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      Democrats in Congress warn cuts at top US labor watchdog will be ‘catastrophic’

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      Democrats have warned that cuts to the US’s top labor watchdog threaten to render the organization “basically ineffectual” and will be “catastrophic” for workers’ rights.The so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) has targeted the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for cuts and ended its leases in several states.Representatives Bobby Scott, Mark DeSaulnier and Greg Casar have written to NLRB’s chair, Marvin Kaplan, and the acting general counsel, William Cowen, requesting answers on the cuts.“If the NLRB reduces its workforce and closes a number of regional offices, it will render the NLRB’s enforcement mechanism basically ineffectual, thereby chilling workers from exercising their rights to engage in union organizing and protected concerted activities,” they wrote.The letter noted the NLRB has already been suffering from drastic understaffing and budget constraints, while caseloads have increased. NLRB field staffing has declined by one-third in the last decade, while case intake per employee at the agency grew by 46%.“The harm to America’s workers by potential directives to reduce this independent agency’s workforce cannot be overstated,” the letter added. “Any NLRB reduction in force (RIF) or office closures would be catastrophic for workers’ rights.”The representatives also requested all information related to Doge’s role at the NLRB, including all communications Doge had with employees at the NLRB or regarding the NLRB with other agencies.Doge is led by billionaire Trump donor Elon Musk. Musk’s SpaceX has challenged the constitutionality of the NLRB. A whistleblower at the NLRB told NPR earlier this month that Doge accessed sensitive data at the agency and took steps to cover their tracks in doing so.The National Labor Relations Board Union, representing workers at the agency, reported last week that Doge cancelled the NLRB regional office’s lease a year early in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, ending it in August 2025.In March 2025, Doge terminated the lease for the NLRB regional office in Memphis, Tennessee. In February 2025, Doge terminated the leases for NLRB offices in Buffalo, New York; Puerto Rico; Los Angeles, California; Overland Park, Kansas; and Birmingham, Alabama.“The NLRB is an agency that has been starved of funding and resources for over a decade. We have seen massive staffing cuts simply from attrition. There is no need for any austerity measures with our operations; Congress has already done that to us.” the NLRB Union stated on social media.The NLRB declined to comment. More

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      Despite Pope Francis’s wishes, there’s little appetite for richer nations to help the poorest

