The Federal Reserve has shifted to rate cuts, which could be a boon for companies that rely on consumer spending.
The Federal Reserve just cut interest rates. The goal was, basically, to protect the U.S. economy from falling into a recession.
Wall Street is expecting additional rate cuts from here, which could lead to positive outcomes for these three consumer goods companies. Each one comes with a different set of risks and potential rewards. Here’s why these stocks could be worth examining today, before more rate cuts are made.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. Target isn’t resonating with consumers right now
Target(TGT) is a large big box retailer, offering a range of products under one roof. It competes directly with Walmart(WMT 0.64%). That’s an important comparison point because Target is doing poorly right now and Walmart is doing quite well. To put numbers on that, Target’s same-store sales fell 1.9% in the second quarter of 2025 while Walmart’s same store sales rose 4.6% in its U.S. locations.
The big difference is that Target’s business model is to offer a more premium experience, while Walmart is squarely about its everyday low prices ethos. Consumers worried about the economy and inflation, which The Motley Fool’s research shows can ravage the buying power of the dollar, appear to be voting with their feet. However, if Federal Reserve rate cuts lead to a growth uptick, consumers could trade back up to Target.
Just such a shift has happened before, so expecting it to happen again isn’t a big stretch in a sector driven by consumer sentiment. That said, Target’s shares are down more than 40% from their 52-week high, making them look relatively cheap. And the Dividend King is offering an attractive 5% yield that’s backed by over five decades of annual dividend increases.
2. Lululemon is a luxury basics clothing retailer
The story around Lululemon(LULU -0.75%) is roughly similar to that of Target. Lululemon makes athletic wear basics. However, the cost of these basics is very high, so it is really a luxury retailer. To be fair, there’s a fashion twist here and the company has made past design missteps that can’t be ignored. But overall, it has been on trend more than it has been off trend.
But one thing Lululemon can’t control is the swings in the economy and how customers react to those swings. The company’s second quarter results weren’t bad if you take a top-level view of the income statement, with revenues up 7% and same-store sales up 1%. But that was entirely driven by international growth, with sales up just 1% in the Americas and same store sales off by 4%.
It clearly looks like consumers in the Americas are pulling back on what are really discretionary purchases, despite the basic nature of the items. If rate cuts make consumers more confident in the economy again, that trend could change. With the stock down more than 50% from its 52-week high, there could be some turnaround appeal here for more aggressive investors.
3. Coca-Cola is boring and doing fairly well
Coca-Cola(KO -0.83%), the last stock up on this list, is appropriate for conservative investors. The shares are only down around 10% from their 52-week highs. But that’s enough to have pushed the stock’s price-to-sales and price-to-earnings ratios below their five-year averages. It wouldn’t be fair to suggest that Coca-Cola is trading hands at fire-sale prices, but it does appear fairly priced to a little cheap. The stock doesn’t go on sale very often, so this could be a good opportunity for long-term investors who place a high value on dividends.
On the dividend front, the beverage giant is a Dividend King with over six decades of annual dividend increases behind it. The yield is notably above the market at nearly 3.1%. And it is one of the largest and best-run consumer staples companies on the planet. If you are risk averse, Coca-Cola is a solid option. And economic growth driven by rate cuts could make it that much easier for consumers to justify splurging on what is basically very expensive water.
There’s plenty of benefit to go around from rate cuts
Federal Reserve rate cuts are a bit of a blunt instrument when it comes to impacting the economy. But they can be very effective at freeing up capital for investment. If there are more rate cuts to come, as Wall Street seems to expect, Target, Lululemon, and Coca-Cola could all benefit if the outcome is continued, if not stronger, economic growth. The upside at Target and Lululemon is more material, but Coca-Cola shows that even the most conservative investors can get in on the rate-cut investment opportunity.
Reuben Gregg Brewer has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Lululemon Athletica Inc., Target, and Walmart. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Plans for a major reform of the housebuying system, which aim to cut costs, reduce delays and halve failed sales, have been unveiled by the government.
Housing Secretary Steve Reed said the changes would “fix the broken system” and put more money “back into working people’s pockets”.
Under the new proposals, sellers and estate agents will be legally required to provide key information about a property up front.
The overhaul could save first-time buyers an average of £710 and cut up to four weeks off the typical property transaction timeline, according to the government.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of families and first-time buyers could benefit from the reforms.
Those in the middle of a chain could also potentially gain a net saving of £400 as a result of the increased costs from selling being outweighed by lower buying expenses.
The consultation draws on other jurisdictions, including the Scottish system where there is more upfront information and earlier binding contracts.
This will include being up front about the condition of the home, any leasehold costs, and details of property chains.
The government says this transparency will reduce the risk of deals collapsing late in the process and improve confidence among buyers, particularly those purchasing a home for the first time.
Binding contracts may also be introduced to prevent parties from walking away late in the deal, a move intended to halve the number of failed transactions, which currently cost the UK economy an estimated £1.5bn a year.
“Buying a home should be a dream, not a nightmare,” said Reed. “Our reforms will fix the broken system so hardworking people can focus on the next chapter of their lives.”
The reforms will also aim to boost professional standards across the housing sector.
A new mandatory Code of Practice for estate agents and conveyancers is being proposed, along with the introduction of side-by-side performance data to help buyers choose trusted professionals based on expertise and track record.
The government said a full roadmap for the changes would be published in the new year, forming part of its broader housing strategy, which includes a pledge to build 1.5 million new homes.
Housing expert Kirstie Allsopp, the presenter of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location, told the BBC’s Today programme she was “really glad the government has grasped this nettle”.
She said it was important to focus on both the buying and selling sides, “because things fall through because buyers walk away just as much as sellers walk away, and I think that was a worrying element”.
The boss of property website Rightmove, Johan Svanstrom, welcomed the plans to modernise the system.
“The home-moving process involves many fragmented parts, and there’s simply too much uncertainty and costs along the way. Speed, connected data and stakeholder simplicity should be key goals.”
However, Conservative shadow housing minister Paul Holmes said: “Whilst we welcome steps to digitise and speed up the process, this risks reinventing the last Labour Government’s failed Home Information Packs – which reduced the number of homes put on sale, and duplicated costs across buyers and sellers.”
The announcement comes as the Conservatives are set to detail changes to its tax policy for first home buyers at the party’s conference in Manchester.
Shadow chancellor Mel Stride will announce proposals for a “first-job bonus” that would divert national insurance payments into a long-term savings account.
The party say it will be funded by cuts to public spending worth £47bn over five years in areas such as welfare, the civil service and the foreign aid budget.
The Trump administration this week escalated its efforts against renewable energy when it announced the cancellation of $7.56 billion in funding for projects in 16 states, including California.
The U.S. Department of Energy said the 223 canceled projects — all of which are in states that favored Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election — were terminated because they “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”
But while the cuts took aim at blue states, they will affect Trump’s base as well: The terminated projects span districts represented by 108 Democratic members of Congress and 28 Republicans. In California, that includes large swaths of the Central Valley and Inland Empire, which largely leaned toward Trump in 2024.
Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and a top Trump administration official, said in a post on X that the canceled projects were using “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda.”
The biggest cut was $1.2 billion for California’s ambitious project to develop clean hydrogen known as the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, or ARCHES. It was awarded by the Biden administration as part of a competitive nationwide effort to develop hydrogen projects. The idea is that the hydrogen, which burns at a very high temperature, will be able to replace planet-warming fossil fuels in some industry and transportation uses.
The ARCHES project is a public-private partnership that would create at least 10 hydrogen production sites around the state, primarily in the Central Valley. It would also help transition two large gas-fired power plants — Scattergood in Los Angeles and the Lodi Energy Center in San Joaquin County — to 100% renewable hydrogen, and develop more than 60 hydrogen fueling stations in areas including Fresno, Riverside, Orange and San Joaquin counties.
In all, it would deliver an estimated 220,000 jobs, including 130,000 construction jobs and 90,000 permanent jobs, according to the state. California is pursuing hydrogen in addition to renewables such as offshore wind, solar power and geothermal energy to help diversify its supply, meet growing demand driven by artificial intelligence data centers, and reach its target of 100% carbon neutrality by 2045.
The Trump administration said terminating the clean energy projects will save taxpayers money.
One district with a project that’s been cut is the northern San Joaquin Valley, represented by Tom McClintock (R-Elk Grove). McClintock said he strongly supports the Energy Department’s decision.
“$7.5 billion comes out to about $60 taken from the average earnings of every family in America,” McClintock said. “Call me old fashioned, but I think that companies should make their money by pleasing their customers and not by using government to take money that families have earned.”
