A surging stock market and a flurry of deal-making padded the profits of Wall Street’s two big investment banks, which both saw a double-digit jump in profits in the fourth quarter.
Goldman Sachs’s net earnings rose 12% from a year earlier, posting a profit of $4.62 billion, or $14.01 a share. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley said it earned $4.4 billion, or $2.68 per share, compared to a profit of $3.71 billion, or $2.22 per share, compared to a year earlier.
Wall Street has been bolstered by the Trump administration’s deregulatory policies, which have led corporations to seek out mergers and acquisitions, as well as the surge of investor interest in artificial intelligence companies and those who stand to benefit from the mass adoption of technologies like ChatGPT.
Fourth-quarter investment fee revenues over at Goldman were up 25% year-over-year and Morgan Stanley saw a 47% jump in revenue in its investment banking division. Both banks said their investment fee backlog, which is a signal of how much deal-making is still pending that banks are working on, increased significantly in the fourth quarter.
Goldman and Morgan’s results reflect the strong earnings out of the other big banks that reported their results this week. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup all saw jumps in fourth-quarter profits, but their results were dampened by the ongoing tensions that Wall Street is having with the White House over the issue of the independence of the Federal Reserve and President Donald Trump’s interest in capping credit card interest rates at 10%.
Along with a strong investment banking performance, Goldman Sachs also agreed to sell off its Apple Card credit card portfolio to JPMorgan Chase last week, effectively exiting its brief experiment in consumer banking. The bank sold the credit card portfolio at a discount to JPMorgan, a sign of how desperately Goldman wanted to exit the business and put the Apple Card behind it.
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This story has been corrected to show that Morgan Stanley’s investment banking revenues rose 47%, not 22%.
By Ken Sweet, AP business writer
The average long-term U.S. mortgage rate is now down to its lowest level in more than three years.
The benchmark 30-year fixed mortgage rate eased to 6.06% this week, down from 6.16% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. One year ago, the rate averaged 7.04%.
The last time the average rate was lower was Sept. 15, 2022, when it was at 6.02%.
Meanwhile, borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also fell this week, dropping to 5.38% from 5.46% last week. A year ago, that average rate was at 6.27%, Freddie Mac said.
Lower mortgage rates boost homebuyers purchasing power, good news for home shoppers at a time when the housing market remains in a deep slump after years of soaring prices and elevated mortgage rates have shut out many aspiring homeowners.
Uncertainty over the economy and job market are also keeping many would-be buyers on the sidelines.
Mortgage rates began easing in July in anticipation of a series of Fed rate cuts, which began in September and continued last month.
The Fed doesnt set mortgage rates, but when it cuts its short-term rate that can signal lower inflation or slower economic growth ahead, which can drive investors to buy U.S. government bonds. That can help lower yields on long-term U.S. Treasurys, which can result in lower mortgage rates.
The pullback in mortgage rates helped drive sales of previously occupied U.S. homes higher on a monthly basis the last four months of 2025. Even so, home sales remained stuck at a 30-year low last year, extending the housing markets slump into its fourth year.
Lower mortgage rates have been helpful for home shoppers who can afford to buy at current rates. The median U.S. monthly housing payment fell to $2,413 in the four weeks ending Jan. 11, according to Redfin. Thats a 5.5% drop from the same period a year earlier and near the lowest level in two years.
The latest drop in rates comes after President Donald Trump announced last week that the federal government would buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds in a bid to reduce mortgage rates.
Lower rates spurred a sharp increase in homeowners seeking to refinance their existing home loan to a lower rate last fall, a trend that has continued into this year.
Applications for mortgage refinancing loans soared 40% last week from the previous week and accounted for 60% of all home loan applications, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Applications for loans to buy a home climbed 16%.
With mortgage rates much lower than a year ago and edging closer to 6%, MBA expects strong interest from homeowners seeking a refinance and would-be buyers stepping off the sidelines, said MBA CEO Bob Broeksmit.
Economists generally expect mortgage rates to ease further this year, though most recent forecasts show the average rate on a 30-year mortgage remaining above 6%, about twice what it was six years ago.
Still, rates would have to drop considerably for homeowners, who bought or refinanced when mortgage rates hit rock bottom earlier this decade, to take on a new loan at a far higher rate.
Nearly 69% of U.S. homes with an outstanding mortgage have a fixed-rate of 5% or lower, and slightly more than half have a rate at or below 4%, according to Realtor.com.
