Alcohol has long been synonymous with relaxation. If you want to unwind after a rough day at work—or kick back on the couch, at a baseball game, or in the pool—there’s historically been a good chance you’ll have a drink in hand. Now, the tides are turning. In early January, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report warning that even small amounts of alcohol can cause cancer. Drinking just one alcoholic beverage a day increases the risk of liver cirrhosis, esophageal cancer, oral cancer, and various injuries, a federal analysis suggests. According to a recent survey, nearly half of Americans are trying to cut back on their alcohol consumption in 2025—a 44% increase since 2023. The message is especially getting through to young Americans, who increasingly view less as more, leading the charge among age groups going dry. As the science around alcohol’s health risks crystallizes, a new question is brewing: What are you supposed to do to relax and unwind and escape your mental headspace if you ditch booze? Is there a healthier way to turn off your brain temporarily or shift into a happier place—and if so, how do you achieve it? “It’s a major dilemma,” says Dr. Anna Lembke, chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic and author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. She works with people struggling with alcohol use disorder, who have to give up drinking altogether. They often wrestle with “what to do to relax to deal with their negative emotions, and to have fun, because alcohol is what they've relied on to achieve those goals,” she says. “It’s a real challenge, because many of the alternatives are also addictive, like scrolling online. The risk of cross-addiction is huge.” We asked experts why it’s so hard to figure out what to replace alcohol with—and to share their favorite ideas on how to relax booze-free.

Last week, as forecasters at the National Weather Service in the San Francisco Bay Area looked at a series of storms that would hammer the region, they predicted that some areas in the North Bay would see six to eight inches of rain between Saturday and Tuesday. Instead, around a foot of rain fell at the wettest locations. Highways were flooded, landslides were triggered, and rivers swelled. By Tuesday afternoon, a house slid down a saturated hillside and fell into the Russian River in Sonoma County. Evening evacuation orders were issued, hours before the swollen river started spilling over onto a handful of roadways. The storms, known as atmospheric rivers, are a common feature of West Coast winters. They’re thin ribbons of moisture carried by powerful winds, sometimes for thousands of miles, which can make forecasting them especially challenging. “We got a little more rain than expected, and the rivers responded more than expected as well,” said Dylan Flynn, a meteorologist with the Weather Service. “A couple days ago we didn’t expect any of the rivers to flood.” The rain could have been even more impactful if Northern California hadn’t seen an abnormally dry January. The first of the recent rains was mostly absorbed by the dry soil starved of rain, sparing the area from more severe flooding. Another one of these moisture-rich storms is slated to sweep the region Thursday into Friday, bringing more rain and flooding concerns, but Mr. Flynn said this one is expected to be more “run-of-the-mill” than the last.This prolonged spell of atmospheric-river activity in Northern California has brought rain to the valleys and coast and snow to the mountains. The storms’ effects have stretched as far north as Washington and into Southern California. To pinpoint where these systems will land, meteorologists use tools far more sophisticated than what was available two decades ago, including higher-resolution satellites and weather models run on supercomputers. There’s even a program to fly hurricane-hunter planes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into the storms to collect data. Still, it is tricky to predict these systems with perfect accuracy. A misforecast can result in surprises. Strong atmospheric rivers carry copious amounts of moisture, and if a storm unexpectedly shifts slightly one way or another, it can bring a lot of rain to one watershed versus another, consequently leading to one river to flood while another remains safely in its banks. Chad Hecht, a meteorologist with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego, said pockets of intense rainfall can occur within these storms and lead to hazards such as urban flooding or mudslides in areas where wildfires have recently burned. “These pockets can form at such small scales that forecast models struggle to resolve them, and it’s hard to identify exactly when and where they will occur,” Mr. Hecht said. As these storms began taking shape last week, there was some concern that they could shift south to Los Angeles, where devastating wildfires last month left the ground scarred. Instead, by early this week, forecasters said they expected only up to about an inch of rain for some parts of that region. And by Wednesday, they said, the storm was “underperforming” there, with up to half an inch of rain measured. Atmospheric rivers are corridors of moisture transported through the atmosphere by powerful winds. They’ve long existed all over the world, but the term was only first used in scientific literature in the 1990s, and the media quickly latched onto the colorful description.On the West Coast, the systems form over the Pacific Ocean in the subtropics. As they travel over the ocean, they pull in moisture and move across a vast, empty expanse where observational data is sparse compared with what the robust network of weather stations on land can collect. There are about 100 buoys managed by NOAA in the Pacific, the world’s largest ocean, that help predict the approach of a storm, versus 1,000 observational data points that can forecast the storm’s course once it reaches land, said Marty Ralph, the director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes. “Satellites help, but big gaps remain,” Mr. Ralph said. Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, said that today’s sophisticated satellites mostly make up for the lack of observational data available over the ocean. He’d like to see more high-powered, long-distance radar set up along the West Coast to collect data from the ocean as a storm approaches. “We can take the data from those radars and take it into our models, and then we could substantially improve our forecasts,” Mr. Mass said. Even with all the tools available, a forecast is a precarious undertaking, because while the storms can be thousands of miles long, they’re also narrow at only a few hundred miles across. “Because of that narrow plume of moisture, these system can literally thread the needle between observations,” said Brian Garcia, a meteorologist with the Weather Service. When these storms hit land, they’re wrung out like sponges. Forecasters are tasked with pinpointing where the systems will unleash that moisture. One thing they know for certain is that these systems are likely to release the most rain when they interact with mountains on West Coast, where there are a lot of large ranges, including the Siskiyous and the Sierra Nevada. “Because the mountains don’t move, especially relative to the weather, that makes it easier to predict where the heavy rain or snow is going to be,” Mr. Ralph said. While the mountains don’t move, the actual storms can make slight yet unpredictable shifts because of disturbances in the atmosphere. Mr. Garcia said that atmospheric rivers travel through the air more like a Frisbee with a wobble than like an arrow with a straight path. In the case of the system that swept California from Monday night into Tuesday, Mr. Garcia said it “wobbled” into the Bay Area, resulting in over a foot of rain on Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. Just across the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco recorded 2.8 inches of rain on Tuesday, breaking its same-day rainfall record of 2.2 inches set in 1882. The region is expected to get more rain on Thursday and Friday, though that storm is expected to be less impactful than the previous two. By the end of the day on Friday, Mr. Garcia said, some of the wettest locations in the North Bay may have recorded up to 18 inches of rain over the last week.