The Times also reached out to Reps. Vince Fong (R-Bakersfield), Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), Keven Kiley (R-Rocklin), Ken Calvert (R-Corona), Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills) and Jay Obernolte (R-Big Bear Lake), whose districts are touched by the ARCHES hub and other terminated projects.
A representative for Fong said his office was dealing with issues related to the U.S. government shutdown and so was unable to comment. None of the others responded.
Jesse Lee, senior advisor with the nonprofit group Climate Power, said the cancellations may not save taxpayers money, but cost them. The administration this year has canceled a $7 billion program to help low-income households install solar panels on their homes and halted the development of off-shore wind projects, among other efforts.
“Having these projects come to fruition is really the only chance we have at insulating people from skyrocketing utility bills year after year,” Lee said — particularly in the face of energy-thirsty AI. “The only way to have a prayer of meeting that demand is through these kinds of clean energy projects.”
Lee believes the actions could come back to haunt the party in the midterm elections. Since Trump took office in January, at least 142 clean energy projects have been canceled affecting what his group estimates is at least 80,500 jobs — not including the latest round of cuts announced this week. About 47% of those jobs were in congressional districts represented by Republicans, according to Clean Power’s energy project tracker.
Democratic officials in California said the Energy Department’s latest cuts amount to political retaliation. They were announced on the first day of the shutdown, which the administration blames on Democrats.
“The cancellation of ARCHES is vindictive, shortsighted, and proof that this Administration is not serious about American energy dominance,” California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla wrote in a joint letter to Energy Secretary Chris Wright dated Thursday, in which they urged him to restore its funding.
“The cancellation of this award threatens the future promise of hydrogen energy, leaving us behind the rest of the world,” the senators said. “The ARCHES hub is a key strategic investment into American energy dominance, energy technology prominence, manufacturing job growth, and lowering energy costs for American families.”
The cuts come as the Trump administrations eases the path for production of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal, including this week’s announcement that it will open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired power plants. Coal has become increasingly uncompetitive with either natural gas or solar power.
Large-scale renewable energy and carbon capture projects in red states such as Wyoming, Ohio, Texas, Louisiana and North Dakota that received funding from the Energy Department were not subject to the cuts.
Other canceled awards in California include $630 million to the California Energy Commission for grid resilience upgrades; $500 million to the National Cement Company of California for a carbon-neutral cement production facility; $87 million to Redwood Coast Energy Authority for grid updates benefiting tribal communities; $50 million to Southern California Edison for a battery energy storage project; and $18 million to the Imperial Irrigation District to modernize its electrical grid, bolster resiliency against power outages and catalyze renewable energy usage.
“We are disappointed as we did a great deal of work to win the $18.3 million matching grant from the DOE to help modernize our electrical grid and enhance reliability for our customers,” said Robert Schettler, a spokesman for the Imperial Irrigation District located in southeastern California. “Despite this setback, we will reevaluate the scope as the project is a necessity.”
Officials with ARCHES called the administration’s decision a “short-sighted move that abandons America’s opportunity to lead the global clean energy transition.” They said they hope to keep the project moving forward even without the federal grant; ARCHES has also secured more than $10 billion in private funding agreements.
“Despite the loss of federal funding, we will press forward with our state, private, and international partners to build the infrastructure, train the workforce, and establish the supply chains that will power a modern, resilient energy economy,” ARCHES board chair Theresa Maldonado said in a statement.
WASHINGTON — Hopes for a quick end to the government shutdown faded Friday as Republicans and Democrats dug in for a prolonged fight and President Trump readied plans to unleash layoffs and cuts across the federal government.
Senators were headed back to the Capitol for another vote on government funding on the third day of the shutdown, but there has been no sign of any real progress toward ending their standoff. Democrats are demanding that Congress extend healthcare benefits, while Republicans are trying to wear them down with day after day of voting on a House-passed bill that would reopen the government temporarily, mostly at current spending levels.
“I don’t know how many times you’re going to give them a chance to vote no,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said at a news conference Friday. He added that he would give Democratic senators the weekend to think it over.
Although Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, the Senate’s filibuster rules make it necessary for the government funding legislation to gain support from at least 60 of the 100 senators. That’s given Democrats a rare opportunity to use their 47 Senate seats to hold out in exchange for policy concessions. The party has chosen to rally on the issue of healthcare, believing it could be key to their path back to power in Washington.
Their primary demand is that Congress extend tax credits that were boosted during the COVID-19 pandemic for healthcare plans offered under the Affordable Care Act marketplace.
Standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Thursday, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said, “Understand this, over the last few days and over the next few days, what you’re going to see is more than 20 million Americans experience dramatically increased healthcare premiums, co-pays and deductibles because of the Republican unwillingness to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”
The shutdown gamble
Democrats are running the high-risk strategy of effectively voting for a government shutdown to make their stand. Trump has vowed to make it as painful as possible for them.
The Republican president has called the government funding lapse an “unprecedented opportunity” to make vast cuts to federal agencies and potentially lay off federal workers, rather than the typical practice of furloughing them. White House budget director Russ Vought has already announced that he is withholding billions of dollars for infrastructure projects in states with Democratic senators.
On Friday morning, Vought said he would withhold $2.1 billion for Chicago infrastructure projects to extend its train system to the city’s South Side.
Jeffries has displayed no signs of budging under those threats.
“The cruelty that they might unleash on everyday Americans using the pretense of a shutdown is only going to backfire against them,” he said during an interview with the Associated Press and other outlets at the Capitol.
Still, the shutdown, no matter how long it lasts, could have far-reaching effects on the economy. Roughly 750,000 federal employees could be furloughed, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and they could lose out on $400 million in daily wages. That loss in wages until after the government reopens could drive down wider demand for goods and services.
“All around the country right now, real pain is being endured by real people because the Democrats have decided to play politics,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday.
Who will take the blame?
The American public usually spreads the blame around to both major political parties when it comes to a government shutdown. While Trump took a significant portion of the blame during the last partial government shutdown in 2018 as he demanded funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall, this standoff could end differently because now it is Democrats making the policy demands.
Still, lawmakers were relentlessly trying to make their case to the American public with a constant beat of news conferences, social media videos and livestreams. Congressional leaders have been especially active.
Both sides expressed confidence that the other would ultimately be found at fault. And in the House, party leaders seemed to be moving further apart rather than closer to making a deal to end the shutdown.
Jeffries on Thursday called for a permanent extension to the ACA tax credits. Meanwhile, Johnson and Thune told reporters that they would not negotiate on the tax credits until the government is reopened.
Talks in the Senate
A few senators have engaged in bipartisan talks about launching negotiations on extending the ACA tax credits for one year while the Senate votes to reopen the government for several weeks. But those discussions are in their early stages and appear to have little involvement from leadership.
As senators prepared for their last scheduled vote for the week on Friday, they appeared resigned to allow the shutdown to continue at least into next week. Thune said that if the vote failed, he would “give them the weekend to think about it” before holding more votes.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), in a floor speech, called for Republicans to work with her and fellow Democrats to find “common ground” on the ACA subsidies, saying their expiration would affect plenty of people in states with GOP senators — especially in rural areas where farmers, ranchers and small business owners purchase their own health insurance.
“Unfortunately, right now our Republican colleagues are not working with us to find a bipartisan agreement to prevent the government shutdown and address the healthcare crisis,” she said. “We know that even when they float ideas — which we surely do appreciate — in the end the president appears to make the call.”
Groves and Brown write for the Associated Press. Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Kevin Freking and Joey Cappelletti contributed to this report.
A top Trump administration official on Wednesday said the U.S. Department of Energy will cut billions of dollars in funding for energy projects in Democratic states.
“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” said Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, in a post on X.
“The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA,” Vought said.
All 16 states listed did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election.
Vought said more information about the cuts would come from the U.S. Department of Energy, which also announced this week that it will open 13 million acres of federal lands for coal mining and provide $625 million to recommission or modernize coal-fired power plants.
In a news release, the department confirmed that it had terminated more than 300 financial awards associated with 223 projects, amounting to $7.56 billion. The department did not specify the project names or locations, but said the awards had been issued by multiple offices, including the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.
According to the DOE, the projects were canceled following a review that found they did not “adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.” About a quarter of the awards had been issued by the Biden administration between election day in November and Trump’s inauguration in January, the agency said.
California Senator Adam Schiff said Vought’s post amounts to political retaliation.
“Our democracy is badly broken when a president can illegally suspend projects for Blue states in order to punish his political enemies,” Schiff wrote on X. “They continue to break the law, and expect us to go along. Hell no.”
Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro described the move as “purely vindictive” and said it will result in higher energy prices across the country.
“Terminating critical energy projects in Democratic states weaponizes policy for political revenge and will only drive energy bills higher, increase unemployment, and eliminate jobs,” DeLauro said in a statement. “It is reckless and betrays both common sense and public trust.”
California and other states on Vought’s list have been working to advance clean energy projects such as solar power and offshore wind. Republican states working on similar efforts — such as Texas, the largest producer of wind energy in the U.S. — were not among Vought’s list of cuts, despite also receiving funding from the Department of Energy.
Vought, one of the authors of the conservative platform document Project 2025, has been actively involved in reshaping the federal government during the second Trump administration. Vought on Wednesday also announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation was freezing $18 million for two infrastructure projects in New York City “to ensure funding is not flowing based on unconstitutional [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] principles.” The projects include a train tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey and a subway line running along Second Avenue in New York City.
The recipients of the canceled awards will have 30 days to appeal the termination decisions, according to the DOE, which said some of the projects included in the announcement have already begun that process.
A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily halted a Trump administration plan to reduce disaster relief and anti-terrorism funding for states with so-called sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants.
U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy granted the temporary restraining order curtailing the cuts at the request of California, 10 other states and the District of Columbia, which argued in a lawsuit Monday that the policy appeared to have illegally cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.
The states said they were first notified of the cuts over the weekend. McElroy made her decision during an emergency hearing on the states’ motion in Rhode Island District Court on Tuesday afternoon.
California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta cheered the decision as the state’s latest win in pushing back against what he described as a series of unlawful, funding-related power grabs by the Trump administration.
“Over and over, the courts have stopped the Trump Administration’s illegal efforts to tie unrelated grant funding to state policies,” Bonta said. “It’s a little thing called state sovereignty, but given the President’s propensity to violate the Constitution, it’s unsurprising that he’s unfamiliar with it.”
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the funding and notified the states of the cuts, immediately responded to a request for comment Tuesday.
Sanctuary policies are not uniform and the term is imprecise, but it generally refers to policies that bar states and localities — and their local law enforcement agencies — from participating in federal immigration raids or other enforcement initiatives.
The Trump administration and other Republicans have cast such policies as undermining law and order. Democrats and progressives including in California say instead that states and cities have finite public safety resources and that engaging in immigration enforcement serves only to undermine the trust they and their law enforcement agencies need to maintain with the public in order to prevent and solve crime, including in large immigrant communities.
In their lawsuit Monday, the states said the funding being reduced was part of billions in federal dollars annually distributed to the states to “prepare for, protect against, respond to, and recover from catastrophic disasters,” and which administrations of both political parties distributed “evenhandedly” for decades before Trump.
Authorized by Congress after events such as Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina, the funding covers the salaries of first responders, testing of state computer networks for cyberattack vulnerabilities, mutual aid compacts between regional partners and emergency responses after disasters, the states said.
Bonta’s office said California was informed over the weekend by Homeland Security officials that it would be receiving $110 million instead of $165 million, a reduction of its budget by about a third. The states’ lawsuit said other blue states saw even more dramatic cuts, with Illinois seeing a 69% reduction and New York receiving a 79% reduction, while red states saw substantial funding increases.
Bonta on Tuesday said the administration’s reshuffling of funds based on state compliance with the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement priorities was illegal and needed to be halted — and restored to previous levels based on risk assessment — in order to keep everyone in the country safe.
“California uses the grant funding at stake in our lawsuit to protect the safety of our communities from acts of terrorism and other disasters — meaning the stakes are quite literally life and death,” he said. “This is not something to play politics with. I’m grateful to the court for seeing the urgency of this dangerous diversion of homeland security funding.”
Homeland Security officials have previously argued that the agency should be able to withhold funding from states that it believes are not upholding or are actively undermining its core mission of defending the nation from threats, including the threat it sees from illegal immigration.
Other judges have also ruled against the administration conditioning disaster and public safety funding on states and localities complying with federal immigration policies.
Joining California in Monday’s lawsuit were Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.
Ever since Elijah Maldonado was born at just 29 months, he has needed specialty treatments that his family could afford only with publicly funded healthcare.
Diagnosed with cerebral palsy as an infant, he spent his first three months at a public hospital where the family lives in Orange County.
Now 7, Elijah receives physical and speech therapy among a host of other services paid for through Medicaid. He relies on a wheelchair funded by the government. An assistant paid for with taxpayer dollars makes sure he’s safe on the bus ride to and from school.
Each month, he receives a $957 disability check that helps to cover his and his family’s living expenses.
Josephine Rios wipes her grandson Elijah’s face.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Still learning to speak on his own, he uses a Proloquo speech app on an iPad provided by his school to tell his family when he’s hungry, needs to use the restroom or wants to play with his favorite toys.
“It’s his voice — his lifeline,” his aunt and primary caretaker Cassandra Gonzalez says of the app. Her compensation for his in-home care comes from taxpayer dollars too.
Now that lifeline — and much of the government assistance Elijah receives — is at risk of going away.
With hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cuts to Medicaid and food aid kicking in this fall thanks to the passage of the Republican-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — on top of earlier cuts imposed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — a host of federally funded healthcare and nutrition programs that serve low-income Americans will be scaled back, revamped with expanded work requirements and other restrictions or canceled altogether if individual states can’t find alternate funding sources.
The budget reduces federal spending on Medicaid alone by about $1 trillion over the next 10 years nationwide, with initial reductions taking effect in the coming weeks.
Gov. Gavin Newsom responded by accusing the Trump administration of “ripping care from cancer patients, meals from children and money from working families — just to give tax breaks to the ultra-rich.”
L.A. public health officials called the cuts devastating for a county where nearly 40% of the population is enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. L.A. County’s Department of Health Services, which oversees four public hospitals and about two dozen clinics, projects a budget reduction amounting to $750 million a year, and federal funding for the Department of Public Health, which inspects food, provides substance-use treatment and tracks disease outbreaks, will drop by an estimated $200 million a year. Spending cuts have prompted hiring freezes and projections of ballooning budget deficits, county health officials said.
Spending reductions, combined with recent changes to the Affordable Care Act and Medicare, could leave an additional 1.7 million people in California uninsured by 2034, according to an analysis by the nonprofit healthcare research organization KFF.
It’s not just that the cuts to these programs are massive by historical standards.
The new rules and restrictions are confusing and states have been given little guidance from the federal agencies that oversee health and nutrition programs on how, or even when, to implement them, experts at the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities wrote in a recent report.
What’s clear, the CBPP said, is that millions of children, older adults, people with disabilities and veterans stand to lose not just Medicaid coverage but federal aid to access the type of healthy foods that could prevent illness and chronic conditions.
More than 5 million California households receive food aid through the state’s CalFresh program and 97% percent of them will see their benefits either slashed or eliminated because of federal spending cuts, changes to eligibility requirements or financial constraints at the state level, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan California Budget Policy Center.
Elijah plays with toy cars outside his aunt’s home in Tustin.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
In Orange County, where Elijah’s family lives, public health officials were already reeling from federal spending cuts in the months before the budget bill passed, said Dr. Veronica Kelley, director of the OC Health Care Agency. For example, there was the $13.2-million cut to funding for family planning services in the county, and the $4-million reduction in funding to Women, Infants and Children nutrition (WIC).
The agency has worked to prevent mass layoffs by moving public-health workers in canceled programs to other departments or leaving some positions unfilled in order to save jobs elsewhere, and it has sought out nonprofit social service organizations and philanthropies to either take over programs or help fund them, Kelley said.
Now, Kelley is preparing for possible cuts to programs to combat obesity, maintain community gardens, help seniors make better healthcare decisions and reduce the use of tobacco. The agency also has to figure out how to make up for a $4.8-million reduction in federal funds for the county’s SNAP program that takes effect on Wednesday — another casualty of the federal spending bill.
The measures that the agency has leaned on to get through the year are not sustainable, Kelley said. “We can only do that for so long,” she said. “It’s chaotic. In terms of healthcare, it’s devastating… It feels like we’re taking so many steps backward.”
The looming cuts and changes have also set off alarm bells at Kaiser Permanente, California’s largest private healthcare provider with 9.5 million members statewide, 1.1 million of whom are enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program.
“Without the ability to pay, newly uninsured people will find themselves having to delay care, leading to more serious and complex health conditions, increasing the use of emergency services and more intensive medical services,” Kaiser Permanente Southern California Regional spokeswoman Candice Lee said in a statement to The Times.
