frequently partner with government and are known for conducting high-quality studies. Those staffing cuts were confirmed in interviews with current and former employees, and in recordings of internal meetings reviewed by The Times. Some of the research cuts immediately affect students and teachers who had been participating in the educational equivalents of medical drug trials. One canceled contract was weighing how effectively Oregon schools spent taxpayer dollars that were set aside to improve reading instruction, by emphasizing phonics, vocabulary and other building blocks of early literacy. The findings from the study were supposed to guide school spending decisions in the future. Another aborted project provided mentoring and a life-skills curriculum for high school students with disabilities, as they prepared to transition into the work force or college. The purpose of the research had been to find out what types of supports were most helpful. Disabled students “don’t get a lot of research” done on their needs that is directly relevant to schools, said Nathan Edvalson, director of special education for the Canyons School District, outside of Salt Lake City. About 90 students in his suburban district were participating in the canceled evaluation, called Charting My Path for Future Success, which was working with 1,600 students nationwide. Funding from the project had allowed Canyons to hire three teachers and one counselor, who spent most of the fall semester in training and had only begun meeting with students in December. Since the grant was canceled, those staffers have been reassigned to other jobs. Parents received a letter explaining that their teenagers would no longer receive support from the program, but would be eligible for other types of counseling. Mr. Edvalson said he understood the need for fiscal responsibility. But he argued that quality education research served that cause by pointing to best practices that would help students with disabilities become independent, working adults. A spokesman for the American Institutes for Research, which was administering the program, declined an interview request. According to audio recordings of internal meetings shared with The Times, the nonprofit laid off about 300 staffers on Monday. In one of the recorded meetings, A.I.R.’s president, Jessica Heppen, said that because of federal cuts to education and foreign aid, the group had lost $80 million of its expected 2025 funding of $400 million for research projects. Another $80 million was at risk, she said, from federal stop-work orders. “We cannot maintain our current staffing levels given the situation and the headwinds we know are coming,” she said in the recording. “We’ve had to make agonizing decisions that affect our staff.” A.I.R. had about $236 million in federal funding in 2024 for work over multiple years, including $115 million from the education department. At Mathematica, based in Princeton, 340 workers were laid off or furloughed last week, according to current and former staffers. The organization had $360 million from the federal government last year, including $28 million from the Education Department. The Trump administration ended Mathematica’s work managing regional educational laboratories across 11 states, according to a statement from the group. Those labs were researching math instruction, writing instruction and teacher shortages, among other topics. Grazia Mieren, a digital project manager who was laid off, said Mathematica staff had heard for months about preparations for cuts during a second Trump term. She said the group had been planning to beef up its existing funding from state governments and philanthropies. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Even so, the extent of the reductions had been shocking. “Nobody expected this,” Ms. Mieren said. “Your life is upside down, inside out and backwards.” Another 50 positions were eliminated at WestEd, a research nonprofit based in San Francisco. Several canceled WestEd projects directly addressed the biggest challenges in education since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. WestEd had managed the canceled evaluation of Oregon’s reading reforms, and had been planning similar efforts in Alaska, Montana and Washington. The group was also working to combat chronic absenteeism in a Nevada school district; researching how to prevent teacher attrition in Utah; and developing tools to aid student mental health in Alaska. In a written statement, WestEd chief executive Jannelle Kubinec said, “These cancellations are a great loss for our nation’s students, families and communities.” Nat Malkus, an education expert at the American Enterprise Institute who has been tracking contract cancellations and layoffs, acknowledged inefficiencies in federally funded research. But the Trump cuts had been made so broadly and hastily, he argued, that they had grouped the wheat with the chaff, while threatening the agency’s core functions. “We will lose some valuable studies,” he said, “and we’ll probably lose some bloated studies.”

