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      California’s Push for Electric Trucks Sputters Under Trump

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      The state will no longer require some truckers to shift away from diesel semis but hopes that subsidies can keep dreams of pollution-free big rigs alive.President Trump’s policies could threaten many big green energy projects in the coming years, but his election has already dealt a big blow to an ambitious California effort to replace thousands of diesel-fueled trucks with battery-powered semis.The California plan, which has been closely watched by other states and countries, was meant to take a big leap forward last year, with a requirement that some of the more than 30,000 trucks that move cargo in and out of ports start using semis that don’t emit carbon dioxide.But after Mr. Trump was elected, California regulators withdrew their plan, which required a federal waiver that the new administration, which is closely aligned with the oil industry, would most likely have rejected. That leaves the state unable to force trucking businesses to clean up their fleets. It was a big setback for the state, which has long been allowed to have tailpipe emission rules that are stricter than federal standards because of California’s infamous smog.Some transportation experts said that even before Mr. Trump’s election, California’s effort had problems. The batteries that power electric trucks are too expensive. They take too long to charge. And there aren’t enough places to plug the trucks in.“It was excessively ambitious,” said Daniel Sperling, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in sustainable transportation, referring to the program that made truckers buy green rigs.California officials insist that their effort is not doomed and say they will keep it alive with other rules and by providing truckers incentives to go electric.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’s USAID Cuts Halt Agent Orange Victims Program in Vietnam

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      Nearly 40 years after she was born with a malformed spine and misshapen limbs — most likely because her father was exposed to Agent Orange, the toxic chemical that the American military used during the Vietnam War — Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diem finally got some help from the United States.A project funded by U.S.A.I.D. gave her graphic design training in 2022 and helped her land a job. Even when the company closed a few months ago, she stayed hopeful: The same program for Agent Orange victims was due to deliver a new computer, or a small loan.I was the first to tell her that the support may never come; that President Trump had frozen U.S.A.I.D. funding and planned to fire nearly everyone associated with the humanitarian agency.“It makes no sense,” Ms. Diem told me, her tiny body curled into a wheelchair, below a crucifix on the wall. “Agent Orange came from the U.S. — it was used here, and that makes us victims,” she said. “A little support for people like us means a lot, but at the same time, it’s the U.S.’s responsibility.”Ms. Diem had been expecting a small U.S. loan to help her buy a more modern computer for her graphic design work.Linh Pham for The New York TimesMs. Diem uses a computer from 2011. It often freezes and shuts down unexpectedly.Linh Pham 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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      Republicans Want Lower Taxes. The Hard Part Is Choosing What to Cut.

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      House Republicans are preparing to adopt a plan that puts a $4.5 trillion limit on the size of the tax cut, but even that will not be enough for some of President Trump’s promises.Since their party swept to power, Republicans have entertained visions of an all-inclusive tax cut — one that could permanently lower rates for individuals, shower corporations with new incentives and deliver President Trump’s sprawling suite of campaign promises.If only it were so easy.House Republicans are preparing to adopt a budget plan that puts a $4.5 trillion upper limit on the size of the tax cut. Even such a huge sum is not nearly enough for all of their ideas, and so lawmakers must now decide which policy commitments are essential and which ones they can live without.For a sense of the Republican predicament, take a look at the 2017 tax cuts. Many of the measures in that law, including a larger standard deduction and more generous child tax credit, expire at the end of the year. The overriding goal of this year’s bill is to extend the expiring provisions, which provide their largest benefits to the rich, before they end.But accomplishing just that would cost roughly $4 trillion over the next 10 years. Then there’s a coveted business tax break for research and development — which, in an example of the zigzag of tax policy in Washington, Republicans wound down in 2017 and now want to revive. That would be another $150 billion. Allowing companies to once again deduct more of the interest on their debt is another $50 billion.Those changes are the table stakes. They essentially amount to preserving the status quo. And together they would eat up all but $300 billion of the $4.5 trillion Republicans are giving themselves to cut taxes. That’s not very much money, considering the ambitions Mr. Trump and other Republicans have for the bill.The squeeze is on.“You do start running out of space to do other things,” said Andrew Lautz, a tax policy expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank.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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      Let’s Argue About Our Phones (and Tech in General)

