The 2026 national park pass features a portrait of Donald Trumps face, and the Department of the Interior (DOI) has threatened to penalize anyone who tries to cover it up. Now, park lovers are inventing their own clever work-arounds to remove the presidents visage from their passes.
For over two decades, the annual America the Beautiful park pass design has featured photography of nature, animals, and scenery across the United States. But when the DOI revealed the 2026 pass in November, something was glaringly different. Rather than a cascading waterfall or towering redwoods, the pass included a portrait of George Washington, framed side by side with Trumps mug-shot-inspired headshot.
The response to the pass design was swift. Many cardholders took to the internet to show themselves covering Trumps face with stickers as a form of protest. But mere weeks later, per an internal email obtained by SFGate, the DOI updated its Void if Altered policy in a transparent effort to discourage pass holders from covering Trumps face.
Whereas the policy previously stated that passes could be voided only if the signature section of the card was altered, it now overtly flags stickers and other coverings as alterations that could invalidate the pass. According to a policy document shared with The Washington Post, staff who come across altered passes are instructed to ask that stickers or coverings be removed. If that’s not possible, they’re permitted to either charge the guest with the regular entrance fee or give them the option to buy a brand-new pass.
While the Trump administration is acting quickly to redesign the National Park Service in Trumps literal image, national parkgoers are quicker. In the days since the pass policy was altered in early January, multiple designers have stepped up with clever work-arounds that conceal the presidents glowering face without running afoul of the restrictions. The simplest solution is a card sleeve that covers Trump’s face most of the time, but can be easily removed when the card is shown at park entrances.
[Photo: Dirt Roads Project]
How small designers are fighting back against the DOI
Katie Weber and her husband, Chris, started their Michigan-based apparel brand Dirt Roads Project in March 2025. The company, Weber says, was her way to make a difference after feeling overwhelmed by everything happening in our country.” So part of each purchase gives back to the preservation of parks and nature, including through collaborations with nonprofits like the Michigan Animal Rescue League, Alliance for the Great Lakes, and Reef Relief.
When Weber saw the park pass design for 2026, she immediately decided to create something that would cover Trumps face.
I was incredibly frustrated and wanted to be able to bring the parks front and center instead of showing someone who is honestly trying to dismantle our parks, Weber says. That night, I started going through all of our photography from past hiking trips, chose a handful that I loved, and created the design.
Her final selections, which run for just $6 each, feature photos taken at eight prominent national parks, including Zion in Utah, Haleakal in Maui, and Yosemite in California. After they launched for preorder around Thanksgiving, Weber says, interest in the stickers has been growing rapidly.
Weber specifically engineered the stickers to avoid covering any pertinent information on the cards, including the signature section, holographic strip, and barcode. But in the wake of the DOIs new sticker ban, she adapted the design to guarantee that users wont be penalized. Instead of adding the sticker directly to their passes, customers can now purchase a $2 plastic card sleeve from Dirt Roads Project to keep their cards completely unaltered while still obscuring the presidents face.
After the DOIs new regulations emerged, Weber says Dirt Roads Project has seen “skyrocketing” demand, bringing in over $6,000 from the stickers alone in the first weeks of January. To me, that shows that this small form of protest is being seen, and that people’s frustration is being heard, she says.
Other small businesses are similarly using their art to fight back. Mitchell Bowen is a graphic designer who runs a poster company called Recollection Project, pulling inspiration from 1930s illustrations to create posters of national parks and other travel destinations. He designed
My grandmother never realized she was practicing a die with zero philosophy. She liked to give generous presents to her children and grandchildren on birthdays, gift-giving occasionsand whenever the mood struck her. I once asked her why she kept her loved ones so well-supplied in gifts, and she remarked, Why should you be glad Im dead?
In other words, she didnt see the point in holding onto the money that would come to her family anyway when she died. By spending her money on us while she was still alive, she enjoyed our delight in her generosity. She saw that as a better use of her money than letting it grow until it became our emotionally uncomfortable inheritance.
In many ways, Grandma embodied the die with zero financial planning philosophy popularized by Bill Perkins. This philosophy encourages people to enjoy their money while they liveideally spending their final dollar just before kicking the bucketbecause theres no point in being the wealthiest person in the cemetery.
Considering the complexities of traditional financial planningnot to mention your understandable worries about running out of money in retirementthe die with zero philosophy may sound like a great way to live with low-grade anxiety during your golden years. But theres a way to balance your impulse to save for the future with the joy of enjoying your money right now.
The problem with traditional planning
Every day without fail, youll find a brand new think piece about how painfully underfunded the average American retirement account is. That’s why financial medias prevailing message about retirement planning is only slightly less hyperbolic than, For the love of all that is holy, put some money in a 401(k) NOW before its too late!!!
Unfortunately, this hyperfocus on building wealth makes it seem like even the largest of nest eggs is one unwary purchase away from leaving you destitute. The majority of retirees have built the life they want, but almost half are afraid to spend their money so they can live that life.