By Alex Veiga, AP business writer
An investigation into a sprawling betting scheme to rig NCAA and Chinese Basketball Association games ensnared 26 people, including more than a dozen college basketball players who tried to fix games as recently as last season, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
The scheme generally revolved around fixers recruiting players with the promise of a big payment in exchange for purposefully underperforming during a game, prosecutors said. The fixers would then place big bets against the players teams in those games, defrauding sportsbooks and other bettors, authorities said.
Calling it an international criminal conspiracy, U.S. Attorney David Metcalf told reporters in Philadelphia that this case represents a significant corruption of the integrity of sports. The indictment suggests that many others including unnamed players had a role in the scheme but werent charged, and Metcalf said the investigation was continuing.
The varying charges against the 26 defendants, filed in federal court in Philadelphia, include bribery, wire fraud, and conspiracy.
Concerns about gambling and college sports have grown since 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on the practice, leading some states to legalize it to varying degrees.
According to the indictment unsealed Thursday, fixers started with two games in the Chinese Basketball Association in 2023 and, successful there, moved on to rigging NCAA games as recently as January 2025.
The fixers scheme grew to involve more than 39 players on more than 17 different NCAA Division I mens basketball teams, who then rigged and attempted to rig more than 29 games, prosecutors said.
They wagered millions of dollars, generating substantial proceeds for themselves, and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to players in bribes, prosecutors said, with payments to players typically ranging from $10,000 to $30,000 per game.
Prosecutors named more than 40 schools that were involved in games that were targeted by the scheme.
Rigged games included those played by teams in major conferences, such as Big East and Atlantic 10, prosecutors said.
Some were games against nationally ranked programs while some were playoff games, including the first round of the Horizon League championship and the second round of the Southland Conference championship.
Some of the allegedly targeted teams were Tulane University, Buffalo State University, DePaul University, Robert Morris University, University of Southern Mississippi, Abilene Christian University, Eastern Michigan State University and the University of New Orleans.
Players often recruited teammates to cooperate by playing badly, sitting out or keeping the ball away from players who werent in on the scheme to prevent them from scoring. Sometimes the attempted fix failed, meaning the fixers lost their bets.
To entice players, fixers would text photos of stacks of cash. In one case, a fixer encouraged a player to recruit a St. Louis University teammate by texting him one such photo: send that to him if he bite he bite if he dont so be it lol, the indictment said.
Four of the players charged Simeon Cottle, Carlos Hart, Oumar Koureissi and Camian Shell played for their current teams in the last few days, although the allegations against them do not involve this season, but the 2023-24 season.
Of the defendants, 15 played basketball for Division I NCAA schools during 2024-25 season, prosecutors say. Five others last played in the NCAA in the 2023-24 season while another, former NBA player Antonio Blakeney, played in the Chinese Basketball Association in the 2022-23 season.
The remaining five defendants were described as fixers who recruited players and placed bets. They include two men who prosecutors say worked in the training and development of basketball players. Another was a trainer and former coach, one was a former NCAA player and two were described as gamblers, influencers and sports handicappers.
One fixer reassured another by texting him there were no guarantees in this world but death taxes and Chinese basketball, court papers said.
At the end of the Chinese Basketball Association’s 2022-23 season, fixers put nearly $200,000 in bribe payments and shared winnings from rigged games into Blakeney’s storage locker in Florida, authorities said.
In many instances, the defendants wagers on the rigged games were successful. The sportsbooks would not have paid out those wagers had they known that the defendants fixed those games, the indictment said.
One betting scandal after another has rocked the sports world, where gambling revenue topped $11 billion for the first three-quarters of last year, according to the American Gaming Association. Thats up more than 13% from the prior year, the group said.
The NCAA does not allow athletes or staff to bet on college games, but it briefly allowed student-athletes to bet on professional sports last year before rescinding that decision in November.
The indictment follows a series of NCAA investigations that led to at least 10 players receiving lifetime bans this year for bets that sometimes involved their own teams and their own performances. And the NCAA has said that at least 30 players have been investigated over gambling allegations. More than 30 people were also charged in last years sprawling federal takedown of illegal gambling operations linked to professional basketball.
Marc Levy and Tassanee Vejpongsa, Associated Press
Associated Press writer Maryclaire Dale contributed.
President Donald Trump on Thursday announced the outlines of a health care plan he wants Congress to take up as Republicans have faced increasing pressure to address rising health costs after lawmakers let subsidies expire.
The cornerstone is his proposal to send money directly to Americans for health savings accounts so they can handle insurance and health costs as they see fit. Democrats have rejected the idea as a paltry substitute for the tax credits that had helped lower monthly premiums for many people.
The government is going to pay the money directly to you, Trump said in a taped video the White House released to announce the plan. It goes to you and then you take the money and buy your own health care.