For months now, President Trump has been threatening to deport foreign students who took part in last year’s campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war. Behind the scenes, his administration got to work. Investigators from a branch of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that typically focuses on human traffickers and drug smugglers scoured the internet for social media posts and videos that the administration could argue showed sympathy toward Hamas, administration officials said. The investigators handed over reports on multiple protesters to the State Department, which used an obscure legal statute to authorize the arrest over the weekend of a 30-year-old lawful permanent resident: Mahmoud Khalil. Mr. Trump said this week that Mr. Khalil’s case was the first of “many to come.” Civil rights groups say the arrest of Mr. Khalil, who is a legal permanent resident and is married to an American citizen, is a clear violation of the First Amendment. But it also illustrates how Mr. Trump is using the tools of the federal government to launch a crackdown not only on those who break the law — but also on dissent more broadly. “Freedom of speech has limitations,” Thomas D. Homan, who is overseeing Mr. Trump’s deportation operation, said on Wednesday during a meeting of New York lawmakers in Albany. “We consider him a national security threat.” Mr. Khalil has not been charged with any crime. Instead, the government is using a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act to argue that his actions during protests at Columbia University harmed U.S. foreign policy interests by fomenting antisemitism. The statute says that any “alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.” Mr. Khalil was a negotiator and a spokesman for the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia, from which he graduated in December with a master’s degree. His lawyers said Wednesday that they had not been able to hold a private conversation with him since his arrest. Stephen Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said there was only one other case he was aware of where similar powers were cited in deportation proceedings. The case involved Mario Ruiz Massieu, the former deputy attorney general of Mexico who entered the United States in 1995 on a visa. That year, the U.S. government tried to send him back to Mexico, where he was wanted on money laundering and other charges. The secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, said deportation was necessary for foreign policy reasons. Allowing Mr. Ruiz Massieu to stay would undermine the U.S. push for judicial reforms in Mexico, Mr. Christopher argued. The case against Mr. Ruiz Massieu was held up on appeal.The cases differ in important ways, Mr. Vladeck said. Mr. Ruiz Massieu was a foreign government official accused of corruption who was in the country on a temporary visa. Mr. Khalil has a green card — which allows a person a path to stay in the United States permanently — and was engaged in what appears to be constitutionally protected speech. “The government certainly appears to be retaliating for constitutionally protected, even if offensive, speech,” Mr. Vladeck said. The Trump administration has argued that Mr. Khalil’s role in protests at Columbia showed he was “aligned with Hamas,” but officials have not accused him of having any contact with the terrorist group, taking direction from it or providing material support to it. Mr. Trump has talked openly over the years about using the power of the presidency for retribution and reprisals. He has fired or launched investigations of government officials deemed to be disloyal and revoked security details for people with whom he has fallen out. He has put federal employees embracing diversity programs that he disagrees with on leave. But critics of the president say Mr. Khalil’s case seems designed to intimidate. “We cannot allow this nation to slide into a system of presidential authoritarianism, where people are seized at their homes, arrested and detained simply for expressing disfavored political viewpoints,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and ranking member of the judicial committee. Mr. Raskin said the detention of Mr. Khalil “sets an extremely dangerous and chilling precedent from an administration that is hellbent on wielding fear and intimidation as weapons to crush political dissent.”Legal experts say Mr. Trump’s attempts to stifle dissent can have a chilling effect. “Even if Khalil is eventually able to prevail, the government may get the short-term win of sending the message to immigrants of every status that they risk arrest, detention and perhaps even removal for having the temerity to speak out in favor of unpopular causes, even if they might win their lawsuit in the end,” Mr. Vladeck said. Mr. Trump has used his powers in the past to muzzle forms of protest. In 2020, as demonstrations against police brutality and racism swept the nation, Mr. Trump deployed various federal agencies, including the Bureau of Prisons and Customs and Border Protection officials, to crack down on protests in Washington. His administration even deployed military helicopters to fly low in the nation’s capital to try and disperse protesters. The Trump administration also considered making use of the Hobbs Act, which was put into place in the 1940s to punish racketeering in labor groups, to charge the protesters. At the same time, Mr. Trump has shown leniency when it comes to protests he agrees with. One of his first acts when he came into office in January was granting clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people who committed both violent and nonviolent crimes on Jan. 6, 2021, including assaulting police officers and seditious conspiracy. The rioters ransacked the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name after Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the election.

As a disabled veteran, I have entrusted my life to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) since 1999. When an ovarian cyst ruptured, the VA was there. When my service-connected migraines made daily life unbearable, the VA was there. And when I suffered a stroke in 2019, the VA was there, managing my care, ensuring I had access to rehabilitation, and literally helping me get back on my feet. Now the Trump administration, with the full backing of the new VA Secretary Doug Collins, is planning to slash 83,000 jobs from the VA back to levels seen in 2019—stripping the very foundation of the care that veterans like me, and millions of others, rely on. This is not just reckless; it is a betrayal of every veteran who served this country. The VA’s mission, as enshrined in 2023, is "to fulfill President Lincoln's promise to care for those who have served in our nation's military and for their families, caregivers, and survivors." Cutting these jobs spits in the face of that promise. It is a violation of those who defended our nation—on a service that so many people depend upon. The numbers do not lie. In 2021, 52% of veterans relied on at least one VA benefit or service, and 6.2 million veterans used VA healthcare. And since the passing of the PACT Act in August 2022, nearly 740,000 new veterans have enrolled in VA’s benefits, including over 333,000 from the PACT Act population—veterans of Vietnam, the Gulf War, and the Post-9/11 conflicts. In just over two years since the PACT Act was enacted, the VA has provided critical health care and benefits to millions of veterans and survivors affected by toxic exposure. In fact, the demand for VA healthcare is not decreasing; It is rising at an unprecedented rate. This is why cutting VA staffing to 2019 levels will be catastrophic. Since 2019, the veteran population seeking care has grown, with more veterans aging into the system and requiring specialized treatment for combat-related injuries, PTSD, and toxic exposure illnesses. Rolling back to pre-pandemic staffing levels ignores these realities and sets veterans up for longer wait times, reduced specialized care, and life-saving treatments will likely skyrocket. Veterans will suffer, and some of us will die waiting for care that they were promised. This is not just policy—it is negligence, plain and simple. But the betrayal does not stop there. Thousands of veterans work for the VA, dedicated to serving their fellow service members. These job cuts will not only hurt veterans who need care, but also those who have made it their mission to care for others. The VA was built to support those who have sacrificed for this country—why is this administration turning its back on us? I am not just concerned for myself—I am terrified for our senior veterans, those with severe combat injuries, survivors of military sexual trauma (MST), and those battling PTSD. They will bear the brunt of this cruel decision. As veterans already face alarming suicide rates—according to a 2024 VA report, an estimated 17 veterans die by suicide every day. Cutting off critical support will only worsen this crisis, leaving our most vulnerable without the care they desperately need and deserve.

