BRIDGEWATER, N.J. (AP) — President Donald Trump plans to attend the NCAA wrestling championships for the second time in three years, the latest example of how he has mostly limited travel early in his new term to trips built around sports events.
Trump is expected to be at Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on Saturday night as Penn State looks to close out its fourth straight men’s team title. The Republican president spent Friday night as his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, about 70 miles northeast of Philadelphia, on what was his first visit there of his second term.
“We’re going to the big fight. The reason I’m going is in Philadelphia. They have the NCAA, world, wrestling for college. And I’ve always supported the wrestlers,” Trump told reporters as he left the White House on Friday evening. “I want to support them. These are the great college wrestlers from the various schools.”
That’s more travel for sports than for policy announcements or official duties, though a long January swing took Trump to tour damage from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and wildfires in Los Angeles. He then gave a speech and visited the floor of Las Vegas’ Circa Resort & Casino before heading to Doral, Florida, to address a House Republican policy conference.
Trump has long built his public and political persona around sporting events, and relishes turning up at live events to hear cheers from the crowd, even if some in attendance boo him. He also has signed an executive order intended to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports — an action which he points to frequently to fire up his core supporters.
The president has used most Saturdays and Sundays to play golf at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, though he also sometimes remained in Washington to give weekend speeches.
WASHINGTON − President Donald Trump is expected to ban or severely restrict travel to the United States by citizens of more than a dozen countries, including Iran and Venezuela, as soon as Friday.
Trump ordered his administration to establish vetting and screening standards and procedures for entry into the U.S. and submit a list of countries that do not meet them by March 21. The order follows on a campaign pledge and an initiative from Trump’s first day in office.
He also directed officials to identify and potentially remove nationals from earmarked countries who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration.
The resulting actions could be more sweeping than the travel ban Trump put on seven majority-Muslim countries during hisfirst term that led to chaos at airports and lawsuits alleging religious discrimination.
Trump issued multiple versions of the ban in 2017 until he landed on one that the Supreme Court upheld, and his most recent executive order directs members of his Cabinet to expand on what was in place when he exited office.
This time around, Trump went through a more rigorous process to implement his expected travel ban, calling for restrictions based on the level of information that countries collect and provide on international travelers. And he will benefit from an even more conservative Supreme Court when his executive actions face legal challenges.
A list of more than 40 countries whose citizens could be barred or limited from entry into the United States is reportedly under consideration. That list includes, Afghanistan, North Korea and even tiny Bhutan, a majority-Buddhist Himalayan nation.
The State Department declined on Thursday afternoon to comment on the deliberations.
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Trump asked for travel ban on Day One
Trump said as a candidate that he’d reinstate his travel ban, citing a need to protect the country from “radical Islamic terrorists.”
His Jan. 20 executive order called on Cabinet members to submit a report identifying countries “for which vetting and screening is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension” of admission to the U.S.
The report should also identify “how many nationals from those countries” have entered or been admitted to the United States since Jan. 20, 2021, the first day of former President Joe Biden’s term.
Trump tasked four individuals with producing the report: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Trump administration appears to be structuring its second term ban differently than the first one, creating a three-tiered list of nations that do not provide the U.S. with the level of information it is seeking or are otherwise deemed by officials as a national security threat.
Countries on the “red” list would see travel to the U.S. banned altogether, while countries on the middle, or “orange” list would face visa restrictions. A lower tier of nations would be put on notice by the administration that they need to address problems.
Travel could be banned from 11 countries, according to the New York Times, which obtained a draft list of recommendations for the travel ban. Those are Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
Trump previously banned travel from most of the countries on that list, with the exception of visa and green card holders. Bhutan and Cuba were not part of Trump’s previous travel ban. The State Department lists Cuba as a state sponsor of terror.
Another 10 countries, including Russia and Belarus, would see visas sharply restricted. The remaining 22 countries, which includes many African nations, would have 60 days to address security concerns. They could ultimately be moved up on the list or completely left off, depending on their response.
Reuters reported on a similar memo. The list had not been finalized, the outlets cautioned, and may not have been approved yet by the secretary of state.
“Not all those countries will likely survive being on the list, because the staff is just looking at what they were told, what were their instructions, which were to ascertain and to evaluate each country,” said former acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf, the executive vice president of the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute. “But there’s other decisions at play on whether a country gets a travel restriction or not.”
“There are other geopolitical issues,” Wolf added. “That’s why it goes to the secretary of State. That’s why others will weigh in on those decisions.”
Less focus on Muslim-majority countries
Based on what has been reported publicly, Wolf said it sounded like the administration plans to tell countries that until they increase their information sharing with the U.S. or provide certain data, they will have travel restrictions in place.
One factor the administration is likely to take into consideration is how frequently a country reports lost or stolen passport data to Interpol.
“What we found the first time around is a lot of countries just didn’t report that in a timely manner,” said Wolf, who worked on Trump’s earlier travel ban.
The State Department denied the existence of a list earlier in the week and said it did not create the memorandums that have been circulating.
“There is a review, as we know through the president’s executive order, for us to look at the nature of what’s going to help keep America safer, in dealing with the issue of visas and who’s allowed into the country,” Tammy Bruce, the spokeswoman for the State Department, said Monday.
Unlike Trump’s first iteration of a ban in 2017, which led to court challenges for discrimination against Muslims, the reported reincarnation does not focus solely on Muslim-majority countries. Bhutan, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela are being reportedly considered for outright bans but do not have Muslim majorities.