Trump’s plan also focuses on lowering drug prices and requiring insurers to be more upfront with the public about costs, revenues, rejected claims and wait times for care.
Trump has long been dogged by his lack of a comprehensive health care plan as he and Republicans have sought to unwind former President Barack Obamas signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. Trump was thwarted during his first term in trying to repeal and replace the law.
When he ran for president in 2024, Trump said he had only concepts of a plan to address health care. His new proposal, short on many specifics, appeared to be the concepts of a plan.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, described it to reporters on a telephone briefing as a framework that we believe will help Congress create legislation.
It was not immediately clear if any lawmakers in Congress were working to introduce the Republican presidents plan. A White House official who was not authorized to speak publicly and described some details on condition of anonymity said the administration had been discussing the proposal with allies in Congress, but was unable to name any lawmakers who were working to address the plan.
Few specifics on health savings accounts
The White House did not offer any details about how much money it envisioned being sent to consumers to shop for insurance, or whether the money would be available to all Obamacare enrollees or just those with lower-tier bronze and catastrophic plans.
The idea mirrors one floated among Republican senators last year. Democrats largely rejected it, saying the accounts would not be enough to cover costs for most consumers. Currently, such accounts are used disproportionately by the wealthiest Americans, who have more income to fund them and a bigger incentive to lower their tax rate.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked at her briefing Thursday whether the president could guarantee that under his plan, people would be able to cover their health costs. She did not directly answer, but said, If this plan is put in place, every single American who has health care in the United States will see lower costs as a result.
Enhanced tax credits that helped reduce the cost of insurance for the vast majority of Affordable Care Act enrollees expired at the end of 2025 even though Democrats had forced a 43-day government shutdown over the issue.
Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, has been leading a bipartisan group of 12 senators trying to devise a compromise that would extend those subsidies for two years while adding new limits on who can receive them. That proposal would create the option, in the second year, of a health savings account that Trump and Republicans prefer.
The White House official denied that Trump was closing the door completely on those bipartisan negotiations, and said the White House preferred to send money directly to consumers.
Plan follows massive cuts to health programs
Trumps plan comes months after the Republicans big tax and spending bill last year cut more than $1 trillion over a decade in federal health care and food assistance, largely by imposing work requirements on those receiving aid and shifting certain federal costs to the states.
Democrats have blasted those cuts as devastating for vulnerable people who rely on programs such as Medicaid for their health care. The GOP bill included an infusion of $50 billion over five years for rural health programs, an amount experts have said is inadequate to fill the gap in funding.
The White House said Trump’s new proposal will seek to bring down premiums by fully funding cost-sharing reductions, or CSRs, a type of financial help that insurers give to low-income ACA enrollees on silver-level, or mid-tier plans.
From 2014 until 2017, the federal government reimbursed insurance companies for CSRs. In 2017, the first Trump administration stopped making those payments. To make up for the lost money, insurance companies raised premiums for silver-level plans. That ended up increasing the financial assistance many enrollees got to help them pay for premiums.
As a result, health analysts say that while restoring money for CSRs would likely bring down silver-level premiums, as Trump says, it could have the unwelcome ripple effect of increasing many peoples net premiums on bronze and gold plans.
Lowering drug prices is a priority
Oz said Trump’s plans also seeks to have certain medications made available over the counter instead of by prescription if they are deemed safe enough. He mentioned higher-dose nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and peptic ulcer drugs as two examples.
It was unclear whether the White House is asking Congress to take steps to make more prescription drugs available over the counter. For decades, the Food and Drug Administration has had the ability to do that.
The heartburn drug Prilosec, as well as numerous allergy medications, are among those the FDA has approved for over-the-counter sales. The FDA only approves such changes if studies show patients can safely take the drug after reading the package labeling. Companies must apply for the switch.
The White House said Trumps plan would also codify his efforts to lower drug prices by tying prices to the lowest price paid by other countries.
Trump has already struck deals with a number of drugmakers to get them to lower the prices. As part of that, the drugmakers have agreed to sell pharmacy-ready medicines directly to consumers who can shop online at the White House’s website for selling drugs directly to consumers, TrumpRx.gov.
TrumpRx did not yet have any drugs listed on Thursday. Oz said drugs will be available on the website at the end of the month.
Michelle L. Price and li Swenson, Associated Press
AP Health Writer Matthew Perrone contributed to this report.
A federal judge on Thursday cleared the way for a New York offshore wind project to resume construction, a victory for the developer who said a Trump administration order to pause it would likely kill the project in a matter of days.
