The Headlines - First Major White House Shuffle, and Why Online Shopping’s About to Cost More

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

Plus, a Friday news quiz. On Today’s Episode:Trump Moves Waltz to U.N. and Names Rubio Interim National Security Adviser, by Maggie Haberman, David E. Sanger and Jonathan SwanTrump Ends Chinese Tariff Loophole, Raising the Cost of Online Goods, by Ana SwansonTrump Signs Executive Order Seeking to End Federal Funding for NPR and PBS, by Qasim NaumanTrump Administration Cancels $1 Billion in Grants for Student Mental Health, by Michael C. BenderU.S. Creating Second Military Zone Along Southern Border, by Eric SchmittMay Day Protests Across the Country Show Opposition to Trump’s Policies, by Orlando Mayorquín, Robert Chiarito and Aishvarya KaviU.S. Prosecutors Accuse Large Insurers of Paying Kickbacks for Private Medicare Plans, by Reed Abelson and Margot Sanger-KatzChatting in Movie Theaters Is a No-No. But What About Chatbots?, by Brooks BarnesTune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. 

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Friday, May 2nd. Here's what we're covering. In the first major shakeup in White House staffing this term, President Trump has removed his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, who'd come under scrutiny for organizing a group chat on Signal about military strikes and accidentally including a journalist. I'm sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number. But you've never talked to him before, so how's the number on your phone?

I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but it's just curious. How's the number on your phone? Well, if you have somebody else's contact and then somehow it gets sucked in. Oh, someone sent you that contact. Even before that mistake, Waltz was on thin ice in the administration. Trump's close advisors had decided he was too hawkish, too aggressive on foreign affairs to work for a president who campaigned on not intervening abroad. For example, as recently as this week, Waltz had been arguing internally for sharp sanctions against Russia.

Trump's aides tell the Times that the only reason Waltz kept the job this long is, in part, because the president didn't want to be seen as giving in to the media's coverage of the group chat controversy. And even now, he's not sending Waltz away entirely. The president has just written on Truth Social that Mike Waltz is going to become the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Well there you go. No longer the national security adviser. Fabulous.

The news that Trump nominated Waltz to be the U.N. ambassador instead was so sudden, it caught the State Department's spokeswoman by surprise at a briefing after a reporter read it from the president's social media post. It is clear that I just heard this from you. Though short, Waltz's tenure is longer than Trump's first national security adviser back in 2017, who was fired after four weeks. Trump ended up going through three more. For now, the national security adviser position will go to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who will hold both jobs. Rubio's collected

an extraordinary number of titles in the administration so far. He's also the acting administrator of what's left of USAID, the foreign aid agency. And he's the acting national archivist, a role he was assigned after Trump abruptly fired the previous one. For years, online shopping has almost seemed like a race to the bottom. Literally it was like 99 cents, I think, for this whole pack. Testing just how cheap things could get. I think I got like 15 things, maybe 16. I don't really know.

Fast fashion brands like Shein could churn out an endless stream of new designs for shockingly low prices. And on sites like Tmoo, you could get just about anything else, too. Bedazzled phone cases, gadgets that make you dog-shaped waffles, the list goes on. This is insane. Let's do a Tmoo haul. That new economy was made possible in part by a loophole in America's trade policy. Shipments from China that were worth less than $800 and were being sent directly to consumers

could sail across the border with almost no paperwork and avoid tariffs that had been in place since Trump's first term. As many as a billion packages a year had been coming into the U.S. that way. But as of 12 a.m. today, the so-called de minimis exemption is over. President Trump ended it, claiming it was being used by drug traffickers to ship the ingredients for fentanyl into the US and that the cheap shipments had been undermining American manufacturing. For a lot of shoppers in recent years that have been buying from these websites, they probably had no idea how much they were benefiting from this particular loophole. But now that it's gone, it's going to become very obvious to them very quickly.

Julie Cresswell is a Times business reporter. She says there will now likely be processing delays for the shipments and higher costs that the companies are already starting to pass along. I spent a lot of time on some of these websites. Sheen, for instance, shoppers there were saying prices were increasing on some of the goods. You know, a customer that I spoke to in Atlanta had put a couple dresses into her shopping cart late last week and they were like $9, $11 and by Sunday those prices had gone up to $13 or $15 after Sheen said it had built

the tariffs into the prices. It'll be interesting to see in the next few weeks and months how this does change overall online shopping behavior, especially among Gen Zers. They were really used to going on to these websites. You're going to see, I think, shoppers try to probably reduce some of their shopping from these places because they're just going to become more expensive than they've been used to. Meanwhile, President Trump's trade policies are also driving up prices beyond fast fashion

and online impulse buys. More and more companies are starting to warn customers that the new tariffs will cost them. This week, the power tool company Stanley Black & Decker, as well as Procter & Gamble, which makes everything from paper towels to laundry detergent, and Adidas, all said they expect to raise prices on their products.