It’s hard to believe it's been five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020, the disease has killed more than 1.2 million Americans—more than in any other country. That accounts for more than 1 in 7 reported COVID-19 deaths in the whole world (although the true global death toll is likely much higher due to under-reporting). Don’t be fooled by some social-media revisionist historians who would have us believe that COVID-19 was “mild”—it was one of the most lethal infectious disease outbreaks in human history, ranking only behind the 1918 Spanish Flu and the Bubonic Plague (not including the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic). Advertisement Thankfully, in 2025, the days of lockdowns and quarantines now seem a distant memory for many—even though the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of the pandemic persist in many ways. However, the question remains: Are we better prepared for next time? Sadly, if anything, we are less prepared than before. Pandemics are not necessarily once-in-a-lifetime events. We already saw in 2009 a swine flu pandemic that killed up to half a million people globally. H5N1 bird flu continues to spread in poultry, wild birds, and mammals in the U.S., with each case increasing the risk of further spillover into humans—making the U.S. a possible epicenter of any new flu pandemic, should the virus evolve further to spread easily among humans. MPox, MERS (another coronavirus with a high fatality rate), and Ebola are just some of the currently circulating pathogens with pandemic potential. And, of course, "Disease X" (a potential virus that could emerge in the future that we don't yet know about) is always a possibility. What should we be doing that we’re not? First, we should be making investments, not cuts, in pandemic preparedness. The U.S. has withdrawn funding from the World Health Organization. Working alongside local and national health authorities, the WHO is a key “first responder,” identifying and containing infectious-disease outbreaks before they spread. The U.S. contributed approximately $120 million in 2023-2024 on responding to acute health emergencies and to preventing pandemics and epidemics, so our step back leaves a massive hole in resources designed to tackle emergencies and stop outbreaks from spreading. Also, recent funding cuts or freezes to agencies like USAID are already having ramifications on the ground, with public-health professionals concerned that progress in tackling diseases like tuberculosis will stall or regress. With less funding, pandemic preparations also slow down, and the U.S. ceasing negotiations for the Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations makes matters worse. Advertisement Nationally, purported plans to de-prioritize infectious-disease research and defund some CDC training programs are a recipe for having a public-health workforce that is under-resourced and under-skilled to deal with future pandemic threats. Although some employees have since been rehired, sweeping and hasty cuts to key staff involved in potential pandemic response will mean a loss of invaluable experience of those working on the public-health frontlines during COVID-19. Read More: Measles Is Back. And a Lot More People Are at Risk Second, the ideologies and track records of some of those with the greatest responsibility for protecting public health in the U.S. would suggest that, if a new pandemic were to emerge in the next few years, the response would be hands-off. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently endorsed (albeit weakly) the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to fight the measles outbreak in Texas. While that was a welcome move, he has a long history of spreading misinformation on vaccines. RFK Jr. has lobbied against and opposed COVID-19 vaccines. The Trump Administration is said to be re-evaluating nearly $600 million funding for H5N1 mRNA vaccine research. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the likely new head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), held views on COVID-19 that deviated from the scientific mainstream, which included arguing in favor of a herd-immunity approach that thousands of scientists argued would have led to preventable deaths. While the U.S.’s COVID-19 policies were far from harmless and perfect, and while some of the more draconian and harmful measures like extended school closures could hopefully be avoided in the future, doing too little during the next health emergency would be reckless. How much would pandemic measures like vaccines be promoted next time?