Even as much of the United States shivered under frigid conditions last month, the planet as a whole had its warmest January on record, scientists said on Thursday. The warmth came as something of a surprise to climate researchers. It occurred during La Niña conditions in the Pacific Ocean, which tend to lower the globe’s average temperature, at least temporarily. Earth’s surface has now been so warm for so much of the past two years that scientists are examining whether something else in the planet’s chemistry might have changed, something that is boosting temperatures beyond what carbon emissions alone can explain. Those emissions, the byproduct of burning coal, gas and oil, remain the main driver of global warming, which reached record levels in both 2023 and 2024. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT It’s because of La Niña that scientists expected this year to be slightly cooler than the past two years, both of which experienced the opposite pattern, El Niño. The waters of the eastern tropical Pacific oscillate between El Niño and La Niña conditions, influencing weather worldwide by changing the balance between heat in the ocean and heat in the air. But a host of other factors figure into global temperatures as well. At the moment, chances aren’t high that 2025 will end up being the hottest year on the books, Russell Vose, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told reporters recently. But this time last year, researchers were saying much the same thing about 2024, Dr. Vose said. They were wrong.“So it’s a tough game, forecasting global temperature,” Dr. Vose said. According to Copernicus, the European Union climate monitoring agency, last month was much balmier than usual in northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia, as well as parts of Australia and Antarctica. Abnormally high temperatures above the Hudson Bay and the Labrador Sea helped shrink Arctic sea ice to a record low for January, Copernicus said. As scientists try to explain the unending streak of worldwide warmth, one thing they’ve focused on is reductions in air pollution. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In a report this week, James Hansen, the famed former NASA scientist, argued that cutting pollution had already played a big role in causing global warming to accelerate. The reason is a little counterintuitive: For decades, humans have not only been emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases when they burn fossil fuels. They’ve also been spewing tiny sulfate particles into the air. These particles spur the formation of more and brighter clouds, which help shield Earth from the sun. But as regulators have curbed sulfate pollution to protect people’s lungs, this cooling effect has diminished, exposing the planet to more of the full force of greenhouse warming. Three decades ago, Dr. Hansen was among the first scientists to draw broad attention to climate change. Speaking to reporters this week, he argued that the United Nations was ill-prepared to address accelerated warming. The U.N.’s approach to meeting its climate goals still counts on societies to slash their carbon emissions in the coming decades, he said. Those goals now look “impossible” to achieve, Dr. Hansen said, “unless some miracle occurs that we don’t understand.”

If you’re a member of the Society of Black Engineers at West Point, you can probably forget about attending the national group’s annual conference next month. That’s because the United States Military Academy, one of five American service academies, that trains cadets for the U.S. Army is disbanding its Society of Black Engineers chapter as well as at least 11 other clubs, according to a recent internal memorandum that circulated online. The memo, issued in accordance with President Donald Trump’s executive orders cracking down on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and offices across the federal government, instructs 12 specific clubs to immediately cease all formal and informal activities and remove public facing content. The move comes after the U.S. Army and Air Force shuttered their respective DEI offices and programs and removed related media and trainings on Jan. 23. The disbanded clubs, all of which have had their webpages removed from the academy’s site, were listed under “affinity” groups on West Point’s club directory, which has also been removed as of publication. The pages, according to digital archives, were available online as recently as last week. The list of banned student groups, all of which were open to all cadets irrespective of identity, includes the Asian-Pacific Forum Club, which “promotes the general knowledge and application of knowledge about the Asian-Pacific region”; the Contemporary Cultural Affairs Seminar Club, which supported cadets “transitioning from civilian to cadet and cadet to officer” through “academic services, mentorship, professional development opportunities, and community outreach programs”; the Corbin Forum, which aimed to promote women’s leadership within the Army; the Japanese Forum Club, which described itself as a place for promoting “understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture and language”; the Korean American Relations Seminar, which focused on education around the Korean American experience; the Latin Cultural Club, which operated two subordinate clubs: West Point Latin Dance and the mentorship- and outreach-focused Latina Connection; the Native American Heritage Forum, which had the mission to “educate members of the Corps of Cadets about the history, heritage, and current affairs of Native Americans”; Spectrum, a social club that provided support to LGBTQ cadets and promoted acceptance of LGBTQ people in the military community; and the Vietnamese-American Cadet Association, which aimed to increase “cultural awareness of the Vietnamese-American experience” and the “legacy of Vietnamese-American veterans.” It also included the West Point chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society for Hispanic Professional Engineers, and the Society of Women Engineers. An archived version of the academy’s club directory emphasizes the availability and variety of clubs as assets in training cadets to be “well-rounded leaders of character.” The academy’s webpage on leadership development similarly points to its clubs and activities as tools for developing cadets’ civic character and