“This will affect all of us as the cost of this uncompensated care leads hospitals and care providers to charge paying customers more to cover their costs. Some hospitals and providers, especially those in rural and underserved areas, will be unable to make up for these unreimbursed costs, and will be financially threatened by these changes.”
Standing in front of her sister Cassandra’s town home in Tustin, a quiet suburban city of 80,000 about 10 miles south of Disneyland, Elijah’s mother, Samantha Rios; grandmother Josephine Rios; and Aunt Cassandra are filled with worry.
Elijah points to a command on his Proloquo speech app, which he uses to communicate his needs.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Josephine, a nursing assistant who works at a Kaiser hospital in Orange County, said she hears the panic in patients’ voices when they describe rushing to schedule needed medical procedures in anticipation of losing their Medicaid benefits.
Earlier this year, Josephine joined delegations of unionized California healthcare workers who traveled to Washington with the aim of pressing lawmakers to oppose spending cuts.
Rep. Young Kim, the Republican who represents the Rios family’s district in Congress, was receptive to the delegation’s pleas to vote no on the budget bill, Josephine recalls. The congresswoman ultimately voted for the bill, saying on her official webpage the legislation was good for Californians because it would relieve the tax burden on families, ensure that government dollars are used effectively and “strengthen Medicaid and SNAP for our most vulnerable citizens who truly need it.”
Elijah’s Aunt Cassandra and grandmother Josephine look over his shoulder as he watches a TV show.
(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)
Now, Josephine looked on as Elijah, seated in his wheelchair, played on his iPad and watched a Disney program on his phone. He can press a tab on the touchscreen to make the tablet say “My name’s Elijah” if he’s feeling unsafe away from home, another to tell his family he needs space when upset.
Watching Elijah enjoy himself, the women said they feel awkward broadcasting their woes to strangers when all they desire is what’s best for him. They don’t need the public’s pity.
The family wants lawmakers and the public to understand how seemingly abstract healthcare decisions involving billions of dollars, and made 2,000-plus miles away in Washington, have brought new financial turmoil to a family that’s already on the edge financially.
Samantha, a single mom, works full time to provide a home for Elijah and his two sisters, ages 10 and 8. A subscription to the Proloquo speech app alone would cost $300 a year out-of-pocket — more than she can afford on her shoestring budget.
Due to changes in household income requirements, Samantha had already lost Medicaid coverage for herself and her two girls, she said, as well as her SNAP food assistance, leaving her at a loss for how to fill the gap. She now pays about $760 a month to cover her daughters and herself through her employer-based health plan.
The cut to food aid has forced her to compensate by getting free vegetables, milk, eggs and chicken from the food pantry at a local school, a reality that she said she was at first too ashamed to disclose even to relatives.
Then came the bad news Samantha recently received about Elijah’s monthly Social Security Insurance for his disability. She was stunned to hear that because of stricter income cut-offs for that type of aid, Elijah would no longer receive those checks as of Oct. 1.
“Before, he was getting $957 a month — obviously that’s grocery money for me,” Samantha said. The money also went to buy baby wipes, as well as knee pads to help him move more comfortably on the floor when not using his wheelchair.
“I don’t get food stamps. I don’t get Medi-Cal for my girls. I don’t get any of that,” Samantha said. “As of Oct. 1, now I’ve got to figure out how am I going to pay my rent? How am I going to buy groceries?”
Luckily, the sisters said, the physical, speech and behavioral-health therapies that Elijah receives are safe — for now.
And the women know they can lean on each other in tough times. The sisters and Josephine all live within minutes of each other in Tustin, close enough for Samantha’s children to eat at someone’s home when their own cupboards are bare.
Every few months, Samantha said, Elijah experiences severe seizures that can last up to 90 minutes and require hospitalization.
Cassandra and Josephine like that they can run over to help if Elijah has a medical emergency. Another sister who lives farther away is on hand when needed too.
“What’s going to happen to other families who don’t have that support system?” Samantha said.
Given the potential for further cuts to programs that pay for home-based healthcare and assistants for people with disabilities, Cassandra wonders what will happen to her own family if she can no longer work as Elijah’s caregiver.
Where would the family get the money to pay a new caregiver who is qualified enough to work with a special-needs child who can speak a few words thanks to speech therapy but who cannot eat, walk or use the restroom without supervision? What if funding is eliminated for the assistant who travels with Elijah to school?
“People think that cutting Medi-Cal, cutting food stamps or whatever isn’t going to affect that many people,” Cassandra said. “It’s affecting my nephew and nieces. It’s affecting my sister. But it’s not just affecting her household. It’s affecting my household.”
“We’re not saying we’re going to Disneyland or going out to eat every day,” Cassandra said. “This is just living. We can’t even live at this point, with things being cut.”
The women offered up principles they feel are in short supply lately in the discourse over the government’s role in public health — among them “morals” and “empathy.” Samantha adds one more word to the list.
At 3:25 in the morning of July 24, Milagro Solis Portillo was woken up and booked out of B-18, ICE’s basement detention facility in the downtown L.A. courthouse. She was not told where she was headed as she was put onto a commercial flight along with two immigration officer escorts. A few hours later, she was booked into the Clark County Jail in Jefferson, Ind.
Ming Tanigawa-Lau, an attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center representing Portillo, said her transfer was retaliatory, especially when there was open space at nearby facilities. The 36-year-old’s encounters with ICE had caused a local stir. She suffered a medical incident during her arrest outside her home in Sherman Oaks that required treatment at Glendale Memorial Hospital.
While at the hospital, she was monitored constantly by immigration officers. Local activists and representatives held events protesting her treatment. After two weeks, ICE forcibly removed her from the hospital against the advice of her medical team and sent her to B-18 and then across the country.
State Sen. Sasha Renée Perez (D-Alhambra) speaks at a news conference in front of Glendale Memorial Hospital where Milagro Solis Portillo was treated after being arrested by ICE on July 7.
(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)
Portillo isn’t the only detained immigrant flown across the country. The Times analyzed ICE data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the Deportation Data Project and found that transfers between facilities in the first half of this year are happening faster and more frequently compared with the same period last year. The typical detainee is transferred at least once. From January through July, 12% of those detained have been transferred at least four times. In the first half of 2024, 6% of detainees were transferred 4 or more times.
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network, said transfers have been used as a retaliatory tactic for those who make requests, file complaints or stage protests such as hunger strikes. Transfers move people from places where they may already have an attorney or where there are established legal-services organizations to a place that is unfamiliar and where there may be fewer resources for detained migrants.
ICE moves people from temporary holding spaces to more long-term housing as they prepare detainees for deportation. But, as a result, they could be sent far from loved ones, professional organizations, church groups and other community networks. They miss out on in-person visits from family and instead have to pay for phone or video calls. Ghandehari said she believes this isolation is deliberate.
“Conditions are bad because it’s meant to be a deterrent,” Ghandehari said. “So it’s also part of the way the system is set up. And I think transfers play into that more than people realize.”
On July 18, a 20-year-old man was deported from the Alexandria Staging Facility to Honduras. Two months prior, on May 13, he was arrested outside of Orlando and then transferred 15 times back and forth across the country between facilities in Florida, California, Arizona, Hawaii and finally Louisiana.
He had no criminal history. Public ICE data do not show whether he had an attorney or was fighting his case to remain in the country.
15 transfers. 11 facilities. 4,800 miles.
A man first detained in Florida spent 30 days in a federal detention center in Hawaii.
Broward Transitional Center, Fla.
Alexandria Staging Facility, La.
Florence Staging Facility, Ariz.
Florence Service Processing Center, Ariz.
Golden State Annex, Calif.
Bakersfield hold room, Calif.
Honolulu Federal Detention Center, Hawaii
Arizona Removal Operations
Coordination Center, Ariz.
July 18 – Deported to Honduras
Arizona Removal Operations
Arizona Removal Operations
Facility placement is not to scale.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from the Deportation Data Project
LOS ANGELES TIMES
The journeys from one facility to another can be difficult. On Aug. 15, ICE moved Portillo from Clark County Jail to Louisiana through a flight out of Chicago. First, she spent about 12 hours in a holding room in the nearby Clay County Justice Center without access to communicate with anyone. Around 1:30 a.m. the next day, she and nine other women were put into a van headed to Chicago, five to a bench on either side.
“It was a very scary trip,” Portillo said, speaking with The Times through a translator. “We couldn’t be comfortable because our hands and feet were handcuffed. It was dangerous because it seemed like the officials driving were falling asleep. We could feel that the van would sway one way and another way at dawn.”