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      Pope Francis’s vast funeral in Rome on Saturday featured a certain amount of politicking amid the splendour, against the magnificent backdrop of St Peter’s Basilica.If the meeting between Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Donald Trump results in progress towards a less inequitable peace than the one currently envisaged by the US, perhaps that will be fitting, given the late pontiff’s consistent calls for an end to war.But in Washington last week, at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, where the architecture is far less glorious, campaigners struggled to find much backing among the powerful for another aspect of Francis’s worldview – his calls to make 2025 a Jubilee year of debt forgiveness for the world’s poorest countries.A quarter century on from the hugely consequential Jubilee 2000 movement – in which churches played a major role – the pope had asked a commission chaired by the economist Joseph Stiglitz to report on the issue next month. Debt relief is also likely to be discussed at the UN financing for development conference in Seville in late June.But there was little optimism in Washington that any country is prepared to offer the necessary moral and political leadership to force the issue up the agenda. Certainly, it will not be the UK, which played a crucial role in the Jubilee 2000 campaign under Gordon Brown, but has shown little interest in the issue since imposing brutal cuts to aid spending, to boost defence.Meanwhile, ample evidence was shared in Washington to show how the situation is rapidly deteriorating. The IMF’s analysts warned that Trump’s dramatic shake-up of the global trading system, the final shape of which remains impossible to guess, will depress economic growth and ratchet up the risks of financial crisis.For emerging economies, the outlook is especially bleak. Many had already been left heavily indebted, after grappling with the Covid pandemic. And as the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Review made clear, one side-effect of the market chaos triggered by Trump’s “liberation day” is likely to be tighter financial conditions.That will make it harder, and more costly, for countries to refinance their debts – a problem the IMF said could be compounded by fresh volatility in the currency markets.The more is spent on debt repayments, the less is available for important areas of government spending that are necessary for development. As Achim Steiner, the head of the UN’s development arm, the UNDP,said on the sidelines of the spring meetings: “The debt servicing is essentially a defunding. We’re defunding, or forcing countries to take money out of their social and welfare and education budgets and health budgets just to service their debt. This is for obvious reasons bad: it’s not sustainable and ultimately contributes further to locking countries in into this stagnation.”He added: “If you are defunding your own education system, you’re locking yourself into a generation that is going to fall behind.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionA report by the British thinktank Development Finance International into tackling inequality in eastern and southern Africa, published at the spring meetings, found that 40% of countries in the region spent more on debt servicing last year than on healthcare and education combined. Since 2022, 80% have cut social spending as a share of their budget.This comes at a time when the economic impacts of the climate crisis are already being felt, in the soaring costs of extreme weather events for example. There is a consensus, at least outside the White House, that significant investment will be needed to manage the transition away from fossil fuels.Another report launched in Washington last week – from the expert panel on climate and finance, a joint project of the Colombian, French, Kenyan and German governments – warned of a “vicious circle”, between the “debt, climate and nature crises”.“Debt pressures and environmental vulnerabilities are most pronounced in the poorest and most credit-constrained countries … yet these countries account for only a tiny fraction of the consumption and emissions driving nature loss and climate change,” they said.Even the IMF itself suggested last week that debt restructuring may need to be part of the toolkit to respond to the rapidly changing economic and financial situation.