A court blocked Trump’s first travel ban, issued in January 2017, saying the order violated people’s due process rights without sufficient national security justification. His administration replaced that with a second version in March 2017, which another court blocked. The Supreme Court upheld the third iteration of his travel ban that he signed in September 2017.
In its 2018 decision, the Supreme Court outlined a lengthy process that the government used to create the third travel ban, highlighted ways that certain foreign nationals can get exceptions to the travel ban, and argued the Trump administration was acting in “legitimate national security interest.”
The process is similar to what Trump outlined in his Jan. 20 executive order. But critics have signaled they could challenge fresh aspects of the new administration’s policies, including the attempts to retroactively apply visa restrictions to individuals who entered the country during the period Trump was not in office.
The International Refugee Assistance Program, one of the groups that sued in the first administration, said its next steps would depend on what is in the anticipated ban.
“Our team will be analyzing it as soon as it comes out to identify what those challenges might look like,” said Stephanie Gee, senior director of US legal services at IRAP.
“To the extent there are arguments to be made that the action is unlawful, there are a lot of organizations who will be looking to bring challenges.”
When could a travel ban go into effect?
Trump already appears to implementing part of his executive order, which allows the secretary of Homeland Security to “take immediate steps” to exclude or remove a foreign national from countries without proper vetting standards.
The order cites advocacy for “foreign terrorist” groups and “hostile attitudes” towards U.S. “citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles” as reasons for visa rejection and possible removal.
The Trump administration this month deported a kidney doctor with work visa after she attempted to enter the country on a flight to Boston. The Department of Homeland Security said she had “sympathetic photos and videos” to a leader of Hezbollah on her phone.
“A visa is a privilege not a right,” the department said on X. “Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be denied. This is commonsense security.”
“I’m a Shia Muslim,” authorities say Dr. Rasha Alawieh said, according to the USA TODAY Network. “He’s a religious figure. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s all religious, spiritual things.”
Federal authorities also arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist attending graduate school at the Colombia University. Khalil was in the U.S. legally.
After his arrest, Rubio said, “We will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”
The State Department acknowledged Thursday that it was conducting a review of all visa programs, as mandated by Trump’s order but declined to say whether it had made any formal recommendations or when they could go into effect.
The Trump administration’s report recommending countries for a travel ban is due Friday, March 21.
“I just constantly felt like I am at war,” said Sandra Fenelon, a Navy veteran who had a rocky transition back to civilian life.Credit…Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
Trump and DOGE Propel V.A. Mental Health System into Turmoil
A chaotic restructuring ordered threatens to degrade services for veterans of wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I just constantly felt like I am at war,” said Sandra Fenelon, a Navy veteran who had a rocky transition back to civilian life.Credit…Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
Late in February, as the Trump administration ramped up its quest to transform the federal government, a psychiatrist who treats veterans was directed to her new workstation — and was incredulous.
She was required, under a new return-to-office policy, to conduct virtual psychotherapy with her patients from one of 13 cubicles in a large open office space, the kind of setup used for call centers. Other staff might overhear the sessions, or appear on the patient’s screen as they passed on their way to the bathroom and break room.
The psychiatrist was stunned. Her patients suffered from disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Treating them from her home office, it had taken many months to earn their trust. This new arrangement, she said, violated a core ethical tenet of mental health care: the guarantee of privacy.
When the doctor asked how she was expected to safeguard patient privacy, a supervisor suggested she purchase privacy screens and a white noise machine. “I’m ready to walk away if it comes to it,” she wrote to her manager, in a text message shared with The New York Times. “I get it,” the manager replied. “Many of us are ready to walk away.”
Scenes like this have been unfolding in Veterans Affairs facilities across the country in recent weeks, as therapy and other mental health services have been thrown into turmoil amid the dramatic changes ordered by President Trump and pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
Among the most consequential orders is the requirement that thousands of mental health providers, including many who were hired for fully remote positions, now work full time from federal officespace. This is a jarring policy reversal for the V.A., which pioneered the practice of virtual health care two decades ago as a way to reach isolated veterans, long before the pandemic made telehealth the preferred mode of treatment for many Americans.
As the first wave of providers reports to offices where there is simply not enough room to accommodate them, many found no way to ensure patient privacy, health workers said. Some have filed complaints, warning that the arrangement violates ethics regulations and medical privacy laws. At the same time, layoffs of at least 1,900 probationary employees are thinning out already stressed services that assist veterans who are homeless or suicidal.
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A demonstration outside a V.A. medical center in Detroit last month.Credit…Paul Sancya/Associated Press
In more than three dozen interviews, current and recently terminated mental health workers at the V.A. described a period of rapid, chaotic behind-the-scenes change. Many agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because they want to continue to serve veterans, and feared retribution from the Trump administration.
Clinicians warn that the changes will degrade mental health treatment at the V.A., which already has severe staffing shortages. Some expect to see a mass exodus of sought-after specialists, like psychiatrists and psychologists. They expect wait times to increase, and veterans to eventually seek treatment outside the agency.
“Psychotherapy is a very private endeavor,” said Ira Kedson, a psychologist at the Coatesville V.A. Medical Center in Pennsylvania and president of AFGE local 310. “It’s supposed to be a safe place, where people can talk about their deepest, darkest fears and issues.” Veterans, he said, trust that what they tell therapists is confidential.
“If they can’t trust us to do that, I think that a sizable number of them will withdraw from treatment,” he said.