grit. But, as of Feb. 5, every club webpage has been removed, at least temporarily, seemingly in accordance with the memo, which stated that all other clubs not listed for disbandment are to cease activities until they are reviewed and revalidated to ensure they align with President Trump’s executive orders and Department of Defense guidance. TIME has requested comment from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which did not immediately respond. The memorandum, first posted on the West Point subreddit and then on X, has drawn ire from some who feel the ban is discriminatory. “I am sure all the Eurocentric, Christian events that are still embedded in daily activities and federal holidays will still continue. It is discriminatory to get rid of all the non-white ones,” one Reddit user wrote. “Why can’t we let Americans with other cultures celebrate their heritage also?” Some users pointed out that affinity-like clubs listed as academic clubs, such as the West Point Polish Club (also known as the Kosciuszko Squadron), which described itself as “an association of cadets who explore and enjoy Polish culture, history, and language,” were not singled out for disbandment. Similarly, the West Point Humanist Society, which described itself as aiming to “build a community at West Point that is welcoming to freethinkers while espousing the ideals of scientific rationality, secularism, and human-based ethics,” was the only affinity club that was not explicitly listed in the memo. Other users criticized the disbandment as narrow-sighted, suggesting it might impact future enrollment. “Answers the age old question ‘How do I adversely impact the morale, identity, and professionalism of our military professionals?’” wrote one X user. “I worked for the main Space Shuttle subcontractor for many years,” another X user wrote. “Many different ethnicities worked there and I see absolutely nothing wrong with these societies. My young granddaughter wants to be an engineer.” But others described the move as “appropriate” and “how it should be.” “Those particular types of organizations, designed and intended to separate out specific groups, never belonged at West Point, or any other military school,” wrote one user. Knights Out, an association of LGBTQ West Point graduates and their allies, published a statement in response to the Trump administration’s efforts to ban trans servicemembers “as well as deny any public recognition of LGBTQIA identities.” The group said it is working with West Point and the other military academies to understand the implications on queer cadets and servicemembers and reiterated its support: “No executive order or policy will stop us from protecting and preserving our extraordinary community—who show us every day that service to the nation is not dependent on individual identity. Our military serves all Americans; all Americans should be able to serve in it.”

On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 31, World Relief, an evangelical charity that helps resettle refugees around the world, but especially in the U.S., got an order from the U.S. Department of State to stop all work under its contract with the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. This was confusing, since that evening a group of Afghans who had served alongside Americans in the long-running conflict there were arriving into Sacramento airport, and the nonprofit group was contracted by State to take care of them. "It said, stop all work," says Matthew Soerens, the vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief. "But we were not going to not show up at the airport. We were not going to not make sure that they had a place to sleep that night and a warm meal." It's not a heavy lift to meet people at an airport and buy them a meal. What worries the folks at World Relief more is who was going to pay their rent for the next 90 days? Usually that time period is covered by federal money distributed through various partners so that refugees have time to get on their feet and find a job, but now the State Department has ordered World Relief and other charities to immediately cease doing that. And who was going to pay rent for the thousands of other families World Relief was supporting, both in the U.S. and overseas? Since the inauguration, the incoming Administration has imposed spending freezes and stop-work orders on a wide swath of American foreign-aid enterprises. Funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—which, at roughly $40 billion, accounts for less than 1% of the federal budget—was paused for 90 days on all but a very narrow set of programs, mostly involving life-threatening hunger or medical emergencies. Many USAID contractors and staff were fired or put on administrative leave, the USAID website was closed down, and similar cuts were made to the developmental and humanitarian programs of the State Department. On Feb. 4, a few days after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that he would run USAID for the time being, the rest of the staff—all except those "responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs"—were also put on leave and those working in overseas missions were told that arrangements would be made for them to return to the U.S. within 30 days. Evangelical and other Christian charities have not been spared these cuts. Among the organizations that lost funding are such Christian behemoths as World Vision, International Justice Mission, Samaritan's Purse, and Catholic Relief Services, which at $476 million, was the largest USAID recipient in 2024. Because of the vagueness of the language around which programs would still be funded, some groups pulled back their spending, just in case. "World Vision is responding to the executive order that pauses U.S. foreign assistance funding—with the exception of emergency food assistance—for the next 90 days, while programs are reviewed for alignment with the current administration’s foreign policy," said the international relief organization in a statement to TIME. But others decided to go ahead anyway. "Although we received suspension orders, we have not halted our work in Uganda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia," says a spokeswoman for Medical Teams International in an email. "We have chosen this course for the time being because as a Christian organization, we center our decisions on the worth and dignity of ALL people—the people