NPR News Now - NPR News: 03-20-2025 5PM EDT

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

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These days, there's so much news, it can be hard to keep up with what it all means for you, your family, and your community. The Consider This podcast from NPR features our award-winning journalism. Six days a week, we bring you a deep dive on a news story and provide the context and analysis that helps you make sense of the news. We get behind the headlines. We get to the truth. Listen to the Consider This podcast from NPR. Live from NPR News in Washington, I'm Jack Spear. President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Department of Education. On the campaign trail, Trump continually derided the department as wasteful and influenced by

liberal ideology. He's proposed turning over at least some of the agency's responsibilities to the states. He reiter proposed turning over at least some of the agency's responsibilities to the states. He reiterated that point at today's White House signing ceremony. We're going to be returning education very simply back to the states where it belongs. And this is a very popular thing to do, but much more importantly, it's a common sense thing to do,

and it's going to work. Not entirely clear, though, is how it would work. Also not clear is whether Trump has the authority common sense thing to do and it's going to work. Not entirely clear though is how it would work. Also not clear is whether Trump has the authority to actually dismantle the Department of Education created by Congress in 1979. If we take an act of Congress to shutter it, the White House says the department won't completely close right away, continuing to oversee things like federal student loans and Pell grants.

A federal judge says the government provided a woefully insufficient response to his prior orders in a case over the Alien Enemies Act. Judge James Boesberg had earlier asked the Trump administration to provide more detail about weekend flights that deported hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador despite his order to turn the planes around. He asked the government to provide details of its claims that deportations fall under the state secrets doctrine. The judge reset a deadline to 10 a.m. tomorrow for the administration to justify

invoking the privilege of state secrets and decide whether to invoke the privilege by March 25th. Recent cutbacks at the IRS are raising concerns about potential delays in tax return processing and refunds. NPR's Windsor Johnston reports the Trump administration slashed the agency by roughly 7 percent as part of a broader effort to reduce the federal workforce. Experts are advising taxpayers to file their returns as soon as possible to prevent delays. While the IRS aims to issue most refunds within 21 days of filing electronically, processing times can vary,

especially if returns require additional review. Accountants and other tax professionals say they so far haven't seen unusual or significant delays relating to the cutbacks in staff. The IRS began accepting and processing returns for early filers on January 27th and says it's remained on track even after the first round of layoffs hit the agency late last month. Windsor-Johnston NPR News, Washington. U.S. regulators have

announced a recall involving nearly all of Tesla's cyber trucks. It is the eighth recall involving the shiny stainless steel vehicles since they were introduced just over a year ago. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, issuing the recall of around 46,000 Cybertrucks, warded an exterior panel running along the left and right side of the windshield can detach while driving, creating a road hazard for other drivers. On Wall Street, the Dow fell 11 points. You're listening to NPR. An executive at a private equity firm is set to buy the Boston Celtics in what

is reported to be the biggest deal ever for US professional sports team. William Chisholm, the managing partner of California-based Symphony Technology Group, has agreed to acquire the Celtics in a $6.1 billion deal. If approved by the NBA's board of governors, it would top the $6.05 billion paid for the NFL's

Washington commanders in 2023. We don't remember anything from when we were babies, but is that because we don't make memories when we're infants? Science reporter Ari Daniels says, new research may hold the answer. One of the hardest parts of this study was getting the babies into the fMRI machine.

Infants in many ways are the worst possible subject population. That's Yale cognitive neuroscientist Nick Turk Brown. His team showed infants a series of images they'd never seen before while snapping photos of their brains, including the hippocampus. A region that we know is super important for memory in adults. Tristan Yates is a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia. The more active the hippocampus was when seeing an image for the first time, the more likely babies were to remember it later, meaning that infants seem to form memories. Whether we can retrieve them later in life remains an open question. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.