“The path forward demands clarity and coordination. Countries should work constructively to promote a stable and predictable trade environment, facilitate debt restructuring, and address shared challenges,” it said in its World Economic Outlook.But campaigners complain that the IMF’s debt restructuring process, the Common Framework, is cumbersome and time-consuming – and can still leave beneficiaries with high servicing costs, because it does not contemplate debt write-offs.Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, when he was not taking anti-woke side swipes at the IMF and the World Bank, said he would like to see the IMF get more involved in restructuring struggling countries’ debt. In a much-analysed speech, he said the IMF should “more proactively push official bilateral lenders to come to the table early, to work with borrower countries to minimise periods of debt distress”.Some development campaigners seized on his comments as a positive sign that the US would not stand in the way of multilateral efforts to ease the burden for the world’s poor.But others warned that in saying that he wanted to “make the IMF again”, and calling for it to be a “brutal truth teller”, Bessent appeared to be yearning for a return to the bad old days of economic shock theory, when the fund swept into struggling countries and imposed a prescription of harsh spending cuts and privatisation.Meanwhile, as they geared up to amplify Francis’s calls for a jubilee, some in Washington last week privately warned it may take a large-scale default to force the world’s powerful to accept the need to lift developing countries’ debt burdens. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. More

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      US consumer sentiment sees largest drop since 1990 after Trump tariff chaos

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      US consumer sentiment plummeted in April after Donald Trump’s trade war threw the global economy into chaos, according to a new report.The index of consumer sentiment, a score based on a monthly survey asking Americans about their financial outlooks, fell by 32% since January – the largest drop since the 1990 recession, according to the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.“Expectations worsened for vast swaths of the population across age, education income and political affiliation,” said Joanne Hsu, director of the surveys of consumers, in a statement. “Consumers perceived risks to multiple aspects of the economy, in large part due to ongoing uncertainty around trade policy and the potential for a resurgence of inflation looming ahead.”In April, the index of consumer sentiment fell to 52.2, down from 57 in March. The last time the index fell below 55 was in the summer of 2022, when inflation rose to 9%.Consumer expectation of inflation also soared from 5% in March to 6.5% in April, the highest it has been since 1981.It is a sign that, despite his insistence that tariffs will “make a lot of money” and have not yet raised prices, Trump still has not convinced many Americans that his tariffs will actually work.Trump’s trade policies have scared investors, causing sell-offs in stock and bond markets. The president softened his tone earlier this week on his trade war with China after a volatile few weeks. Markets rallied after Trump said that his Chinese tariffs “will come down substantially”, though he also warned that “it won’t be zero.”But Wall Street tends to be more reactive than consumers, who have shown four straight months of declining sentiment on the economy. Even after Trump paused the highest of his reciprocal tariffs, causing stock markets to rise, consumer inflation expectations still remained much higher compared with March.Higher inflation expectations have also been paired with consumers anticipating slower income growth for the year ahead, meaning that more of them will be hesitant to spend in the months ahead – which all could ultimately mean a slowdown in the economy.“Without reliably strong incomes, spending is unlikely to remain strong amid the numerous warning signs perceived by consumers,” Hsu said. More

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      Ukraine, Gaza and Iran: can Witkoff secure any wins for Trump?