A Veterans Affairs spokesman, Peter Kasperowicz, dismissed the contention that a crowded working environment would compromise patient privacy as “nonsensical,” saying that the V.A. “will make accommodations as needed so employees have enough space to work and comply with industry standards for privacy.”
“Veterans are now at the center of everything V.A. does,” Mr. Kasperowicz added. “Under President Trump, V.A. is no longer a place where the status quo for employees is to simply phone it in from home.” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said the president’s return-to-office order was “ensuring that all Americans benefit from more efficient services, especially our veterans.”
The DOGE cuts have already sparked chaos and confusion within the sprawling agency, which provides care to more than nine million veterans. The Trump administration has said it plans to eliminate 80,000 V.A. jobs, and a first round of terminations has halted some research studies and slashed support staff.
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Therapy and other mental health services at Veterans Affairs facilities have been thrown into turmoil amid the dramatic changes ordered by President Trump and pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
The cuts drive at a sensitive constituency for Mr. Trump, who has campaigned on improving services at the V.A. In Mr. Trump’s first term, the agency expanded remote work as a way to reach veterans who are socially isolated and living in rural areas, who are at an elevated risk for suicide. Now those services are likely to be sharply reduced.
“The end of remote work is essentially the same as cutting mental health services,” said a clinician at a mental health center hub in Kansas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “These remote docs aren’t moving and they have other options if they are forced to drive to some office however many miles away every day to see their patient virtually from there.”
Veterans, too, are expressing anxiety. Sandra Fenelon, 33, said she had a rocky transition back to civilian life after leaving the Navy in 2022. “I just constantly felt like I am at war,” said Ms. Fenelon, who lives in New York and is training to become a pharmacist.
It took a year, working with a V.A. psychologist, until she felt safe enough to begin sharing the troubling things she had seen on deployment, things that, she said, “people on the outside would never understand.”
Now, Ms. Fenelon is worried that the tumult at the V.A. will prompt her therapist to leave before she is better. In her session this past week, she burst into tears. “I feel like I’m now forced to be put in a position where I have to start over with someone else,” she said in an interview. “How can I relate to a therapist who never worked with veterans?”
‘You Deserve Better’
For a suicide prevention coordinator in California, mornings start with referrals from a crisis hotline. On a typical day, she said, she is given a list of 10 callers, but sometimes as many as 20 or 30. The work is so intense that, most days, there is no time for a lunch break or bathroom breaks.
“My job is to build rapport, to figure out what I need to do to keep them alive. I let them know: ‘I’m worried about you, I’m going to send someone out to check on you,’” the coordinator said. “I tell them, ‘You served this country. You deserve better.’”
The team, which is responsible for covering some 800,000 veterans, was supposed to get three more social workers, but the new positions were canceled as a result of the administration’s hiring freeze, the coordinator said.
She said the stress around the staff reductions is intense, and fears it will cause her to miss something critical. “I’m so scared I’ll make a mistake,” she said. “I’m not sleeping well, and it’s hard to stay focused.”
Veterans are at sharply higher risk for suicide than the general population; in 2022, the suicide rate was 34.7 per 100,000, compared to 14.2 per 100,000 for the general population. A major factor in this is the availability of firearms, which were used in 73.5 percent of suicide deaths, according to the V.A.
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Bilal Torrens had a job helping homeless veterans settle into life indoors.Credit…Rachel Woolf for The New York Times
In Denver, Bilal Torrens was just finishing a shift when he was notified by email that he was being terminated.
His job, he said, was helping homeless veterans settle into life indoors after years of living on the street. During those early months, Mr. Torrens said, the men are often overwhelmed by the task of collecting benefits, managing medications, even shopping for groceries; he would sit with his clients while they filled out forms and paid bills.
The layoffs reduced the support staff at the homeless service center by a third. The burden will now shift onto social workers, who are already staggering under caseloads of dozens of veterans, he said.
“They’re not going to have enough time to serve any of the veterans properly, the way that they should be served and cared for,” Mr. Torrens said.
Alarms Over Privacy
In Coatesville, Penn., mental health providers have been told they will conduct therapy with veterans from several large office spaces, sitting with their laptops at tables, said Dr. Kedson. The spaces are familiar, he said — but they have never before been used for patient care.
“That would sound like you’re seeing them from a call center, because you’d be in a room with a bunch of people who are all talking at the same time,” Dr. Kedson said. “The veterans who are going to be in that position, I suspect they will feel very much like their privacy is being violated.”
So far, only supervisory clinicians have been affected by the return-to-office policy; unionized workers will be expected to report to the office in the coming weeks.
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A memorial for veterans who died by suicide in Washington.Credit…Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Dr. Kedson said clinicians have warned that the orders compromise patient privacy, but he has seen little response from the agency’s leadership. “They’re doing it because these are the marching orders coming out of the current administration,” he said. “People are trying to make something that is really untenable work.”
Dr. Lynn F. Bufka, head of practice at the American Psychological Association, said the “longstanding presumed practice for the delivery of psychotherapy” requires a private location, like a room with a door and soundproofing outside the room.
She said HIPAA, the health privacy law, allows for “incidental disclosures” of patient information if they cannot be reasonably prevented — a threshold that she said the V.A. risks not meeting. In this case, she said, the privacy risk could be prevented “by simply not requiring psychologists to return to the office until private spaces are available.”
Several V.A. mental health clinicians told The Times they were interviewing for new jobs or had submitted their resignations. Their departures risk exacerbating already severe staffing shortages at the V.A., outlined in a report last year from its inspector general’s office.