we serve and our staff." So far only one portion of a program in Uganda has received a waiver to keep operating and the organization recognizes it might not be reimbursed for other programs. "It is our understanding that life-sustaining essential emergency supplies are exempt from the stop order," said Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan's Purse, in a statement to TIME. "However the details of the waiver process are not yet clear." He added that his organization, which receives less than 5% of its international aid budget from USAID, would continue to fund the projects, which are in Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ethiopia. Some of the organizations have supporters inside the Trump Administration or the State Department and are trying to use back channels to find some clarity on the future of USAID and the projects it funds. And there are others who are calling on the President to reverse course. "If President Trump understood that evangelical Christians wanted secure borders, he's absolutely right," says Soerens. "If he understood that evangelical Christians wanted refugees shut out who had been thoroughly vetted, who in many cases are persecuted Christians, then he got that wrong." While 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, Soerens points to a new survey by LifeWay Research, the Southern Baptist Convention's polling firm, found that 70% of evangelicals in the U.S. say they believe the U.S. has a moral responsibility to receive refugees. This may be why, in the two weeks since the government funds were paused, World Relief has raised $3 million, most of it from small donors. It's not going to be enough, however, to pay the three months of rent that the government had promised. "There's about 4,000 people, who the government invited to come to United States, and arranged plane travel for," he says. "It's very different from some of the other immigration debates." The group estimates there will be an $8 million funding hole in their budget if the U.S. government decides to not pay rent for legal refugees. For Christians who worked with USAID, the stop-work orders, the suspension of funding, and the steady stream of denigration of the agency's work from Elon Musk, who tweeted that it is "evil," and Trump adviser Stephen Miller are a profound betrayal of what they consider a sacred vocation. "I'm here to do what I can, to be the hands and feet of God in this world," says Anne Linn, who has spent most of her career working on alleviating malaria, both on the ground in different parts of Africa and in Washington, D.C. "Like, what can I do to alleviate the suffering of others, of my neighbors?" She was laid off on Friday when her contract with the U.S. President's Malaria Initiative, like World Relief's, was canceled. Linn acknowledges that many Americans would like the malaria-stricken countries to pay for their own health care and not rely so heavily on the U.S. "Those countries want that too," she says. "But so much of their GDP goes to servicing debt. We have to give them a runway. It can't just happen overnight." In the meantime, in some of the countries with which she has worked, the rainy season is about to start; the mosquitos will arrive and the bed nets won't, because they're stuck in a warehouse and the people contracted to deliver them also have a stop-work order. She fears for the pregnant mothers and the children under 5, whom malaria can kill. "Who can read the words of Jesus Christ and think this is OK?" she asks. "That is baffling to me. If we say that we are pro-life, we cannot be OK with this."

In Boonton, N.J., Linda Mauriello helps young people with disabilities prepare to enter the work force after they leave school. They learn to set career goals, create resumes and build relationships at work. Sometimes they get help finding internships and receive support on the job, too. One student with multiple disabilities trained at a school cafeteria, got hired and is still working there five years later. A student with autism trained at the local Walgreens, learning time management and working with customers. He was hired and is now in charge of opening up the store. Ms. Mauriello is a big fan of the program. “My students have really benefited from it,” she said. But hundreds of thousands of students with disabilities who are eligible for similar assistance do not receive it. The federal and state governments spend about half a billion dollars each year for such services, but most parents — and even some school officials — don’t even know the program exists. In 2023, New Jersey had the nation’s lowest proportion — roughly 2 percent — of eligible students getting help, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of government data. For 10 years, New Jersey’s program has languished. And the state’s decentralized school governance system has hampered efforts to get the services into schools. Interviews with dozens of advocates, educators and parents depict a confusing bureaucratic maze, one that leaves tens of thousands of students without services. New Jersey officials acknowledge the problem. “We know that there’s not enough people who are fully aware of all of our services,” said Charyl Yarbrough, assistant commissioner of employment accessibility services at New Jersey’s Department of Labor and interim director of the state’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services. “Nobody wants to be a best-kept secret.” Across the country, only 40 percent of people with disabilities ages 16 to 64 are employed, even though experts say most are capable of holding jobs. Congress created the school-age job training program a decade ago, funneling money to the states. But only about 295,000 students received some form of services — out of an estimated 3.1 million who are eligible — in 2023, the most recent year for which national data is available. In New Jersey last year, that number was 1,370, out of more than 80,000 eligible students. New York State has not been much more successful: It is serving about 5 percent of its eligible students. When job training programs do reach students with disabilities, advocates say they are often inadequate, and states face little accountability for their shortcomings. “If young people have an opportunity to be exposed to the world of work, and they get services ahead of time, they can work independently in the community,” said Maureen