While this is not a problem that every retiree will face (see the depressing statistics about the size of the average American retirement account), its still a common issue for anyone who has internalized the accumulate! retirement planning message for decades.
Enter the die with zero financial philosophy.
What is Die with Zero?
Although hedge fund manager Bill Perkins coined the term (and wrote the eponymous book Die With Zero), the concept is hardly a new one. With the possible exception of some pharaohs and oligarchs, we all know we cant take it with us when we go.
Instead, Perkins suggests that our highest goal should be to maximize positive life experiences using the three limited resources we are all afforded: health, time, and money.
Of course, our levels of health, time, and money are not in perfect balance throughout our lives, which is why Perkins recommends using each of these resources when we have them.
When youre young, healthy, and have plenty of time, you can spend it enjoying low-cost but high-effort experiences, like backpacking through Europe. Once youre older, time-crunched, and wealthierbut still enjoying good healthyou can spend money to enjoy luxurious experiences that are lower-effort, like taking a cruise through the Greek Isles. And anytime your health is declining, you can spend time and money to help improve your health.
Die with zero financial planning
Die with zero is an appealing philosophy in part because its not just about money, retirement, or financial planning. Its a framework for optimizing your life. Much of the die with zero model is about changing your view of money, health, and time throughout your life.
However, the die with zero philosophy includes a blueprint for financial planning. Specifically, Perkins recommends the following rules for handling your finances so that you can die with zero:
Plan for different seasons of your life: Described by Perkins as time-bucketing, this strategy separates your life into 5- to 10-year chunks. For each time-bucket, you set experience goals you want to meet that will change as your time, health, and wealth change.
Spend with intention: Rather than accumulate wealth that youre afraid to spend, joyfully spend your money on memorable experiences that will make your life more meaningful.
Give money away to children and charities when its the most impactful: This is an echo of my grandmothers attitude. Rather than leaving a financial legacy to beloved family or charities when you diewhen they may no longer need the moneygive it away when the money can do the most good and while youre alive to see the benefit.
Recognize when youve hit your wealth peak: So much of retirement planning is about accumulation, which means it can be tough to know when youve reached enough. And then it can be even harder to feel comfortable spending down your nest egg. This philosophy suggests that you figure out when youre done growing your wealth so you can let go of the drive to keep growing.
Balancing prudence with pleasure
Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die may be an excellent motto for soldiers heading off to war, but its a little harder to justify as a responsible life maxim when youre impulsively charging once-in-a-lifetime trips to Bali on your high-interest credit card.
Which is why its a good idea to fold the philosophy of the die with zero movement into traditional financial planning.
Focus on growing your nest egg, especially when you have the benefit of compound interest over time. But make sure you also invest some of your resourcestime, health, and moneyinto making memories.
Plan ahead for potential health problems in old age, which may mean earmarking money for future medical expenses. But also let yourself be generous with money to your loved ones when they need it.
Continue to make smart and frugal financial decisions in retirement. Butkeep meeting the experience goals you set for yourself, too, so that you continue to have new adventures to look forward to.
Treating your finances with intentionality is the best way to enjoy yourself and your moneynow and in retirement.
There are few things in the digital world as annoying as spam emails. They flood our inbox after our email address is sold by a data broker, shared with third parties from a site weve willingly given it to, or obtained through a data breach. Its natural to want to get off these lists as fast as possible, but if theres one thing you should rarely ever do with one of these spammy emails, it’s click the unsubscribe link found in it. Heres why, and what to do instead.
The problem with ‘unsubscribe’ email links
With few exceptions (see below), you should avoid clicking on unsubscribe links in most emails you receive. This is especially true if the link is in an email that is clearly spam, one from some business or website you have never given your information to.
This is because these unsubscribe links usually take you to a web page via a URL embedded in the unsubscribe text that identifies your email address, either in plain text or via an alphanumeric code. The moment this unique URL loads, the spammer at the other end knows that you were the one to click it; they now know that the email address they blasted does, in fact, have a real person at the other end.
If the email is from a spammer, there is a high chance that they will notand never intended todelete your email address from their database. In this case, clicking on that unsubscribe link reveals to the spammer that the email address theyve sent the message to is being read by a human. This confirmation usually only makes your email address a target for even more spam emails. This is the best-case scenario.
But theres a worst-case scenario as well. Scam emails often imitate genuine organizationssuch as your bank or a subscription service provider. These emails typically claim that you can opt out of what appear to be marketing messages by clicking the unsubscribe link. However, when you do, the link directs you to a malicious website that appears legitimate and asks you to log in or provide other personal information to verify that you are the account owner who wants to unsubscribe. The scammers then use the information you enter on their fake site to hack into your real account or commit other types of identity theft with the data youve given them.
Heres what to do instead
It should be noted that if you are 100% certain an email is from the organization it purports to be (such as Netflix, Apple, or Chase Bank, for example), its pretty safe to click on the emails unsubscribe link. Large companies tend to honor unsubscribe requests because they would face significant public backlash (and potential legal troubles) if they didnt.
