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Murdoch Paper Goes Scorched Earth on Trump for ‘Destroying’ Jobs Trump’s favorite policy has done little to promote economic growth, argued the paper’s editorial board. The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal eviscerated President Donald Trump over the reality of his beloved tariffs. The newspaper’s editorial board published a scathing piece on Thursday evening, ripping the 80-year-old president over one of his signature policies as he seeks to “rescue his underwater job rating.” Following Trump’s Truth Social brag on Tuesday, in which he took credit for Toyota’s announcement about a $3.6 billion expansion in Texas, the Journal asserted that the president likely had nothing to do with the decision. The company shifted production of its Tacoma truck from Mexico to a manufacturing facility in San Antonio, and as the newspaper pointed out, only made reference to the state’s pro-business milieu and local political leaders. Neither Trump nor his Senate endorsee, Ken Paxton, were mentioned in Toyota’s press release. “But the President is right that his tariffs are at work—in destroying U.S. jobs and raising prices,” the Journal wrote. The editorial board highlighted how the U.S. has lost around 75,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump took office in January 2025, over a third of which were in motor vehicle and auto part production. The paper cited rising vehicle costs due to Trump’s tariffs as one possible explanation for the job losses, as dwindling sales correlate with a lower need for workers. Additionally, the newspaper emphasized that Trump’s tariffs have actually hurt Americans rather than helped, noting that foreign retaliation has affected U.S. farmers and raised costs for domestic manufacturers. “Mr. Trump’s Section 232 national security tariffs on autos and parts have cost $35.2 billion through April of this year, and his steel and aluminum tariffs another $17.5 billion, according to U.S. government data,” the board wrote. “Mr. Trump and his advisers claim that foreigners pay his border taxes, but the evidence shows that U.S. companies, workers and consumers are picking up most of the tab.” The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on the Journal’s editorial. The Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision in February that Trump’s sweeping global tariffs were unlawful, upholding the principle that only Congress may exercise the power to tax. Despite the illegality of his initiative, Trump has continued to boast about the supposed economic benefits of his policy, even as Americans bear the brunt of higher prices. The nation’s inflation rate has risen drastically month to month since February, when Trump launched his war on Iran. It has risen by nearly two percentage points, from 2.4 percent in February to 4.2 percent in May. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected to publish its June report on Tuesday. https://www.thedailybeast.com/murdoch-paper-wall-street-journal-goes-scorched-earth-on-trump-for-destroying-jobs/? ps:Again more foot n mouth disease for this pathetic little man!!!!!

Trump Humiliated as Google Maps Busts His Big Brag Historical images show that Trump’s win isn’t as grand as it seems. President Donald Trump’s initiative to lower gas prices has been met with an embarrassing reality check by Google Maps. A White House account bragged on Wednesday that one of its Philadelphia “Freedom Fuel Network” stations had provided much-needed financial relief to Americans struggling with high gas prices caused by Trump’s war with Iran. The “Rapid Response” account shared a video segment from NBC Philadelphia that discussed how one former Karco K Shop gas station—now wrapped in “Freedom Fuel” signage—posted a price of $3.47 per gallon, which it said was around 40 cents below the state average.However, Google Street View images of the gas station at 3101 N. Broad Street show that the promotion was not quite as monumental as the White House portrayed. In April 2025—three months into Trump’s second term—the gas station displayed a price of only $3.05 per gallon. Other historical images captured of the station show prices either similar to or lower than the $3.47 under the “Freedom Fuel” promotion. Those images appeared to serve as a stark reminder that the price decrease touted by the White House was still effectively an increase over the prices seen before the war. Trump, 80, had campaigned on bringing domestic gas prices below $2 a gallon. However, gas prices skyrocketed in the wake of his strikes on Iran over four months ago, leaving Americans to deal with the consequences at the pump. The White House did not address questions emailed by the Daily Beast when reached for comment. The president announced the “Freedom Fuel Network” in a Truth Social post on July 1, saying that 25 gas stations across the greater Philadelphia area would be lowering their prices ahead of the nation’s semiquincentennial. “This Retailer is taking the lead, and others should follow. They are doing this because they love the U.S.A.,” the president wrote. “America has never been stronger than it is now, and Gas Prices will soon be back to the Record Low Prices Americans enjoyed at the pump before our very successful ‘excursion’ in Iran.” The administration has not shared any details about how the selected gas stations can sell gas at prices well below market. The national average price for a gallon of gas reached as high as $4.56 in May, but has since dropped to around $3.85, according to AAA. However, renewed airstrikes between the U.S. and Iran this week threaten to send prices soaring again. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-humiliated-as-google-maps-busts-his-big-gas-prices-brag/? ps:Notice that he didn't call for Mobil, Shell, etc. to lower the prices that they sell gas to the stations, but asks the gas stations that barely make any money to lower there prices!!!