A potent storm is expected to deliver significant precipitation across California on Wednesday and Thursday, soaking coastal areas and bringing up to an inch and a half of rain to urban areas including San Francisco and Los Angeles. Several feet of snow is forecast to fall in the Sierra Nevada and cause travel delays. There is a heightened risk for urban flooding and landslides, including debris flows in areas of Los Angeles that were burned by wildfires earlier this year. A series of evacuation warnings and orders were in effect on Wednesday in areas that had been affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires, and others, including in parts of Malibu, Pacific Palisades and Sierra Madre.The county posted a map with the evacuations. (An evacuation warning means there’s impending danger and residents should prepare to leave, while an order means there’s an immediate threat and residents should leave immediately.) A big snow dump is expected in the Sierra. The storm is also expected to bring heavy rain to Northern California and significant snow to some of the state’s mountain regions. “This is a widespread system that’s going to affect much of the state, which has not been the case with many storms this year,” said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center. The storm is poised to unleash moisture, whether rain or snow, as it moves up and over mountains near the coast. The California Coastal Ranges, stretching between Del Norte and Humboldt Counties to the north and Santa Barbara County to the south, are forecast to receive up to four inches of precipitation. Mountains around Los Angeles County are expected to see similar amounts. This storm is predicted to be a big snow maker for the Sierra Nevada, with up to four feet of snow possible on Donner Summit, which many people drive over on Highway 80 as they travel between the Sacramento Valley and the Tahoe Basin. To the south in Yosemite National Park, the highest elevations could receive up to three feet of snow and the valley close to one foot. “This is definitely a colder system than we’re accustomed to in March, not too unusual but colder than we’ve seen in a while for March,” said Brian Ochs, a meteorologist with the Weather Service office in Hanford, Calif. Snow could fall at elevations as low as 3,000 to 4,000 feet on Wednesday, and could even get down to 2,500 feet on Thursday, Mr. Hurley said. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Mount Diablo in the East Bay and Mount Hamilton in the South Bay are expected to receive dustings. The storm is likely to be the state’s last big shot at significant amounts of rain and snow before the end of winter, when the state receives most of its annual precipitation. “In the last couple of years, we’ve had storms in April, but they tend to be less frequent,” said Mr. Hurley. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, a crucial water source for the state, was 81 percent of the historic average as of Tuesday, and any storms that arrive in March could help offset the deficit. While the northern Sierra has received an onslaught of storms that built up a big snowpack, the southern half has seen much less precipitation. The storm is expected to whip up winds across the state and forecasters warned of downed trees, power outages and delays at airports.

Just a few years ago, university statements on the day’s social and political issues abounded. When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, Harvard’s president at the time called it “senseless” and “deplorable,” and flew the invaded country’s flag in Harvard Yard. After George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer, Cornell’s president said she was “sickened.” The University of Michigan’s president described the Oct. 7, 2023, violence against Israel as a “horrific attack by Hamas terrorists.” But over the last year, each of those universities has adopted policies that limit official statements on current issues. According to a new report released on Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted “institutional neutrality” policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack. “We must open the way for our individual faculty’s expertise, intelligence, scholarship and wisdom to inform our state and society in their own voice, free from institutional interference,” said Mark Bernstein, a regent at Michigan, after adopting the policy in October. He said the university had historically refrained from issuing statements on momentous events, like the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy or during the two world wars. “So institutional statements are a modern phenomenon and a misguided venture that betrays our public mission,” he said. The universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity and inclusion policies. On Friday, the administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from Columbia, a move that sent shock waves across higher education. The administration has already said it is looking to target other universities. Universities ramped up issuing statements on hot-button issues about a decade ago, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of Black people in places like Ferguson, Mo., said Alex Arnold, director of research at the Heterodox Academy. Some conservatives had long lamented such statements and believed they veered too leftward. Speech groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression worried that they discouraged dissent. For a while, the statements were hardly the subject of widespread controversy. The Hamas attack and the war that followed changed the equation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always split the left, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the war that followed sharpened those divisions. The statements that universities issued on the attack and Israel’s bombing of Gaza came under scrutiny, and were often criticized for being too late, too weak, too biased — or all three. University leaders, under pressure from donors, lawmakers and the public, began to ask: Why put out statements at all? About four out of five colleges that adopted neutrality policies are public and face scrutiny from state lawmakers. Several states, including Texas and Utah and North Carolina, forced their public universities to adopt such policies. Others, like Tennessee, are considering it. Most of the new policies apply to senior administrators, like college presidents and provosts. Others also encompass units like academic departments. And many apply to faculty members when they are speaking in an official capacity, but often make clear that faculty are free to express personal views, according to the Heterodox