McGuire-Kuletz, co-director of the George Washington University Center for Rehabilitation Counseling Research and Education. “That was the hope. If you got in early, then some challenges later on would not exist.” While officials at the U.S. Department of Education acknowledge that so-called pre-employment transition services must be made available to all students with disabilities, they note that the law does not mandate that they all access the services. Not all students choose to receive them, and some may be getting the help they need from their schools, Danté Q. Allen, the commissioner of the department’s Rehabilitation Services Administration until last month, said in an email. In New Jersey, the state government usually uses outside contractors — mostly nonprofit organizations and universities — to provide such training. It spent $14.6 million in federal and state funds on this training in 2023, the last year for which complete data is available. But many parents are unaware of what their children are eligible for and how to get it. Bridgette Breece’s son did well with the hands-on work at his high school in Burlington County, N.J., but his disabilities made reading difficult, and he struggled with textbook-based exams. Worried about his future, Ms. Breece tried to get him some career help before graduation. She saw a Facebook post about the state vocational rehabilitation agency, which serves exactly that purpose. But she says a counselor there told her that her son wasn’t eligible until he turned 18 — which was untrue. After he graduated last spring, he found a job as a tow-truck driver, which he was good at and enjoyed. But the company required all employees to take turns periodically being on call for overnight emergencies. His anxiety disability made him terrified that he would miss a call, so he didn’t sleep for several nights in a row and had to quit. Pre-employment training, which he could have received during high school, could have taught him how to request an accommodation or how to explore jobs that fit his abilities and interests. But he never received that. His mother — like most parents in New Jersey — had no idea the program existed. She has now applied for Social Security benefits for him, something neither of them ever wanted. “He’s embarrassed,” she said. “My heart breaks for the kid. He wants to work, he wants to do good. I just wish we could have gotten help while he was still in high school.” Maureen Piccoli Kerne, who started a transition program at a high school in Ridgefield, N.J., says counseling before job placement is crucial. “It’s important because then they know what they like to do,” she said. “They know what their strengths are. They know how to ask for accommodations at work.” She recently worked with a young woman who loves libraries. Her developmental disability prevented her from attending a traditional college, but she took courses online to become a librarian’s assistant and got a job at a public library on Long Island. “She was so excited about the courses,” said Ms. Kerne. “She has a job she loves and she’s being productive, and that’s what can happen when you work with young people early.” For more than 30 years, federal education law has required schools to help students with disabilities plan for their transition out of high school. But there’s often a gap between what a school can provide and the kind of training or counseling a student needs. That’s where the pre-employment services are supposed to help. Before 2014, state vocational rehabilitation agencies primarily worked with adults. That changed when Congress directed the agencies to offer services geared toward employment to all students with disabilities, starting as early as age 14. Most New Jersey students never get the option. Local teachers say it is difficult to reach overburdened state job-training counselors and, when they do, delays leave parents and students waiting for months for services. Some counselors say it is difficult for them to reach school staff members — and that some local schools claim they are already providing everything their students need. Some New Jersey schools have forged good relationships with state counselors, who help students find trial work experiences. And some schools provide high-quality transition services on their own, without the help of the state’s vocational rehabilitation agency. But in most cases, that disjointed system is broken. Ten years after the federal program was put in place, “everybody’s still struggling,” said Gwen Orlowski, executive director of Disability Rights New Jersey. “It’s just dysfunctional.” The law mandated that vocational rehabilitation agencies spend at least 15 percent of their federal money on employment services for young people. But many states balked at being asked to offer services to thousands of additional people without a budget increase. There are few consequences for the massive gaps in access to services; policy advocates blame a lack of oversight by state and federal agencies. The Rehabilitation Services Administration conducts annual reviews of vocational rehabilitation agencies, but some states go years without fixing problems. “We’ve been wanting greater oversight,” said Julie Christensen, executive director of the Association of People Supporting Employment First. “It shouldn’t be the Wild Wild West.” Federal education officials say that existing oversight mechanisms are leading to improvement. In 2021, 23 states were spending less than the 15 percent required by law. That number dropped to 10 states in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available.Zoe Sullivan, a senior at Collingswood High School who has Down syndrome, had been saying since she was in ninth grade that she wanted to go to a four-year residential college program, but her mother, Kim Brooks, said no one at school really listened. “I want to go to a college,” said Zoe, sitting at a cafe near her home. “I want to take classes and learn to be independent.” Last spring, Ms. Brooks found out, very much by accident, about a nonprofit college prep program for students with developmental disabilities — she saw it on a friend’s Instagram post. She has scrambled to submit applications to programs that she and Zoe have found only through word of mouth and hours of research. “It’s like a secret society,” said Ms. Brooks. “You don’t know what you don’t know. We really missed a lot of years.”