White House Rages After Embarrassing Trump Story Exposed The president hoped he would be praised for lowering food costs at America’s biggest retailer. The White House has gone into full defense mode after Donald Trump was found taking credit for price cuts that had nothing to do with him. On Monday, the 80-year-old president posted on Truth Social that Walmart would be “lowering prices, by a lot, at my Administration’s request,” including cutting the cost of beef by 15 percent as part of the country’s 250th birthday celebrations. Trump took a victory lap, praising the announcement as a “huge deal” for millions of Americans suffering through a cost-of-living crisis. The president’s second term has been dogged by high food prices, despite Trump making lowering them a central pledge of his 2024 campaign. However, a Walmart spokesperson told The Bulwark that the company’s price cuts had already been in place at its stores for a week before Trump tried to suggest he had convinced the country’s biggest retailer to implement them. White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai then melted down on X while replying to Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bulwark and a former politics editor at the Daily Beast, who had shared an article by the site’s economics editor, Catherine Rampell. “The President and Walmart’s announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long. This is a big win for Americans. The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.” Desai also tried to suggest that the White House had something to do with Walmart’s discounts, writing in an earlier X post that the Trump administration “stays in close contact with retailers to ensure savings are getting passed on to American consumers, and results like this prove the strategy is working.”Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social boast, Walmart issued a statement detailing its signature Rollbacks and Sam’s Club offers, which the chain typically introduces during the summer. The statement mentioned price reductions on beef and other products but made no mention of Trump or the administration. On July 7, one day after Trump’s Truth Social post, The Wall Street Journal reported that an Agriculture Department official had called some of the country’s largest grocers to urge them to lower their beef prices. However, during a call with Walmart, the company told the USDA that it already planned to lower prices on a range of items, including beef, and that the reductions had been in place since June 29. Walmart executives had also been discussing lowering prices for months to help consumers, as they expected billions of dollars in tariff refunds after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping import levies in February. “We think the single best return that we can have on a dollar of capital right now is to invest in the customer and invest in price,” Walmart Chief Financial Officer John David Rainey said on an earnings call in May, according to the Journal. The Daily Beast has contacted Walmart for comment. https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-melts-down-after-trump-walmart-price-cut-humiliation/? ps:It's obvious that trump doesn't go to the store and shop! The prices have been going up, up and up, and now they came down a little, but nothing to what they were before!!

