Author: News Room

President Trump has vowed that he wouldn’t cut Social Security benefits, but his administration’s actions, led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, have upended the agency, leaving many beneficiaries concerned that the popular program and their payments may be imperiled.Several players from the private equity world are now embedded inside the Social Security Administration, which is embarking on deep jobs cuts and other policy changes. At the same time, top Trump administration officials continue to perpetuate falsehoods about widespread fraud, even after the allegations are quickly debunked.These rapid-fire changes have unfolded ahead of the arrival of the incoming commissioner,…

Elon Musk slammed President Trump’s top trade adviser as “dumber than a sack of bricks” on Tuesday as tensions between the two exploded over wide-ranging tariffs that have upended the global economy.Mr. Musk directed the criticism at the trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who on Monday said Mr. Musk was not a “car manufacturer” but a “car assembler” because Tesla, his electric vehicle company, relied on parts from around the world.Mr. Musk fired back, defending his company and calling Mr. Navarro a “moron.” Mr. Navarro, he said, should consult “the fake expert he invented, Ron Vara” — the imaginary source Mr.…

Oil is trading at its lowest level in nearly four years. Costs are rising. And Wall Street is growing more worried by the day that President Trump’s trade policies will tip the United States into a recession.The reaction in the oil patch? Silence, mostly.Oil and gas executives, eager to stay in Mr. Trump’s good graces, have offered little public criticism of the president or the tariffs he has rolled out over the past few months. In private, however, they have decried the uncertainty he has sown, including in a recent anonymized survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.If U.S.…

The Internal Revenue Service’s audit rate has been lower this decade than in most taxpayers’ lifetimes, a New York Times analysis shows, and if the Trump administration follows through with plans to cut the agency’s work force, audits will almost certainly become even rarer.The most recent I.R.S. data shows the audit rate of individual taxpayers has decreased by about two-thirds since 2010.Exact comparisons of audit rates are challenging because the I.R.S. has changed its definitions over time. But the Times analysis of historical I.R.S. data found that the effective audit rates between 2020 and 2023, all under 0.5 percent, were…

President Trump’s top trade official defended the administration’s aggressive tariff moves on Tuesday, arguing before a Senate committee that the U.S. economy is facing “a moment of drastic, overdue change” after decades of being propped up by the financial sector and government spending.The remarks by Jamieson Greer, the United States trade representative, came as the Trump administration faced blowback from trading partners, businesses and investors over Mr. Trump’s approach. The president’s moves this month to impose a 10 percent global tariff and steep “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries have already triggered a trade war with China and caused other…

Film at Lincoln Center, the nonprofit organization that programs the New York Film Festival, has named the British movie executive Daniel Battsek its next president.From 2016 until early 2024, Battsek, 66, was chairman of the British production company Film4, overseeing the financing of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) and “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), among other releases.Battsek will succeed Lesli Klainberg, who had led Film at Lincoln Center since 2014 before stepping down last year.In an interview, Battsek, who will take over in May, said the centrality of film in the New York City cultural landscape had always appealed…

To hear Trump administration officials and many energy executives tell it, the United States is on the precipice of a new golden age for natural gas that will be driven in large part by the voracious power needs of data centers.But turning natural gas into electricity requires giant metal turbines that are increasingly difficult to secure. Companies that haven’t already reserved this equipment, which can weigh as much as a large airplane and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, are facing waits of three or four years, about twice as long as just a year earlier.The cost of building gas…

‘Can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube’Global markets are rebounding on Tuesday even as trade tensions show little signs of cooling. To wit: Beijing vowed that it “will fight to the end” against President Trump’s latest tariff threats.Wall Street analysts have issued a flurry of downgrades for the S&P 500, and billionaire business leaders are pushing back against Trump. (Among them is Elon Musk, the president’s biggest backer, who directly appealed to Trump to reverse course, The Washington Post reports.)All this adds to a grim mood hanging over boardrooms and trading floors, with C.E.O.s and investors telling DealBook they…

Ryan Bivens, a Kentucky grain farmer who sells corn to one of America’s biggest bourbon and whiskey producers, operated at a loss last year as he faced higher production costs from persistent inflation.President Trump’s trade war is about to make that economic pain even worse.Industries across the United States are bracing for higher prices for the imports that they need to make their products, as well as new restrictions on their exports as countries around the world prepare to retaliate against Mr. Trump’s tariffs. America’s whiskey industry has become a favorite target of such retaliation, and the blowback is going…

I’m one of those scrappy entrepreneurs you see on Kickstarter and Shark Tank. Eleven years ago, shortly after starting a new job that was a bad fit, I had a life-changing encounter with a pair of pan-seared duck breasts. The first created a cataclysmic mess of my stovetop. The second, a few weeks later, inspired me to pre-emptively wrap my skillet in aluminum foil and create an improvised conical splatter shield. By the end of the following year, the Frywall was selling online and in stores.The new tariffs on imports from China and Taiwan (and the threat of additional Chinese…