District Judge Carl J. Nichols, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled construction on the Empire Wind project could go forward while he considers the merits of the governments order to suspend the project. He faulted the government for not responding to key points in Empire Winds court filings, including the contention that the administration violated proper procedure.
Norwegian company Equinor owns Empire Wind. Spokesperson David Schoetz said they welcome the court’s decision and will continue to work in collaboration with authorities. Its the second developer to prevail in court against the administration this week.
The Trump administration froze five big offshore wind projects on the East Coast days before Christmas, citing national security concerns. Trump has targeted offshore wind from his first days back in the White House, most recently calling wind farms losers that lose money, destroy the landscape and kill birds.
Developers and states sued seeking to block the order. Large, ocean-based wind farms are the linchpin of plans to shift to renewable energy in East Coast states that have limited land for onshore wind turbines or solar arrays.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul applauded the court decision, telling reporters the projects had been stopped under the bogus pretense of national security.
When I heard this I said one thing: Im the governor of New York, if there is a national security threat off the coast of New York, you need to tell me what it is. I want a briefing right now. Well, lo and behold, they had no answer, she said.
On Monday, a judge ruled that the Danish energy company Orsted could resume its project to serve Rhode Island and Connecticut. Senior Judge Royce Lamberth said the government did not sufficiently explain the need for a complete stop to construction. That wind farm, called Revolution Wind, is nearly complete. Its expected to meet roughly 20% of the electricity needs in Rhode Island, the smallest state, and about 5% of Connecticuts electricity needs.
Orsted is also suing over the pause of its Sunrise Wind project for New York, with a hearing still to be set. Dominion Energy Virginia, which is developing Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, plans to ask a judge Friday to block the administrations order so it can resume construction, too.
Trump has also dismissed offshore wind developments as ugly, but the Empire project is about 14 miles (22.5 kilometers) offshore and the Sunrise project is about 30 miles (48 kilometers) offshore.
The fifth paused project is Vineyard Wind, under construction in Massachusetts. Vineyard Wind LLC, a joint venture between Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, joined the rest of the developers in challenging the administration on Thursday. They filed a complaint in District Court in Boston.
Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast New Jersey, said the administration was right to stop construction on national security grounds. He urged officials to immediately appeal the adverse rulings and seek to halt all work pending appellate review. Opponents of offshore wind projects are particularly vocal and well-organized in New Jersey.
Empire Wind is 60% complete and designed to power more than 500,000 homes. Equinor said the project was in jeopardy due to the limited availability of specialized vessels, as well as heavy financial losses.
During a hearing Wednesday, Judge Nichols said the governments main security concern seemed to be over operation of the wind turbines, not construction, although the government pushed back on that contention.
In presenting the governments case, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr. was skeptical of the perfect storm of horrible events that Empire Wind said would derail their entire project if construction didnt resume. He disagreed with the contention that the governments main concern was over operation.
I dont see how you can make this distinction, Woodward said. He likened it to a nuclear project being built that presented a national security risk. The government would oppose it being built, and it turning on.
Molly Morris, Equinors senior vice president overseeing Empire Wind, said in an interview that the company wants to build this project and deliver a major, essential new source of power for New York.
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The Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
Michael Phillis and Jennifer McDermott, Associated Press
Associated Press writer Anthony Izaguirre contributed to this report.
Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies on Thursday as it marked its 25th anniversary.
The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France’s Mistral AI.
Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia’s vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.
The new deals will help one of the world’s most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They’re paying to access Wikipedia content at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs, the foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details.
While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it.
I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because its human curated,” Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. “I wouldnt really want to use an AI thats trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI, Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform.
Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But “you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that youre putting on us.”
The Wikimedia Foundation last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models.
The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links.
Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers.
The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use.
But our infrastructure is not free, right?” Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa.
It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to draw data from Wikipedia, said Iskander, who’s stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.
The bulk of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals.
They’re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies, Wales said. They’re saying, “You know what, actually you cant just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.
Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors.
While AI isnt good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources.
We dont have that yet but thats the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future.
Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said.
You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,” he said. It could respond by saying “heres the answer to your question from this article and heres the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think well move in that direction as well.
Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment.
However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side.
People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didnt need algorithms to be mean to each other, he said. But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility.
Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site Wokepedia and accused it of being biased in favor of the left.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged manipulation efforts in Wikipedias editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.
A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with propaganda and urged people to stop donating to the site.
Wales said he doesn’t consider Grokipedia a real threat to Wikipedia because it’s based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on.
Large language models arent good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia, he said. It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is.
He stressed that he wasn’t singling out criticism of Grokipedia.
