 |
|
|
|||||
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked a push from President Donald Trump to pause federal funding while his administration conducts an across-the-board ideological review to uproot progressive initiatives.The order capped the most chaotic day for the U.S. government since Trump returned to office, with uncertainty over a crucial financial lifeline causing panic and confusion among states, schools, and organizations that rely on trillions of dollars from Washington.U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan blocked the funding freeze only minutes before it was scheduled to take effect. The administrative stay, prompted by a lawsuit brought by nonprofit groups that receive federal money, lasts until Monday afternoon. Another court hearing is scheduled that morning to consider the issue.The White House did not immediately comment on the order, which leaves unresolved a potential constitutional clash over control of taxpayer money. Democrats who have struggled to gain a foothold during Trump’s second term unleashed on the Republican president, describing his actions as capricious and illegal.Administration officials said the decision to halt loans and grants was necessary to ensure that spending complies with Trump’s recent blitz of executive orders. The Republican president wants to increase fossil fuel production, remove protections for transgender people and end diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.But a vaguely worded memo issued by the Office of Management and Budget, combined with incomplete answers from the White House throughout the day, left lawmakers, public officials, and average Americans struggling to figure out what programs would be affected by the pause. Even temporary interruptions in funding could cause layoffs or delays in public services.“This sort of came out of the blue,” said David Smith, a spokesperson for the Shawnee Mission School District in Kansas, one of countless districts that receive federal funding. Now they’re trying to figure out what it means “based on zero information.”Democrats argued that the president had no right to unilaterally stop spending money appropriated by Congress. Just minutes after AliKhan made her ruling, Democratic attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia filed their own lawsuit seeking to block and permanently prevent the administration from cutting off federal funding.“There is no question this policy is reckless, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said.AliKhan, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, questioned how much the details of the funding freeze had been nailed down as she issued her order.“It seems like the federal government currently doesn’t actually know the full extent of the programs that are going to be subject to the pause,” she said.Jessica Morton, an attorney for the National Council of Nonprofits, which brought the suit, said the group has tens of thousands of members around the country who could be affected.“Our client members have reported being extremely concerned about having to shutter if there’s even a brief pause,” Morton said.Justice Department attorney Daniel Schwei argued that the freeze shouldn’t be put on hold because the plaintiffs hadn’t specified anyone who would immediately lose funding if it does go into effect.Trump administration officials said programs that provide direct assistance to Americans would not be affected, such as Medicare, Social Security, student loans, and food stamps. But they sometimes struggled to provide a clear picture.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially would not say whether Medicaid was exempted from the freeze, but the administration later clarified that it was.Although Trump had promised to turn Washington upside down if elected to a second term, the effects of his effort to pause funding were being felt far from the nation’s capital. Organizations like Meals on Wheels, which receives federal money to deliver food to the elderly, were worried about getting cut off.“The lack of clarity and uncertainty right now is creating chaos,” spokeswoman Jenny Young said. She added that “seniors may panic not knowing where their next meals will come from.”The National Science Foundation postponed this week’s panels for reviewing grant applications. Officials in Prichard, Alabama, feared they wouldn’t receive infrastructure funding to fix their leaking drinking water system. Republican leaders in Louisiana said they were “seeking clarity” to ensure nothing was “jeopardizing financial stability of the state.”“Trump’s actions would wreak havoc in red and blue communities everywhere,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “We are talking about our small towns, our cities, our school districts.”The full scope of the administration’s review was spelled out in a 51-page spreadsheet sent to federal agencies and viewed by the Associated Press. Each line was a different government initiative, from pool safety to tribal workforce development to special education.Officials were directed to answer a series of yes or no questions for every item on the list, including “does this program promote gender ideology?” or “does this program promote or support in any way abortion?” Responses are due by February 7.Trillions of dollars are potentially under review. Grants that have been awarded but not spent are also supposed to be halted if they might violate one of Trump’s executive orders.