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      Donald Trump’s version of Pax Americana, the idea that the US can through coercion impose order on the world, is facing its moment of truth in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran.In the words of the former CIA director William Burns, it is in “one of those plastic moments” in international relations that come along maybe twice a century where the future could take many possible forms.The US’s aim has been to keep the three era-defining simultaneous sets of negotiations entirely separate, and to – as much as possible – shape their outcome alone. The approach is similar to the trade talks, where the intention is for supplicant countries to come to Washington individually bearing gifts in return for access to US markets.The administration may have felt it had little choice given the urgency, but whether it was wise to launch three such ambitious peace missions, and a global trade war, at the same time is debatable.It is true each of the three conflicts are discrete in that they have distinctive causes, contexts and dynamics, but they are becoming more intertwined than seemed apparent at the outset, in part because there is so much resistance building in Europe and elsewhere about the world order Donald Trump envisages, and his chosen methods.In diplomacy nothing is hermetically sealed – everything is inter-connected, especially since there is a common thread between the three talks in the personality of the property developer Steven Witkoff, Trump’s great friend who is leading the US talks in each case, flitting from Moscow to Muscat.View image in fullscreenTo solve these three conflicts simultaneously would be a daunting task for anyone, but it is especially for a man entirely new to diplomacy and, judging by some of his remarks, also equally new to history.Witkoff has strengths, not least that he is trusted by Trump. He also knows the president’s mind – and what should be taken at face value. He is loyal, so much so that he admits he worshipped Trump in New York so profoundly that he wanted to become him. He will not be pursuing any other agenda but the president’s.But he is also stretched, and there are basic issues of competence. Diplomats are reeling from big cuts to the state department budget and there is still an absence of experienced staffers. Witkoff simply does not have the institutional memory available to his opposite numbers in Iran, Israel and Russia. For instance, most of the Iranian negotiating team, led by the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, are veterans of the 2013-15 talks that led to the original Iran nuclear deal.Yuri Ushakov, Vladimir Putin’s chief foreign policy adviser, who attended the first Russian-US talks this year in Saudi Arabia, spent 10 years in the US as Russian ambassador. He was accompanied by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund who then visited the US on 2 April.In the follow-up talks in Istanbul on 10 April, Aleksandr Darchiev, who has spent 33 years in the Russian foreign ministry and is Russian ambassador to the US, was pitted against a team led by Sonata Coulter, the new deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, who does not share Trump’s benign view of Russia.View image in fullscreenAs to the Gaza issue, Benjamin Netanyahu has lived the Palestinian conflict since he became Israel’s ambassador to the UN in 1984.Richard Nephew, a former US Iran negotiator, says the cuts to state department means the US “is at risk of losing a generation of expertise … It’s beyond tragedy. It’s an absolutely devastating national security blow with the evisceration of these folks. The damage could be permanent, we have to acknowledge this.”One withering European diplomat says: “It is as if Witkoff is trying to play three dimensional chess with chess grandmasters on three chessboards simultaneously, not having played the game before.”Bluntly, Witkoff knows he needs to secure a diplomatic win for his impatient boss. But the longer the three conflicts continue, the more entangled they become with one another, the more Trump’s credibility is questioned. Already, according to a Reuters Ipsos poll published this month, 59% of Americans think Trump is costing their country its credibility on the global stage.The risk for Trump is that the decision to address so much so quickly ends up not being a show of American strength but the opposite – the public erosion of a super power.In the hurry to seal a deal with Iran inside two months, Trump, unlike in all previous nuclear talks with Tehran, has barred complicating European interests from the negotiation room.To Iran’s relief, Witkoff has not tabled an agenda that strays beyond stopping Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb. He has not raised Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine. Nor has he tabled demands that Iran end arms supplies to its proxies fighting Israel.That has alarmed Israel, and to a lesser extent Europe, which sees Iran’s desire to have sanctions lifted as a rare opportunity to extract concessions from Tehran. Israel’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, and Mossad’s head, David Barnea, met Witkoff last Friday in Paris to try to persuade him that when he met the Iran negotiating team the next day in Rome, he had to demand the dismantling