Its just the way large language models work.
Wales say he’s known Musk for years but they haven’t been in touch since Grokipedia launched.
I should probably ping him, Wales said.
What would he say?
’Hows your family?’ Im a nice person, I dont really want to pick a fight with anybody.
Kelvin Chan, AP business writer
AP writer Mogomotsi Magome contributed to this report
If you are Verizon customer, like me, you’ve probably been scrambling to make phone calls, send texts, and get online since Wednesday, due to a massive, nationwide service outage. (I am writing this from my local food co-op outside Boston, where I am using the internet in their cafe.)
The mobile giant says the issue has now been resolved, however, some customers are saying they’re still without service. Some 1.5 million users reported the prolonged outage on Downdetector, which still had some 893 reports (as of around 2:30 p.m. ET). That’s over 24 hours after customers first started losing service around noon ET on Wednesday, with iPhone users reporting an SOS icon, as Fast Company reported.
This live map on Downdetector reports continued outages in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Tampa, Dallas, and Houston (as of this writing at around 3 p.m. ET).
To its credit (literally), Verizon has said it will contact customers and provide them with a $20 credit for the inconvenience.
Posting on X, the mobile company wrote on Thursday: “Yesterday, we did not meet the standard of excellence you expect and that we expect of ourselves. To help provide some relief to those affected, we will give you a $20 account credit that can be easily redeemed by logging into the myVerizon app.”
How can I get the $20 Verizon credit for the outage?
According to the post, customers will receive a text message when the credit is available.
However, the credit will not be automatically applied to customers’ accounts, and customers must redeem it through the myVerizon app. Additionally, the credit can also be redeemed by contacting Verizon customer service through phone, chat, or online, according to reporting from Engadget.
“On average, this covers multiple days of service. Business customers will be contacted directly about their credits,” the company explained. “This credit isnt meant to make up for what happened. No credit really can. But its a way of acknowledging your time and showing that this matters to us.”
Still having trouble connecting? Verizon suggests the following: “please restart your device (power down and power back on). This is the fastest way to reconnect your phone to the network.”
The president was barely a year into his administration when a health care debate began to consume Washington.
On Capitol Hill, partisan divides formed as many Democrats pressed for guaranteed insurance coverage for a broader swath of Americans while Republicans, buttressed by medical industry lobbying, warned about cost and a slide into communism.
The year was 1945 and the new Democratic president, Harry Truman, tried and failed to persuade Congress to enact a comprehensive national health care program, a defeat Truman described as the disappointment of his presidency that troubled me the most. Since then, 13 presidents have struggled with the same basic questions about the governments role in health care, where spending now makes up nearly 18% of the U.S. economy.
The fraught politics of health care are on display again this month as millions of people face a steep rise in costs after the Republican-controlled Congress allowed Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire.
While the subsidies are a narrow, if costly, slice of the issue, they have reopened long-festering grievances in Washington over the way health care is managed and the legacy of the ACA, the signature legislative achievement of President Barack Obama that was passed in 2010 without a single Republican vote.
That’s the key thing that I’ve got to convince my colleagues to understand who hate Obamacare, said Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, who is leading a bipartisan group of lawmakers discussing ways to extend some of the subsidies. Let’s take two years to actually deliver for the American people truly affordable health care.
Democrats have heard that refrain before, and argue Republicans have had 15 years to offer an alternative. They believe the options being discussed now, which largely focus on allowing Americans to funnel money to health savings accounts, do little to address the cost of health care.
They’ve had a lot of time, said Rep. Steny Hoyer, the Maryland Democrat who was House majority leader during the ACA debate.
And with that, welcome back to the health care debate that never seems to end.
The challenge of reaching consensus
The often-tortured dynamics surrounding health care have remained remarkably consistent. Obamacare dramatically expanded coverage but remains even in the minds of those who crafted the law imperfect and more expensive than many would prefer.
And Washington seems more entrenched in stalemate rather than marching toward a solution.
People hate the status quo but theyre not too thrilled with change, Rahm Emanuel said as he reflected on the arc of the health care debate that he has watched as a top aide to President Bill Clinton, chief of staff to Obama, and Chicago mayor. Thats the riddle to the politics of health care.
Major reforms inevitably run into a health industry a broad group of interests ranging from pharmaceutical and health services companies to hospitals and nursing homes that spent more than $653 million on lobbying in 2025, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political spending.
Any time you try to figure out how to bring costs down, somebody thinks uh oh, Im about to get less, said Hoyer, who announced last week he will not seek reelection after serving since 1981.