Academy. “The whole experience of coping with the campus controversy triggered by the Hamas attack has really gotten institutional leaders to think carefully and to reflect on what the function of our institutions of higher education is,” Mr. Arnold said. “I do think this is probably going to be a pretty durable change.” Critics of the neutrality trend have argued that administrators are merely sidestepping difficult debates on the Middle East conflict, and scared of angering donors and lawmakers. After Clark University, in Massachusetts, said it would shy away from taking positions, the school newspaper’s opinion editor called the move a “fake policy” designed to curb discussion of the conflict. But even universities that adopted such a policy have not gone totally silent on contested political issues. At an Anti-Defamation League event in New York City last week, Michigan’s president, Santa Ono, called the effort to boycott, divest and sanction Israel antisemitic, and said his response had been to invest even more in those partnerships. In an email, the university said the new neutrality policy adopted a “heavy presumption” against issuing statements “not directly connected to internal university functions.” “Combating antisemitism and making sure we have an environment where all students can thrive and succeed is part of our moral and legal obligation, and absolutely connected to our internal functions as an institution of higher education,” said Colleen Mastony, a Michigan spokeswoman. Presidents are often stumbling over their new policies. During an October interview with the school newspaper, Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, called a statement by pro-Palestinian students “offensive,” prompting the editorial board to tell him to “follow your own policy.” Last month, the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group, issued a statement on neutrality that was, more or less, neutral. It stated that the idea “is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The re-election of Donald Trump is now testing those policies. As the new administration, which has described universities as “the enemy,” ratchets up its attack on higher education, colleges are under greater pressure to be voices of resistance. But many college presidents have been spooked into silence, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a small Catholic institution three miles from the White House. “They look at what happened to Claudine Gay, and some of the other presidents,” she said, referring to the former Harvard president who resigned last year after a congressional hearing on antisemitism. “And they’re like: ‘I don’t want that to happen to me. So I’ll just shut up and hunker down, and hope this cloud passes.’” No university is more associated with neutrality than the University of Chicago, where incoming students are furnished with the Kalven Report, the 1967 document that made the case for neutrality. The report, penned as violence upended college campuses during the Vietnam War, said the university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Tom Ginsburg, director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at Chicago, says adopting neutrality signals to lawmakers that colleges are committed to welcoming diverse viewpoints. “Because the statements tended to reflect the majority views on campuses, which are overwhelmingly left-leaning,” he said, “you can see how adopting it would be a way of saying to lawmakers: ‘This isn’t who we really are. We’re not indoctrinating people with contested positions.’” But even the Kalven Report included a caveat that doesn’t settle precisely when universities should issue statements. Neutrality, the report says, still allows colleges to speak out when “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” are threatened. That moment is now, said Ms. McGuire of Trinity Washington University. “The erosion of knowledge and expertise that this administration has embraced is very, very scary,” she said, “and higher ed should be calling it out at every turn.”

The Education Department announced on Tuesday that it was firing more than 1,300 workers, effectively gutting the agency that manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools. The layoffs mean that the department, which started the year with 4,133 employees, will now have a work force of about half that size after less than two months with President Trump in office. In addition to the 1,315 workers who were fired on Tuesday, 572 employees accepted separation packages offered in recent weeks and 63 probationary workers were terminated last month. The cuts could portend an additional move by Mr. Trump to essentially dismantle the department, as he has said he wants to do, even though it cannot be closed without the approval of Congress. Linda McMahon, the education secretary, described the layoffs as part of an effort to deliver services more efficiently and said the changes would not affect student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students or competitive grant making. “Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents and teachers,” Ms. McMahon said in a statement. Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, wrote on social media that he had spoken with Ms. McMahon and received assurance that cuts would not affect the department’s “ability to carry out its statutory obligations.” Sheria Smith, the president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents more than 2,800 workers at the Education Department, said the Trump administration had “no respect for the thousands of workers who have dedicated their careers to serve their fellow Americans” and vowed to fight the cuts. The department’s Office of Civil Rights had particularly steep cuts, with regional centers shuttered or reduced to a skeleton crew, including those in New York, San Francisco and Boston. The office, already understaffed, regularly struggled to work through lengthy civil rights investigations. It had accumulated a heavy backlog of cases under the Biden administration after protests roiled campuses across the country last year. “We will not stand idly by while this regime pulls the wool over the eyes of the American people,” Ms. Smith said. Becky Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, said the changes would drain job training programs and increase costs of higher education. “The real victims will be our most vulnerable students,” Ms. Pringle said.Mr. Trump has repeatedly said he wants to close the Education Department and instead rely on states and local school districts to fully oversee America’s education system. The president adopted the stringent position during the 2024 