Putin’s Nightmare Deepens After Humiliating Strikes Ukrainian drones set two oil tankers ablaze in the Sea of Azov and hit fresh depots as the Kremlin’s fuel misery grows. Vladimir Putin’s fuel nightmare has worsened as Ukrainian drones set two oil tankers ablaze in the Sea of Azov and torched depots deep inside Russia.Thursday’s strikes are the latest blows in a punishing months-long campaign that has crippled Russia’s refineries and plunged roughly 50 million people—about a third of the population—into a fuel crisis on a scale not seen since the dying days of the Soviet Union. At the time of publication, the tankers were still burning off Russia’s southern coast, Rostov Gov. Yuri Slusar said, with one crew forced to evacuate. It was the latest in a run of strikes on shipping in the area, part of Kyiv’s push to choke fuel supplies to Crimea, the peninsula Russia illegally annexed in 2014. Drones also triggered a blaze at an oil depot in the western city of Tver, acting Gov. Vitaly Korolyov said. In the Stavropol region, burning reservoirs forced residents of several apartment blocks to flee, according to Gov. Vladimir Vladimirov. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, 48, has cast the attacks as “long-range sanctions”—payback for Moscow’s refusal to stop fighting. “We have long proposed that Russia end this war, and every day of delay should bring the feeling of war to where it all began—to Russia,” he said. The strikes landed a day after U.S. President Donald Trump, 80, told Zelensky the U.S. would grant Ukraine a license to build its own Patriot air defense systems, as the Associated Press reported. While this would hand Kyiv a long-sought win at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, a top Ukrainian official warned homegrown Patriot interceptors could be a year or more away. Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine’s defense minister, said the real obstacle is time, not skill, with some subcontracted parts taking up to two years to produce.Russia’s Defense Ministry said it downed 73 Ukrainian drones overnight. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s air force said it faces its own barrage from 94 Russian drones and two ballistic missiles, saying 19 drones and both missiles hit 13 sites. The Kremlin brushed off any idea that the strikes would expedite peace. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov called Washington’s stance “ambivalent” but said Moscow still welcomed Trump’s efforts. “It’s a mistake to think that escalation and military pressure could pave the way to a peaceful settlement,” Peskov said, warning that more strikes would only push Russia to carve out a bigger “buffer zone” in Ukraine. He added that Putin is “open to dialogue” and ready for another call with Trump. https://www.thedailybeast.com/putins-war-nightmare-deepens-in-humiliating-strikes-by-zelenskys-ukraine-on-oil-facilities/? ps:Personally they need a different country to be an arbiter between Ukraine and Russia, trump is useless here!!!!!

Trump’s Son Wipes $600M From Family Fortune With Disastrous Bet Eric Trump posted a cringeworthy bid for his dad’s approval just hours before news of the staggering loss broke. One of Donald Trump’s sons got ahead of reports that he lost the first family more than $600 million by posting a cloying online tribute to his father. “I am deeply honored that at 5:01 a.m., Trump Force One will be the first plane to land at the newly renamed Palm Beach International Airport—now and forever President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” Eric Trump wrote on X in the early hours of Thursday morning. “There is no person who has done more for Florida and our country, and no one more deserving of this incredible honor,” he went on. “As a son, and someone who flies out of this airport nearly every day, I will forever be proud to see the initials ‘DJT’ on my boarding pass. Congratulations Dad — I’m happy to have played a big role in making this happen.” Eric Trump spearheaded efforts to rename the airport in his father’s honor. He also, according to a Bloomberg report published less than two hours after his post, played a big role in wiping hundreds of millions of dollars from his family’s holdings with a disastrous bet on the crypto industry. The American Bitcoin venture, which the younger Trump helped launch and now steers as chief strategy officer, has cratered since going public last year, the outlet writes, shedding over 95 percent from its September high. Things got so bad this week that the company had to pull an emergency maneuver, bundling every 15 shares into one, just to stay listed on the Nasdaq stock index. The price hit a record low on Wednesday. Bloomberg calculates that the crash has wiped out more than $600 million of Eric Trump’s stake in the space of 10 months. His brother Donald Trump Jr. also advises the firm. Their father raked in over $1.4 billion in crypto last year, the outlet adds. Eric’s move had been to bet big on Bitcoin itself. As the coin’s price sank and investors piled onto artificial intelligence last year instead, rival miners like Riot Platforms and MARA Holdings rented out their computing power to AI companies—and their stocks soared. American Bitcoin did not follow that lead, Bloomberg writes. It instead gambled that stockpiling the coin through the slump would eventually pay off. It hasn’t yet, even as Eric refuses to sell. “Just hold on, guys,” he said at a Las Vegas crypto conference in April. “Just hold on.” The Daily Beast has contacted American Bitcoin for comment on this story. https://www.thedailybeast.com/eric-trump-wipes-600m-from-family-fortune-with-disastrous-american-bitcoin-bet/?

🤖 OpenAI broadly released its new GPT-5.6 model after staggering the rollout of the powerful new model at the request of the U.S. government, Axios' Ina Fried and Madison Mills report.