When Obamacare was passed, opinion on the law was mixed, although views tended to be more positive than negative, according to KFF polling. But the law has steadily grown in popularity. A KFF poll conducted in September 2025 found that about two-thirds of Americans have a favorable view of the ACA.
That’s put Trump and Republicans in a bind.
Trump’s concepts of a plan
Since the ACA’s passage, Republicans largely dedicated themselves to the law’s destruction. Trump issued social media posts calling for a repeal as early as 2011 and spoke in generalities during each of his presidential campaigns about delivering better coverage at lower cost. During his 2024 debate against Democratic rival Kamala Harris, he referred to concepts of a plan.
One thing he hasn’t done offer his own formal proposal.
During a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday, Trump said he would soon announce a health care affordability framework. Throughout his second term, Trump has criticized Obamacare as unfairly subsidizing insurers, a point that could have been addressed had the legislation created a so-called public option that would have competed alongside the private sector. Republicans and a sizable number of Democrats objected to that approach, arguing it would give the government an outsize role in health care.
But in a reminder that the past is never really over, a small group of Democrats is aiming to revive the debate over the public option, even if the prospects in a Republican-controlled Congress are dim. Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, along with Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, introduced legislation last week that would create a public health insurance option on the ACA exchanges.
Last year, a record 24 million people were enrolled in ACA, though fewer appear to be signing up this year as the expired subsidies make coverage more expensive. The Supreme Court has upheld the law and Republicans have failed to repeal, replace, or alter it dozens of times. In the most famous example, Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, cast the deciding vote in 2018 to keep the legislation in place, underscoring the lack of an alternative by noting there was no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens.
Democrats successfully turned the repeal efforts into a rallying cry in the 2018 midterms and see an opportunity to do so again this year with the expired subsidies. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who isn’t seeking reelection, has warned this moment could be even more perilous for Republicans because, unlike the subsidies, voters didnt lose anything during the 2018 debate.
Us failing to put something else in place did not create this cliff, Tillis said. Thats the fundamental difference in an election year.
ACA veterans acknowledge challenges
Even those who crafted the ACA concede that the health care system created in its wake has problems. Former Se. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who was one of the bill’s architects as chair of the Finance committee, acknowledged that nothing is perfect, pointing to high health care costs.
Bending the cost curve, that has not bent as much as we’d like, he said.
That’s in part why some Republicans have expressed openness to a deal on the subsidies. They see it less as an endorsement of ACA than a bridge that would give lawmakers time to address more complex issues.
We need to get to a long-term solution, said Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb.
Veterans of past health care negotiations, however, are skeptical that lawmakers can produce anything meaningful without the type of in-depth negotiations that led up to the ACA.
It takes a long time to figure all this out, Baucus said.
Asked whether he’s studied that history as he dives into the next chapter of health care talks, Moreno noted that he’s only been in Congress for a year.
I don’t know s-, he said. What that means is I don’t have scars.
By Steven Sloan, Associated Press
Associated Press writer Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux contributed to this report.
In recent years, theres been a wave of studies reporting that humans are basically full of microplastics: Theyve been found in our brains, arteries, and even in placentas.
But some scientists, quoted and cited in an article published by The Guardian this week, have critiqued some of those findings, saying that microplastics research has been muddied by issues like contamination and false positives.
One chemist even told the outlet that these criticisms are forcing us to reevaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body.
However, other scientists who study microplastics and human health say that this framing is overblown.
While they concede that the field of studying microplastics in our bodies is newand that some concerns over study methodologies are validreaders should not conclude that the entire area of study is filled with errors.
And, they add, it’s an irrefutable fact that microplastics are present in human bodies.
What are the critiques of microplastic studies?
When plastics break down, they form these tiny fragments we call microplastics, defined as pieces less than 5 millimeters in length.
There are also nanoplastics, which are even smaller particles, usually considered smaller than 1,000 nanometersabout 100 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
Research has found them in the air, the soil, and our bodies. But in comments to scientific journals and a recent Guardian article, some scientists have challenged the way that researchers have identified these microplastics, particularly in human organs.
One study, which said that the levels of microplastics in human brains are rapidly rising, was critiqued for having limited controls around contamination, and for not validating potential false-positives.
Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat, Dušan Materić, an environmental chemist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, told the Guardian.
Other studies, which found microplastics in arteries, were criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room, basically a way to measure if theres any background contamination to start with.
Researchers who wrote comments to scientific journal editors also generally highlighted that the the analytical approach used in some microplastic studies is not robust enough to support [their] claims.
What do these critiques really mean?
Microplastics researchers do understand that there are methodological challenges to studying microplastics in human organs. Thats because the field itself is still new.