But if you are even remotely uncertain, or the email is clearly from a spammy site you never signed up for in the first place, it’s probably best to avoid clicking on that tempting unsubscribe link.
Instead, if you want to stop receiving emails from the sender, you can block the offending email address. When you block an email address, any emails from that address will usually be sent directly to your spam or junk mail folder, so you should never see a message from the senders email address in your inbox again.
How to block an email address
The best way to block an email address depends on the email service provider you have.
If you use Gmail on the web, you can click the More button in the Gmail menu bar of the offending email and then select Block [sender]. Future messages from that email address will be sent right to the spam folder. If youre using a mobile device, you can find Googles instructions for blocking an email address here.
If you use Apples iCloudor the built-in iPhone Mail appyou have several options for blocking an email address. If youre on an iPhone, the quickest way to block a sender is to swipe on the email message in the Mail apps inbox to reveal its More button. Tap that button and then tap Block Contact to block the sender of the email.
This will cause a banner to appear above the email stating that the sender is blocked. However, emails from a blocked sender will still stay in your inbox until you set the Mail app to automatically move messages from a blocked sender to the Trash folder. Do this by opening the iPhones Settings app, tapping Mail, tapping Blocked Sender Options, and then selecting Move To Trash.
Other major email providers, such as Outlook.com (owned by Microsoft) and Yahoo Mail, offer ways to block email addresses. See instructions here for Outlook and here for Yahoo Mail.
Protect your email address without needing to unsubscribe from anything
A final way to avoid getting a deluge of spam email is to avoid using your real email address in online forms or websites. Instead, use an email alias, which is a randomized email address you can use instead of your real one. Emails sent to this email alias will still arrive in your real email addresss inbox, but if that email alias is ever abused, you can just delete the alias, which means that any emails sent to it never reach your inbox.
The easiest email alias system to use is Apples Hide My Email servicea feature available to paying iCloud Plus subscribersand arguably the best reason to become a paying subscriber. As I wrote previously, Hide My Email is probably the best Apple product you arent using. Its effective, easy to use, and costs as little as 99 cents a month.
But what if youre not an Apple user? Google is reportedly working on bringing a Hide My Email-like feature to Gmail users, called Shielded Email. In the meantime, Android and Windows users with non-iCloud email accounts could get similar Hide My Email functionality with Protons SimpleLogin service.
But whatever you do, try to avoid clicking on those tempting unsusbscribe links in spam emails.
One year on from the catastrophic LA wildfires, journalist, author, and MS NOW correspondent Jacob Soboroff examines what the fires reveal about Americas growing age of disaster. Drawing from his new book Firestorm, Soboroff shares hard lessons from the aftermath, exposing systemic failures, unlikely heroics, and what todays recovery efforts tell us about how the U.S. will respond to the next crisis.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
You grew up in the Palisades, which were the heart of the fires. For our listeners who haven’t been there, can you describe the Palisades? What it looks like, what type of place it is, and then what happened when the fire swept through and the aftermath?
Pacific Palisades is a coastal enclave, I think you could say, in between Santa Monica and Malibu, the iconic Malibu, and it’s nestled along the Pacific Coast. And it’s actually on the absolute opposite side of Los Angeles County from Altadena where the Eaton fire also burned. And the reason it’s the costliest wildfire event in the history of the country is that both of these massive urban conflagrations unfolded at the same time.
The Palisades fire due to a holdover fire from an arson fire seven days earlier up at the top of Lachman Lane in the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Eaton Fire in Altadena because of, the prevailing theory goes, faulty electrical equipment that energized and led to a spark, that when there were hurricane force Santa Ana wind gusts 80 miles per hour or greater, which by the way, were predicted by the National Weather Service as a particularly dangerous situation, one spark like that led to what they knew was going to be a catastrophic situation.
And so the Palisades, the fire raced down from the Santa Monica Mountains and engulfed the community of tens of thousands, and the same exact thing happened in Eaton Canyon on the other side of Los Angeles County, engulfing Altadena.
You said that the winds were predicted. There are some folks who talk about how the conditions were unprecedented, these hurricane force winds, and dry landscape, and densely populated homes altogether. Folks weren’t really prepared to handle what unfolded.
No, definitely not, and growing up in the Palisades, I evacuated the house that we lived in as a kid, and you always return home and the house is fine. And certainly, there have been homes lost in these fires, but nothing like this. Nothing like thousands of homes, 31 people killed, hundreds of thousands of people displaced. This was something that I don’t think any of us had ever seen, and as you mentioned, the conditions were such that we had received barely any rain at all in the late part of 2024 and into the beginning of 2025, and so Los Angeles was a tinderbox ready to go.
And I think what I’ve uncovered, discovered, learned about what it was that I experienced was that this was really the fire of the future. I thought it was a time machine into my past, but really, it was a look into the future that my children and our children will inhabit. And when I say the fire of the future, this was a senior emergency manager working for the federal government that said to me in a clandestine meeting after the fires, who this guy had been to every mass casualty fire in the last five years working for the federal government, there’s not one proximate cause.