🏡 U.S. home prices hit an all-time high in June, with the median sales price hitting a record $440,600, according to the National Association of Realtors. Go deeper.

✈️ PBI is now DJT. The FAA has alerted air traffic controllers that Palm Beach International Airport's three-letter identifier officially changed today to honor President Trump. Read the announcement. ps:How pathetic is it that a president has to have things named after him before he dies! But there's a madness to what he's doing, he knows no one will ever name anything after him when he passes any!!!!!

📊 Venture capital's record year Data: Q2 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor; 2026 data through June 30. Chart: Dan Primack/Axios 💰 More venture capital dollars were invested in U.S. companies during the first half of 2026 than in any full year, Axios' Dan Primack reports from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association data. U.S. companies raised $412.7 billion between January and June. That's a whopping 29% increase over what U.S. companies raised in all of 2025 and a 15% increase over the all-time record set in 2021. 💵 The boost was driven by mega-rounds, with over 81% of H1 2026 dollars going to deals of $100 million or more. This includes seven rounds of $1 billion+ in Q2. 🥊 Reality check: The only dark cloud is that Q1 significantly outpaced Q2, although Q2 is where most of the exit activity was found.

Praise the Lord for He is good!

Those are not from the Bible are they?

Lindsey Graham, longtime senator from South Carolina and Trump ally, dies at 71 https://abcnews.com/Politics/sen-lindsey-graham-south-carolina-dies-71/story?id=134688641

The Ju;y 2026 issue of the Recorder contains an article by Darla M. Tucker that mentions that La Sierra University has been rated high in educational quality by the 2026 Forbes Evaluation of U.S. colleges and Universities. The comment was accurate, as far as it went. In short it was selective. It would have been much better journalism if it had more fully reported on the SDA colleges in general, and not confined its reporting to one issue and one school. The following aspects of the Forbes report shows that our colleges are in deep trouble. Our members need to understand and deal with the entire reality. The 2026 Forbes rankings of Adventist institutions from most to least financially healthy: La Sierra University – B+ with a GPA of 3.32 Walla Walla University – B with a GPA of 3.00 Adventist Health University – C+ with a GPA of 2.45 Southwestern Adventist University – C+ with a GPA of 2.35 Southern Adventist University – C+ with a GPA of 2.31 Andrews University – C with a GPA of 2.01 Kettering College – C- with a GPA of 1.97 Union Adventist University – C- with a GPA of 1.79 Washington Adventist University – D with a GPA of 1.57 Oakwood University – D with a GPA of 1.32 Pacific Union College – D with a GPA of 1.30 From a June 12, 2026 article in Spectrum: https://spectrummagazine.org/news/la-sierra-and-walla-walla-universities-top-list-of-us-adventist-higher-ed-finance-rankings/

🏗️ 1 for the road: Construction surrounds White House Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP On the South Lawn, a helipad is being built for Marine One, which has been scorching the grass. "It's got the seal of the White House on it ... in carved granite," President Trump told reporters Monday. "It's really a beautiful thing." Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images On the North Portico, workers yesterday draped tarps around scaffolding on the towering stone columns. The tarps, partially see-through, evoke the ornate stone columns beneath. Trump said on Monday: "We've taken about 150 years of paint off of the columns ... If you don't strip the paint off, it gets worse and worse and worse." (AP) Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP The ballroom, seen here from the Washington Monument, is going up fast. Trump's plans to build a 250-foot-high "Triumphal Arch" in the nation's capital won initial approval yesterday from the National Capital Planning Commission. Members put off a decision on whether a federal law that limits building heights should be applied. Keep reading.

8 men indicted in planned drone and sniper attack on White House UFC cage-fighting show COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Eight men were indicted on murder and terrorism conspiracy charges Thursday for their alleged roles in a thwarted drone and sniper attack on the UFC cage-fighting show staged at the White House in June. https://apnews.com/article/trump-ufc-show-attack-plot-3b1142773319ce650a916e61901ad35b?