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      More from our inbox:Excuse Me, but Who Are You Calling Stupid?Musk Has Seen ‘State Capture’ BeforeThe Autocrats’ Playbook221A/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “The Only Phone You Need Is a Dumb One,” by August Lamm (Opinion guest essay, Feb. 2):Three cheers for Ms. Lamm, an anti-tech activist.I am a boomer who grew up meeting people face to face, talking with family members at the dinner table, playing outdoors, writing with a ballpoint pen and going to the library to get information. So it’s refreshing to see a young person striving to restore our basic sanity — our basic humanity, in fact — by encouraging us to dump harmful, unnecessary technology.We’re living in a dangerously dizzying time in which high tech threatens to end our very existence.Dennis QuickCharleston, S.C.To the Editor:August Lamm announces that she is “on a mission … to get people off their smartphones.” Why has she made it her mission to change the lives of strangers who have never asked for her intervention? Because “we’ve become so used to selecting partners on a sterile, simulated interface that we’ve lost the ability to make spontaneous, messy connections in real life.”But I often make spontaneous, messy connections in the real life of cyberspace, which lets me make these connections based on mutual interests and values rather than mere propinquity.The only opinion I need about how to live my social life is my own, supplemented by suggestions from friends who actually know something about me.Felicia Nimue AckermanProvidence, R.I.To the Editor:August Lamm is 29 years old, so she may be too young to know: Seventy years ago, everyone in the United States smoked, or at least it seemed that way. Today, far fewer Americans smoke. I suspect that social media is headed in the same direction.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 Fired, Then Unfired, National Nuclear Security Administration Employees. What Were Their Jobs?

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      When termination letters were sent to employees across the federal government last week, the Trump administration affected an agency charged with the readiness of America’s nuclear arsenal.The move also shined a spotlight on the agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which few Americans likely think of often, if ever, but has a monumental responsibility.Here’s a rundown of what the obscure agency does and the potential reasons that the Trump administration had to quickly adjust some of the firings:What is the agency’s mission?The National Nuclear Security Administration maintains, refurbishes and keeps safe the United States’ more than 3,000 nuclear warheads. It also supervises the production of new nuclear warheads. It has a $25 billion annual budget and more than 57,000 employees. Congress also put the agency in charge of thwarting nuclear proliferation, researching and developing nuclear propulsion systems for submarines and directing national laboratories that provide key scientific and engineering knowledge for the U.S. nuclear weapons system.Those laboratories include the historical Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the top secret Manhattan Project took place during World War II.To what department does it belong?Confusingly, despite its long-held, pivotal role in the military’s defense strategy, the agency sits within the Department of Energy, rather than the Department of Defense.In 2017, after accepting the offer to serve as energy secretary in the first Trump administration, Rick Perry was bewildered that the job entailed supervising the maintenance and production of the most fearsome weapons in the world.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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      The MAGA Youth Remind Me of the 1980s and Not In a Good Way

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      When I was 7, I sent a birthday card to President Ronald Reagan. It was the 1980s. I lived in rural Alabama, and pretty much all the adults around me were loudly on board with what was then the Reagan revolution, which had swept Jimmy Carter and his timid liberal apologists for America’s greatness out of power and made the presidency, especially to my young eyes, a glamorous exemplar of everything good about the country. I remember the seductive appeal of the story he told about America as a global superpower, a “shining city on a hill” where anyone could be successful with enough elbow grease, so long as those meddlesome big-government liberals didn’t get in the way.Being young and preppy and rich back then looked cool to me. Within a few years I had a crush on Alex P. Keaton on “Family Ties,” who horrified his ex-hippie parents with his love of heartless capitalism and harebrained business schemes. I didn’t see that the show was making fun of him, too. The young conservatives of the ’80s were all molded in his image (and he in theirs).Now, in 2025, some young people (who were not yet born in the age of Reagan) are renouncing the progressive politics of their millennial elders and acting like it’s the ’80s again. There was a marked shift toward Donald Trump by voters under 30 according to exit polling in last November’s election, so maybe they are just dressing the part. But when I read about a group of younger MAGA supporters reveling in their victory at the member’s only Centurion New York (declaring, as one 27-year-old in attendance did, that Trump “is making it sexy to be Republican again. He’s making it glamorous to be a Republican again”) or see photos or watch videos of MAGA youth at, say, Turning Point USA events run by Charlie Kirk, a preppy right-wing influencer whose organization recruits high schoolers and college students to be soldiers in the culture war, or in Brock Colyar’s New York magazine cover story about the young right-wing elite at various inauguration parties — I get a very distinct feeling of déjà vu. It’s laced with nostalgia but grounded in dread.These young right-wingers have a slightly modernized late ’80s look. I doubt they use Aqua Net or Drakkar Noir, but I imagine their parties have the feel of a Brat Pack movie where almost everyone is or aspires to be a WASPy James Spader villain. Few of the people I’m talking about were even alive in the 1980s, and so they can’t understand what it means for Mr. Trump to be so stuck in that time, still fighting its battles. Now, instead of renouncing hippie counterculture, they’ve turned against whatever their generation considers to be woke. The incumbent liberal they detested was Joe Biden instead of Jimmy Carter. Instead of junk bonds, many of them plan to get rich by investing in crypto and trust that this administration will pursue or exceed Reagan levels of deregulation to facilitate it. After all, Project 2025 mentions Reagan 71 times.Mr. Trump’s ’80s were, until now, his glory years, when he built Trump Tower, published “The Art of the Deal” and called the tabloids on himself using a made-up name, John Barron. He was routinely flattered in the tabloids thanks to the excellent public relations skills of Mr. Barron, popped up regularly on TV and wrestling promotions and started making movie cameos. Urban elites looked down on him — Spy magazine called him a “short-fingered vulgarian” — but he embodied what many people who weren’t rich thought rich people looked like, lived like, and, in his shamelessness and selfishness, acted like.More important for us now, his formative understanding of politics seems to have been shaped by that era, when America, humbled by the Vietnam War, Watergate, crime and the oil crisis, was stuck with a cardigan-wearing president who suggested that we all turn down our thermostats for the collective good. Reagan told us to turn the thermostat way up, live large and swagger again. Hippies became yuppies, at least in the media’s imagination.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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      This Is What the Courts Can Do if Trump Defies Them