According to Tanigawa-Lau, it can take days after a transfer for family and legal representatives to find out that a person has been moved. The online system that is meant to show where detainees are located is not updated right away. The families of detainees typically find out where their loved one has been sent from the detained person — once they are able to place a phone call.
The abrupt relocations of her clients have led to missed appointments and court hearings, Tanigawa-Lau said. When a client is transferred, it becomes more difficult to mount a legal defense.
In the Los Angeles area, Tanigawa-Lau and her organization have knowledge of the judges and how to contact detention facilities to communicate with clients.
States such as Louisiana don’t have the same kind of immigration defense infrastructure. On the Immigration Advocates Network site, California has 205 resources listed to help migrants and their representatives find local legal services. Indiana has 16. Louisiana has 10. The Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana, which has deported the most immigrants this year, routinely limits access to attorneys, according to reporting by the Guardian.
Portillo recounted a comment made on the flight from California to Chicago by one of the ICE agents escorting her that it was thanks to the laws in California that she was being brought to Indiana. Indiana’s Republican Gov. Mike Braun is a strong supporter of the Trump administration’s immigration strategy.
ICE did not respond to questions about what considerations are made when transferring detainees or about why Portillo was sent to the Indiana facility.
Jason Houser, former ICE chief of staff during the Biden administration, said the goal of transfers is to optimize for removals, which typically happen from Louisiana and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.
They also have to consider facility capacity. ICE is operating under a policy to fill all beds. Additionally, with bond hearings being denied, immigrants are stuck waiting for their cases to be resolved in detention. As many facilities reach, and even exceed, their bed capacity, Houser said this means that folks that need to get to Louisiana are stuck because there aren’t open beds along the way.
“If you fill every bed, can I move somebody from Northern Virginia through Tennessee to Louisiana? No, because the Tennessee field director will tell the Virginia field director, ‘I have no empty beds.’ Your person must just continue to sit there,” Houser said.
Most detention stays for those arrested in 2025 lasted about 24 days and resulted in removal. So far, 63% of those booked into a detention facility were deported. But some are held in detention much longer. More than a quarter of those booked into a detention center this year are still in custody. About 24% were held for more than two months. Nearly 9% for more than five months.
“If there is someone in an ICE bed that isn’t a convicted criminal and has no foreseeable way to be removed within 30 days, that isn’t a criminal, they should not be in a … bed,” Houser said. “They should be out at their job being a thriving member of the community until they’re humanly able to be removed. But that’s not what this administration is about.”
In the first half of 2024, more than 45,500 immigrants were released from detention on bond, through parole or under supervision while they went through immigration proceedings. This year, 13,800 received similar treatment. The vast majority have had to wait for their cases to conclude while in detention.
Portillo still gets emotional talking about her experience in ICE detention. She had been in California for 15 years. Her family was in Los Angeles. When she was transferred to Indiana, she lost all hope of winning her case and returning to them.
Upon arrival at the jail, it was clear to her that this was not a detention center. She was being held with people who had committed crimes. For weeks, as her mental health declined, she felt like she was being tortured.
Milagro Solis Portillo was transferred 2,000 miles away from her family and her attorney
Glendale Memorial Hospital, Calif.
Anaheim Global Medical Center, Calif.
Clay County Justice Center, Ind.
South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, La.
Aug. 29 – Deported to El Salvador
Clay County Justice Center
Glendale Memorial Hospital
Anaheim Global Medical Center
South Louisiana ICE Processing Center
Clay County Justice Center
Glendale Memorial Hospital
Anaheim Global Medical Center
South Louisiana ICE Processing Center
Facility placement is not to scale.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement data from the Deportation Data Project
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Ghandehari says that the transfers create an environment of “fear and anxiety” as a tactic to encourage people to self-deport. She says that it is an explicit strategy for this administration but it is not new. This year, however, the number of voluntary returns and departures more than doubled.
“It is about efficiency for ICE on their end, but with a total disregard for the people that they’re detaining and ripping apart from their loved ones,” Ghandehari said.
For Portillo, her treatment in detention became too much to endure.
“I decided to give up. We weren’t going to keep fighting … not because I didn’t want to stay but because of health reasons. … My mental health since being in Indiana started to suffer. When I was in L.A., it was one thing. I knew that my family was close and I had access to my attorney,” she said.
Ultimately, she decided it would be better to return to El Salvador.
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WASHINGTON — The White House is telling agencies to prepare large-scale firings of federal workers if the government shuts down next week.
In a memo released Wednesday night, the Office of Management and Budget said agencies should consider a reduction in force for federal programs whose funding would lapse next week, are not otherwise funded and are “not consistent with the President’s priorities.” That would be a much more aggressive step than in previous shutdowns, when federal workers not deemed essential were furloughed but returned to their jobs once Congress approved government spending.
A reduction in force would not only lay off employees but eliminate their positions, which would trigger yet another massive upheaval in a federal workforce that has already faced major rounds of cuts this year due to efforts from the White House’s cost-cutting team the Department of Government Efficiency, and elsewhere in the Trump administration.
Once any potential government shutdown ends, agencies are asked to revise their reduction in force plans “as needed to retain the minimal number of employees necessary to carry out statutory functions,” according to the memo, which was first reported by Politico.
This move from OMB significantly increases the consequences of a potential government shutdown next week and escalates pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The two leaders have kept nearly all of their Democratic lawmakers united against a clean funding bill pushed by President Trump and congressional Republicans that would keep the federal government operating for seven more weeks, demanding immediate improvements to healthcare in exchange for their votes.
In statements issued shortly after the memo was released, the two Democrats showed no signs of budging.
“We will not be intimidated by your threat to engage in mass firings,” Jeffries wrote in a post on X. “Get lost.”
Jeffries called Russ Vought, the head of OMB, a “malignant political hack.”
Schumer said in a statement that the OMB memo is an “attempt at intimidation” and predicted the “unnecessary firings will either be overturned in court or the administration will end up hiring the workers back.”
OMB noted that it held its first planning call with other federal agencies earlier this week to plan for a shutdown. The budget office plays point in managing federal government shutdowns, particularly planning for them ahead of time. Past budget offices have also posted shutdown contingency plans — which would outline which agency workers would stay on the job during a government shutdown and which would be furloughed — on its website, but this one has not.
The memo noted that congressional Democrats are refusing to support a clean government funding bill “due to their partisan demands,” which include an extension of enhanced health insurance subsidies set to expire at the end of the year, plus a reversal of Medicaid cuts that were included in Republicans’ big tax and spending cuts law.
“As such, it has never been more important for the Administration to be prepared for a shutdown if the Democrats choose to pursue one,” the memo reads, which also notes that the GOP’s signature law, a major tax and border spending package, gives “ample resources to ensure that many core Trump administration priorities will continue uninterrupted.”
OMB noted that it had asked all agencies to submit their plans in case of a government shutdown by Aug. 1.
“OMB has received many, but not all, of your submissions,” it added. “Please send us your updated lapse plans ASAP.”
These stocks will benefit in a big way from heightened economic activity.
It wasn’t a big surprise that Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell cut interest rates at the Fed’s September meeting on Wednesday. In July, he implied in no uncertain terms that a rate cut was coming, and the likelihood was that it was going be a quarter of a point. That’s what has happened. The governing body also signaled that two more cuts would come at its next two meetings, in October and December.
Powell noted that there are mixed signals in the economy, which made it a difficult decision. Normally, the Fed keeps rates high until inflation backs down, and right now, inflation is higher than the Fed wants it to be. Nonetheless, the once-strong job market is beginning to falter, and a reduction in interest rates should stimulate the economy and employment opportunities.
A more active economy with more jobs and money flowing is great news for most businesses, and some companies will feel the change more acutely. Visa(V 1.19%), SoFi Technologies(SOFI 4.96%), and Carnival(CCL -2.86%) (CUK -2.67%), are three stocks that should benefit in a big way.
Image source: Getty Images.
1. Visa: The best indicator of spending habits
Visa is the largest credit card company in the world, and its performance tells the story of the economy to some degree. Because it’s a credit card network, its processed volume is a strong indication of how people are spending. And because it targets a wide range of demographics, its message is fairly universal.
The purpose of cutting interest rates is to boost the economy, and Visa is a major beneficiary of higher spending. Visa’s core business is providing the network, or infrastructure, that moves money from a customer’s partnering bank to a merchant, taking a small cut of each transaction. Although it has branched out to other services, they mostly center around different ways of moving money. More money flowing means more money for Visa.
