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      Mass Layoffs Hit Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

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      The Trump administration sent layoff notices on Thursday to a large swath of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just days after a federal appeals court pared back an injunction that had prevented the agency’s leaders from carrying out plans to fire nearly all of the bureau’s workers.The full scope of the cuts was not immediately clear, but by late afternoon, hundreds of workers across all of the agency’s major divisions had received reduction-in-force notices. Fired employees were told they would lose access to their email accounts and the agency’s work systems on Friday evening.A legal filing Thursday evening by the consumer bureau’s staff union estimated that the terminations could hit as many as 1,500 of the bureau’s 1,700 employees. “Entire offices, including statutorily mandated ones, have or soon will be either eliminated or reduced to a single person,” the union said in its filing to the Federal District Court in Washington.Representatives of the consumer bureau did not respond to a request for comment.The bureau, which was created by Congress in 2011, monitors banks and other lenders. Since it was established, the watchdog agency has returned $21 billion to defrauded consumers through refunds and debt cancellation, according to government figures.On Wednesday, Mark Paoletta, the agency’s chief legal officer, sent an all-staff memo laying out new priorities. The bureau will significantly reduce its enforcement and compliance examination work, and “deprioritize” oversight of student loans, medical debt, digital payments and peer-to-peer lending, he wrote.Russell T. Vought, the White House budget office leader who is also the consumer bureau’s acting director, has frozen nearly all of the agency’s activity and sought to eliminate almost all of its staff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What We Know About the Gunman in the Florida State Shooting

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      The gunman accused of killing at least two people and injuring six others on Thursday in a shooting at Florida State University is a current student at the school and his mother is a Leon County sheriff’s deputy, officials said.The shooter was identified by the police as Phoenix Ikner, 20. Chief Lawrence E. Revell of the Tallahassee, Fla., Police Department said the man accused used his mother’s personal handgun in the shooting.The authorities said the attacker appeared to have been acting alone. He was in the hospital on Thursday, after being shot and wounded by responding officers for failing to obey their commands.Few details about the gunman emerged in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Calls to his family and friends on Thursday mostly went unanswered.The man accused of the shooting graduated in 2022 from Lincoln High School, a public school in Tallahassee. He was a member of the Leon County Sheriff’s Office Youth Advisory Council in 2021-2022.According to the sheriff’s office website, the program is an opportunity for members to help address issues facing young people in their communities. Eligible students must be a rising sophomore, junior or senior at a high school in Leon County, have limited unexcused absences and a minimum grade point average of 2.0.Jacob West, 18, was part of the same youth advisory council with the suspect. Mr. West said he was shocked to hear the suspect’s name on the news and double-checked his phone to confirm it was the same person. He described the man accused as always “in good spirits,” helpful and always proposing “really good ideas to help Leon County.”“To hear what had happened was absolutely just heartbreaking,” said Mr. West.When they were in the youth advisory council together, the suspect was interested in car-racing video games and Minecraft, and he was passionate about vehicles, Mr. West said. The two would talk about the program, as well as pickup trucks and school, Mr. West said.“He never spoke about guns or anything,” Mr. West said.The suspect had told Mr. West that he was considering a career in law enforcement, but toward the end of their time with the youth advisory council, he said his interest in the profession had waned, Mr. West recalled. Mr. West said he left the program early, and that the two texted briefly afterward but had not been in touch since.Susan C. Beachy More

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      Pride and Dread in Harvard Yard as Trump Wars With the University

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      Students on Thursday protested the president’s attacks on Harvard, but at town hall meetings, defiance mixed with uncertainty as faculty members examined the toll of the White House’s actions.For four days, Harvard University’s name had been in the headlines, heroic to some, villainous to others — after the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning stood up and said no to the demands of President Trump, and then suffered his wrath.But when leaders of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health convened a town hall meeting on Thursday morning, resistance or acquiescence was not the question of the moment, nor was defiance the prevailing mood. The school’s leaders laid out their dire financial circumstances to a stunned and overwhelmed audience of about 1,000 students and faculty and staff members, near the end of a week of unprecedented federal aggression.They had no good news to share.“It’s like you’re hunkering down for the beginning of a war, where you think you’re going to be losing a lot of your freedoms and a lot of your resources,” said Steve Gortmaker, director of the school’s Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity, who attended the meeting.With Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, standing toe-to-toe with the president of the United States, faculty members and students on the Cambridge campus on Thursday said they were struggling to make sense of the rapid escalation this week of Mr. Trump’s campaign to bend the university to his will. After Mr. Garber rejected Mr. Trump’s demands, the White House moved swiftly to inflict punishment, freezing $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard on Monday, suggesting on Wednesday it would revoke Harvard’s tax exemption, and then threatening to block the university from enrolling international students.In Harvard Yard, students still hurried to class; tourists still lined up under flowering trees to take photos of a statue of John Harvard. But behind the scenes, professors and researchers acknowledged a rising tide of angst, anger and uncertainty, their pride in the university’s stand against federal intervention mingling with their dread of the painful consequences.Since Harvard University leadership stood up to the Trump administration, many were rushing to sort out what the loss of funding would really mean below the surface.Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      DOGE Guts AmeriCorps, Agency That Organizes Community Service Programs