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Matthew Hunnicutt, a social worker with nearly 15 years of experience at the V.A., retired last month.Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
“Everybody is afraid, from the top down,” said Matthew Hunnicutt, 62, a social worker who retired in late February after nearly 15 years, much of it in supervisory positions, at the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center in Chicago.
When staff were ordered to shut down diversity initiatives, Mr. Hunnicutt decided to speed up his retirement, feeling that “everything I had done was just wiped away.” He said care at the V.A. had been improved during his time there, with better community outreach, shorter wait times and same-day mental health appointments.
“Just to have it be destroyed like this is extreme,” he said.
Alain Delaquérière and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Nicholas Nehamas is a Washington correspondent for The Times, focusing on the Trump administration and its efforts to transform the federal government.More about Nicholas Nehamas
Roni Caryn Rabin is a Times health reporter focused on maternal and child health, racial and economic disparities in health care, and the influence of money on medicine.More about Roni Caryn Rabin
In the process of attacking big law firms this week, the Trump administration hinted at another potential target: a decades-old nonprofit that helps students land jobs on Wall Street.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sent letters to 20 law firms on Monday demanding information on their diversity, equity and inclusion, or D.E.I., efforts. All of the letters asked about Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, an organization known as SEO.
The letters, and the E.E.O.C.’s interest in SEO, may ultimately amount to no more than a headache. But in singling out the organization, President Trump has taken aim at a program that is core to diversity efforts on Wall Street and put a spotlight on the uncertain future of such efforts amid his escalating attacks on D.E.I.
“For several decades, that is one of the largest providers of entry-level talent that has gone on — especially across Wall Street — to grow up and be senior-level talent across all these firms,” Porter Braswell, the founder of 2045 Studio, a membership network for professionals of color, told DealBook.
“It’s an incredibly important organization that plays a very meaningful role in developing racially diverse talent,” he added.
SEO helps prepare students for Wall Street careers, including by assisting them in getting internships at banks and law firms. The highly selective internship program is different from many of the recruiting organizations that have emerged in recent years to help firms quickly live up to their diversity promises. Lawyers say it would have traditionally eschewed legal scrutiny because it was focused on providing opportunities, not fulfilling a target for diversity numbers.
But the E.E.O.C. said in an F.A.Q. this week that it also considered benefits like training or sponsorship because of an individual’s race to be examples of unlawful discrimination — even if those benefits were also available to others. While lawyers tell DealBook that they do not believe that guidance will withstand legal challenges, it could scramble diversity efforts already facing pressure. And that raises big questions for Wall Street.
A spokesperson for SEO declined to comment.
A growing assault. The E.E.O.C. sent its letter to the law firms — including Kirkland & Ellis; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; and Latham & Watkins — as the Trump administration was already ramping up its assault against Big Law. Over the past two months, Trump has signed a memo stripping security clearances from lawyers at Covington & Burling and issued executive orders against Perkins Coie and Paul, Weiss.
On Thursday, the chairman of Paul, Weiss — long seen as the face of Big Law’s diversity efforts — struck a deal with Trump to rescind the executive order in exchange for a number of concessions, including $40 million worth of pro bono work on causes supported by Trump
As part of the deal, Paul, Weiss also reiterated its commitment to “merits-based hiring, promotion and retention.” Paul, Weiss said it would hire an outside expert, within 14 days, to conduct “a comprehensive audit of all its employment practices.”
The firm’s chairman, Brad Karp, said in a memo to employees that the agreement was consistent with the firm’s longstanding principles. But many on Wall Street viewed the deal as capitulation.
At the same time, the Trump administration is broadening its efforts to rein in diversity initiatives. On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission said it would block merger proposals from companies that practiced D.E.I.
Some banks have already shifted the way they communicate about such efforts. JPMorgan Chase wrote in an internal memo Friday that it would rename its D.E.I. operation “Diversity, Opportunity & Inclusion.”
Diversity is a longstanding challenge for law firms. Last year, about half of associates at law firms were women, while 31 percent were people of color, according to the National Association for Law Placement, an industry group. That was up from a decade earlier, when 45 percent of associates were women and 22 percent people of color.
The numbers get tougher when you look at the partner level. About 29 percent of partners were women in 2024 and 13 percent people of color. A decade earlier, those figures were 21 percent and 7 percent.
Big Law pushed to improve its diversity efforts after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, spending tens of millions on diversity consultants and scholarships and working with organizations to help bring in more diverse employees.
Not all of those attempts were successful, partners at law firms say. Internally and publicly, there have been debates over the costs and efficacy of these programs.
The pullback. After the 2023 Supreme Court ruling ending affirmative action in U.S. schools made corporate D.E.I. programs vulnerable to legal challenges, firms began withdrawing. Trump’s election and subsequent Big Law scrutiny have put these efforts into overdrive.
Some firms say they no longer provide clients racial and gender breakdowns that are often part of a pitch process. Others are no longer holding diversity-focused events. Many are scraping their websites of D.E.I. language.
Karp’s deal with Trump may make it easier for firms to strike a similar deal or further expedite the D.E.I. pullback, lawyers say. (“D.E.I. will just have to wait four years,” one partner told DealBook.)
But pausing won’t come without backlash: An associate at Skadden said in a firmwide email on Thursday that she was putting in her conditional resignation unless the firm came up with a “satisfactory response” to the current moment.
It all raises big questions for SEO. Unlike some recent D.E.I. initiatives, SEO is part of the Wall Street fabric.