of Tehran’s civil nuclear programme.Witkoff refused, and amid many contradictory statements the administration has reverted to insisting that Iran import the necessary enriched uranium for its civil nuclear programme, rather than enrich it domestically.Russia, in a sign of Trump’s trust, might again become the repository of Iran’s stocks of highly enriched uranium, as it was after the 2015 deal.Israel is also wary of Trump’s aggrandisement of Russia. The Israeli thinktank INSS published a report this week detailing how Russia, in search of anti-western allies in the global south for its Ukraine war, has shown opportunistic political support not just to Iran but to Hamas. Israel will also be uneasy if Russia maintains its role in Syria.But if Trump has upset Netanyahu over Iran, he is keeping him sweet by giving him all he asks on Gaza.Initially, Witkoff received glowing accolades about how tough he had been with Netanyahu in his initial meeting in January. It was claimed that Witkoff ordered the Israeli president to meet him on a Saturday breaking the Sabbath and directed him to agree a ceasefire that he had refused to give to Joe Biden’s team for months.As a result, as Trump entered the White House on 19 January, he hailed the “EPIC ceasefire agreement could have only happened as a result of our Historic Victory in November, as it signalled to the entire World that my Administration would seek Peace and negotiate deals to ensure the safety of all Americans, and our Allies”.But Netanyahu, as was widely predicted in the region, found a reason not to open talks on the second phase of the ceasefire deal – the release of the remaining hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a permanent end to the fighting.Witkoff came up with compromises to extend the ceasefire but Netanyahu rejected them, resuming the assault on Hamas on 19 March. The US envoy merely described Israel’s decision as “unfortunate, in some respects, but also falls into the had-to-be bucket”.View image in fullscreenNow Trump’s refusal to put any pressure on Israel to lift its six-week-old ban on aid entering Gaza is informing Europe’s rift with Trump. Marking 50 days of the ban this week, France, Germany and the UK issued a strongly worded statement describing the denial of aid as intolerable.The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is calling for a coordinated European recognition of the state of Palestine, and Saudi Arabia is insisting the US does not attack Iran’s nuclear sites.Witkoff, by contrast, has been silent about Gaza’s fate and the collapse of the “EPIC ceasefire”.But if European diplomats think Witkoff was naive in dealing with Netanyahu, it is nothing to the scorn they hold for his handling of Putin.The anger is partly because Europeans had thought that, after the Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public row with Trump in the Oval Office, they had restored Ukraine’s standing in Washington by persuading Kyiv to back the full ceasefire that the US first proposed on 11 March.View image in fullscreenThe talks in Paris last week between Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and European leaders also gave Europe a chance to point out it was Putin that was stalling over a ceasefire.But instead of putting any countervailing pressure on Russia to accept a ceasefire, Witkoff switched strategy. In the words of Bruno Tertrais, a non-resident fellow at the Institut of Montaigne, Witkoff is “is now presenting a final peace plan, very favourable to the aggressor, even before the start of the negotiations, which had been due to take place after a ceasefire”.No European government has yet criticised Trump’s lopsided plan in public since, with few cards to play, the immediate necessity is to try to prevent Trump acting on his threat to walk away. At the very least, Europe will argue that if Trump wants Ukraine’s resources, he has to back up a European force patrolling a ceasefire, an issue that receives only sketchy reference in the US peace plan.The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, addressing the country’s parliament on Wednesday, pointed to the necessity of these security guarantees. “Any arrangement with the Kremlin will only last so long as the Russian elite dreads the consequences of its breach,” he said.View image in fullscreenBut in a sense, Trump and Putin, according to Fiona Hill at the Brookings Institution, a Russia specialist in Trump’s first administration, may already have moved beyond the details of their Ukrainian settlement as they focus on their wider plan to restore the Russian-US relationship.It would be an era of great power collusion, not great power competition in which Gaza, Iran and Ukraine would be sites from which the US and Russia could profit.Writing on Truth Social about a phone call with Putin in February, Trump reported” “We both reflected on the Great History of our Nations, and the fact that we fought so successfully together in World War II … We each talked about the strengths of our respective Nations, and the great benefit that we will someday have in working together.”Witkoff has also mused about what form this cooperation might take. “Shared sea lanes, maybe send [liquefied natural] gas into Europe together, maybe collaborate on AI together,” he said, adding: “Who doesn’t want to see a world like that?” More