The tools are in their infancy, Kara Meister, a pediatric ear, nose, and throat doctor with Stanford Medicine who also studies how our environment (including the presence of microplastics) affects our immune system, told Fast Company.
None of these tools [to detect microplastics] were developed specifically to look at this problem, so we’re borrowing from other science and then trying to apply that to a brand-new field, she adds.
The critiques, then, do have truth to them.
Yes, microplastics can be confused with fats, Meister says. Thats because microplastics are often made from polymers (something with repeated bonds or a predictable structure), which is also how several human tissues, like fats, are made. Scientific tools cant always parse the two.
And yes, limiting contamination is a challenge. Thats because microplastics are everywhere.
When we take human tissuewhether that’s a blood sample or a tissue sample from the bodywere doing it in an operating room that is full of plastic, Meister says.
In her lab, she uses metal instruments and wraps samples in sterile foil, but there are still ambient microplastics that might lead to some element of contamination.
And yes, there are issues around having a positive or negative control in a studybasically, a control to compare a sample to show this is what it looks like with or without microplastics.
In a perfect study, we would know, if I took this tonsil and I spiked it with known polyethylene, are we picking that up right in the tools? Meister asks. The problem is that the plastics that you can buy in a laboratory setting to be able to test these, theyre not actually what were encountering in real life.
In real life, microplastics are not one specific thing; they have multiple characteristics. Take microplastics from a plastic bottleif those contaminate your body, your body isnt only seeing the polyethylene.
Your body also sees things like BPA, heavy metals, dyes, inkall the things that come with it, Meister says. Microplastics are also known to carry bacteria and other proteins, like a little raft they attach to.
This means when scientists look for microplastics in our bodies, theyre not just looking for one thing.
It’s really hard to measure, because it’s a category of a whole bunch of diverse, different things,” she says. And we also know that there are over 350,000 different proprietary chemicals in the world.
Along with all these challenges, its also difficult for researchers to compare their findings across labs or research techniques. There arent standards for how to measure microplastics or tools researchers should use.
Scientists know about these caveats
So there are challenges to measuring microplastics, but scientists working to study this already know that.
Ideally, Meister says, researchers would measure microplastics in three ways: identify (what is the polymer; is it polyethylene, for example, or maybe PVC?); quantify (how many particles, and how big are they?); and localize (where are they within human tissue?).
The problem is, there isnt yet one measurement technique that can answer all three of those questions.
That leaves triangulating different types of measurements and some gaps in the science, she says. We will get there, but its going to take trial and error to get better standards and accelerate the data.
Megan Wolff, executive director of the Physician and Scientist Network for Advocacy on Plastics and Health, put it this way on LinkedIn: Methodological uncertainty is a normal feature of science, especially in a newly evolving discipline.
In some cases, the critiques raised in The Guardian article were also acknowledged by the original study authors. These caveats, though, may not always be clear in media stories or to the general public.
Concerns over framing
Critiquing studies itself isnt controversial, Wolff added; thats part of how science evolves. But she took issue with the way the critiques were framed.
In both The Guardians headline and lede, the article highlights a quote calling the critiques of the brain study a bombshell.
That phrase is attributed to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Co., and the same source who said that the critiques are forcing us to reevaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body.
The fact that this chemist formerly worked at Dow, a major plastics manufacturer, was a controversial choice to Wolff. Dow has a vested interest in casting doubt on the science of plastics, microplastics, and human health, she wrote.
Kulhman’s “bombshell” comment was in response to a study assessing a specific analysis method for quantifying plastics in human blood, and which found those tools are “not a suitable analysis method” for two types of plastic, polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride, in uhman tissue.
In a statement to Fast Company, Kuhlman stood by this framing, and his concerns about the way that “questionable results” in scientific studies have been “trumped to popular media outlets as solid scientific facts.”
“Scientists have traditionally been conservative with public descriptions of early-stage results for good reason,” he added. “I hope the article in The Guardian and related reports help level-set public expectations to the true state of current scientific understanding, which is that we know almost nothing about concentrations of micro- and nanoplastics in human bodies.”
Kuhlman also disputed the idea that his experience at Dow would color his comments. “I am not, nor have I ever been, a corporate spokesmanI was a lab rat,” he said. “Both throughout and after my employment, environmental issues (especially climate change) have been critical to me and guided my priorities and thinking.”
Should concerns diminish the whole field?
Even with some problematic studies, cross contamination, and difficulties quantifying microplastics in human tissue, Wolff emphasized that there are a few irrefutable facts about microplastics and our bodies, regardless of measurement techniques, Wolff adds.