The opening weeks of President Trump’s second term have cast America’s campuses into turmoil, with upheaval that threatens to erode the financial foundation of higher education in the United States. As the administration orders the end of diversity programs and imposes cuts to foreign aid, university presidents and their lawyers fear that millions of dollars in federal funding could ultimately vanish. Some research projects, including many connected to the U.S. Agency for International Development, have been suspended, and program directors have made plans for layoffs. But universities have largely been quiet. Professors and administrators alike seem wary of provoking a president who has glorified retribution and has already started to tighten the funding spigot. Staying out of the spotlight, some reason, is prudent. Those who have spoken have often relied on carefully calibrated letters and statements, noting that they are watching but hardly offering any overt opposition. In some instances, researchers and campus leaders have been pressured into silence by a government that has demanded they not speak to reporters as money remains bottled up. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “It’s a hard time and it’s an uncertain time and the combination is nearly paralyzing,” said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which counts more than 1,600 colleges and universities in its membership. The uncertainty, Dr. Mitchell said, has created “reluctance to speak out for fear of repercussions,” a phenomenon he described as “a rational fear.” The White House’s threat last week to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans posed a major risk to universities, though the plan’s legal fate has been thrown into doubt. Other orders, like ones suspending foreign aid and insisting that federal money not go toward diversity, equity and inclusion work, are still convulsing campuses.On the campaign trail, Mr. Trump and others now in his administration crusaded against a cadre of pre-eminent schools, despite the president being an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania and Vice President JD Vance holding a law degree from Yale. But the early policy pushes are striking at campuses far beyond the Ivy League. That includes public research universities that are the pride of many state systems and that are, in some cases, integral to the Feed the Future initiative at U.S.A.I.D. The project, whose website has been offline for days, promotes global food access. But it is built around “innovation labs” at universities in the United States, many of them juggernauts in red states, like the University of Georgia and Mississippi State University.The program, which has spent billions over the years, has effectively been on hiatus as Trump administration officials conduct a broad examination of American aid abroad. “Reviewing and realigning foreign assistance on behalf of hardworking taxpayers is not just the right thing to do, it is a moral imperative,” Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement announcing the pause. The department claimed last week that it had already “prevented” at least $1 billion in “spending not aligned with an America First agenda.” As the administration trumpets the closing of the nation’s checkbook, universities have hardly harnessed their own bully pulpits. Despite outrage over campus protests, tuition levels and particular professors and courses buffeting the higher education industry, many individual universities retain enormous sway and good-will in their communities and states. For now, though, schools seem to be reluctant to try to tap into that. Mississippi State, which leads a Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Fish under a $15 million grant, declined to comment. A spokesman for the state’s higher education board said officials were “aware of the temporary pause” and would “continue to monitor this directive.” And the University of Georgia, home to the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut, similarly referred an inquiry about the pause in aid to the state’s higher education system. The system, led by Sonny Perdue, Mr. Trump’s agriculture secretary during his first administration, did not respond to an interview request.An inquiry to U.S.A.I.D. about claims that it had directed researchers to avoid speaking to the news media went unanswered. The agency, founded in 1961, has itself become a cauldron of worry as top officials have been placed on leave and Elon Musk, who is seeking to cut $1 trillion in federal spending, declared that the administration would close it. (It is not clear whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Musk have such authority.) On Monday, after agency employees assigned to the Washington headquarters were told to stay home from work, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he was serving as the agency’s acting administrator. Some of the silence and hesitancy from campuses stems from confusion. In recent days, university lawyers have scrambled to decipher terse stop-work orders, in part to determine whether schools can use their own money to continue research projects that had been receiving federal support. If legal, such an option might be financially feasible for only some universities. Federal dollars are seen as the only practical, long-term option for most projects that have relied on backing from Washington. In the 2023 fiscal year, the federal government gave universities almost $60 billion for research. During a Faculty Senate meeting that was streamed online on Monday, Jennifer L. Mnookin, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, urged professors to “hold off” on optional expenses so the university could help ensure that “you’re making smart choices.” “The transition has created for us an enormous amount of uncertainty, combined with fast-moving and changing information,” she said. “It’s generated some potentially quite significant threats to important aspects of our mission, as is true for our peer institutions nationally.” Universities across the country are for now using a subtle playbook to try to stave off funding losses: beseeching their congressional delegations to intervene, and sometimes deploying Republican-aligned lobbyists across Washington. “These are different times,” said former Senator Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican who became a lobbyist after he left the congressional leadership. “I’m sure everybody is trying to figure out how it’s going to play out and what they need to do. Different team in town and people are going to have to figure out how to deal with it.” Schools braced for changes after Mr. Trump’s election, including to the nation’s academic research landscape. The first weeks of the new administration have nevertheless been jarring, said Jeffrey P. Gold, the president of the University of Nebraska. “The abruptness and the scale of the messaging have been the largest elements of surprise,” he said in an interview, adding that the outcomes of many projects could be harmed if more delays and cuts materialize. Some critics of Mr. Trump’s budget-cutting ambitions have tried to borrow language from the administration’s rhetoric to make their points. Mark Becker, the president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said the possible end of U.S.A.I.D. support for research risked the nation’s stature and competitiveness abroad. “We urge the administration to resume the critical work of U.S.A.I.D. to assure American prosperity and security,” he said. “It is by empowering our nation’s scientists to tackle global challenges that we will secure U.S. leadership for decades to come.” Mr. Becker is one of the few academic leaders applying such explicit public pressure against a specific set of potential cuts. But congressional Democrats have assailed the chaos that they say the administration has unleashed in higher education. Representative Nikki Budzinski, a Democrat whose district includes the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said she had been “in regular contact with the university since the freeze and, now, the miscommunication about the freeze.” “It’s really, truly creating panic across the board,” she added. In a statement, the university said its Soybean Innovation Lab, which works to improve agriculture in 31 countries, was notified recently that funding had been paused. It has received more $50 million since 2013. Republicans expect that voters, especially in conservative states, will have some tolerance even for cuts that affect their communities. “Probably most Nebraskans are in favor of looking for greater efficiencies,” said Tom Osborne, a Republican who coached the University of Nebraska’s football team to three national championships and later served three terms in Congress. “But sometimes it can pinch a little bit here and there.” Mr. Osborne predicted that changes to some programs would probably go unnoticed by many voters. “Looking at the papers and talking to people here,” he said, “I have not heard a whole lot of conversation about it.” But the consequences already feel acute at some campus offices. At Iowa State University, the compensation of at least 11 people is tied, to some degree, to a U.S.A.I.D. grant that promotes curriculum modernization in Kosovo and that grew out of a decade-old “sister-state” partnership between Iowa and Kosovo. “We are not to put forth any efforts on these activities,” said Curtis R. Youngs, a professor in the Department of Animal Science who works on the project. The grant is worth $4 million over five years. “By U.S.A.I.D. standards, that’s not a huge grant,” Dr. Youngs said. “But it’s a sizable grant from our perspective.”