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      USPS workers sound alarm over Trump efforts to dismantle service: ‘The hounds are at the door

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      US postal workers – and many who depend on them – may have sighed in relief when the Trump-appointed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, resigned last month. Now, postal workers and others fear the worst is to come.Many feared DeJoy, a prolific Trump donor and trucking logistics executive who pushed a 10-year consolidation plan at the agency, would be the man who would finally dismantle the United States Postal Service (USPS). Now the service is facing off with an empowered Trump and Elon Musk, his billionaire backer and chainsaw-wielding leader of his government job-cutting “department of government efficiency” (Doge).At stake, supporters argue, is the very existence of a service woven into US society, which can be traced back to 1775. “These are real threats. The hounds are at the door,” said Don Maston, president of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, the union representing more than 130,000 mail carriers in rural America.Workers and labor unions at the USPS are sounding the alarm and calling for public awareness of the threats of dismantling and privatizing the agency by the Trump administration.In March, the USPS reached an agreement with Doge to cut billions of dollars from its budget and finalize a voluntary retirement buyout program announced under the Biden administration to cut 10,000 employees. The Washington Post has reported industry executives are preparing for government efforts to outsource mail and package handling and long-haul trucking routes, and offload leases for unprofitable post offices.“There are other organizations on the chopping block right now, and it is just an amount of time before they get to us. So we just need to get the message out and get ahead of them to say ‘hands off the post office’,” said Tameka Brown, a rural letter carrier in Louisiana and president of the Louisiana Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. “We are the lifeline for a lot of American people, so to feel that your job is being threatened, it’s heart-wrenching.”View image in fullscreenDeJoy’s cuts are already affecting service, especially in rural areas and states. Wyoming, for example, looks set to lose all afternoon mail pickup.Brown warned that if the postal service is privatized, the services it provides would be eliminated or offered at much higher prices by private companies.“We touch American lives every day,” added Brown. “You’re linked to us throughout your whole life in one way or the other. They need to keep their hands off the post office. Through the rain, sleet, snow and through Covid, we were there. We didn’t miss a day.”Doge was even too much for DeJoy, who reportedly left after clashing with its staff over access to the agency.Last month, Musk voiced support for privatizing the USPS. The idea has been praised on the right, including by staff at the Heritage Foundation, which organized Project 2025, and by Trump: “It’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at it,” he said last year.Maston of the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association said Trump had been “floating balloons, seeing what he can get away with and what the reaction is going to be” over his interest in privatizing the USPS. But Trump also seems cautious. The postal service is popular with Americans, and especially rural Americans.“It’s not the US Postal Business, it’s the US Postal Service,” said Maston. “It’s owned by we, the people, you and I and every other American.“The postal service is the No 2 most trusted and loved government agency. The threats and the attacks by the current administration and Elon Musk, it’s all just for a bottom line and to make something that they can make a profit off of, another piece of the pie.”Marc Mancini, a letter carrier in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and shop steward with the National Association of Letter Carriers, said the USPS was already under intense strain. “The way I feel they’re going about it is they’re trying to save money by squeezing more and more out of workers. So you’re getting a lot more pressure from management, upper management, to have the carriers run faster and move quicker,” he said.He noted any changes to the independence of the USPS must be made by Congress, but he said he was worried that the Trump administration might try to skirt around the proper channels.“I think a lot of people cling to the hope that because of that, Trump and Doge cannot fully implement a full privatization of the post office, but I don’t think Trump really cares much for what the constitution says or what the laws are,” Mancini added. “He’s already making threats that if judges rule against them, he’s going to remove them. So I think the threat of privatization should be taken a lot more seriously.”No permanent replacement has yet been named for DeJoy. The Washington Post reported in February 2025 that Trump was considering dissolving the leadership of the USPS by executive order and absorbing the agency into the US Department of Commerce.The White House rejected the report of a planned executive order, though the president said it was being looked into it. Trump claimed during the swearing-in ceremony of US Department of Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, that the USPS was a“tremendous loser for this country”.View image in fullscreenThe merger proposal was characterized by unions representing USPS workers as an attack on the workers, postal services and the people who rely on them.Brian Renfroe, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said the USPS was far from being a “loser”. “It is a public service that does not operate on taxpayer dollars. It’s self-sustaining. It is paid for. It’s funded solely by revenue from people that mail things,” he said.The USPS lost $9.5bn in fiscal year 2024. Indisputably, it faces huge challenges, although 80% of its continued net losses are due to factors outside management’s control. Revenue losses by the agency are not entirely due to operation costs, but from liabilities for pensions and retirements that require policy changes to alleviate, such as enabling better pension investments.“It’s challenging during a period of modernization where they’re trying to change and improve their network, but you have to still provide service every day. It’s almost like rebuilding a ship while you’re crossing the ocean,” said Renfroe. “Maintaining that network and public service where everyone, no matter where they live, receives the same postal services for the same price is ultra important, and that is really where the problem comes in with privatization. That would be virtually impossible to maintain in a privatized model.”Postal workers have held rallies around the US in recent weeks, including those organized by the National Association of Letter Carriers, the American Postal Workers Union, the National Postal Mailhandlers Union and the National Rural Letter Carriers’ Association. Of the 640,000 workers at the USPS, about 91% are union members.Legislation has also recently been introduced in the House and Senate with Democratic and Republican support to oppose privatization of the USPS.Tim Thomason, vice-president of the West Virginia chapter of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association and a retired mail carrier of 33 years who served out of the Princeton, West Virginia, post office, argued that rural communities rely on the postal service even more as many private mail services do not serve them because doing so is not profitable.“Those folks rely on us. I took medicine to disabled people. I pulled cars out of ditches. I changed flat tires. It wasn’t just about being the mailman. I felt like I was part of our community,” he said. “If it is torn apart, then we lose the universal service and and I think that the people that I delivered mail to are the ones that are hurt.”The USPS did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A senior White House official claimed “the Trump administration is not considering privatization of the USPS”.The official added in an email: “Doge is actively assessing ways to cut waste, fraud and abuse while eliminating the presence of DEI in the USPS. The president is committed to ensuring no disruptions to the critical mission of the USPS.” More

