NPR News Now - NPR News: 01-28-2025 7PM EST

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

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This is Eric Glass. In this American life, sometimes we just show up somewhere, turn on our tape recorders, and see what happens. If you can't get seven cars in 12 days, you gotta look yourself in the mirror and say, holy, what are you kidding me? Like this car dealership, trying to sell its monthly quota of cars, and it is not going well. I just don't want one balloon to a car. Balloon the whole freaking place so it looks like I'm circus. Real life stories every week. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Jack Spear. The fallout from an OMB memo

that detailed a federal funding freeze set to take effect this evening was fast and furious with agencies wondering whether or not they'd be affected. So we hear from NPR's Tamara Keith even after some White House explaining it wasn't much clearer. The language in the original memo was quite broad and has caused widespread confusion about just what funding might be cut off. So throughout the day, there have been some clarifications from the White House. Among those clarifications is that the pause does not apply across the board.

It doesn't affect direct payments to Americans like Medicaid, student loans, or food assistance. The White House has had a lot to say about what isn't affected, but they've been far less clear about what is going to be affected and how. In the end, a federal judge stepped in to temporarily block the spending freeze until next week. The White House said it wanted the funding pause to conduct an ideological review of government spending. The Office of Personal Management has offered deferred resignation to some federal employees, inviting them to resign on or before September 30th of this year. Employees who accept the offer by February 6th will retain their current salary and benefits,

but not have to follow the Trump administration's return to office policies. That's according to screenshots of the OPM memo that provided by federal employees, employees who want to accept the offer, have been asked to sign a letter acknowledging their agencies quote may make adjustments including moving, eliminating, consolidating, reassigning positions and tasks, reducing official duties and or placing employees on paid administrative leave until the resignation date. Oklahoma's State Board of Education has advanced a rule today that would require schools to collect employees on paid administrative leave until the resignation date. Oklahoma's State Board of Education has advanced a rule today that would require schools to collect citizenship or legal immigration status and enrollment.

State Impact Oklahoma's Beth Wallace has the story. The rule would require districts to record the number of enrolled students without legal status and submit that number to the State Department of Education, excluding personally identifiable information. State Superintendent Ryan Walters says the rule is going to help make informed decisions about school allocations. Well, what we are doing is ensuring that we have the documentation around the child to understand if they are a legal citizen for the purposes of resources and personnel alignment.

The rule passed unanimously. It now heads to the state legislature for consideration. For NPR News, I'm Beth Wallace in Tulsa. The unveiling by China of a new artificial intelligence deep learning model that appears to rival some much more expensive US AI options has been rattling financial markets, so things seem to have calmed down a bit today. China lacking access to some of the most advanced chips through a company called DeepSeek has now demonstrated its new AI model works. Stocks closed higher today amid rebound in some tech sector shares.

The Dow was up 136 points. This is NPR. After succeeding in pressuring Colombia to accept deportees using the threat of tariffs, the Trump administration is turning its attention to Canada and Mexico, threatening essentially the same thing. But while Colombia caved quickly,

the stakes are much higher, with economists already looking at the potential economic fallout of such a move. While consistently insisting the tariffs against Canada and Mexico will force them to respect the U.S. economists say consumers would bear some of the higher costs associated with such actions. A company that hopes to produce a new supersonic commercial airliner to succeed the Concorde has broken the sound barrier in a test flight over the Mojave Desert. And Bureau of Scott Newman is more. There we are.

XB-1 is supersonic, faster than the speed of sound. A company known as Boom Technologies nudged its XB-1 demonstrator to Mach 1.1, just over the speed of sound. That's about 850 miles per hour. The Denver-based company says the XB-1 is the world's first independently developed supersonic jet. Boom is already developing an 80-passenger supersonic airliner known as Overture. This test flight is meant to provide crucial data to that project. Both the United and American Airlines have shown interest in purchasing Overture, which

the company aims to have flying commercially by 2030. The plane could cut transcontinental and transoceanic airline travel times in half. Scott Newman, NPR News. Critical futures prices rebounded a bit from multi-week lows. Oil was up 60 cents a barrel today to settle at $73.77 a barrel in New York. I'm Jack Spear, NPR News in Washington.