Ron Elving

Speaking at a data users conference, the Census Bureau's acting director, Ron Jarman, compared over 1,000 employees around the country taking early retirement or voluntary separation offers to a pivotal Marvel movie scene with the supervillain Thanos.

German said the Bureau will keep giving high priority to the 2030 census and the surveys that produce key economic indicators. But the Bureau is figuring out what other statistical work it will stop doing. Many census advocates are concerned about the Bureau's ability to produce accurate 2030 census results that are set to be used to redraw voting maps in the next decade.

Trump sent firing notices to a dozen of these last night, some of whom are people he himself appointed in his first term. And it's unclear what the legal effect of this will be. As the law says, Congress has to get 30 days notice in advance. And obviously that didn't happen.

In the House, you hear similar objections to the ones we're hearing from the Senate from Republicans in swing districts. But you're also hearing from the hardcore budget hawks who want Trump to go further. They want deep, long-term cuts. And now... while the political climate still feels like last fall.

And they are afraid another budget cycle will go by, and they'll have missed the chance for that fundamental change in what the government does.

Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota have all issued air quality alerts for their residents. This comes as 17,000 Manitobans have been forced to flee their homes as dangerous fires cut through the province's prized wildlands. The evacuation effort is the largest in recent history for Manitoba. These fires come on the heels of two consecutive years of devastating wildfire seasons.

In those years as well, Americans suffered as heavy smoke plumes crossed into the states. In all three affected states, experts warn that the air quality is unsafe for people like children and the elderly. In Minnesota, which is projected to be the hardest hit, the air quality will be reduced to the point of danger for sensitive groups. You're listening to NPR News.

And all this has been complicated further by court decisions this week, saying Trump does not have the authority to impose all these tariffs without Congress. That ruling by the International Trade Court could cripple the whole anti-tariff campaign, but that, too, is on pause just now while a higher court reviews that ruling.

The DHS spokesman told NPR Friday that these offices, quote, obstructed immigration enforcement by adding bureaucratic hurdles and undermining DHS's mission, unquote. Well, their job was to provide in-house oversight and restraint on this powerful agency and make sure it stays within the law and follows its own mandates. That's what watchdogs do. That's what ombudsmen offices are for.

They say the retaliation we're seeing from China and elsewhere will be transitory. They say our trading partners will knuckle under and lower their own tariffs. And most important, they say American companies will bring home the jobs that they've shifted overseas and that other countries will shift their manufacturing to the U.S., creating jobs here rather than in their own countries.

Jimmy Carter left the White House in defeat in January 1981, handing the keys to the man who had defeated him, Ronald Reagan. But in a post-presidential career that spanned nearly four decades, Carter set a new standard for achievement by a former chief executive. He founded the nonprofit Carter Center in 1982 and oversaw its many peacekeeping and hunger relief missions in more than 80 countries.

Among his international accolades, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He remained active while fighting liver and brain cancer in his later years, still teaching Sunday school classes and building houses with Habitat for Humanity in his 90s. Ron Elving, NPR News, Washington.

Florida is not a place where you're welcome with that type of conduct in the air. And I don't know how it came to this. We were not involved. We were not notified.

A purposeful, forceful, but reasonable, immediate response. We won't relent until tariffs are removed and, of course, everything is on the table.

By and large, it would be people who share Trump's sense of grievance about world trade and global affairs. People who believe the United States has been getting ripped off, to quote the president, they tend to also believe that tariffs will help even the score.

Now, Trump says tariffs will be our external revenue service, collecting money from other countries instead of taxing Americans like the internal revenue service we all know. And that must sound pretty good to a lot of folks judging by the election results. Of course, as we just heard from Scott Horsley, economists see tariffs quite differently.

They tend to see an outmoded and counterproductive blunderbuss of a weapon that often winds up wounding the user as much as the target. The classic example being the tariffs the U.S. imposed in the early 1930s. Historians tell us those tariffs actually deepened and lengthened the Great Depression.

You'd have to say it was mixed and rather limited, really. Those tariffs served their purpose in the short run in targeted areas. But they did not measurably improve Trump's standing for reelection in 2020 or, for that matter, when he came back in 2024. The tariffs were not the salient issue either time. There were just too many other issues.

And the blame for the inflation of the past few years had long since gone elsewhere.

To me, the chief executive moment of the week was Trump's news conference Thursday morning about the midair collision over Ronald Reagan National Airport. Diverting attention from that tragedy to make a tech on diversity hiring. When we still don't know who or what was responsible for that crash, Trump said he was using common sense and that's a phrase he's been using a lot lately.

I think people are beginning to get a sense of what that common sense means to him. As for the executive orders, it's quite a competition. I'd have to go with the now rescinded order to freeze federal spending. That order said all grants had to be frisked for Marxism or race and gender diversity or approval of certain sexual orientation. That language was striking as well as confusing.

Federal judges stepped in. The freeze is off for now. But the underlying orders, the judgments from the Trump administration remain in effect. Of course, the courts had already paused an earlier order against birthright citizenship. But perhaps the most notable evidence, of the overall attitude of these orders is the preemptory nature of it.

There was a sense Trump was testing the boundaries and trying all the locks on the Constitutional House at once.

Not at the moment, although the margins in both chambers are historically slim. All presidents have used executive orders, at least at times, and often at critical times. It's fast. It creates an impression of action and change and effectiveness, but only for a time, and only if the various orders survive court challenges and other forms of pushback.

When you go around Congress for short-term success, you risk a reckoning that can have longer-lasting effects.