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      Trump administration has set Noaa on ‘non-science trajectory’, workers warn

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      The Trump administration has shunted one of the US federal government’s top scientific agencies onto a “non-science trajectory”, workers warn, that threatens to derail decades of research and leave the US with “air that’s not breathable and water that’s not drinkable”.Workers and scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) are warning of the drastic impacts of cuts at the agency on science, research, and efforts to protect natural resources.“The problems are still there. We still have harmful algal blooms, we still have fisheries that are collapsing, waters you can’t swim in. These problems don’t go away because we fired all the people who were trying to solve a problem,” said one Noaa veteran, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “How do you save the arms and legs or the feet and hands when the core is dying?”The longtime research scientist with more than 20 years at Noaa has taken early retirement. “I left because it was just so demoralizing and fearful and scary,” they said.Trump administration officials are seeking to abolish the scientific research division at Noaa, the Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (Oar) office. It is the latest of a series of cuts at the agency that began the second Trump administration with 12,000 employees around the world, including more than 6,700 engineers and scientists.The cuts are disrupting the collection of data sets, including recordings of global temperatures in the air and ocean, and that data cannot be replaced, said the Noaa veteran.The dismantling of Noaa, they said, would harm work in many areas, from finding solutions to combat harmful algae and improving sustainable fisheries to work on new medicines and industrial products and collecting information for disaster preparation.“We can look at other countries that are actively making these mistakes, where they have air that’s not breathable and water that’s not drinkable,” they said. “I think it’s done. I think this is done. The enemies are in the gate. I don’t see any indication so far of anyone stopping it. They’re just letting it burn. I honestly don’t understand how US science will recover.”More than 800 probationary employees at the agency were fired, reinstated, then refired this month. Employees have reported having their firings backdated and having their health insurance canceled even though premiums were being taken out of their paychecks.Rachel Brittin, worked as the federal deputy director of external affairs at Noaa before she was fired, then reinstated, then fired again as a probationary employee, with just a few months left on her two-year probation.“The whole situation is a mess,” she said. “How is Noaa going to be able to keep up with the services it provides? I don’t know. I don’t know how that’s going to happen, but it’s very scary to me. The loss of anybody at Noaa is directly connected to services lost by every individual in the United States.”Contractors for the agency have been furloughed as all Noaa contracts over $100,000 have to now be approved by Trump’s Department of Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.Doge has slated 31 offices and building leases at Noaa for termination around the US. Nearly $4m in funding to Princeton University as part of a cooperative agreement with Noaa was cancelled on 8 April.Fourteen Noaa data services on earthquakes, marine, coastal and estuary science at have been slated for decommissioning, more than twice as many as in 2024.Four regional climate centers providing weather analysis tools and data for 21 states in the US have gone dark after lapses in funding, with the remaining two covering the US set to face a funding lapse in June.A reduction in force plan to cut an additional 10% of the agency’s workforce is anticipated and at least several hundred workers have taken voluntary buyouts or early retirement according to Noaa workers interviewed by the Guardian, though Noaa and the Department of Commerce did not disclose the numbers.“It seems clear that the actions that have been taken have intentionally reduced our ability to do our jobs,” said a Noaa scientist who requested to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “You’re not expected to get anything done.”They said due to firings, early retirements and resignations, scientific research teams around the agency have been left with gaps of expertise that can’t be replaced.“We are scrambling,” they added. “We are finding workarounds, but its becoming increasingly difficult.”Marty Kardos, a research molecular geneticist at the northwest fisheries science center at Noaa, decided to resign after the agency’s violations of their collective bargaining agreement with workers meant he would be forced to move from Montana to Seattle in a week or resign.“The agency is on a non-science trajectory,” Kardos said, speaking in a personal capacity. “All the plans for research we were making for the upcoming years are out of the window. Morale is extremely bad.”The attrition of scientists and management at Noaa is effectively undermining the agency’s ability to sustainably manage fisheries and identify and recover endangered species, he said.“The agency is essentially, openly hostile to their mission and their people,” Kardos added. “A lot of this seems to be related to deregulation. The agency is responsible for the Endangered Species Act for marine species and one way to hamstring the act without repealing it is to get rid of the scientists who help to implement it.”The cuts come as the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the Trump administration have installed allies in key positions at the agency.Neil Jacobs, the Trump nominee for Noaa administrator and acting head of Noaa in the first Trump administration, has yet to be confirmed. Jacobs was caught up in “Sharpiegate” – a bizarre 2019 incident when the White House was accused of altering a Noaa map of the predicted path of Hurricane Dorian with a black marker to support an incorrect claim by Trump that the Florida-bound storm would also hit Alabama.A staffer from Doge, Bryton Shang, announced this month he was appointed as a senior adviser to the Noaa administrator. Shang was one of the two Doge staffers who flew to Los Angeles during the wildfires in January, and attempted to open a large water pump system in California.Erik Noble, dubbed Trump’s “eyes and ears” at Noaa during his first administration, is back at the agency as deputy assistant secretary for oceans and atmosphere and is reviewing contracts at the agency with Keegan McLaughlin, a special assistant at the commerce department and former intern for the 2024 Trump campaign.Noaa was a target of Project 2025, the conservative roadmap for a second Trump administration. That document pushed to “break up NOAA” and labeled the agency “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry”.“Understanding things lets us make decisions that can put us on a track to things getting better. Knowing bad news doesn’t create the bad news. It lets you be prepared to take actions that may let you avoid the worst consequences,” the Noaa scientist at Oar added on the Trump appointees and the authority they are being given over scientific decisions.“Pretending that our resources are inexhaustible doesn’t make them inexhaustible,” they added. “I don’t think people understand the arrogance of thinking: ‘Hey, I think I understand this, even though I know nothing about it.’ This whole antithesis to experts, I don’t understand it. Would you want to do that with your own personal health? Why would you do it with any kind of complex system?”Noaa and the Department of Commerce did not respond to multiple requests for comment. More

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      Stock markets rise as Trump backtracks on high China tariffs and firing Fed chair