Now that bird flu has been detected in animals in all 50 states, and nearly 70 cases have been confirmed in people, health officials are racing to find better and more reliable ways to track the virus. One promising method is sampling wastewater. The technique continues to prove useful for monitoring COVID-19; since most people now self-test and formal data collection has diminished, wastewater is the most reliable way of tracking upticks and changes in infections since it doesn’t require people to report results. Scientists are now figuring out how to apply the same principle to test wastewater on farms for H5N1, the avian influenza virus. On Feb. 4, the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR) announced a grant to Barnwell Bio, Inc. to fund the development of a farm-based system for testing wastewater for pathogens. The nonprofit research group FFAR was created by Congress in 2014 via the Farm Bill to use both government and private funding to support important agricultural research, and Barnwell Bio focuses on agricultural applications of wastewater testing. "The system is pretty patchwork" when it comes to understanding what makes animals sick, says Michael Rhys, CEO of Barnwell Bio. “There isn’t a gold standard for understanding animal health of different species.” Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily Read More: We Are Not Safe from Bird Flu Until We Protect Farmworkers Part of the problem has to do with the many species of animals that reside on farms, from pigs to chickens and cows. And not all farms have a central wastewater system, like towns and cities do, where all waste is processed. Developing a way to detect H5N1 in these conditions required specific strategies for each species, says Rhys. To evaluate pathogens that affect chickens, which relieve themselves everywhere in the barn, the farmers wear booties that end up getting covered in the animals’ waste. Vets or health officials take samples from those booties, places them in test tubes, and analyzes them for the presence of H5N1. As for cows, most dairy farms generally focus on milk-producing cows, so effluent can be sampled after workers hose down milking areas, since that's where cows urinate. The grant, which totals around $150,000, will help Rhys’ team to develop a test that farmers can use on site to detect H5N1 early. “Can we detect H5N1 early such that on a big chicken farm, it’s not spreading barn to barn?” says Rhys. “We’re also looking at different variants of H5N1 which can be helpful in understanding where it came from, whether it was a wild bird or it was an animal-to-animal infection.” The company is currently working with two poultry farms to test the feasibility of their wastewater surveillance system.

In late January, scientists at the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH) reported the first cases of H5N9 avian influenza in the U.S., on a duck farm in California. The latest strain isn’t a surprise, say public-health experts, since influenza takes different forms in different species and is constantly mutating. But the appearance of H5N9 is still concerning, especially in light of the ongoing outbreaks in chickens and cows of H5N1. Here's what to know. Why bird flu is so rampant right now “We’ve never seen a global spread of avian influenza virus like this,” says Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “We’ve seen an explosion in the number of outbreaks in poultry and duck operations over the course of recent weeks. This reflects the fact that there is so much H5N1 in migrating waterfowl." There are about 40 million migratory aquatic waterfowl in North America, Osterholm says—which means there are plenty of potential bird-flu hosts, whose poop spreads disease. Read More: Scientists Are Starting to Track Bird Flu in Farm Wastewater "What we are seeing more and more are outbreaks in poultry operations because this virus is common in the environment and it’s blowing around," he says. "That’s different from anything we’ve seen before.” How H5N9 is different from H5N1 H5N9 is “not commonly seen in poultry in general,” says Eman Anis, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. (Anis is part of a lab that conducts national testing of poultry samples for avian influenza.) The virus is the result of a combination of H5N1, H7N9, and H9N2, according to researchers in China who studied samples isolated from bird markets in 2015. At the time, the scientists said it wasn't clear how adept the virus was at infecting people—which remains the case today—but warned it was "imperative to assess the risk of emergence of this novel reassortant virus with potential transmissibility to public health." Why scientists are worried about H5N9 When H5N9 was recently detected in ducks, H5N1 was detected along with it. That's concerning, since viruses are able to combine and reassemble their genetic material. With so much H5N1 circulating, the danger of that strain coming into contact with other avian viruses—like H5N9—increases the chances that new, mutant strains can emerge. The fear is that one of those reassortments could result in a strain that easily infects and spreads among people. Read More: Trump’s Freeze on Foreign Aid Will Make Diseases Surge By allowing bird flu to spread among animals mostly unchecked, “We are increasing the risk of something really terrible happening,” says Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health. “When you take risks, sometimes you get lucky. I always say you can close your eyes and cross a busy street, and you might not get hit by a car. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea." Concern for the future "What absolutely needs to be happening right now is we need a global coordinated strategy," Jha says. "Migratory waterfowl do not observe national boundaries, and any surveillance for [avian influenza] has to be done in a multi-national way.” President Trump’s decision to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization (WHO), and his instructions for federal employees not to work with anyone from the global health agency, will make such a coordinated effort nearly impossible, Jha says—and that it will heighten the chances that viruses, including bird flu, cause larger outbreaks.