And certainly, there’s lots of investigative reporting to be done about whether or not there were predeployed firefighters in the right places or the reservoir was full, and it wasn’t full and should have been and who’s to blame for that? Or should Karen Bass, the mayor of LA, have been in town or out of town? Did Gavin Newsom do what he said? Did Donald Trump’s misinformation and disinformation affect this as the president elect?
But really, this man, Jonathan White, from the Commissioned Health Service Corps, said to me, he took my notebook and he said, “Let me draw an X on it.” And on the forums of the X were obviously climate change, infrastructure falling apart, changes in the way we live, thousands of electric car batteries, another new technology exploding during the fires. And then the big one is the misinformation and the disinformation in terms of how people got notified, or didn’t, about what was happening in Los Angeles.
And all of those things together is what made this not only the Great Los Angeles Fires, but also in some measure, the new age of disaster, America’s new age of disaster where it isn’t just a spark. It’s a spark combined with our politics, it’s a spark combined with the ways we live, it’s a spark combined with hurricane force winds in bone dry Los Angeles in the middle of the winter. It’s all of those things combined.
You write in the book about people fighting to save their homes or spraying down their own property with flames all around them. What’s our individual responsibility in a disaster versus what we should be expecting of our government? The tales of people spraying down their own houses, it seems dangerous.
I think it certainly was. My own brother spent a long time considering whether or not to leave their house that ultimately burned down that he was living in, his in-laws’ home. And I know many stories like that, that people didn’t leave till the very last second, and I think it’s human nature to want to stand up and defend what is yours. These men and women of the LA County Fire Department, of the LA City Fire Department, of the mutual aid efforts from all over not just Southern California, but the American West and Mexico and Canada, firefighters came from everywhere, thousands and thousands of firefighters. They did everything they could to stop this blaze.
There’s a firefighter, Eric Mendoza, who I write about, who laid on his stomach in the middle of El Medio Street in the Palisades with his hose, two and a half diameter hose, biggest hose they could flow open full bore with thousand plus degree temperatures, automobile metal melting around them, and saying to himself, “I’m going to have black shit in my lungs and be coughing up stuff for days and weeks. I can barely see. I need to go into a house to wash my eyes out.”
The question is what’s our government’s role? Our government’s role is to provide services to us to mitigate and ideally stop, but the reality is it’s not going to be possible. And as I said, are there questions to ask about could there have been more pre-deployed firefighters in the Palisdes? Of course, those are important questions to ask.
But to me, it’s also as much a story, if it’s a story about failures, it’s a story about hope, because I got to meet and spend time around incredible people, not just the firefighters from the Palisades and from Altadena, wildlife biologists who studied the animals that were the first to repopulate these areas, federal government employees like the meteorologists that predicted this stuff. All of them give me hope in the way in which they have approached this. Day laborers, by the way, who are out rebuilding and cleaning up, despite the fact that they’re under the crosshairs of this administration.
I always find that in a catastrophe, there are hopeful threads. It’s easy to think about the negative parts of this, but to me, I’m also as uplifted as I’ve ever been after having a really hard year, and I think that that’s what this book was for me as much as anything, which was a cathartic process to work through.
For years, AI at work felt like a quiet helper in the background. It summarized meetings, suggested text, and answered questions when we asked. That era is ending.
The latest AI agents are beginning to move through systems more like teammates. They join projects, update plans, and act across teams. For the first time, organizations are effectively bringing on colleagues that can see more of the workplace than any single person ever could.
Ive spent years building tools to give teams clarity and save them time, so I see the upside. But that shift forces a harder question: what does it really mean for an AI to see everything in a workplace?
The ethical issue isnt whether agents can technically access information. It is whether their access mirrors what a reasonable employee would encounter in the course of doing their job.
When Visibility Turns Into Influence
Most workplaces rely on role-based access and permissions to maintain order. People see only the information relevant to their role, and those boundaries shape how teams collaborate and how they resolve disagreements.
AI agents complicate that system. If an agent has more access than it should, even by accident, it can surface information that changes how work is interpreted and shifts decisions away from the people meant to make them.
These scenarios usually appear in small ways first. An employee might ask an agent a question and receive an answer based on sensitive information they did not realize was in the agents scope.
People also produce their best ideas through drafts, notes, and early sketches that are not meant for broad consumption. Even the chance that AI might leverage those early drafts changes how people ideate. They’ll start revising earlier, sharing less freely, and spending more time avoiding misinterpretation.
Each incident can seem isolated, but together they alter how authority, context, and trust flow through an organization.
What Responsible Use Should Look Like
The central question for leaders is not what AI agents are capable of doing; it is what they should be allowed to see. Boundaries must be clear before these systems become part of daily work.
An agent working on behalf of an employee should have the same access that employee has, no more and no less. Anything else creates uncertainty. Who can see what? Who can change what? That uncertainty erodes internal trust.