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      Stock markets have risen around the world after Donald Trump said his tariffs on China would come down “substantially” and he had “no intention” of firing the chair of the US central bank, Jerome Powell.Weeks of tough talk on trade from White House officials have rattled investors and Trump now appears to be softening his tone. The president told reporters in Washington on Tuesday he planned to be “very nice” to China in trade talks and that tariffs could drop in both countries if they could reach a deal, adding: “It will come down substantially, but it won’t be zero.”Overnight in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei rose by nearly 2%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 2.4% and the South Korean Kospi gained 1.6%.The rally spread to Europe in early trading on Wednesday, with the UK’s FTSE 100 index up 1.6%, while the Italian FTSE MIB rose by 1.1%. Germany’s Dax gained 2.6% and France’s Cac 2.1%.Meanwhile, US stocks opened on a high Wednesday morning, with the Dow rallying over 800 points, and the Nasdaq Composite up over 3%. The rally stalled in the afternoon but all the major stock markets managed to end the day higher.On Wednesday, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, also took a softer, optimistic tone on China in remarks delivered at the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC, saying that China “knows it needs to change”.“If China is serious on less dependence on export-led manufacturing growth and rebalancing toward a domestic economy … let’s rebalance together,” Bessent said. “This is an incredible opportunity.”Bessent told investors in a private meeting on Tuesday that he expects a “de-escalation” of the trade war between China and the US in the “very near future”.“‘America First’ does not mean America alone. To the contrary, it is a call for deeper collaboration and mutual respect among trade partners,” Bessent said on Wednesday.Investor confidence also grew after Trump told reporters he would not fire Powell, the chair of the US Federal Reserve, reversing the previous day’s losses triggered by the president calling the central bank boss a “major loser”.The president has criticised the Fed chair repeatedly for refusing to cut interest rates and last week hinted that he believed he could dismiss Powell before his term as the head of the central bank comes to an end in May next year.Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, last week that Powell’s termination “could not come fast enough”, after the Fed chair raised concerns about the impact of trade tariffs on the American economy.However, the suggestion from the White House that the US central bank will remain independent helped stocks to rise on Wednesday, as well as the prospect of lower tariffs on Chinese imports to the US.The US dollar, which hit a three-year low on Tuesday before recovering, rose by 0.25% against a basket of major currencies.Oil prices also rose on Wednesday, with Brent crude rising above $68 (£51) a barrel amid hopes that lower tariffs will be less damaging to the global economy. The rise was also led by new US sanctions targeting Iranian liquefied petroleum gas and the crude oil shipping magnate Seyed Asadoollah Emamjomeh.Meanwhile, gold, which is traditionally viewed by investors as a safe haven asset during volatile periods, retreated from the new high of $3,500 (£2,620) an ounce it hit on Tuesday, to trade at about $3,307. More

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      The Guardian view on the IMF’s warning: Donald Trump could cost the world a trillion dollars | Editorial

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      Wake up! When the most sober of global institutions, the International Monetary Fund, abandons its usual technocratic calm to sound the alarm on the political roots of global financial instability, it’s time to pay attention. The IMF is warning of a non-negligible risk of a $1tn hit to global output, as Donald Trump’s erratic “America first” agenda – part oligarchic enrichment scheme, part mobster shakedown – collides with a perfect storm of global financial vulnerabilities.Such a shock would be equivalent to a third of that experienced in the 2008 crisis. But it would be felt in a much more fragile and politically charged environment. This time, the crisis stems not just from markets but from the politics at the heart of the dollar system. The IMF’s latest Global Financial Stability Report sees the danger in Mr Trump’s trade policies, especially his “liberation day” announcements, which have pushed up America’s effective tariff rate to the highest in over 100 years.The IMF put investors on notice that Trumpian volatility was taking place as US debt and equities – especially tech stocks – were overvalued. It cautions that hedge funds have made huge bets that have gone sour, requiring them to sell US treasuries for cash and potentially deepening the chaos in bond markets. Ominously, the IMF draws the comparison, first made by the analyst Nathan Tankus, with the “dash for cash” in March 2020 during Covid, when the Federal Reserve rescued US treasury markets directly. Developing nations, already grappling with the highest real borrowing costs in a decade, may now be forced to take on even more expensive debt – the IMF warns – just to cushion the blow from Mr Trump’s new tariffs, risking a dreaded “sudden stop” in capital flows.At the heart of this chaos stands the US, the very country meant to uphold the global financial architecture. Just over a week ago, Adam Tooze of Columbia University wondered if markets had begun to “sell America” after US long-maturity bond prices fell precipitously. He thought that markets were no longer just responding to economic fundamentals but to politics as a systemic risk factor. In this case: Mr Trump’s tariff threats and his increasing political pressure on Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell. In essence, Prof Tooze gave us the theory; the IMF just confirmed the data.The US president’s continued attacks on the Fed chair over the weekend have only added to a flight from US equities, bonds and the dollar itself. The money is fleeing to safe havens such as gold. Some of the loss has been clawed back, but at what cost? Investors aren’t just jittery about inflation or growth – they’re hedging against political chaos. That might explain the seemingly divergent IMF messaging: blunt systemic warnings in its report versus the soothing market-facing comments from a senior official at the fund’s press conference. This is central bank diplomacy. The institution is signalling that it is worried while trying not to spark a self-fulfilling panic in treasuries and the dollar.The real concern here is not technical dysfunction in treasury markets or the mechanics of the Fed, which are the bedrock of the global financial system. It’s about the politicisation of the monetary-fiscal nexus under a Trumpian regime that is fundamentally hostile to the norms of liberal-democratic governance. When even the dollar is no longer a safe haven, what – or who – can be?Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More