campaign to align himself with the parents’ rights movement that grew out of the backlash to school shutdowns and other restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic. That movement gained steam by organizing around opposition to left-leaning ideas in the curriculum, especially on L.G.B.T.Q. issues and race. Activists contended that those priorities undermined parental rights and values. In an interview last week on Fox News, Ms. McMahon said Mr. Trump intended to sign an executive order aimed at closing her department, but she declined to give details on the timing. An executive order to dismantle the department would challenge the authority of Congress, which created the department by statute and legally must sign off on any move to close it. In a closely divided Senate, it is unlikely the administration could find enough support to do so, particularly as public opinion polls during the past two months have consistently shown roughly two-thirds of Americans oppose closing the department. But Mr. Trump may be forging ahead anyway. He has talked about moving some of the agency’s work with student loans to the Treasury Department. Education Department officials visited the Treasury Department on Monday to prepare for the shift, said one person familiar with the planning. In her confirmation hearing last month, Ms. McMahon discussed moving civil rights enforcement to the Justice Department and services for disabled students to the Health and Human Services Department. Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the second Trump term, also laid out a detailed plan for eliminating the department. The proposal envisioned moving much of agency’s work to other arms of the federal government. Student aid, for example, would be handled by the Treasury Department; vocational education by the Labor Department; and disability education by the Department of Health and Human Services. Rumors about potential layoffs began circulating around the Education Department after workers received an email around 2 p.m. announcing that the agency’s offices in the Washington area would be closed on Wednesday and reopen on Thursday. The email did not provide a reason for the closure, but the administration gave similarly cryptic notices about temporarily closing offices before severe cuts last month at the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Department officials later told reporters that the building closure was related to the layoffs, and was done out of an abundance of caution to protect the safety of workers keeping their jobs. Workers who lost their jobs were informed in emails sent after 6 p.m. on Tuesday, after they had left for the day. They will remain on the payroll for 90 days, receiving full pay and benefits, and be given one week of pay for each of their first 10 years of service and two weeks’ pay for every year of service beyond 10 years. They will also be given time in the coming weeks to return to the department and collect their belongings, agency officials said. About 75 former agency workers had gathered outside the department’s headquarters in Washington on Tuesday morning to rally opposition to the cuts pushed by the administration. At the end of the rally, Dorie Turner Nolt, one of the organizers, urged the crowd members to face the building and cheer their former colleagues inside who, she said, were doing their best to uphold democracy. Several workers inside the building pressed up against the windows, waving their hands and flashing a thumbs-up amid the ovation. Later that evening, a woman left the building carrying a stack of government laptops to a group of colleagues waiting at the curb so they could check their emails to see if they were let go. The woman, who declined to give her name out of fear of retribution, said she had worked for years at the agency overseeing payments from the department. Mr. Trump has radically upended federal agencies at the start of his second term by relying on a team overseen by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to shrink and disrupt the federal government. Mr. Musk’s team has taken aim at more than 20 agencies while gaining access to sensitive government data systems. Ms. McMahon told Fox last week that she had held regular meetings with Mr. Musk’s team. “I’ve been very appreciative of the things they’ve shown us, some of the waste, and we’re reacting to that,” she said.

My mother’s name is Usha, and for years, when I told non-South Asian people her name, I’d watch them squint, trying to picture the spelling. But these days, it clicks immediately: Usha, like Usha Chilukuri Vance, the Second Lady of the United States. When people make the connection, I want to add that my family and I have nothing in common with the “Other Usha," the lawyer-turned-enigmatic political wife who stands by her man—the vice president—as he denigrates immigrants and women alike. But, in fact, I share a great deal with the Other Usha, whose life is, in some ways, a doppelganger of mine. We both come from academically-oriented Indian American families; our paternal grandfathers were both scientist-professors, as are our fathers, who are both named Krish. We are both Yale-educated, ambitious millennial women: she graduated from Yale Law School the same year I finished undergrad; if I ever brushed past Vance on campus, we would not have taken note of one another—two among many hardworking desi women, living the immigrant dream, hoping to have it all. Our shared touchstones might seem superficial, but as the country increasingly seems split into two separate Americas, each one unable to speak to the other, I’ve found myself obsessing over the things I, a progressive, have in common with Vance and her conservative ilk. Because our similarities reveal an uncomfortable truth: The country that formed Usha Vance and her husband also formed me, and its mythologies are also mine. Specifically, Vance embodies twin figures in the American imagination of meritocracy: the high-achieving child of immigrants, and the high-achieving woman—both near-mythic creatures who appear to prove that anyone can make it here, if they work hard enough, and lean in far enough. For many years, both liberal and conservative Americans celebrated these “bootstrapper” characters. When I was younger, I bought into this story of America, too; I believed that my second-generation work ethic and fierce feminist ambition could grant me access to the American dream. As the leftist writer Naomi Klein has written about her own right-wing doppelganger, Naomi Wolf, we all have twins on the other side of the aisle. I consider Vance my mirror image—a crucial reminder that liberal and conservative America share a great