Limiting agents to any other standard also creates problems. An agent that lacks access to shared context, public decisions, or common company knowledge will give incomplete or misleading answers. Ethical design is not about minimizing access. It is about giving agents enough accurate, live context to be genuinely useful.
Responsibility also has to remain with people. Access defines what an agent can do; accountability defines who owns the outcome. When an agent takes an action, the individual who invoked it should be accountable for the result. Just like a manager owning the work done by their team, delegating tasks to AI can help with efficiency, but decision-making still belongs to the humans who direct the work.
Private creative spaces deserve protection as well. Drafts, personal notes, and early explorations help employees test ideas before presenting them. These spaces do not need to be sealed off, but they should be clearly defined and respected. Preserving them supports healthier experimentation and a more open exchange of ideas.
Transparency matters throughout this process. Protected spaces only work if the system around them is visible and understandable. When an agent recommends an action or executes one, employees should be able to understand, at a basic level, how it reached that conclusion.
As companies adopt AI agents more widely, technical and organizational decisions will converge. The systems will influence how teams collaborate, how information moves, and how people feel about their work. This shapes whether AI becomes a supportive part of the workplace or a source of friction.
The issue is no longer whether AI can see everything. It is how leaders define the limits, and how clearly they communicate those choices to the people who rely on them.
In todays rapidly changing work environment, developing trust among team members is crucial for success. Yet, many organizations struggle to foster an atmosphere of collaboration and understanding, often resulting in communication breakdowns, conflicts, and a decrease in productivity. The inability to trust can be the result of misunderstanding, conflicting values, or misjudging others because they trigger us and remind us of a negative situation or experience in our past.
Building our emotional intelligence can help us increase our awareness and become less prone to building up barriers to trust. Trust isnt built through charisma or authorityits built through emotional presence. Leaders who create environments where people feel emotionally safe, seen, and respected accelerate not just connection, but performance, says Dawn Christian, the CEO of BeLeadership, a leadership coaching community. Emotional intelligence means we become more effective at recognizing and managing our own emotions, as well as understanding and influencing the emotions of others. As an author of two books on emotional intelligence, Ive found that by boosting emotional intelligence, leaders and employees can build a culture that reduces and eliminates many of the barriers that lead to a lack of trust.
Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five major areas: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and social skills. Through developing these areas, employees and leaders at all levels can become more adept at navigating through all the areas that build barriers to trust.
1. Self-awareness
The first area is being able to reflect on situations. At the end of the day, everyone needs to take an inner journey and consider why they reacted the way they did to a situation. In hindsight, we could ask ourselves how well we managed our reactions in the moment. Would another way of interpreting and reacting have been more effective? Would the outcome have been more positive? Journaling is a known way to aid in the process of self-reflection. It helps us track emotions and reactions and look for patterns that keep coming up that we may want to work on changing.
2. Self-regulation
We need to practice self-regulating our emotions. When we notice strong emotions emerging, we need to keep ourselves from reacting. For example, when we have a strong desire to act out from our emotions, count to 10 or remove ourselves from the situation. After taking time to think things through, it is unlikely that we would choose the same response we would if we reacted purely from our emotions. When we continually practice this, we will feel more confident that we have mastered our emotions and wont react in a manner that we may later regret.
Busyness doesnt just drain our energyit erodes our emotional capacity . . . Breaking up with busyness isnt about doing lessits about clearing the space where emotional intelligence, trust, and leadership actually take shape, Christian points out.
3. Motivation
A good practice is to always view a situation through the lens of how our reactions will serve us. Once we have a firm understanding of our goalsprofessionally and personallyit becomes easier to motivate ourselves. Once we have a clear picture of what we want from life, and where we are going, we are better able to hold ourselves accountable and not deviate from actions that prevent us from moving in the direction of our goals. With this comes a strong realization that we have to be able to collaborate and work as part of a team to succeed. This makes us the kind of person others trust and want to work with.
4. Empathy
Practice active listening and empathy. Most of the time when someone is speaking, we are thinking of a response rather than really listening. Everyone has a need to feel that they have been heard. When others are speaking, pay full attention and let them know by your posture and body language that you are engaged. After they have spoken, ask questions to clarify that we have understood them correctly. Even if we do not agree with their perspective, it is crucial that they feel heard and respected. This is a major step towards building trust.
5. Social skills
Continually build our social skills through activities that encourage collaboration. Any type of team-building activity is a good way to engage with others in an authentic and supportive manner. Activities in which people share both their successes and their struggles help show that we all have strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Whenever we engage in activities that bring out more of our human side, we build stronger bridges between people and deepen trust.
The Food and Drug Administration commissioner’s effort to drastically shorten the review of drugs favored by President Donald Trump’s administration is causing alarm across the agency, stoking worries that the plan may run afoul of legal, ethical, and scientific standards long used to vet the safety and effectiveness of new medicines.