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      Are we heading toward a full-blown constitutional crisis? For the first time in decades, the country is wrestling with this question. It was provoked by members of the Trump administration, including Russell Vought, the influential director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, who have hinted or walked right up to the edge of saying outright that officials should refuse to obey a court order against certain actions of the administration. President Trump has said he would obey court orders — though on Saturday he posted on social media, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”Some have argued that if the administration is defiant there is little the courts can do. But while the courts do not have a standing army, there are actually several escalating measures they can take to counter a defiant executive branch.The fundamental principle of the rule of law is that once the legal process, including appeals and stay applications, has reached completion, public officials must obey an order of the courts. This country’s constitutional traditions are built on, and depend upon, that understanding.A profound illustration is President Richard Nixon’s compliance with the Supreme Court decision requiring him to turn over the secret White House tape recordings he had made, even though Nixon knew that doing so would surely end his presidency.If the Trump administration ignores a court order, it would represent the start of a full-blown constitutional crisis.The courts rarely issue binding orders to the president, so these orders are not likely to be directed at President Trump personally. His executive orders and other commands are typically enforced by subordinate officials in the executive branch, and any court order — initially, it would come from the Federal District Court — would be directed at them.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 Team Leaves Behind an Alliance in Crisis

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      European leaders felt certain about one thing after a whirlwind tour by Trump officials — they were entering a new world where it was harder to depend on the United States.Many critical issues were left uncertain — including the fate of Ukraine — at the end of Europe’s first encounter with an angry and impatient Trump administration. But one thing was clear: An epochal breach appears to be opening in the Western alliance.After three years of war that forged a new unity within NATO, the Trump administration has made clear it is planning to focus its attention elsewhere: in Asia, Latin America, the Arctic and anywhere President Trump believes the United States can obtain critical mineral rights.European officials who emerged from a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they now expect that tens of thousands of American troops will be pulled out of Europe — the only question is how many, and how fast.And they fear that in one-on-one negotiations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, Mr. Trump is on his way to agreeing to terms that could ultimately put Moscow in a position to own a fifth of Ukraine and to prepare to take the rest in a few years’ time. Mr. Putin’s ultimate goal, they believe, is to break up the NATO alliance.Those fears spilled out on the stage of the Munich Security Conference on Saturday morning, when President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that “Ukraine will never accept deals made behind our backs.” He then called optimistically for the creation of an “army of Europe,” one that includes his now battle-hardened Ukrainian forces. He was advocating, in essence, a military alternative to NATO, a force that would make its own decisions without the influence — or the military control — of the United States.Mr. Zelensky predicted that Mr. Putin would soon seek to manipulate Mr. Trump, speculating that the Russian leader would invite the new American president to the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. “Putin will try to get the U.S. president standing on Red Square on May 9 this year,” he told a jammed hall of European diplomats and defense and intelligence officials, “not as a respected leader but as a prop in his own performance.”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