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      The independent federal agency that organizes community service work in the United States has placed on administrative leave almost all of its federal staff at the direction of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team, according to people familiar with developments at the agency.Those on leave include all of the employees of a national disaster response program, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information they provided.A majority of federal employees at the agency, which is known as AmeriCorps, received emails on Wednesday with an attached memo, dated April 16, from the interim head of the agency, Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi. The memo told them they were placed on administrative leave with pay, effective immediately, according to two copies reviewed by The New York Times.It also directed them not to return to AmeriCorps property or access its systems.The changes at AmeriCorps come as Mr. Musk’s team, called the Department of Government Efficiency, has moved to shutter agencies, including those with missions cast into law by Congress, in a bid to cut what it calls excess federal spending.As with other agencies affected as part of Mr. Musk’s effort, only a small fraction of AmeriCorps employees remained at the headquarters in Washington on Thursday. The expected cuts could gut the agency’s response work in regions decimated by recent natural disasters, including areas in the Southeastern United States that were wiped out by Hurricane Helene. An official with the Trump administration confirmed on Thursday that roughly 75 percent of full-time AmeriCorps employees were placed on administrative leave, and noted that the agency’s $1 billion budget, which the official suggested was mismanaged, was appropriately targeted in President Trump’s bid to eliminate waste.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Opens Marine National Monument to Commercial Fisheries

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      President Trump on Thursday said he was allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves, introducing industrial operations for the first time in more than a decade to a vast area of the Pacific dotted with coral atolls and populated by endangered sea turtles and whales.Mr. Trump issued an executive order opening up the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument, which lies some 750 miles west of Hawaii. President George W. Bush established the monument in 2009 and President Barack Obama expanded it in 2014 to its current area of nearly 500,000 square miles.A second executive order directed the Commerce Department to loosen regulations that “overly burden America’s commercial fishing, aquaculture, and fish processing industries.” It also asks the Interior Department to conduct a review of all marine monuments and issue recommendations about any that should be opened to commercial fishing.“The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader,” Mr. Trump wrote.The marine monument, a chain of islands and atolls amid more than 160 seamounts, is a trove of marine biodiversity. Environmentalists said opening the area to commercial fishing would pose a serious threat to the area’s fragile ecosystems.Mr. Trump, accompanied in the Oval Office by a fisherman from American Samoa and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen, the territory’s delegate to the House of Representatives, said his predecessors had deprived Pacific island communities of “fertile grounds.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Harvard’s Stand Against Trump Is Helping It Raise More Money

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      The Trump administration said it would take $2.2 billion in research funds from the school. Some small donors are doing their best to make up for the shortfall.For two decades after graduating from Harvard, Samuel Graham-Felsen never donated to his alma mater.The 388-year-old university represented elitism, he said. Giving even more money to the world’s wealthiest school didn’t align with his values.“Why should I be giving to this place that has billions of dollars?” he asked himself when he received fund-raising notices.His sentiment changed this week, after the university rejected a series of demands from the Trump administration. The government asked Harvard to do a host of things — like auditing professors’ work for plagiarism and reporting international students who break rules to federal authorities — that outraged the school’s leaders, others in higher education and people far beyond its iron gates.Within hours, the federal government responded with a $2.2 billion funding freeze, and later in the week said it would try to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.The Trump administration has said it is targeting Harvard because it has not done enough to combat antisemitism. That did not sit well with Mr. Graham-Felsen, a novelist and freelance writer in New Jersey, who is Jewish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ukraine and U.S. Sign Agreement in Lead-Up to Full Minerals Deal

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      The signed memorandum of understanding was thin on details, and the White House did not comment. But President Trump has said he expects to sign a minerals deal with Kyiv soon.Ukraine and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding late on Thursday as a “step toward a joint economic partnership agreement,” according to Ukraine’s economy minister, bringing both sides closer to a minerals deal that has gone through multiple, contentious rounds of negotiations.The agreement was thin on details. While it referred to the creation of a fund that would invest in reconstruction in Ukraine — which has been devastated by the war Russia has waged since a full-scale invasion in 2022 — it did not specify the source of such revenue.There was no immediate comment from the White House. But the Ukrainian minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, who is also deputy prime minister, announced the agreement in a post on Facebook, after signing it on a video call with the U.S. Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, who was in Washington. Ms. Svyrydenko said the agreement would “benefit both our peoples.”Mr. Bessent, in his own comments on Thursday afternoon, did not mention he had signed the memorandum but said he expected a full deal next week.Yulia Svyrydenko, the Ukrainian economy minister, announced the signing of a memorandum of agreement with the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent.Angelo Carconi/EPA, via ShutterstockEarlier drafts of a minerals deal had swiveled between what critics called a brazen extortion of Ukraine by the Trump administration and versions that included points sought by Ukraine, such as references to U.S. support for post-settlement security guarantees.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Columbia Activists Are Being Detained. Protesters Demand Answers.

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      Demonstrators rallied on Columbia’s campus and marched in Manhattan, three days after Mohsen Mahdawi was detained by immigration officials after arriving for a U.S. citizenship appointment.Hundreds of college students, faculty members and others took to the streets of New York City and to the campus of Columbia University on Thursday to protest the federal detention of organizers of pro-Palestinian demonstrations and what they regard as an assault on higher education.The protesters demanded answers about the fate of Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, Palestinians who had been involved in campus demonstrations over the war in Gaza.Mr. Khalil, a Columbia graduate and legal permanent resident, was detained on March 8 at his New York City apartment, was sent briefly to a New Jersey detention center and has since been held at a facility in Jena, La. Mr. Mahdawi, who is finishing his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Columbia’s School of General Studies, was detained by immigration officials on Monday after arriving for an appointment in Vermont that he thought was a step toward becoming a U.S. citizen.Thursday’s protest at Columbia, with about 300 demonstrators, rang with chants of “Free Mohsen, free them all — every fascist state will fall,” accompanied by the beat of drums. Organizers handed out medical masks to help students shield their identities, along with fliers promoting a planned student strike.Demonstrators criticized Columbia’s leadership for failing to more aggressively challenge demands by the Trump administration over what the White House described as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students from harassment. The federal government last month cut about $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia.Faculty members turned out in solidarity, condemning what they said was a growing authoritarian crackdown on universities by the Trump administration.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More