“The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve,” wrote Matthew Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a memo distributed Monday.Vaeth wrote that “each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders.” He also wrote that the pause should be implemented “to the extent permissible under applicable law.”The pause on grants and loans was scheduled to take effect at 5 p.m. EST, just one day after agencies were informed of the decision.Leavitt, who held her first White House briefing on Tuesday, said the administration was trying to be “good stewards” of public money by making sure that there was “no more funding for transgenderism and wokeness.”She denied that Trump was deliberately challenging Congress to establish his dominance over the federal budget.“He’s just trying to ensure that the tax money going out the door in this very bankrupt city actually aligns with the will and the priorities of the American people,” she said.The attempt to implement a funding pause is the latest example of how Trump is harnessing his power over the federal system to advance his conservative goals. Unlike during his first term, when Trump and many members of his inner circle were unfamiliar with Washington, this time he’s reaching deep into the bureaucracy.For example, federal employees are being asked to report their colleagues if they try to continue diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.“They are pushing the president’s agenda from the bottom up,” said Paul Light, an expert on the federal government and professor emeritus of public service at New York University.He also said there are risks in Trump’s approach, especially with so many voters reliant on Washington.“You can’t just hassle, hassle, hassle,” Light said. “You’ve got to deliver.”Fears about interruption in government services were exacerbated as states reported problems with the Medicaid funding portal, where officials request reimbursement for providing healthcare to poor residents.Democrats condemned the Trump administration, connecting the issue to the funding pause.But Leavitt said the portal would be back online soon.“We have confirmed no payments have been affectedthey are still being processed and sent,” she posted on social media. The White House did not provide an explanation for the problem. Associated Press writers JoNel Aleccia, Moriah Balingit, Collin Binkley, Matthew Daly, Lisa Mascaro, Adithi Ramakrishnan, Amanda Seitz, Michael Sisak and Tammy Weber contributed to this report. Chris Megerian and Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press
Category:
E-Commerce
The tech industry has long been infatuated with metaphors relating to the original space race. Its favorite one is moon shot, a term it applies to any undertaking of atypical ambition. But Chinese startup DeepSeeks release of a reasoning AI model that may be a peer of OpenAIs GPT-o1despite having been created on the cheap, without access to Nvidias best chipshas everyone reaching back to 1957s original Sputnik moment as a point of comparison. It somehow took most people a week to pay attention to DeepSeeks R1, which the company released on January 20. Once they did, it spawned an insta-frenzy whose shockwaves ranged from the technological to the geopolitical. They include a stock market beating for Nvidia and other chipmakers, new questions about whether vast resources actually provide an edge in AI after all, and shock that the Biden administrations bans on shipping the most powerful U.S.-designed chips to China didnt prevent that countrys researchers from making a possibly epoch-shifting breakthrough with the stuff they had on hand. DeepSeeks abrupt impact has undeniable similarities to the panic set off more than 67 years ago when the U.S.S.R. successfully put a satellite into orbit before the U.S. did. But as former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong pointed out in a post this week, the parallels are shallow. For one thing, the Soviets worked in deep secrecy. By contrast, DeepSeek is publishing code and research relating to its techniques for creating AI that does more with less. That gives the entire world the opportunity to quickly build upon what the company has created, potentially accelerating AIs use everywhere rather than preserving a daunting competitive advantage for one company or country. To be sure, the sudden commodification of AI could have profound implications for the handful of powerful U.S. companies that have hitherto propelled the technology forward. But while the details and timing of such an inflection point were unpredictable, its inevitability was not. For example, an internal Google document leaked in early 2023 was titled We Have No Moat and Neither Does OpenAI. Or, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it when I talked to him later that year, As far as Im concerned, early leads in technology dont matter. DeepSeeks R1and other AI technologies modeled upon its approachmay well force AIs incumbent giants to reassess everything about their future. Yet thats hardly an end game for the industry as weve known it. Artificial intelligence isnt anywhere near hitting an insurmountable wall that prevents further progress, and its tough to imagine that companies with access to vast resources wont be able to unlock some advances that those operating under greater constraints cannot. Most importantly, the dizzying improvements weve seen in LLMs over the past few years have yet to be matched by the real-world AI in applications we use. As generative AIs novelty wears off, tools such as Microsofts Copilot look like rougher and rougher drafts of something that needs further ingenuity to live up to its potential. The work of hooking up AI to all the processes we use to get stuff done has barely begun, and a lot of money stands to be made by the companies who get it done. Thats the underyling fact behind the industrys obsession with so-called agentic AIa slightly annoying buzzword that encompasses forms of the technology that can perform complex tasks without constant human oversight. There are some decent early stabs at the