Marty Makary’s program is causing new anxiety and confusion among staff already rocked by layoffs, buyouts, and leadership upheavals, according to seven current or recently departed staffers. The people spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential agency matters.
At the highest levels of the FDA, questions remain about which officials have the legal authority to sign off on drugs cleared under the Commissioners National Priority Voucher program, which promises approval in as little as one month for medicines that support U.S. national interests.
Traditionally, approval decisions have nearly always been handled by FDA review scientists and their immediate supervisors, not the agencys political appointees and senior leaders.
But drug reviewers say they’ve received little information about the new program’s workings. And some staffers working on a highly anticipated anti-obesity pill were recently told they can skip certain regulatory steps to meet top officials’ aggressive deadlines.
Outside experts point out that FDA drug reviewswhich range from six to 10 monthsare already the fastest in the world.
The concept of doing a review in one to two months just does not have scientific precedent, said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School. FDA cannot do the same detailed review that it does of a regular application in one to two months, and it doesnt have the resources to do it.
On Thursday, Reuters reported that FDA officials have delayed the review of two drugs in the program, in part due to safety concerns, including the death of a patient taking one of the medications.
Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the voucher program prioritizes gold standard scientific review and aims to deliver meaningful and effective treatments and cures.”
The program remains popular at the White House, where pricing concessions announced by the Republican president have repeatedly been accompanied by FDA vouchers for drugmakers that agree to cut their prices.
For instance, when the White House announced that Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would reduce prices on their popular obesity drugs, FDA staffers had to scramble to vet new vouchers for both companies in time for Trump’s news conference, according to multiple people involved in the process.
Thats sparked widespread concern that FDA drug reviewslong pegged to objective standards and procedureshave become open to political interference.
Its extraordinary to have such an opaque application process, one that is obviously susceptible to politicization, said Paul Kim, a former FDA attorney who now works with pharmaceutical clients.
Top FDA officials declined to sign off on expedited approvals
Many of the concerns around the program stem from the fact that it hasn’t been laid out in federal rules and regulations.
The FDA already has more than a half-dozen programs intended to speed up or streamline reviews for promising drugsall approved by Congress, with regulations written by agency staff.
In contrast, information about the voucher program is mostly confined to an agency website. Drugmakers can apply by submitting a 350-word statement of interest.
Increasingly, agency leaders such as Dr. Vinay Prasad, the FDAs top medical officer and vaccine center director, have been contacting drugmakers directly about awarding vouchers. Thats created quandaries for FDA staffers on even basic questions, such as how to formally award a voucher to a company that didnt request one.
Nixon, the HHS spokesman, said that voucher submissions are evaluated by a senior, multidisciplinary review committee, led by Prasad.
Questions about the legality of the program led the FDAs then-drug director, Dr. George Tidmarsh, to decline to sign off on approvals under the pathway, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. Tidmarsh resigned from the agency in November after a lawsuit challenging his conduct on issues unrelated to the voucher program.
After his departure, Dr. Sara Brenner, the FDAs principal deputy commissioner, was set to have the power to decide, but she also declined the role after looking further into the legal implications, according to the people. Currently, the agencys deputy chief medical officer, Dr. Mallika Mundkur, who works under Prasad, is taking on the responsibility.
Giving final approval to a drug carries significant legal risks, essentially certifying that the medicine meets FDA standards for safety and effectiveness. If unexpected safety problems later emerge, both the agency and individual staffers could be pulled into investigations or lawsuits.
Traditionally, approval comes from FDA drug office directors, made in consultation with a team of reviewers. Under the voucher program, approval comes through a committee vote by senior agency leaders led by Prasad, according to multiple people familiar with the process. Staff reviewers don’t get a vote.
It is a complete reversal from the normal review process, which is traditionally led by the scientists who are th ones immersed in the data, said Kesselheim, who is a lawyer and a medical researcher.
Not everyone sees problems with the program. Dan Troy, the FDAs top lawyer under President George W. Bush, a Republican, says federal law gives the commissioner broad discretion to reorganize the handling of drug reviews.
Still, he says, the voucher program, like many of Makarys initiatives, may be short-lived because it isn’t codified.
If you live by the press release then you die by the press release, Troy said. Anything that theyre doing now could be wiped out in a moment by the next administration.
The voucher program has ballooned after outreach by FDA officials
Initially framed as a pilot program of no more than five drugs, it has expanded to 18 vouchers awarded, with more under consideration. That puts extra pressure on the agencys drug center, where 20% of the staff has left through retirements, buyouts or resignations over the past year.
When Makary unveiled the program in October, there were immediate concerns about the unprecedented power he would have in deciding which companies benefit.
Makary then said that nominations for drugs would come from career staffers. Indeed, some of the early drugs were recommended by FDA reviewers, according to two people familiar with the process. They said FDA staffers deliberately selected drugs that could be vetted quickly.
But, increasingly, selection decisions are led by Prasad or other senior officials, sometimes unbeknownst to FDA staff, according to three people. In one case, FDA reviewers learned from GlaxoSmithKline representatives that Prasad had contacted the company about a voucher.