The program’s alumni work in the highest echelons of corporate America. They include Cesar Conde, the chairman of NBCUniversal News Group; Joseph Bae, a co-C.E.O. of KKR; and Frank Baker, a co-founder of Siris Capital.
And its supporters span the political divide. They include the Citadel founder Ken Griffin, who voted for Trump in 2024, and Frank Bisignano, Trump’s initial pick to lead the Social Security Administration.
It would be “very emotional” if SEO went away, Braswell told DealBook, stressing that he believed the organization would get through any pressure it faced.
For now, SEO’s efforts remain unchanged. Its class of 186 is expected to start their legal internships in mid-May.
— Lauren Hirsch
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The first A.I. start-up to go public published its I.P.O. terms. CoreWeave, the Nvidia-backed cloud computing company focused on A.I. applications, is seeking to raise up to $2.7 billion at a valuation of $32 billion in its hotly anticipated I.P.O., according to a securities filing. Advisers have priced shares between $47 and $55 — for now. The company’s biggest client, Microsoft, reportedly chose not to exercise an option to buy nearly $12 billion worth of extra computing power, but CoreWeave recently secured a contract with OpenAI for that same amount, which also gives OpenAI a stake in CoreWeave.
The Federal Communications Commission said it would block merger proposals from companies practicing D.E.I. “Any businesses that are looking for F.C.C. approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of D.E.I. discrimination,” Chairman Brendan Carr said in an interview with Bloomberg. The extraordinary statement could force companies to eradicate any inclusion efforts. Such a directive falls outside the agency’s mandate but is consistent with President Trump’s aims to eliminate diversity initiatives across the country. Paramount, which is still awaiting approval for its merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance, recently announced that it would pull back on its inclusion policies, citing Trump’s policies.
The San Francisco Giants sold a stake to private equity while the Boston Celtics scored a record deal in a private equity sale. The Giants, one of baseball’s most successful teams, sold about a 10 percent equity stake to Sixth Street, DealBook first reported. Days later, the Celtics announced that they were selling themselves to an investor group for a record-breaking sum that values the team at as much as $7.3 billion. Both deals spotlight skyrocketing valuations for sports, putting teams out of the reach of trophy-seeking billionaires and into the hands of major funds.
Meta’s takedown of a tell-all tanks
Meta has taken extraordinary measures to hinder promotion of the tell-all corporate memoir by its former global public policy director, Sarah Wynn-Williams. But if making the book less visible was the goal, the company’s efforts seem to have backfired: “Careless People” rose this week to the top of The Times’s nonfiction best-seller list. It is the third-best-selling book on Amazon.
Did Meta’s efforts actually help the book?
Welcome to the “Streisand effect,” the phenomenon where an attempt to conceal information accidentally results in publicizing it, which is named after Barbra Streisand’s unsuccessful attempt to suppress a photograph of her cliff-top mansion.
On March 12, Meta published an arbitration filing that temporarily barred Wynn-Williams from promoting the book until private arbitration over whether she had violated a nondisparagement contract with the company concludes. A Meta spokesperson wrote in a social media post that the ruling affirmed that the “false and defamatory book should never have been published.”
The next day, conversation about the book spiked on social media, according to an analysis for DealBook by Kantar Media, the measurement tracking firm, which examined posts across Reddit, Bluesky, Twitter and other platforms.
“I think it’s clearly a massive contributor,” said James Campbell, Kantar’s head of digital analytics for North America, of how Meta’s response to the book factored into raising its profile.
While the conversation appeared to quickly move on from Meta’s legal victory, the amount of chatter about the book remained elevated. When the book appeared at the top of The Times’s best-seller list on Wednesday, several news outlets published stories highlighting the title’s success, calling it “the book Meta doesn’t want you to read.”
But concealing the book may not have been Facebook’s entire goal. Even best-selling books reach relatively few people. “Careless People” sold 18,549 print copies during the week that ended on March 15, according to Circana.
And the claims made against Meta in the memoir are not likely to hurt the company’s bottom line, said Brian Wieser, an analyst who has followed Facebook since 2004. Take the discussion of Facebook’s role in fueling political violence during the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Wieser published a report highlighting similar claims in 2018. “I think literally no one on Wall Street cared,” he told DealBook. “Of course, I’d argue they should have.”
Meta may have other concerns, like deterring other employees from writing negatively about the company or setting a precedent of enforcing its contracts.
Did the effort seed doubt? The temporary block on Wynn-Williams’s promotion efforts has nothing to do with the veracity of the claims in the book. The disagreement is about whether she violated her nondisparagement agreement with Meta. It’s also unclear whether Meta will prevail, especially considering that the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that nondisparagement clauses in severance agreements are generally not legal. But not everyone who learns of Meta’s arbitration victory may appreciate those distinctions.
“Having worked with a lot of C.E.O.s and executives over the years, sometimes the simple act of fighting back and making it look like you’re doing something — that matters more than what actually happens,” said Scott Bisang, a founding partner of the communications firm Collected Strategies, who has worked with companies including Twitter and Lyft. “If you do nothing, the perception is, well, maybe the book’s right.”
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you Monday.
We’d like your feedback. Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
Lauren Hirsch covers Wall Street, including M&A, executive changes, board strife and policy moves affecting business.More about Lauren Hirsch
Donald Trump has taken a shine to the term “liberation day” as a shorthand for his coming reciprocal tariff plans.