🚲 E-bike injuries surge Data: NEISS. Chart: Brad Jennings/Axios E-bike sales in the U.S. have more than quadrupled over the past five years, but a spike in ownership has also meant a spike in injuries — especially among young people. About 41% of all emergency visits for e-bike injuries in 2024 and 2025 involved patients ages 10 to 19, Axios' Brad Jennings reports from National Electronic Injury Surveillance System estimates.

🦾 AI chip rush Illustration: Shoshana Gordon/Axios Nearly every major AI company is either making or considering making homegrown chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia and cut costs. Reality check: Designing a chip is one thing. Securing the manufacturing capacity, memory and packaging needed to produce it at scale is much harder, Axios' Ina Fried and Madison Mills write. Read on.

🏛️ MAGA figures flock to Charlie Kirk murder hearing Prominent MAGA and conservative figures are descending on a Utah courthouse this week to attend the preliminary hearing for the man accused of murdering Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Axios' Alex Isenstadt and Marc Caputo report. Why it matters: The show of support in Provo underscores that, nearly a year after his assassination, Kirk remains a unifying figure across the Republican Party and the MAGA movement. Among those who have joined Kirk's family members this week in attending hearings for accused killer Tyler Robinson are: Donald Trump Jr. Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R). Conservative influencers Jack Posobiec and Graham Allen. Rush Limbaugh's widow, Kathryn Adams Limbaugh. The latest: Prosecutors are using this week's preliminary hearing to try to persuade a Utah judge there is sufficient evidence to send Robinson to trial on aggravated murder charges, which could lead to the death penalty. Keep reading.

🇨🇳 Pharma's China tradeoff Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images The life sciences world is split over how the U.S. should respond to China's quick biotech advances — specifically over whether Washington needs a more protectionist playbook to preserve American dominance, Axios' Caitlin Owens reports. It's both cheaper and faster to do early-stage drug development in China than in the U.S. That reality is now being reflected in the places pharma giants like Bristol Myers Squibb and Pfizer are spending their money. Zoom in: Skeptics warn that the strategy of rapidly snapping up Chinese-developed experimental drugs is shortsighted or even dangerous. It risks hollowing out the American biotech base, and it won't stop China from eventually competing directly with large pharmaceutical companies. Others take the view that the China work will yield another source of high-quality drugs. "American patients deserve access to groundbreaking new drugs," Atlas Venture partner Bruce Booth wrote in a blog post. "The origins of drugs have never really mattered, nor should they."

AI have-nots and know-nots Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Stock: Getty Images A staggering class divide now separates how Americans experience artificial intelligence, Axios' Zachary Basu reports: For frontier power-users, AI feels like a revolution: a force capable of conjuring companies, building software and solving complex problems at warp speed. For the average person, it feels more like an evolution: a smarter search bar, a faster inbox, an ambient tech layer that saves time — but not much else. Why it matters: Trillions of dollars in economic value — and the livelihoods of millions of workers — are being staked on a technology that most Americans neither trust nor fully understand. It's a new chapter in America's digital divide — the AI "haves," "have-nots" and "know-nots" — with profound implications for the future of wealth, work and power. 🤖 Zoom in: The newest frontier models are designed for an agentic world of coding, research and cybersecurity that most Americans will never see, let alone operate. OpenAI's Sol and Anthropic's Fable now sit atop the pyramid of elite AI obsession, prized for running long coding and research loops with minimal human intervention. Prominent developers have spent the week personifying the two models — debating their temperaments, work ethics, even their personalities, the way sports fans argue over rival athletes. "My overall feel is that Fable is a 'wise owl' who is very thoughtful and very well spoken," tweeted AI researcher Peter Gostev. "GPT-5.6-Sol is like a rottweiler who will grab the problem by the throat and not let go until it is done." Reality check: The people fluent enough to judge Sol against Fable on a coding benchmark are a tiny slice of the country. For most Americans, those names and metrics mean nothing. Millions of people encounter AI passively or unknowingly — through search summaries, AI-generated content, customer-service bots and invisible features inside apps. Nearly half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots. But the most common use is basic information search — the same job Google has done for two decades, a world away from autonomous coding agents. OpenAI counts more than 50 million paying subscribers in its weekly ChatGPT user base of more than 900 million. The population running agentic coding tools is a fraction of that fraction. 👀 Between the lines: Even among the elites living the frontier AI revolution, there's a pecking order. Sol began as a restricted preview for OpenAI's trusted partners and select organizations before broader rollout, making early access itself a status marker inside AI circles. Fable was pulled offline globally for nearly three weeks in June under U.S. export controls. Its more powerful sibling, Mythos, remains restricted to a small number of trusted organizations. The result is a hierarchy inside the hierarchy: free users, paid users, power users, preview users and an insider class testing capabilities the rest of the world can only read about. Zoom out: The AI industry ultimately needs broad social permission for the transformation it's selling — more data centers, deeper workplace automation, and AI embedded in schools, government and daily life. Yet as AI adoption has climbed, trust has fallen: 63% of Americans say AI is advancing too quickly, and just 16% expect it to benefit society over the next 20 years, according to Pew Research. The clearest gains are being captured by investors, tech giants and power users, while ordinary Americans are being asked to absorb the disruption to jobs, energy and information feeds. 👓 What to watch: The Trump administration's Labor Department published a national AI literacy framework in February, aimed at helping workers "share in the prosperity that AI will create." OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft and Amazon helped pool $500 million in June for RAISE US, a workforce retraining initiative led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb. But basic literacy efforts can only go so far: Frontier users have better tools, earlier access, deeper technical context and hundreds of hours of trial-and-error with systems that change every few weeks.