Access to Makary is limited because he does not use a government email account to do business, according to people familiar with the matter, breaking with longstanding precedent.
Under pressure from drugmakers, some FDA reviewers were told they can skip steps
Once a voucher is awarded, some drugmakers have their own interpretation of the review timeline creating further confusion and anxiety among staff.
Two people involved in the ongoing review of Eli Lilly’s anti-obesity pill said company executives initially told the FDA they expected the drug approved within two months.
The timeline alarmed FDA reviewers because it did not include the agency’s standard 60-day prefiling period, when staffers check the application to ensure it isnt missing essential information. That 60-day window has been in place for more than 30 years.
Lilly pushed for a quicker filing turnaround, demanding one week. Eventually the agency and the company agreed to a two-week period.
Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, told attendees at a health care conference on Tuesday that the company expects FDA approval of its pill in the second quarter of the year.
Nixon declined to comment on the specifics of Lilly’s review but said FDA reviewers can adjust timelines as needed.
Staffers were pushed to keep the application moving forward, even though key pieces of data about the drug’s chemistry appeared to be missing, according to one person involved in the process. When reviewers raised concerns about gaps in the application, the person said, they were told by a senior FDA official that it was OK to overlook the regulations if the science is sound.
Former reviewers and outside experts say that approach is the opposite of how FDA reviews should work: By following the regulations, staffers scientifically confirm the safety and effectiveness of drugs.
Skipping review steps could also carry risks for drugmakers if future FDA leaders decide a drug wasnt properly vetted. Like other experts, Kesselheim says the program may not last beyond the current administration.
They are fundamentally changing the application of the standards, but the underlying law remains what it is, he said. The hope is that one day we will return to these scientifically sound, legally sound principles.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Matthew Perrone, AP health writer
U.S. President Donald Trump suggested Friday that he may punish countries with tariffs if they dont back the U.S. controlling Greenland, a message that came as a bipartisan Congressional delegation sought to lower tensions in the Danish capital.
Trump for months has insisted that the U.S. should control Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark, and said earlier this week that anything less than the Arctic island being in U.S. hands would be unacceptable.
During an unrelated event at the White House about rural health care, he recounted Friday how he had threatened European allies with tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
I may do that for Greenland too, Trump said. I may put a tariff on countries if they dont go along with Greenland, because we need Greenland for national security. So I may do that, he said.
He had not previously mentioned using tariffs to try to force the issue.
Earlier this week, the foreign ministers of Denmark and Greenland met in Washington this week with U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
That encounter didnt resolve the deep differences, but did produce an agreement to set up a working group on whose purpose Denmark and the White House then offered sharply diverging public views.
European leaders have insisted that it is only for Denmark and Greenland to decide on matters concerning the territory, and Denmark said this week that it was increasing its military presence in Greenland in cooperation with allies.
A relationship that we need to nurture
In Copenhagen, a group of senators and members of the House of Representatives met Friday with Danish and Greenlandic lawmakers, and with leaders including Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.
Delegation leader Sen. Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat, thanked the groups hosts for 225 years of being a good and trusted ally and partner and said that we had a strong and robust dialogue about how we extend that into the future.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, said after meeting lawmakers that the visit reflected a strong relationship over decades and it is one that we need to nurture. She told reporters that Greenland needs to be viewed as our ally, not as an asset, and I think thats what youre hearing with this delegation.
The tone contrasted with that emanating from the White House. Trump has sought to justify his calls for a U.S. takeover by repeatedly claiming that China and Russia have their own designs on Greenland, which holds vast untapped reserves of critical minerals. The White House hasnt ruled out taking the territory by force.
We have heard so many lies, to be honest and so much exaggeration on the threats towards Greenland, said Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic politician and member of the Danish parliament who took part in Fridays meetings. And mostly, I would say the threats that were seeing right now is from the U.S. side.
Murkowski emphasized the role of Congress in spending and in conveying messages from constituents.
I think it is important to underscore that when you ask the American people whether or not they think it is a good idea for the United States to acquire Greenland, the vast majority, some 75%, will say, we do not think that that is a good idea, she said.
Along with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, Murkowski has introduced bipartisan legislation that would prohibit the use of U.S. Defense or State department funds to annex or take control of Greenland or the sovereign territory of any NATO member state without that allys consent or authorization from the North Atlantic Council.
Inuit council criticizes White House statements
The dispute is looming large in the lives of Greenlanders. Greenlands prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said on Tuesday that if we have to choose between the United States and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO. We choose the Kingdom of Denmark. We choose the EU.
The chair of the Nuuk, Greenland-based Inuit Circumpolar Council, which represents around 180,000 Inuit from Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Russias Chukotka region on international issues, said persistent statements from the White House that the U.S. must own Greenland offer a clear picture of how the US administration views the people of Greenland, how the U.S. administration views Indigenous peoples, and peoples that are few in numbers.