“April 2 is liberation day for our country because we’re finally going to be taking in money,” he said Monday during a stop at the Kennedy Center.
He brought it up again Friday in the Oval Office, saying, “We have been ripped off by every country in the world, friend and foe.”
All told, Trump has used a version of the term at least six times this past week in a reflection of how central tariffs have become to his second-term vision and how, in his mind, this liberation theme encapsulates his plans.
He used “liberation day” language previously in his inaugural address, but then he was looking at Jan. 20, the day he took the oath of office.
The now-in-focus April 2 trade deadline “has become something of a catch-all date for tariff rate hikes from the White House,” Henrietta Treyz of Veda Partners said this past week, noting that headline risk for markets and new duties for importers are likely around that day.
President Trump talks to reporters during a tour at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on March 17. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) ·Chip Somodevilla via Getty Images
Trump’s main agenda item on April 2 will be reciprocal duties after a plan was unveiled in February laying out an administration investigation that will end — as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently put it — with a situation where “each country will receive a number that we believe … represents their tariffs.”
A wide array of industries — from autos to shipbuilding to pharmaceuticals to semiconductors to copper to uranium to lumber to dairy — could also be in for new sector-specific duties after a flood of threats from the White House.
The main question for those sector-specific duties is whether Trump actually moves to impose new tariffs on these sectors that day or whether he instead launches new investigations that push those deadlines for another 30 days or longer as new investigations and public comment periods commence.
What Trump promised again and again this past week is that April 2 will be when the country-specific reciprocal tariffs are in place and money flows in.
“It’s called April 2, and that’s going to be tariffs,” Trump said at another point this past week, even refusing to back down when his interviewer, Laura Ingraham of Fox News, responded by bringing up the chances of a recession.
An academic journal may inject some optimism into US health policy – a scarce commodity amid the Trump administration’s mass layoffs, funding freezes and the ideological research reviews.
A new issue of Health Affairs Scholar argues the conversation around healthcare can change – and radically – if academics think “bigger” and policymakers invest in their communities.
“We saw what happened in the public outcry of the murder of the United HealthCare CEO,” said Dr Victor Roy, a family physician and director of the health and political economy project at the New School in New York City.
“There is a sense people are fed up and people are looking for bigger alternatives. People have really visceral feelings around these issues and we have a way to tackle them if people come up with ideas on the scale of the challenges people are experiencing.”
Health policy has quickly become a major touchstone of the Maga (“Make America great again”) right, as the Trump administration undertakes a shock and awe campaign that has dramatically altered public health institutions.
In just a few weeks in office, the administration has scrubbed government health websites of information on women and racial minorities, reviewed billions in scientific grant applications for conformity to the president’s agenda, and confirmed the nation’s foremost vaccine critic, Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the nation’s top health leader at the Department of Health and Human Services. The administration has also said it will pull the US out of the World Health Organization (WHO), which it helped found in 1948.
Additionally, congressional Republicans have floated major cuts to Medicaid, a health insurance program for the low-income and disabled that insures about 72 million Americans, to extend tax cuts that largely benefit the wealthy.
But even outside recent upheaval, the scale of challenges to American healthcare is something to behold: the US spendsmore on healthcare than almost any other country as a share of gross domestic product, yet has some of the worst outcomes among developed democracies. It is a global outlier for failing to offer universal healthcare and one of the few countries that allows its citizens to be bankrupted by medical debt.
How to fix it? Don’t tinker around the edges, Roy argues. Instead, look upstream for solutions to health problems. Abandon narratives about “deserving-ness”. Examine what is working in cities and states.
In an interview, Roy cited the example of the Philadelphia Joy Bank – a small program that provides pregnant and postpartum women with a $1,000 basic income. This money comes with no questions asked, which is a world of difference from traditional “welfare”, or temporary assistance for needy families (TANF).
TANF once provided temporary cash assistance to the poor. Since Clinton-era welfare reforms, the program has been drained of resources; its scant payments have lost venue with inflation and work requirements have saddled many with insurmountable bureaucratic barriers.
In Connecticut, lawmakers established first-in-the-nation “baby bonds”, a small investing account for each low-income child born in the state. The program provides $3,200 per child that is invested in the market, and can be used to buy a house, start a business, or pay for higher education or retirement.
In Washington DC, reformers at the American Economic Liberties Project are using the lessons of recent anti-trust victories to push for a proposed “Glass-Steagall for healthcare”. The initiative, called Break Up Big Medicine, refers to the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall legislation that separated investment banks from commercial banks.
Other articles in the issue propose home care cooperatives, to provide better working conditions to home care workers as baby boomers age; reinvest in public hospitals and public production of pharmaceuticals, such as California’s $100m investment in local, public insulin production; or to provide social insurance for times people can’t work.
“Prevailing approaches to health policy are leaving people in America behind, including rural and low-income residents and people from historically marginalized communities,” Kathryn A Phillips, the editor-in-chief of Health Affairs Scholar, said in a statement about the issue.
“Policymakers need to know there is another way – an approach that prioritizes investment in patients, communities, and health care clinicians and workers.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour event at Arizona State University, Thursday in Tempe, Ariz. Ross D. Franklin/AP hide caption
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Ross D. Franklin/AP
TEMPE, Ariz. – Sen. Bernie Sanders has emerged as a leading voice for voters opposed to President Trump’s rapid push to dismantle the federal government — and frustrated with the Democratic Party’s response.