THIS DAY IN HISTORY July 10 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial begins In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial begins with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law. read more Sponsored Content by REVCONTENT 1980s 1985 Two bombs sink the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace’s flagship vessel 21st Century 2018 Last of Thai soccer team rescued from cave Black History 1893 Pioneering Black doctor performs successful open-heart surgery Crime 1992 The Exxon Valdez captain’s conviction is overturned 1889 “Buckskin” Frank Leslie murders his lover Inventions & Science 1962 U.S. patent issued for three-point seatbelt U.S. Presidents 1850 Millard Fillmore sworn in as 13th U.S. president 1832 Andrew Jackson vetoes re-charter of the Second Bank of the U.S. World War II 1940 The Battle of Britain begins 1943 Allies land on Sicily

Ground Zero's Final Tower Construction crews broke ground yesterday on the final office tower at the new World Trade Center campus, nearly 25 years after the 9/11 attacks destroyed the complex. American Express will be the sole tenant of 2 World Trade Center upon its completion, currently slated for 2031. The 55-story glass tower will accommodate up to 10,000 employees across nearly 2 million square feet of office space (scroll for mock-ups). At 1,226 feet tall, it will stand 550 feet shorter than One World Trade Center, directly to the west. American Express has not disclosed project costs, but New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) expects the development to create 3,200 jobs and generate $6B in economic activity. Officials began soliciting proposals to rebuild the World Trade Center campus eight months after the terror attacks. The first new building, 7 World Trade Center, opened in 2006, and the landmark One World Trade Center opened in 2014. See the reconstruction timeline here.

🏞️ Life in the park Beth's kids at Yosemite in 2011. Photo: Beth Wilder Speaking of readers, we're constantly delighted by our engaged and thoughtful Finish Line audience. Here's a wonderful note we received from reader Beth Wilder of Birmingham, Ala., yesterday in response to our callout for photos taken at America's national parks: "I was raised by an avid outdoorsman, and we spent our family vacations in the 1960s and 1970s traveling in our old Kingswood station wagon to national parks around the country. My husband and I did the same thing with our own children in the late 1990s and 2000s. We bought our kids National Park passports when they were young, and all of them have spent the past 25+ years filling them up." "Little did we know when we visited Yosemite in 2011 that one of our kids would return in 2024 to make the valley his home. He is a park ranger and now works as a crew chief on the Helitack search and rescue team. His dream job, and he's only 32 years old!"