Sara Olsvig told The Associated Press in Nuuk that the issue is how one of the biggest powers in the world views other peoples that are less powerful than them. And that really is concerning.
Indigenous Inuit in Greenland do not want to be colonized again, she said.
Daniel Niemann and Darlene Superville, Associated Press
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, said on Friday it will start including ads for those who use the app for free, or have the cheapest subscription, ChatGPT Go.
In the coming weeks, the company plans to start testing those ads in the U.S., which will directly relate to user prompts and conversations, “so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer usage limits or without having to pay,” the company said.
According to OpenAI, the ads will be “clearly labeled” at the bottom of the chat and users can turn off personalization if they want.
As for whether the ads will influence the answers ChatGPT provides, OpenAI said the “responses are driven by whats objectively useful, never by advertising,” and user data and conversations “are protected and never sold to advertisers.”
ChatGPT Go, which launched in India last August and has since rolled out in 170 countries, is now coming to the U.S. and everywhere the AI chatbot is available. It’s ChatGPT’s fastest-growing plan, and OpenAI claims it is “among the most affordable AI subscriptions globally.” (Of course, many AI chatbots are free.)
ChatGPT Go costs $8 a month, and offers access to its latest model, GPT5.2 Instant, giving users expanded access to messaging, image creation, file uploads, and memory, the company said in a statement.
For those who want to avoid ads, more premium subscriptions such as ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Pro come ad-free.
With this launch, ChatGPT now offers three subscription tiers globally: ChatGPT Go at $8 per month; ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month; and ChatGPT Pro at $200 per month.
Stocks wavered in afternoon trading on Wall Street Friday as the first week of corporate earnings season closes out with markets trading near record levels.
The S&P 500 rose 0.1% after shifting between small gains and losses. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 52 points, or 0.1%, as of 3:17 p.m. ET. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.1%.
Technology stocks were the strongest forces behind the market’s moves. The S&P 500 has slightly more losers than gainers, but several big technology stocks made strong gains and countered losses elsewhere.
Nvidia rose 0.4%, Broadcom rose 2.8%, and Micron Technology rose 6.8%. All three are semiconductor companies that are among several Big Tech companies with outsized valuations that often push the market higher or lower.
A handful of regional U.S. banks reported their earnings following mixed reports from their larger peers. Pittsburghs PNC jumped 3.9% after it beat Wall Streets fourth-quarter targets, but Regions Financial fell 3% after reporting results that missed forecasts.
Outside of the banking sector, transport company J.B. Hunt Transport Services fell 1% after reporting mixed quarterly financial results.
The latest round of earnings updates from companies could help give Wall Street a better sense of how consumers are spending their money and how businesses are operating amid economic concerns brought on by inflation and tariffs. Results from the technology sector are being scrutinized by investors trying to figure out whether the high stock prices fueled by the craze around artificial intelligence are justified.
Despite the strong start to 2026, we would not be surprised if markets experience volatility in the coming weeks as fourth-quarter earnings progress and the threat of escalating geopolitical tensions remains, wrote Doug Beath, global equity strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, in a note to investors.
Wall Street will have a broader mix of earnings to review next week, coming from airlines, industrial companies, and technology companies. United Airlines, 3M, and Intel are all scheduled to release their quarterly earnings results next week.
Crude oil prices rose after dropping sharply on Thursday. The price of U.S. crude oil rose 0.4% to $59.44 and the price of Brent crude, the international standard, rose 0.6% to $64.13. Oil prices have been volatile amid widespread protests in Iran against that countrys leadership and President Donald Trump’s warnings that the U.S. will come to their rescue.
Gold prices, which have also been volatile this week, fell. Prices for the precious metal, often viewed as a safe haven amid economic and geopolitical uncertainty, fell 0.6%, but are still up more than 5% so far in January.
Treasury yields moved higher in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.23%, from 4.17% late Thursday. The two-year Treasury yield, which more closely tracks expectations for what the Federal Reserve will do, rose to 3.60%, from 3.57% late Thursday.
The Fed’s next policy meeting on interest rates is in two weeks, and Wall Street is betting that it will maintain its current benchmark interest rate. The central bank is trying to balance a slowing jobs market with stubbornly high inflation. Updates on inflation this week showed that prices remain above the Fed’s 2% goal.
The U.S. central bank will get one more update on inflation next week when the government releases the personal consumption expenditures price index, or PCE. It is Fed’s preferred measure for inflation.
European markets fell, and markets in Asia were mixed. Taiwan’s benchmark index rose 1.9% after its government signed a trade deal with the U.S. China, which claims the self-governed island as its own territory, protested the agreement.
The deal with Taiwan comes amid an ongoing trade war between the U.S. and much of the world. Uncertainty over tariffs have raised concerns about inflation and economic damage because of higher costs for businesses and consumers.
Canada is the latest to shift its partnerships because of the uncertainty. It has agreed to cut its 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products as part of the break with the U.S. Tesla rose 0.4%, and Rivian fell 2.6%.
By Damian J. Troise, AP business writer