It has been performing well despite the higher interest rates. In the 2025 fiscal third quarter (ended June 30), revenue increased 14% year over year, and payments volume was up 8%. It’s highly profitable, since it has a simple, low-cost model, and net income increased 8% over last year in the quarter.
Lower interest rates should further boost Visa’s earnings, benefiting this Warren Buffett-backed stock. Visa is a solid long-term investment, offering value to most portfolios.
2. SoFi: A young bank disruptor
Banks have a two-sided relationship with interest rates. They make more money on net interest income when rates are higher, but they also suffer from higher default rates because consumers struggle to pay back loans. They also take out loans at lower rates for that reason, and altogether, banks usually do better with lower rates.
That goes for the industry as a whole, but I’m picking SoFi in particular partly because of its large lending segment, and partly because it’s growing much faster than almost any other bank, which means it stands to gain a lot from an improving economy.
SoFi is a neobank, a cadre of digital banks that have no physical branches and offer a modern take on financial management. In addition to student, personal, and home loans, it offers a broad array of standard banking services and typically beats out national averages on savings rates for deposits.
It also offers non-standard services like cryptocurrency trading on its app, and it recently said it would offer international money transfers on a Blockchain network. That could offer real value, since sending money internationally is often a complicated, expensive, and long process.
SoFi’s lending segment struggled last year when interest rates were at a high, and it has already benefited from lower rates with accelerated revenue growth and better credit metrics. Even lower rates should help all of its segments, which, aside from lending, include financial services, like bank accounts and investing, and tech platform, which is a business-to-business financial infrastructure.
As it becomes a larger and more formidable player in finance, it should be able to weather future uncertainty even better.
3. Carnival: Great performance, high debt
Carnival is sailing through smooth seas as customers continue to sign up for its cruises. Demand is at historical highs, operating income is at a record, and the company is ordering new ships and launching new destinations to meet all of this demand.
There’s only one kink in the business: it has massive debt. It’s been paying it off responsibly, but it’s still more than $27 billion. This year, it has refinanced $7 billion at better rates, saving millions on interest. It will now be able to refinance more of its debt at lower rates.
Outside of the debt, the investment thesis for Carnival is strong. It’s the largest global cruise operator, and demand has stayed healthy despite high inflation. That’s resiliency.
Carnival stock is still cheap today due to the concerns about the debt, but as it pays it down and becomes more profitable, expect the stock to keep climbing.
I worked with John Stapleton at Good Morning Britain and every single person loved and adored him, from make-up artists to editors
14:26, 21 Sep 2025Updated 14:26, 21 Sep 2025
Kevin Maguire is Associate Editor of the Mirror and a politics columnist. He is a frequent contributor to Good Morning Britain and other TV shows. He also writes a column for the New Statesman and earlier in his career was chief reporter for The Guardian. He is a Sunderland AFC supporter.
John Stapleton was loved by everyone he worked with(Image: PA)
EVERYBODY, absolutely everybody, who met or worked with John Stapleton absolutely loved the TV sleuth and presenter.
That’s a rare accolade in an often cut-throat trade occasionally marred by monstrous egos yet Stapes was above all else a wonderful bloke
From the make-up artists who’d powder his nose and camera crews framing his face to powerful editors and famous co-stars, Stapes was adored.
And in turn the ultimate professional was encouraging, generous and gracious to all of them including walk-on players like myself and Tory Boy.
Slim and dapper, I never ceased to be impressed how we’d turn up bleary-eyed for Good Morning Britain and its predecessors and Stapes would be bright eyed and bushy tailed, immaculately dressed as if he’d just stepped off Savile Row.
I worked with John at Good Morning Britain(Image: S Meddle/ITV/Shutterstock)
Never one to brag or stand on ceremony, Stapes enjoyed chatting politics and a good gossip.
He didn’t wear a glorious career on his smart sleeve and the easiness of a journalist with much to boast about was central to his appeal.
Oldham born, Stapes remained a Northern living in the South who’d regularly punctuate our conversations with references to what he’d recently read in the Manchester Evening News.
After his family, the great love of his life was Manchester City, a football team supported through thin and thinner before glory arrived to finally overshadow giant neighbours United.
Stapes buying home and away season tickets to follow City around the country and Europe, cheering unprecedented success with son Nick as the titles and cups rolled in, was him living the dream.
The fortitude and good cheer he adopted when first diagnosed with Parkinson’s, vowing to try not be miserable, was the positive outlook of somebody determined to confront adversity.
“In often cut-throat trade occasionally marred by monstrous egos, Stapes was above all else a wonderful bloke,” says The Mirror’s Kevin Maguire(Image: ITV)
But the truth was his eyes beamed less brightly and he looked a few inches shorter after the 2020 death of wife and onetime co-presenter Lynn Faulds Wood.
Understandable when what defined Stapes was his engaging warmness. He was a TV success because of who he was rather than a person forged by broadcasting triumphs
The wave of heartfelt tributes are genuine for a genuine man. Sorry I never had you back to my place for dinner as promised, Stapes. He once joked I should email the invitation after I pretended it must be lost in the post.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is ending the federal government’s annual report on hunger in America, stating that it had become “overly politicized” and “rife with inaccuracies.”
The decision comes 2½ months after President Trump signed legislation sharply reducing food aid to the poor. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the tax and spending cuts bill Republicans adopted in July means 3 million people would not qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, also known as food stamps.
The decision to scrap the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Household Food Security Report was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
In a news release Saturday, the USDA said the 2024 report, to be released Oct. 22, would be the last.
“The questions used to collect the data are entirely subjective and do not present an accurate picture of actual food security,” the USDA said. ”The data is rife with inaccuracies slanted to create a narrative that is not representative of what is actually happening in the countryside as we are currently experiencing lower poverty rates, increasing wages, and job growth under the Trump Administration.’’
The Census Bureau reported earlier this month that the U.S. poverty rate dipped from 11% in 2023 to 10.6% last year, before Trump took office.
Critics accused the administration of deliberately making it harder to measure hunger and assess the impact of its cuts to food stamps.
“Trump is cancelling an annual government survey that measures hunger in America, rather than allow it to show hunger increasing under his tenure,” Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said on social media. “This follows the playbook of many non-democracies that cancel or manipulate reports that would otherwise show less-than-perfect news.”
The weakest nuclear stock, financially, could benefit most from today’s FOMC decision.
Today is the day.
At 2 p.m. ET Wednesday, give or take a few minutes, the Federal Open Market Committee should decide on its next round of interest-rate changes. Presumably it will lower its target interest rate from the current range of 4.25% to 4.5%, to one of 4% to 4.25% — a quarter-point cut. Potentially, it could lower the interest rate by twice as much — 0.5%.
Either way, and assuming a cut of any size at all, this will be the first interest-rate cut by the Federal Reserve in the past nine months, the Fed having last cut rates (also by 0.25%) back on Dec. 18, 2024.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why might the Federal Reserve cut interest rates?
Economists seem pretty certain a rate cut of some size is in the offing. According to the latest inflation update here at The Motley Fool, inflation is still running hotter (2.9%) than the Fed’s target rate of 2% — which you might think would give the Fed some pause. That said, the jobs market is showing sufficient signs of weakness that the Fed is getting concerned — and inclined to roll the dice and risk a bit of extra inflation in hopes of goosing the jobs numbers higher.
In July, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that only 73,000 net new jobs were created, which was below projections. Then came August’s number, which was an objectively horrible 22,000 net new jobs — less than one-third of what economists had predicted. And all of this came after May and June jobs numbers were revised downward by more than a quarter-million.
So the jobs market doesn’t look great, and that means the Fed probably will cut rates today. Now what does this mean for you, the individual investor?
What it means for investors
Believe it or not, bad news for the jobs market and worrisome trends in inflation are both generally interpreted as good news for the stock market — at least when a Fed interest-rate cut is on the table as a possible solution. This is because when the Fed lowers interest rates, it becomes cheaper to borrow, and cheaper to pay interest on debts, which can be a boon for companies not yet earning profits.
Which kinds of companies? Well, maybe I’m biased because I write a lot about nuclear stocks. But if you ask about companies that might benefit from debt getting a bit cheaper, the first to come to my mind are the handful working to develop a new generation of small modular (and micro) nuclear reactors (SMRs). In order from smallest to largest, these include Nano Nuclear Energy(NNE -2.67%), NuScale Power(SMR -4.70%), and Oklo(OKLO -2.77%).
Investors value these three companies very differently. Nano Nuclear is worth only $1.5 billion in market capitalization, versus NuScale with an implied market cap of $11.1 billion, and Oklo tipping the scales at a weighty $14.1 billion.