Inflation-weary consumers chose Donald J. Trump for President in part because they were sick of seeing prices continue to rise. Now, in the first few weeks of the Trump Administration, prices for homes, cars, fuel, and food are expected to jump once again because of the tariffs Trump announced Feb. 1 on Mexico, Canada, and China. Mexico said Feb. 3 that it had reached a deal with the U.S. to delay its tariffs for a month as the two countries negotiate on border security, but the blanket 25% tariffs Trump threatened could still hit later. Trump also struck a deal with Canada to delay his 25% tariffs on Canadian goods (10% on oil and natural gas) for a month. But 10% tariffs on China are expected to go into effect Feb. 4. Experts say consumer prices on a number of goods are almost sure to rise if these tariffs are in effect for more than a few months. The right-leaning Tax Foundation estimates that the proposed tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China could add more than $800 of costs to each U.S. household in 2025. Home prices shot up in 2020 and have barely moderated since, but there’s more pain to come for potential buyers, experts say. Materials for homebuilding are getting more and more expensive, and the tariffs won’t help: more than 70% of imports of softwood lumber comes from Canada, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The 25% tariff on softwood lumber comes on top of a 14.5% tariff already in place, according to the NAHB. Mexico supplies the U.S. with gypsum, a building material used for drywall, and the price of it is expected to climb when those tariffs go into effect. Tariffs on lumber “increase the cost of construction and discourage new development,” said Carl Harris, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders, in a statement. Consumers may end up paying in the form of higher home prices, which are already up about 40% since 2020. America has a chronic shortage of homes, and many experts say building houses is the key to easing costs. Last year was already a slow time for homebuilding; construction was started on only about 1.4 million units, the lowest level since 2019 and a 4% decline from 2023. That’s partly because of costs. Inputs to residential construction—essentially labor and materials—are up more than 30% since Jan. 2021. The Trump Administration’s round-up of migrants will also drive the cost of labor up, says Jeff Schott, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics. The roundups will leave fewer construction workers available, he says. Autos There are few industries with supply chains that straddle borders as much as automobiles. Parts can be sent across the border to Canada and other countries and then back again numerous times as a car is made, says William Reinsch, senior advisor at the nonprofit Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Even if the tariffs are just on Canada, this is going to royally mess up automobile supply chains,” he says. The U.S. and Canada have had a free trade agreement on automobiles that goes back to the 1970s and predates NAFTA, Reinsch says. The tariffs on Mexico and Canada could increase the price of a sedan by around $2,000, says Michael Hicks, an economist at Ball State University in Indiana. The cost of a big SUV would go up even more because it has so many different electronic components, he says, estimating that a $50,000 U.S. made car could see its prices increase by $5,000 because of the tariffs. Energy Canada is a big supplier of energy, including crude oil, natural gas, and hydropower. Although the energy tariffs on Canadian imports are a bit lower, at 10%, that will still have an impact, says Reinsch. This could lead to pain at the pump in the Midwest, he says, where crude oil from Alberta is sent to refineries which turn it into gasoline. Gas prices in the Midwest peaked in June 2022 at nearly $5 per gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration. They’ve come down since but started ticking up again in January. “These refineries can’t easily shift to another kind of oil,” Reinsch says, meaning they’ll continue to import Canadian crude and pay the tariffs. The energy tariffs could also bump up energy prices in New England and New York, which get some of their electricity from Canadian hydropower. About 53% of Hydro-Quebec’s sales outside of Quebec came from New England in 2023, and 10% came from New York, according to the company’s annual report. The New England Independent Systems Operator, which operates the region’s electricity transmission network, said in a statement that about 9% of electricity demand in New England was met through imports from Canada and New York. Food The U.S. grows a lot of food, but it is increasingly reliant on Mexico and Canada for fresh produce, according to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. The volume of imported fresh vegetables alone rose nearly 200% over the past two decades. The tariffs on Canadian imports will affect prices of a few other foods in particular. About 75% of the world’s maple syrup is made in Canada, and the U.S. was the world’s top importer of the stuff in 2023, buying about $280 million dollars worth, according to the World Bank. Even maple syrup made in Vermont and other places in the Northeast could be affected by the tariffs; most of the equipment used in producing it is made in Canada. Companies in Vermont are frantically moving maple equipment over the border, according to the Maple News, a Vermont trade publication. The U.S. also imports about $17 billion worth of Canadian grain and grain products every year, according to the Grain Growers of Canada. The grain is used for products like bread, pasta, biofuels, feed, and brewing. “Whether you’re growing crops or buying groceries, these tariffs will make life more expensive at a time when most are already being priced out,” Tara Sawyer, an Alberta farmer and chair of the Grain Growers of Canada, said in a statement. Cheap Stuff Online Many economists aren’t thinking as much about how the 10% tariffs on China might affect consumers because those tariffs are relatively small compared to the ones announced on the U.S.’s North American counterparts. But there’s one part of the tariffs in particular that could have a big impact on stuff from China. It’s known as the de minimus provision. For years, companies sending cheap goods to U.S. consumers have been able to avoid tariffs because of the provision, which exempts goods that cost less than $800 from tariffs and inspection. That’s allowed Chinese retailers to send stuff directly to U.S. consumers and avoid taxes that would otherwise be levied on them. One Congressional report from June 2024 found that Chinese e-commerce sites Temu and Shein account for more than 30% of all packages shipped to the U.S. every day under the de minimus provision. The latest executive orders on tariffs, however, suspend the de minimis provision, saying that it has been used to funnel fentanyl into the U.S. One memo from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection office obtained by TIME said that, as of Feb. 4, 2025, “Requests for de minimis entry and clearance for ineligible shipments will be rejected.” This could mean that some of that stuff you’re buying on the Internet, from clothes and cheap electronics to furniture, is likely to become a little more expensive soon.