Sanders and his fiery form of economic populism attacking the growing influence of billionaires and corporations in politics are not new, but interest in both message and messenger has been renewed by Trump’s second term and the outsized role Elon Musk has played in cutting federal spending and pushing agencies to fire workers.
“Well, when I talked about oligarchy over the years, I think for some people it was an abstraction,” Sanders said in an interview with NPR. Now though, “people understand you have to be blind not to see that what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires.”
But the independent senator from Vermont said, at the same time, the Democratic Party has also turned its back on the American working class and suggested the party capitalize on this moment by championing policies that address things like income inequality, health care and climate change.
“If they do that, I think working people will come back into the fold,” he predicted. “If not, I suspect the party will continue to decline.”
Thursday, Sanders kicked off a western swing of his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with rallies in Las Vegas and Tempe, Ariz. joined by New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The pair spoke to an overflow crowd of thousands inside and outside the Mullett Arena at Arizona State University about the threat they say Trump and his allies pose to American voters and the government.
“We will not allow you to move this country into an oligarchy,” Sanders pledged, speaking directly to Trump. “We’re not going to allow you and your friend Mr. Musk and the other billionaires to wreak havoc on the working families of this country. No, you’re not going to destroy Social Security. You’re not going to destroy Medicaid. You’re not going to destroy the Veterans administration.”
Friday, Sanders’ communications director said more than 30,000 people showed up in Denver, Colo. to hear him speak, a larger crowd than any event during his two presidential runs.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a rally on Friday at Civic Center Park in Denver. Sanders’ communications director said the crowd numbered 30,000, a new record for a Sanders event. Chet Strange/Getty Images hide caption
While Democrats do not hold Congress or the White House, Ocasio-Cortez said voters still have power to push back against Trump administration policies that she says mask the true divide in the country between “those at the very, very top and their endless greed costing the lives of everyone else.”
“Ironically, the most divisive forces in this country are actually starting to bring more of us together,” she said. “And that’s important, because the same billionaires who are taking a wrecking ball to our country derive their power from dividing working people apart.”
The Democratic Party is unpopular, too
While a recent NPR/PBS News/Marist poll finds a majority of voters feel down about the state of the country and that Trump’s agenda is being rushed without considering its impact, that displeasure also extends to the Democratic Party.
An NBC news survey from last week finds the party’s popularity at an all-time low, driven by dissatisfied Democrats who want their elected officials to actively counter Trump’s agenda instead of trying to find compromise.
That sentiment was on display at the Sanders rally in Arizona, where volunteer Clarissa Vela said Democrats need to “stop biting their tongues and get loud” to tell voters what they plan to do about unpopular changes pushed by Trump.
“They need to organize themselves, because that’s all that the only way this is going to work,” she said. “They need to show their faces everywhere they go, and they’re going to be so exhausted. But at the end of the day, if we want to take back our democracy, that’s what we’ve got to do. No war was ever won by sitting on your couch. You know what I mean?”
After decisive losses in November, Democrats elected new party leadership to helm the national infrastructure but have no singular figure driving the response to the early days of Trump’s return to the White House, let alone a unified message.
Democratic voters — and some lawmakers — are unhappy with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision to help Republicans avert a government shutdown after House Democrats argued against supporting the spending plan.
What comes next?
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., right, takes a photo with supporters after speaking during a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour event at Arizona State University, Thursday in Tempe, Ariz. Ross D. Franklin/AP hide caption
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Ross D. Franklin/AP
As larger and larger crowds attend Sanders’ events and more people call for a shakeup within the Democratic Party’s strategy, a recurring question has popped up: why don’t more Democrats sound like Bernie Sanders?
For one: Sanders isn’t a Democrat, though he caucuses with them. Sanders has been in Congress for three decades and is arguably the best-known progressive in Washington. Vermont’s politics and demographics are also more friendly to Sanders’ views than other battleground districts in the Trump era.
While other elected Democrats might not be sounding the alarm using the same rhetoric as Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, the rising backlash to Musk and DOGE in particular has seen some in the party begin to adopt similar framing to go after Republicans.
Earlier this week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz spoke at an event in Eau Claire, Wis., one of many places where Democrats have held town halls in GOP-represented districts where constituents have expressed anger at Musk-inspired cuts to the federal government.
Walz took aim at Trump and Musk and implored Wisconsin voters to show up for a key state Supreme Court election April 1. He also mentioned ways the party needs to step up and regain voter trust on key issues.
“We’re going to have to have a conversation that Democrats, quite honestly, have skirted around, that America’s health care system is still incredibly broken in a way that doesn’t serve people,” Walz said. “It’s incredibly frustrating.”
For his part, Sanders is not surprised his longstanding message seems to be resonating with people across the ideological spectrum:
“Because if you’re a working class Republican, you don’t think it makes a lot of sense to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the richest people in this country and then cut the [Department of Veterans Affairs], go after Social Security and make $800 billion cuts in Medicaid,” he said. “Republican, independent, Democrat… very few people think that makes any sense at all.”
Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.
Washington — President Trump has made no secret of his disapproval of a federal judge who temporarily blocked his administration’s efforts to deport Venezuelan migrants suspected of being gang members under a 1789 law.
While the president’s crusade has included calls for the judge, James Boasberg, to be impeached by the House, Mr. Trump and his administration are also taking aim at a form of judicial relief that has temporarily impeded implementation of his second-term agenda and also been a headache for his predecessors in the White House.
In other instances, including the president’s attempt to invoke the wartime Alien Enemies Act to remove certain migrants, judges have issued temporary restraining orders that prevent enforcement of a policy, typically for 14 days, to allow for further proceedings.