idea out there, such as Asanas AI teammates, which already shoulder some of the grunt work of wrangling tasks in the project-management app. But those examples are outnumbered by instances of agentic AI that mostly prove the technology isnt ready to do much on its own. Last week, for example, OpenAI released Operator, a research preview available to users of its $200/month ChatGPT Pro tier. Operator can type into a web browser and control a mouse pointer, a theoretical first step toward letting it handle all the tasks we humans perform on the web. Over at Platformer, Casey Newton reported on his hands-on experience with the service, which included asking it to perform tasks such as writing a high school lesson plan for The Great Gatsby. It took minutes to achieve results that were no better than what the non-agentic ChatGPT came up with almost instantly. And when Newton tried to use Operator to order groceriessomething a stock chatbot cant doit turned out that the current version of Operator is pretty hopeless at the job, too. In December, I got a demo of Googles experimental agentic AI, Project Mariner, that also involved grocery ordering and was too glacially slow to look like progress. That Operator and Mariner arent yet ready to handle a humble task such as buying a gallon of milk isnt evidence that theyre exercises in futilityjust that the goal of making AI usefully agentic remains largely aspirational, even at OpenAI and Google. DeepSeek and other feats of LLM optimization yet to come wont get in the way of further development of agentic AI. Indeed, theyll surely help by making the underlying infrastructure more accessible to more people with good ideas. Even then, the U.S.s AI kingpins will maintain some distinct advantages, from the money and engineering talent they can throw at tomorrows challenges to their ability to market new products to big, established customer bases. Maybe DeepSeek-R1s arrival marks a turning point for these companies. But only a failure of imaginaton would doom them to irrelevance. Youve been reading Plugged In, Fast Companys weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if youre reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Wednesday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. Im also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads. More top tech stories from Fast Company Everything wrong with the AI landscape in 2025, hilariously captured in this SNL sketchIn a recent Saturday Night Live sketch, Bowen Yang and Timothée Chalamet managed to highlight several glaring flaws with the current technology. Read More What people on TikTok are really talking about when they say cute winter bootsThe trend has nothing to do with footwear but is instead an example of algospeak, or the use of coded language to avoid filters and censorship. Read More Bookshop.org is launching e-books to help local bookstores compete with Amazons KindleThe challenger brand to Amazons hegemony has big plans to build further, starting with a new e-book initiative. Read More These 5 trends show where music and streaming are headed in 2025Data firm Luminates music streaming data shows where the industry is headed in 2025from 2024s big year for pop to growth in international subscribers. Read More Why did DeepSeek tell me its made by Microsoft?The Chinese-language model has shocked and awed the American stock market. But my chat with it indicates there are many reasons to be skeptical. Read More Your guide to avoiding job scams in 2025Youve probably felt the thrill that comes with receiving a job offer. You read the congratulatory email, begin to imagine life in your new role, then quickly fill out all the required HR paperwork and receive the necessary equipment. And if all is well, you start preparing for your first day. But what… Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
Welcome to Pressing Questions, Fast Companys work-life advice column. Every week, deputy editor Kathleen Davis, host of The New Way We Work podcast, will answer the biggest and most pressing workplace questions. Q: How can I get more sleep?A: I am writing this at 11:12 p.m., so this advice is as much for myself as it is for anyone else. Heres what we should all be doing differently:First, set a schedule and stick to it. The “stick to it” part is hard. But its called the golden rule of sleep for a reason. Set a bedtime, and then plan at least 20-40 minutes back from that time to start your bedtime routine. You might even need an alarm to remind you that its time to end what you’re doing. So, if you have to get up at 7 a.m. and you want to get seven hours of sleep, you want to be asleep by midnight. That means you should start your bedtime routine by 11:30 p.m..And speaking of bedtime routine, you know you cant go directly from staring at a screen to lights out, right? Your mind needs to wind down. Sleep experts recommend that you not only stick to the same bedtime every night, but that you also stick to the same (or similar) process each night. One option is to take things in 15-20 minute stages. First, prep for the next day (pack lunches, set out clothes) and do your nightly hygiene routine. Then spend 20 minutes doing a relaxing activity like reading. Whatever you do, dont sleep with your phone next to you.The other golden piece of sleep advice is intuitive but many of us with desk jobs skip it: Do some kind of physical activity during the daybut not right before bed. If you spend 30-40 minutes a day being active, you will be more physically tired and it will be easier to fall asleep.Want more advice on how to get more sleep? Here you go: Ultimate guide to getting more sleep 5 ways to get a better nights sleep Having trouble sleeping? Ask yourself these 6 questions
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||