Driving in the Fog (Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.)   View in browser Twice a day, all across the country, the National Weather Service launches a fleet of latex balloons into the stratosphere to collect what’s known as “upper-air data”—detailed measurements of temperature, humidity, and pressure. Before they pop, the balloons collect information that guides the world’s forecasters, and helps the rest of us figure out how to prepare for the days ahead. Lately, though, the NWS has reportedly been sending up fewer balloons than it once did, eroding meteorologists’ confidence in their own predictions. These lapses point to a broader phenomenon. Partly as a result of staffing cuts and funding reductions, government-sourced information has been slowly disappearing. Some organizations have halted surveys and tracking projects; others have deleted archives and databases. Taken together, this new reality risks clouding our understanding of the economy, public health, and the environment—all of which could make it harder to assess the state of the country and the world. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which houses the National Weather Service, lost about 15 percent of its staffers last year through layoffs and buyouts. Meteorologists told Politico that those cuts have affected the schedule of NWS weather-balloon launches in the western United States, creating “sizable data holes for crafting severe weather forecasts.” CBS News reported that similar reductions in weather-balloon launches have been happening elsewhere across the country, and that meteorologists now have fewer data to work with. Accurate forecasts are essential in preparing for large-scale disasters; they can even save lives. Alan Gerard, a weather analyst and former NWS meteorologist, emphasized on his Substack earlier this week that although the precise impact of these launch changes remains unclear, “meteorologists’ confidence in the models and their own ability to analyze some situations has been damaged by the lack of upper air data.” (A NOAA spokesperson told me that “the majority of upper air sites are operating on schedule,” that “any sites conducting fewer launches are due to temporary resource or equipment constraints,” and that “NOAA’s weather model performance shows no evidence of overall degradation on any approved launch schedule.”) The administration’s cost-cutting has also affected some of the global data collection that the U.S. used to fund. When the Trump administration pulled funding for some foreign-assistance programs last year (this is estimated to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide), the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization ended up cutting more than 100 of its programs. Some were focused on monitoring outbreaks of disease and infestation among animals—and among the pests its investments helped track was a parasitic fly called the New World screwworm, which has been disrupting cattle farming in Central America and Mexico over the past few years. Last month, it crossed into the United States, endangering the country’s already dwindling supply of beef. Monitoring alone may not have stopped the screwworm’s spread—and there is no evidence to suggest that U.S. funding cuts led to the current outbreak—but cataloging these flies’ movements has long been a crucial part of prevention. In making certain data private or changing collection methodologies on the orders of the president, this administration is effectively punching holes in the public record. Data.gov removed nearly 3,400 data sets during the first month of Donald Trump’s second term, scrubbing information from the Census Bureau, the Office of Justice Programs, the CDC, and more. The CDC tracks pregnancy risk in the U.S. in an effort to prevent infant mortality; staffing reductions have reportedly made that information inaccessible. Since 1995, the USDA has been tracking the number of American households experiencing food insecurity; the Trump administration discontinued a survey of that data in September, claiming in a press release that this information was “politicized” and “costly” to produce, and did “nothing more than fear monger.” The government’s data are far from infallible (and, as history has shown, can be manipulated). But the cumulative effect of these recent changes is an erosion of public understanding—and potentially of good policy making. The Federal Reserve, for example, bases its interest-rate decisions around the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs data, among other sources. Last year, when the government shutdown delayed the release of that data, then–Fed Chair Jerome Powell likened the experience to “driving in the fog.” It was the first time in 77 years that the BLS failed to release the U.S. unemployment rate. Relying solely on private data, the Fed was forced to cut rates without a comprehensive read of the American labor force. Earlier this year, when the Trump administration axed an online archive called the CIA World Factbook, which compiled information about countries around the world, my colleague David A. Graham wrote that its demise was yet another component of the White House’s broader war on information. “Democracy,” he explained, “requires voters having access to accurate and shared information so that they can assess the claims that the government makes.” When missing balloons magnify inaccuracies in weather forecasts, they lend credence to the idea that the government’s information may be getting more unreliable—and that, just maybe, we don’t need to keep funding NOAA after all. In this way, partial information blackouts can generate more and more distrust in American institutions, creating a vacuum where conspiracy theories can thrive. Transparency may not put a full stop to misinformation, but it can be a powerful remedy. Related: America is losing the facts that hold it together. Donald Trump’s war on reality