Those facts are: Microplastics are present in human bodies, from blood to brains to bones; microplastics are made of fossil carbon and chemical additives, many of which are known to be toxic; and hazardous chemicals are always leaching out of plasticsincluding when we eat off plastic, drink out of plastic, or wear plasticmeaning that plastic degrades throughout its environment.
So maybe scientists dont know how many microplastics are in our bodies, or what exactly they’re doing to us. But theyre trying to figure that out.
And as Leonardo Trasande, director of NYU Langone Health’s Center for the Investigation of Environmental Hazards, put it in his own LinkedIn post: “As a new field, there are of course going to be bumps in the road and a need to recalibrate our understanding.”
But the Guardian article, he added, risks damaging all researchers who study this. “It implies that the entire field is lacking in rigor,” he wrote. “Thats just not the case.”
In a statement to Fast Company, the Guardian said it would not be providing additional comments “as the story speaks for itself.”
When it comes to studying microplastics in our bodies, the question of exactly how many there are in our brains or blood might not even be the most important one, scientifically, to ask.
It’s probably there, yeah, Meister says. Is it actually harming us? Thats the question were trying to answer.
Even if we dont know specifically how theyre impacting human health, we know that microplastics are hurting the environment,” Meister says.
Wolff, in her post on LinkedIn, was even more blunt: The science, for its own part, is clear, she wrote. Exposure to plastic is harmful, be it through large items or tiny particles.
Rejection stings. If youre on the job hunt right now, its likely something youve grown accustomed to, if not entirely numb to.
Considering more than one in four workers without jobs has been unemployed for at least half a year, chances are that comes with a tidal wave of rejection emails. The entry-level job market is also the toughest its been in years, with only 30% of 2025 graduates finding jobs in their fields.
One TikTok creator, however, has made it her personal mission to collect rejections like gold stars, documenting her challenge to receive 1,000 instances of being told no in one year. Just 71 nos into her journey, shes already seen how embracing rejection has opened doors to a whole host of unexpected opportunities.
For Gabriella Carr, among the rejections were some unexpected yeses. She tried to be rejected for a national pageant title, but they accepted me. So now Im a national pageant title holder. She auditioned for a play, thinking she would be rejected, but instead landed the part. I actually went and performed in 11 shows, she says.
Let this be your sign, she concluded. Chase rejection.
Her original video introducing the challenge has already reached hundreds of thousands of views, encouraging others to, if not chase their dreams, at least put themselves out there and see what happens.
Because of your video, I was able to get my own apartment for the first time, got a federal job, applied to volunteer for a hospice home and learned chess, one user commented.
Because of your ideaI launched a business, applied for a scholarship abroad and decided to try remote work, another wrote.
One simply put: Im clearly not using my free will to its fullest potential.
Carrs format is simple and highly replicable. Pick a number of nos to chase this year. (If youre sensitive, no need to start with 1,000. Why not aim for 10?). Or maybe you want to make your goals more effort based and say, Okay, Im going to try 100 times, she also suggests.
From there, she encourages actively seeking opportunities where rejection is a possibility. Track those outcomes in a journal or spreadsheet, logging both nos and yeses. If youre feeling brave, share your progress publicly or with a friend to hold yourself accountable and help normalize rejection as simply part of the process.
The challenge is most effective when the rejections are in service of a bigger goal, whether thats finding a romantic partner or applying for grants, colleges, or a dream job. The math is simple: every no gets you one step closer to a yes.
While the scale of Carrs personal challenge might be petrifying to some, the core principles are nothing new. Exposure therapy is a commonly used technique in cognitive behavioral therapy, developed to help people confront their fears head-on. Meanwhile, entrepreneur Jia Jiangs 2015 TED Talk about his 100 days of rejection, has been viewed more than 11 million times.
Rejection is also nothing new to a generation once described as the most rejected in history by Business Insider. When it comes to Gen Zs experience with rejection, the articles author, Delia Cai, points to the fact that applications to the country’s 67 most selective colleges have tripled in the past two decades, to nearly 2 million a year. The current job market isnt much gentler.
In early 2025, the average knowledge worker job opening received 244 applications, up from 93 in February 2019, according to data cited in the article. Reddit and TikTok are also full of stories of those who have applied to thousands of jobs and been rejected by all of them.
Of course, all this rejection is sure to have an impact on anyone’s psyche, if not their ego. But with Carrs challenge, the logic goes, aiming for 1,000 nos, a far more attainable goal than 1000 yeses, should take some of the pain out of the process. And remember, as entrepreneur Chris Dixon once said: “If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough.”