deal. It may be uncomfortable for Democrats to admit what they have in common with their right-wing rivals, but it is worth trying to see ourselves in the Other Side’s world. Only then can we finally abandon the flawed mythologies that brought us to this place. Since she is the child of immigrants, Vance’s ascent into the highest echelons of American society—Yale, the Supreme Court, the inauguration stage, and perhaps, one day, the East Wing of the White House—might be read as confirmation that America is a true land of opportunity: If you work hard, you can make it here, identity be damned. Indeed, some political observers spun this story about her last year, when J.D. Vance was named the Republican vice-presidential nominee: an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal entitled “J.D. Vance and the Indian-American Dream” extolled Vance as an example of “breathtaking” achievements of Indian Americans; a piece in The Times of India declared, “Usha is living her parents’ American dream.” I recognize myself in this story. Many Indian Americans cast our community’s collective success as affirmation of American meritocracy. In doing so, we pit ourselves against other minorities who conservatives would have us believe are asking for handouts—affirmative action, asylum. This is a dishonest story of our diaspora: as the journalist Arun Venugopal has written in The Atlantic, the Indian American diaspora was formed through complex feats of “social engineering.” Like many desis whose families arrived in the U.S. after 1965, Vance and I are both dominant-caste Hindus, children of intellectually elite Indians—yes, our parents worked hard to get here and worked hard once they arrived, but we were also beneficiaries of generations of privilege well before we were admitted to the ranks of the American cultural elite. This more precise explanation of Indian America helps answer the questions I heard many liberals ask when Usha Vance shot into the national conversation last summer: “How did this daughter of immigrants justify her husband spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets?” “Didn’t she instinctively sympathize with other newcomers to America?” “Surely she was secretly a liberal”—she voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016—"just keeping her opinions to herself?” (People asked similar questions of pro-choice immigrant Melania Trump.) But those questions feel naïve. A standard-issue conservative peeks through Vance’s demureness: In 2024, she described her parents’ immigration story to Fox and Friends, responding delicately to a question from anchor Ainsley Earhardt about how the Vances each exemplify distinct aspects of the American dream—JD climbing the class ladder; Usha the immigrant one. Vance described her parents as coming “from a different country”—never saying “India”—arriving “legally” and “with this intention of belonging.” It was the classic, selective story many Indian Americans have learned to tell about ourselves, and which we in turn train Americans to tell about us: We are the model minorities who promise to put our heads down and assimilate; others are the “bad” kind. Vance isn’t just an example of the immigrant dream. Just a few years ago, she exemplified the 2010s Sheryl Sandbergian dream: the woman who leaned into her career at all the right moments. When she became a mother, she did not take “her foot off the gas pedal,” as Sandberg warned women not to do: instead, Vance began clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts seven weeks after giving birth. The Vances were living apart at the time, so J.D.Vance—a man who, in October 2024, made the blunder of saying “my wife has three children”—did not step in as the primary caregiver. Even after resigning from her law firm in 2024 to become a full-time political wife, she remained conspicuously brainy, toting around The Iliad on the campaign trail and leaving her Goodreads page public. The charm offensive worked: the media fawned over her reading diet, her pink cashmere inauguration coat, her elegant gray hair. The knock-on effect is that Vance—who initially said she would stay out of the limelight on the campaign trail before taking on a more vocal role after J.D. Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies,” among other things—helps soften her husband’s image. This is where the American meritocracy too often leads women: to the top of corporate and political ladders, where we legitimize terrible people—often men. I recognize this version of Vance, too, because I am a variation on the theme: an ambitious millennial woman, raised to take herself seriously. Like some millennial women, I once considered the feminist battle generally won; our foremothers had gotten us the vote, our own credit cards, IUDs, all so we could be less hung up on our own womanhood. This attitude led me, at times, to a dangerously flexible politics, not unlike Vance’s. While she was clerking for conservative judges Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts, I was working for a man whose politics sometimes gave me pause. I took the job because it seemed prestigious, and because, like many Ivy Leaguers, I found power magnetic. In reality, I, like Vance, was settling into a world in which I could afford to treat political differences as superficial. I leaned in—right into complacency. Vance’s life proves that leaning in makes for a Pyrrhic feminist victory when not accompanied by substantive work on behalf of all women. Indeed, Vance is now actively facilitating a political agenda that will make it nearly impossible for people, including and especially working parents, to have it all, as she once did: Vance defended her husband after he mocked people without children, claiming that he was simply saying it was “hard to be a parent in this country,” never mind that he has called universal day care “class war against normal people.” Vance is a case study in what feminism of the Lean In era got wrong about the American dream: It promised access to the elite, to meritocracy. It has only delivered for a select few. Usha Vance scares and fascinates so many liberals, especially women and Indian Americans. How did she transform from one of us into one of them? But on closer inspection, there may not have been much of a transformation at all. So-called “model minorities” have a history of xenophobia, and individualistic, achievement-oriented women often teeter dangerously close to justifying societal misogyny. And the proximity between these worldviews matters, because many of us—including liberals—too easily accept the myths of American exceptionalism. If we want to challenge those people, we need to confront ourselves in the mirror first.