Now, a few other quick updates on the Trump administration. The administration is pushing forward with new cuts to federal spending. President Trump has now moved to shut off all federal support for NPR and PBS, accusing the news outlets of producing left-wing propaganda. The cuts are a relatively small percentage of the broadcasters' budgets, but could still cause widespread disruption for their audiences. And at the Education Department, the administration has slashed a billion dollars for mental health services for children.

The funds were part of a bipartisan effort by Congress to help prevent gun violence after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The Education Department says it cut the funds because the programs focused in part on increasing the diversity of mental health workers. Also, the administration is ramping up its military presence on the southern border. The Pentagon announced last night that a narrow strip of land in southern Texas will effectively become an extension of an army base there, allowing troops to detain anyone who crosses for trespassing

before turning them over to immigration authorities. Last month, the Pentagon created the same kind of military zone in New Mexico. It's 200 miles long. Overall, 8,000 active duty troops have now been deployed to the southern border. Border crossings have plummeted. And across the country yesterday, police closed streets in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities for annual May Day rallies that were supercharged by anger over the administration's

policies. The billionaire class should be afraid of the power of labor. At some of the events, there was a broad range of people, from labor groups to pro-Palestinian activists to anti-Trump protesters, who said they saw many of their concerns as overlapping. Some of the country's largest insurance companies have been accused of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks in exchange for steering people into private Medicare plans. The new lawsuit, filed by a whistleblower along with the Justice Department, says that Aetna, Humana, and Elevance, formerly known as Anthem, incentivized insurance brokers to get people signed up for what are known as Medicare Advantage plans. In recent years, those plans have been hugely lucrative for insurers, who've been accused of raking in billions of dollars by misrepresenting how sick patients are so they can overcharge the government. Beyond the kickback allegations, federal prosecutors also accused some of the insurance companies and brokers of discriminating against people with disabilities.

They say they steered them towards plans that earned them the most money instead of toward the ones best suited to the patient's health care needs. Aetna, Elevance, and Humana have denied the allegations. And finally, Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has proposed a new way to get people back into movie theaters, as box office numbers have tumbled. The catch? It's an idea that many people find absolutely infuriating. Going on your phone during the movie.

Meta's experiment is an app called MovieMate, featuring a chatbot that will ping you with trivia and witty asides in real time as you watch, synced with the film. The argument is that, despite texting in movies once being taboo, people are on their cell phones now anyway. Research shows 20% of young moviegoers already text during movies, so why not channel that instinct? Meta teamed up with Blumhouse, the horror movie studio, already text during movies. So why not channel that instinct? Meta teamed up with Blumhouse, the horror movie studio, to try it out.

For one night only at a couple of theaters, they screened a movie from a few years ago, Megan, about a killer doll, and movie mate texted along. One attendee at a screening in LA thought it was kind of cool for about 20 minutes. Then she told the time she put her phone away and just looked at the messages later. If you found yourself getting angry just listening to me describe this idea. Just know for now there aren't any public plans to try MovieMate

anywhere else, yet. Those are the headlines. But stick around, just after the credits we are trying out a headlines news quiz. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Jessica Met the credits, we are trying out a headlines news quiz. This show is made by Will Jarvis, Jessica Metzger, Jan Stewart and me, Tracy Mumford. Original theme by Dan Powell. Special thanks to Isabella Anderson, Larissa Anderson, Jake Lucas, Zoe Murphy, Paula Schuman and Chris Wood. Now for the news quiz.

For the next month, we are going to give you a chance to test your news knowledge on Fridays. So we've got questions about three stories the Times covered this week. Can you get them all? First up, in Spain so that was tennis star Coco Goff was giving a post-match interview when maybe I just need to like not get a lot of sleep what happened the answer there was a massive power outage across Spain and Portugal tens of millions of people were plunged into a blackout that lasted almost 18 hours the cause is is still a mystery, and officials say an investigation is underway. Okay, next question. Five, four, three...

It was Jeff Bezos versus Elon Musk this one. ...ignition and full thrust... Amazon launched its first batch of satellites to try and take on Starlink. That's Musk's satellite internet service that can beam high-speed data to almost any point on Starlink, that's Musk's satellite internet service that can beam high-speed data to almost any point on the globe. How many satellites did Amazon send up?

Was it 27, 155, or 578? The answer is 27, but Amazon says it's gonna need to get 578 satellites up into Earth's orbit before it can get the service started. They think they'll be able to do that by the end of the year, but they're still way behind Starlink, which has 7,000 satellites up in space and is launching more almost every week. And last one, a little town in Belgium held a competition where participants from more than a dozen countries had to do their best impression of what animal's distinctive

screech. It was a seagull for the European Goal Scream Championship, but the real question that I have for you is can you tell human from bird? Which one of these is the real goal and which one is the winner of the competition? The first squawk was a real goal. The second was Anna Brunald of Denmark, reigning champion. That's it for the news quiz. The headlines will be back on Monday, and we'll try a few more questions next Friday.