But in many respects, these three companies look similar. Neither Nano Nuclear nor Oklo has any revenue to speak of. NuScale, which does have some revenue (from technology licenses, not from actual sales of either reactors or nuclear energy), still did only $56 million in business over the last 12 months — enough to value the stock at nearly 200 times sales.
Lacking revenue, it stands to reason that all three of these nuclear energy stocks are also unprofitable. What worries me more than the losses based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), though, is the fact that these companies must continue burning through their cash reserves as they work toward commercializing their technology. Any nuclear stock that runs out of cash before it starts generating positive free cash flow on its own is at risk of needing to sell shares, or take on debt, to raise the cash it needs.
It’s here that lower interest rates from the Fed could lend a helping hand.
Who benefits most from a Fed rate cut?
I expect NuScale Power to benefit more than the others from a rate cut today. With only $420 million in the bank and an annual cash burn rate of $95 million, NuScale’s on course to be the SMR stock that runs out of cash first — potentially before it reaches profitability in 2030 (according to analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence).
In contrast, both Oklo (with $534 million in cash and a burn rate of $53 million per year) and Nano Nuclear (with $210 million and $23 million, respectively) already have enough cash laid up to keep themselves in business for roughly a decade.
Relatively speaking, they’re both in stronger financial positions than NuScale is — but for this very reason, I expect NuScale stock to benefit most from today’s Fed rate decision.
Rich Smith has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool recommends NuScale Power. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Sept. 17 (UPI) — The Federal Reserve on Wednesday is expected to announce fresh rate cuts in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s demands to do so amid ongoing tariff worries and its impact on the American economy.
The central bank has not lowered interest rates since December and the Federal Open Market Committee is widely expected to lower rates by a quarter percent at its next meeting around 2 p.m EDT. It comes in an ongoing feud with White House that’s infuriated the president as the bank has been targeted by the Trump administration as it seeks to consolidate greater federal control under the executive branch.
On Monday, Trump’s newly appointed member to the Federal Reserve Stephen Miran was confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate in a 48-47 vote.
It’s been suggested that Miran will dissent from the anticipated Fed decision as the administration seeks a higher rate reduction.
The Fed opted to take a “wait and see” approach on rates as the economy shifted under the aggressive economic and tariff policies implemented by Trump.
Trump for months has been vocally critical of Fed Char Jerome Powell and the independent board in his demands to lower interest rates as the president has recently attempted to illegally remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook from her role.
Powell did not give clear indications of the FOMC’s plan for Wednesday in a speech at the end of August to the annual Economic Policy Symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
On Monday, Trump said in a social media post in all caps the FOMC “must cut interest rates, now, and bigger than (Powell) had in mind.”
“In terms of the Fed’s dual-mandate goals, the labor market remains near maximum employment, and inflation, though still somewhat elevated, has come down a great deal from its post-pandemic highs,” Powell said in Wyoming.
“At the same time, the balance of risks appears to be shifting,” he said on August 22.
But a Goldman Sachs economist said Tuesday the “key question” for the September FOMC meeting was whether it will “signal that this is likely the first in a series of conservative cuts.”
“We expect the statement to acknowledge the softening in the labor market but do not expect a change to the policy guidance or a nod to an October cut. However, Chair Powell might hint softly in that direction in his press conference,” David Mericle wrote to CNBC in a note.
Meanwhile, a separate economist suggests that “such an emergency-sized move” that Trump envisions “is not justified by the current data.”
“Any decision to cut by 50 basis points at this stage would appear to be driven more by political pressure than economic necessity,” Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management, told CNN.
A RYDER CUP star was dumped out of the BMW PGA Championship after three rounds – following a rarely-seen SECOND CUT.
All 12 Team Europe players plus captain Luke Donald teed it up at Wentworth this week in the last big event before they fly to New York to face the USA.
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Robert MacIntyre missed the secondary cut at the BMW PGA ChampionshipCredit: Getty
But DP World Tour chiefs were forced into an unusual rule change.
A whopping 86 made it through the regular cut at the mid-way point after 36 holes on Friday evening – with 26 players tied on two-under-par.
However, a secondary cut can be introduced by the Tournament Director after the third round on Saturday to reduce the field for the final day if more than 84 make it to the weekend.
The secondary cut is designed to ensure the maximum number of players on Sunday is 78.
This was the first time the little-known rule was implemented on the DP World Tour since the Hero Dubai Desert Classic in 2023.
That ensures the leaders can go out at 11.10am on Sunday – allowing enough time for a possible play-off and to stick to TV schedules.
His level-par 72 kept him at -2 and sent him packing alongside Alex Fitzpatrick and Niklas Norgaard among others.
But unlike the regular cut, the 13 golfers ditched after Saturday are still entitled to both ranking points in the Race To Dubai and prize money from Wentworth.
‘This rules’ hail fans at dad & son’s viral reaction to Rory McIlroy sinking epic putt to send Irish Open to play-off
Tommy Fleetwood, fresh from his maiden PGA Tour win, just scraped through to Sunday on -3 with Rory McIlroy two shots better off.
Justin Rose, Jon Rahm and Shane Lowry are all at -7 with Ludvig Aberg and Matt Fitzpatrick on -10.
But MacIntyre’s European team-mates Viktor Hovland (-12) and Tyrrell Hatton (-13) will be hoping to chase down the leaders Alex Noren and Adrien Saddier on -15.
Ironically, Noren is a vice-captain for Donald at Bethpage Black in two weeks’ time.
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Tommy Fleetwood scraped through to the final round at WentworthCredit: Getty
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Tyrrell Hatton shot a brilliant 64 to get to -13, two off the leadCredit: Getty
Ryder Cup line ups
Here are the players who will be competing in the Ryder Cup…
New York, USA – Next week, the United States Federal Reserve will hold a two-day policy meeting to decide whether to lower interest rates.
The meeting follows a months-long pause in rates and comes amid heightened pressure on the central bank.
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US President Donald Trump recently dismissed Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook on allegations of mortgage fraud, which she is contesting in court, and has escalated his loud and repeated criticism of Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
The Fed, which emphasises its independence from political influence, will weigh new economic data as it considers its next move. The benchmark interest rate has remained at 4.25 percent – 4.50 percent since December.
So far, the Fed has held rates steady, saying the stance preserves flexibility to respond to economic shocks tied to shifting trade policy. But many economists now believe a rate cut is imminent.
They point to signs of a cooling labour market and tariff-related pressure on inflation as factors that could support lowering rates, not political pressure.
“I think that the Fed has made it pretty clear that they’re going to cut rates in September, and the market certainly expects that,” Daniel Hornung, policy fellow at Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research and former deputy director of the National Economic Council, told Al Jazeera.
CME FedWatch, which tracks the probability of Fed policy moves, puts the likelihood of a quarter of one percentage point cut at 94.5 percent, echoing research from JPMorgan last month.
“For Fed Chair Jerome Powell, the risk management considerations may go beyond balancing employment and inflation risks, and we now see the path of least resistance is to pull forward the next cut of 25 basis points to the September meeting,” Michael Feroli, chief US economist at JP Morgan, said at the time.
Prices jump
Consumer prices rose 0.4 percent in August from the previous month, the sharpest increase in seven months, according to the Labor Department’s consumer price index (CPI) report released on Thursday.
The gain followed a 0.2 percent rise in July. Economists surveyed by Reuters had forecast a 0.3 percent monthly increase in core CPI.
Energy costs climbed 0.7 percent, fueled by a 1.9 percent jump in gasoline. Airfares climbed 5.9 percent, apparel prices rose 0.5 percent, shelter increased 0.4 percent, grocery prices were up 0.6 percent, and restaurant meals rose 0.3 percent.
Some goods saw particularly steep increases. Coffee prices jumped 3.6 percent on the month as Brazil, the world’s top coffee exporter, redirected shipments away from the US following new tariffs.
The Producer Price Index (PPI), which tracks prices businesses receive for goods and services, showed coffee up nearly 7 percent from July and more than 33 percent over the past year.
There is a comparable phenomenon with beef, for which the US relies heavily on Brazil. CPI data showed a 2.7 percent increase, while the PPI measured a 6 percent monthly rise and a 21 percent yearly increase.
Overall, the PPI slipped 0.1 percent, suggesting some businesses are absorbing tariff costs rather than passing them to consumers. Service prices fell 1.7 percent, driven by a 3.9 percent decline in margins for machinery and vehicle wholesalers, which offset a 0.1 percent increase in goods prices. That came after wholesale inflation was revised higher to 0.7 percent in July, which was well above economists’ forecasts.