Tesla sales have been faltering worldwide as consumers push back against the company’s CEO Elon Musk and his political involvement with the Trump Administration. The company’s stock dropped 15% as of end of day on Monday, its steepest drop in five years, as the stock market plunged after President Donald Trump hinted at a recession on Sunday. And the president seems to have taken notice of Tesla’s dip—in a post on Truth Social Monday night, he blamed "radical left lunatics" for the boycott of Musk’s EV company and pledged to "buy a brand new Tesla." The automaker could use the boost. Recent data shows that the brand’s sales have seen major drops in markets around the world. According to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA), Tesla sold just under 7,517 vehicles in Europe in January, half of what it sold in January the year prior. That’s despite sales of battery and hybrid electric vehicles of any brand rising in January as the E.U. continues to tighten regulations on emissions from new vehicles. Looking at Germany, the largest market for EVs in the E.U., the country saw a 30% year-over-year rise in electric vehicle sales in February, but Tesla sales were down more than 70% compared to last year—less than 1,500 new Teslas were registered in the country in February. Other European countries also saw sales fall. Between January and February of 2025, Tesla recorded a 50% drop in sales in Portugal and 45% in France according to Reuters, while sales fell 42% in Sweden and 48% in Norway. Sales are falling outside of Europe as well. In Australia, data from the Electric Vehicle Council shows that Tesla sales dropped over 70% compared to last year— recording just 1,592 sales in February compared to 5,665 in February 2024, the Guardian reports. Meanwhile, Tesla shipments from China dropped 49% in February, as the automaker shipped out 30,688 vehicles—the lowest monthly figure since July 2022, according to Bloomberg. Tesla has faced growing competition from domestic EV makers in the country—Chinese automaker BYD sold more than 318,000 electric and hybrid cars last month, a 161% increase from last year. In California—the biggest domestic market for EVs thanks to its state mandate that 35% of new 2026 car models sold by automakers must be zero emissions—Tesla sales slumped for the fifth consecutive quarter, according to the latest data from the California New Car Dealers Association (CNCDA). Advertisement Not every market, however, has been hit. Britain saw a record number of EV sales in 2024, and Tesla sales were up 20% in February. Musk has not commented on the sales dip, but when asked by Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow how he was running his other businesses, the billionaire said, “With great difficulty.”

In the coming days, former central banker Mark Carney is set to be sworn in as Canada’s Prime Minister, after winning the race to replace Justin Trudeau as the leader of the country’s Liberal Party. He will be tasked with leading Canada through a number of pivotal moments—including a trade war with the United States, a cost of living crisis, and a critical moment in the country’s fight against climate change. National elections must be called by Oct. 20, but could be triggered sooner by Carney or his opposition. Regardless of whether Carney’s Liberal Party or the Conservatives win, the next few years will be decisive for Canada’s fight against climate change. According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, the country must reduce emissions by at least 40-45% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels to meet its international commitments. Tapping his banking background, Carney has emerged as a leader in the climate space in recent years, bridging the financial sector and the climate fight. What is Mark Carney’s Climate Background? Since his time in the banking world, Carney has worked to bring the private sector into the climate fight towards net-zero emissions, calling the green transition “the greatest commercial opportunity of our time” during a London event in 2020. He became a U.N. Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance in 2019, and in 2021 launched the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, an initiative aimed at bringing together financial institutions to support the transition to a net-zero economy. It was his work with the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020 that brought the climate crisis into focus for him. “When I became governor of the Bank of England, which oversees the insurance industry, I saw that the number of extreme weather events had tripled and the cost of those events had gone up five times in a quarter century,” he said in an interview with the United Nations in 2021. “These things really concentrated my mind on climate.” What Would His Climate Goals Be as Prime Minister? Carney’s campaign has proposed a number of climate-forward economic initiatives. To start, Carney has proposed getting rid of Canada’s consumer carbon tax, which places an added fee on consumers using fossil fuels. He claims that it currently places the burden on consumers rather than big polluters. “When I see that something's not working I will change it,” he said during his victory speech on March 9. “So my government will immediately eliminate the divisive consumer carbon tax on families and farmers and small and medium-sized businesses.” Instead, he has proposed replacing it with financial incentives that will make environmentally friendly initiatives, like energy efficient appliances or electric cars, more affordable for consumers. He also supports the enactment of federal permitting reform to speed up approvals of clean energy projects and measures such as improving the Output-Based Pricing System to better reward high emitters that reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Advertisement Carney also pledges to phase out the use of fossil fuels in federal government buildings by 2030 and expand the country’s electric vehicle charging station infrastructure. What is Pierre Poilievre's Climate Stance? Both Carney and Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservative Party will face off against Carney’s Liberal Party in the upcoming general election expected later this year, say Canada’s carbon tax must go. Poilievre has made his “Axe the Tax” campaign a pillar of his political career. He blames the carbon tax program for the country’s cost-of-living crisis. Unlike Carney’s proposed green alternative to the tax, however, Poilievre and the Conservative party advocate for the expansion of oil and gas production in Canada. Poilievre has also opposed major climate initiatives—including a cap on pollution from oil and gas and the Clean Electricity Regulation which mandates a net-zero electricity system across Canada by 2035. Advertisement In fact, throughout his 20 years as an MP, he has rarely voted in support of climate initiatives—voting in favor of protecting the planet only 13 times in his career, according to an analysis of his voting record by DeSmog. This includes on measures such as protecting whales and clean drinking water for First Nations. That’s compared to his 400 anti-climate votes over the same period.