Faced with these injunctions, many of which have been appealed, Mr. Trump and senior White House officials are now calling on Congress and the Supreme Court to take action to limit the ability of federal judges to issue orders that block policies nationwide.
“STOP NATIONWIDE INJUNCTIONS NOW, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” the president wrote Wednesday on Truth Social. “If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, suggested that the administration’s goal is to force action that ultimately curtails these orders.
“Our objective, one way or another, is to make clear that the district courts of this country do not have the authority to direct the functions of the executive branch. Period,” he told Fox News in an interview Thursday.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller talks to reporters outside the West Wing in Washington, D.C., on March 19, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
When pressed on whether the administration is seeking broad change that restricts a district court’s ability to block any executive branch policy, Miller said that “complete and permanent relief is what this administration seeks.”
How injunctions work
Typically in the judicial system, courts focus on resolving the legitimate claims brought by the parties before them. While different courts may reach different outcomes, the broader legal questions can percolate before the Supreme Court may ultimately step in with a resolution.
But in the current landscape, there are many legal battles brought by many different litigants. In some instances, judges are issuing far-reaching orders that extend beyond the parties and bar the government from enforcing the policy at issue against anyone, anywhere in the country.
“Whatever your politics, we can agree that having all of these really important policy questions and legal questions resolved in whatever court somebody can first convince to offer nationwide relief is not the best way to run the system,” said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University. “But fixing it in a balanced and nuanced way probably requires legislation.”
The Trump administration is not the first to complain about nationwide injunctions, and Mr. Trump is not the first president to have his policies derailed by them.
A study published in the Harvard Law Review last April found that at least 127 nationwide injunctions were issued from 1963 through 2023. Building on a dataset from the Justice Department, researchers identified 96 that had been entered by judges since 2001. Sixty-four of those temporarily blocked policies issued in Mr. Trump’s first term, while federal judges issued 14 nationwide injunctions in challenges to President Joe Biden’s proposals through the end of his third year in office. Miller himself repeatedly touted injunctions against Biden administration policies that the legal group he led obtained.
When looking at the judges who entered these orders, the study found that of the 64 nationwide injunctions imposed during Mr. Trump’s first term, 92% came from judges appointed by Democratic presidents. For Biden, all of the 14 injunctions were issued by Republican-appointed judges.
“It’s a broader trend. It has affected administrations of more than one party, and it will affect the next Democratic administration as well,” Adler said.
Mr. Trump’s condemnation of nationwide injunctions has sparked interest from Congress. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, said he plans to introduce legislation to restrict district judges’ ability to issue them.
A bill from Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, would also restrict federal judges’ authority to impose nationwide injunctions. An amendment to his proposal that was approved by the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month would allow the broad orders in some instances, such as in cases brought by multiple states if they’re heard by a three-judge district court panel.
Bills reforming nationwide injunctions have also been introduced by Democrats. In 2023, Democratic Sen. Mazie Hirono of Hawaii proposed requiring cases that seek nationwide injunctive relief to be heard by the federal district court in Washington, D.C. Another plan, from Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, would require civil suits seeking nationwide orders to be filed in district courts with at least two active judges, an effort to prevent so-called forum shopping, where plaintiffs go looking for a friendly judge who is guaranteed to take a case in a certain district.
The House and Senate Judiciary Committees also held hearings on the topic in 2017 and 2020, respectively.
Injunctions at the Supreme Court
At the Supreme Court, several justices have taken note of the uptick in nationwide injunctions.
In its last term, during arguments over the availability of the abortion pill mifepristone brought by a group of anti-abortion rights doctors, Justice Neil Gorsuch lamented what he said is a “rash” of these broad orders.
“This case seems like a prime example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule or any other federal government action,” he said during arguments last March.
In that dispute, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, appointed by Mr. Trump in his first term, issued a sweeping order that suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. The high court last year rejected a challenge from the anti-abortion rights doctors to reinstate more stringent rules for obtaining the drug, preserving access to it.
In 2022, Justice Elena Kagan spoke out against the ability of a single judge to stop implementation of a policy across the country.
“In the Trump years, people used to go to the Northern District of California, and in the Biden years, they go to Texas,” she said, referring to where challengers filed their lawsuits. “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process.”
Justice Clarence Thomas also questioned district courts’ authority to enter universal injunctions in 2018, when the Supreme Court upheld the travel ban Mr. Trump implemented in his first term.
“If their popularity continues, this court must address their legality,” Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion.
The high court was recently given the opportunity to address the lawfulness of nationwide injunctions, when the Biden administration filed a request for emergency relief in December and suggested it settle the question of district court’s entering preliminary relief on a universal basis.
“Universal injunctions exert substantial pressure on this court’s emergency docket, and they visit substantial disruption on the execution of the laws,” then-Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a filing. Quoting Gorsuch, she wrote that the “‘patently unworkable’ practice of issuing universal injunctions has accordingly persisted.”
But the high court declined to do so.
Now, the Trump administration is taking its turn in urging the high court to resolve the fight. In requests for emergency relief stemming from three district court injunctions blocking the president’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said the orders harm the courts and the government.
“Government-by-universal-injunction has persisted long enough, and has reached a fever pitch in recent weeks,” she wrote. “It is long past time to restore district courts to their ‘proper — and properly limited — role … in a democratic society.’”
The Supreme Court is unlikely to decide whether to grant the administration’s request to narrow the scope of the injunctions until early April.
Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.
