NPR News Now - NPR News: 03-20-2025 3AM EDT

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

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On Thru Line from NPR. The consequences for the country would have been enormous. It would have been a crisis. The man who saw a dangerous omission in the U.S. Constitution and took it upon himself to fix it. Find NPR's Thru Line wherever you get your podcasts. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Shae Stevens. President Trump today is expected to sign an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take all steps to shut down her department.

A draft of the order calls for McMahon to transfer education authority to individual states. The department has already announced layoffs, and hundreds of workers there have left of their own accord. The FBI is investigating a series of attacks targeting Tesla properties across the nation. As NPR's Windsor Johnston reports, authorities believe the incidents are tied to Tesla's CEO and his involvement in slashing the federal workforce.

Authorities say the recent attacks have taken place at Tesla locations in Nevada, Missouri, Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado and Oregon. In Las Vegas, security footage shows a suspect throwing Molotov cocktails at a Tesla collision center with the word RESIST spray resist spray painted at the facility. Tesla showrooms, vehicle lots, charging stations, and privately owned cars have also been targeted. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has labeled the incidents as domestic terrorism, says the DOJ has already arrested and charged several people in connection with the attacks. Elon Musk has condemned the violence, describing it as, quote,

insane. Windsor-Johnston, NPR News, Washington. A federal judge has denied a request to block the Doge takeover of a congressionally-funded nonprofit. The request was made in a lawsuit claiming a Doge team, showed at the US Institute of Peace on Tuesday, along with armed police, and forced the board members to leave.

The judge says the takeover was offensive, but that the plaintiffs have failed to meet the requirements for a temporary restraining order. The Federal Reserve Board has left its key benchmark interest rate unchanged. Chairman Jerome Powell says the overall economy is strong and wages are growing faster than inflation, which is still higher than the Fed's 2 percent target. Goods inflation moved up pretty significantly in the first two months of the year. Trying to track that back to actual tariff increases given what was tariffed and what was not,

very, very challenging. So some of it, the answer is clearly some of it, a good part of it, is coming from tariffs. Powell says the Fed's latest quarterly projection for the economy is the same as the one it issued in December. Justice Department attorneys face another deadline today before U.S. District Court Judge James Boesberg. The judge is demanding more information on the weekend deportation flights that carried alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. On Saturday, he ordered three planes carrying the deportees to turn around. Government lawyers ignored the order, insisting that Boesberg's signing was improper.

The judge says DOJ must comply or submit a claim that doing so would harm state secrets. This is NPR. A North Dakota jury has ordered the environmental group Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million for damage to an oil pipeline. The case stems from protests in 2016 and 2017 when demonstrators tried to block construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline and its Missouri River crossing.

The project had been opposed by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which feared the pipeline would contaminate its downstream water supply. The pipeline has been delivering oil since May of 2017. President Trump is promising to help Ukraine get back children who were abducted by Russia, but his administration canceled an aid program that was gathering information about the more than 30,000 Ukrainian children believed to have been taken to Russia during the war. More from NPR's Michelle Kellerman.

In a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, some lawmakers raised concerns about the aid cut to Yale researchers gathering information about Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Ohio Democrat Greg Lansman tells NPR the database he had been searching disappeared. It's a lot of demographic data and a lot of satellite information that we now can't find. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce says the information about abducted children has not been deleted, but is not housed at the State Department. The data exists and it's not been deleted and it's not missing.

But she says the funding for this project has been cut. Michelle Kellerman, NPR News, the State Department. U.S. futures are higher and after hours trading, Asia-Pacific markets are mixed. This is NPR News. Making time for the news is important. Asia-Pacific markets are mixed.