Even so, companies are beginning to warn that they cannot continue absorbing higher costs. In recent weeks, Campbell’s Co, which makes Campbell’s Soup and Goldfish crackers, and Procter & Gamble have both said they plan to raise prices on consumer goods in the months ahead as tariff pressures persist.
Labour market tumbles
The US labour market, a key factor in the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions, has cooled sharply.
Approximately 263,000 people submitted initial jobless claims last week, the most in four years, Department of Labor data released on Thursday showed.
On Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised down job gains over the past few months, as well as between April 2024 and March 2025, when the US economy added 911,000 fewer jobs than had been previously reported.
All of that is echoed by poor jobs numbers last week. In August, the economy added only 22,000 jobs, with gains concentrated in healthcare (which added 31,000 jobs) and social assistance (which added 16,000). The unemployment rate climbed to 4.3 percent, the Labor Department reported.
Revisions showed July job growth slightly stronger at 79,000, up from 73,000, while June was cut from a modest gain to a loss of 13,000.
“The recent job numbers were really, especially the revision of the earlier numbers, were really kind of problematic for the economy,” Michael Klein, professor of International Economic Affairs at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, told Al Jazeera.
Job openings and turnover also declined, leaving more unemployed workers than available positions for the first time since April 2021.
A report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas highlighted the strain, noting a 39 percent jump in job cuts between July and August. Private payroll growth slowed as well, according to the ADP National Employment Report, which showed just 54,000 jobs added, down from 106,000 the prior month.
Competing forces
Typically, high inflation prompts higher interest rates, which discourage borrowing and spending and help rein in prices.
“The Fed is in a very difficult position right now because there is both a weakening labour market and evidence of higher inflation. Typically, if the Fed is facing a weaker labour market, it would want to lower interest rates. And if it’s facing higher inflation, it would want to raise interest rates. But we’re in a situation now where there are countervailing forces,” Klein said.
The labour market is already weighing on consumer spending. Rising layoffs and slower hiring have made shoppers cautious, and the latest consumer confidence index shows plans to buy big-ticket and discretionary items are slipping.
With Trump’s shifting tariffs and hardline immigration policies, businesses are stuck in a “wait-and-see” mode, increasing uncertainty.
“We are seeing immigration and tariff policies that have the simultaneous effect of raising prices and slowing growth in the labour market,” Hornung said.
Corporate treasury teams are increasingly embracing AI to manage volatile foreign exchange (FX) risk—a shift supported by real-world results that demonstrate both cost reduction and strategic gains.
The key takeaway for corporate treasury teams: AI-powered FX hedging isn’t just theoretical; it has delivered real, measurable savings for a major airline.
In a recent pilot, Citigroup and Ant International utilized AI to assist an airline in managing currency risk. “The 30% hedging cost savings Ant International has achieved for the pilot airline customer shows the cost efficiency that can be achieved with AI-enabled FX hedging,” said Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Tech at Ant International, in a prepared statement. The pilot also achieved forecasting accuracy above 90%, showing how AI can optimize hedging decisions.
The appeal of AI in treasury lies in moving from reactive to predictive risk management. Rather than relying solely on conventional contracts and manual forecasts, AI-driven models can analyze market signals at speed and scale. This allows treasurers to optimize both timing and cost.
For corporate treasury teams, the pilot demonstrates what’s possible: AI can significantly reduce hedging costs, enhance forecasting accuracy, and aid in optimizing FX strategies. Teams with exposure to cross-border transactions may consider piloting similar tools to manage currency risk better.
Independent research confirms the benefits: surveys show treasury departments improve forecasting accuracy by 20% to 30% when using AI for cash and currency management. Operational costs also decline as automation reduces manual work, and algorithmic hedging can lower spread costs while improving hedge effectiveness.
Challenges persist, particularly in areas of governance and integration. Treasurers must ensure transparency in AI models and maintain oversight of critical decisions.
Regulators are paying closer attention to the accountability of machine-learning tools. Experts emphasize that AI should complement rather than replace human judgment, with the strongest results emerging when digital models and treasury professionals work in tandem. Even with these caveats, momentum is building. With a clear case study from Citi and Ant International demonstrating savings, and mounting evidence from across the industry, AI-powered FX hedging is quickly moving from experimental innovation to a mainstream necessity for global companies.
Firefighters spray water as they clean a burned bus station following protests in Jakarta on Sunday. Photo by Adi Weda/EPA
Aug. 31 (UPI) — Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto said Sunday the government will make some changes — specifically to compensation officials receive — in an effort to appease protesters concerned with rising cost of living and unemployment rate.
The announcement comes after about a week of protests across the nation, some of which have turned violent. Some rioters have targeted lawmakers’ homes with looting and vandalization, The New York Times reported.
The demonstrations started after members of parliament received an increase of $3,030 in housing allowances, many times the country’s minimum wage.
At least five people have died and hundreds have been injured. In Jakarta, a 21-year-old ride-sharing driver was killed by a police vehicle during a demonstration Thursday, the BBC reported, adding a denunciation of police brutality to protesters’ list of grievances.
Subianto said Sunday that federal lawmakers would receive a cut in their allowances. He said he understood the public’s concerns about the economy.
Amid the protests, Subianto canceled a trip to a security conference Saturday in China.
White House seeks to run out the clock on funding after already slashing billions in aid in move decried as overreach.
Published On 29 Aug 202529 Aug 2025
United States President Donald Trump has sought to cut another $5bn in foreign aid already approved by Congress.
The move is the latest effort by Trump to gut the funding the US provides to humanitarian projects and international organisations. It is also the latest attempt to test the limits of Trump’s presidential power.
While Trump had previously obtained congressional approval to cancel $9bn in foreign aid and public media funding in legislation passed in July, the latest move seeks to use an obscure tactic to bypass the legislative branch entirely.
Under the US Constitution, Congress controls federal spending. But in a letter posted online late Thursday, Trump notified House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson that he planned to unilaterally withhold the $4.9bn in approved foreign spending.
The tactic, known as a “pocket rescission”, would see Trump invoke a law that allows him to pause the spending for 45 days. That would, in turn, take the funding beyond the end of the September 30 fiscal year, causing it to expire.
The White House has said the tactic was last used in 1977, more than 50 years ago.
A court document filed on Friday said the money was earmarked for foreign aid, United Nations peacekeeping operations, and so-called “democracy promotion” efforts overseas.
Most of it was meant to be overseen by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which Trump has largely dismantled and reorganised under US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
‘Triage of human survival’
The move comes as the United Nations and aid organisations have increasingly warned of the devastating fallout of US cuts.
In June, the United Nations announced sweeping programme shrinkages, amid what the humanitarian office described as “the deepest funding cuts ever to hit the international humanitarian sector”.
At the time, UN aid chief Tom Fletcher said the cuts meant the humanitarian community has been “forced into a triage of human survival”. In July, the UN also predicted a surge in HIV/AIDS deaths by 2029 due to the funding withdrawals.
The knock-on effects have been felt sharply in regions across the world, particularly in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa.
In July, Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF, reported that at least 652 malnourished children had died at its facilities in northern Nigeria in the first half of 2025 due to a lack of timely care.
Earlier this week, Save the Children warned that Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan were expected to run out of so-called “ready-to-use therapeutic food” (RUTF) over the next three months.
Meanwhile, at least one Republican lawmaker has challenged Trump’s move as an illegal overreach of presidential power.
“Instead of this attempt to undermine the law, the appropriate way is to identify ways to reduce excessive spending through the bipartisan, annual appropriations process,” Senator Susan Collins said in a statement.
Jude McAtamney, Charlie Smyth and Mark McNamee have missed out on making the final roster for their respective NFL teams, leaving them open to be picked up by another franchise.
Former Gaelic footballers McAtamney, Smyth and McNamee were waived by the New York Giants, New Orleans Saints and Green Bay Packers.
McAtamney lost out to veteran Graham Gano as the New York Giants finalised their 53-man roster for the new season, which begins next week.
The County Derry man handled all kicking duties in the pre-season victories over the New York Jets and New England Patriots, kicking 10 extra points and a field goal between both games, while playing in the second half of the pre-season opener against the Buffalo Bills.
Last season, McAtamney was called from the practice squad into the Giants team for the regular season game against the Washington Commanders when Gano sustained an injury and the New York franchise may wish to recall him to the practice squad for the coming season if his pre-season form does not attract an offer from another team.
County Down’s Smyth missed out on the New Orleans Saints’ final roster for the second season with Blake Grupe again selected at number one.
Smyth, however, is eligible to return to the practice squad in the international player exemption slot.
