The Headlines - Harvard vs. Trump, and Your (Shrinking) Chance of Being Audited

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Plus, black market Lego. On Today’s Episode: Trump Administration Will Freeze $2 Billion After Harvard Refuses Demands, by Vimal PatelEl Salvador’s Leader Says He Won’t Return Wrongly Deported Maryland Man, by Zolan Kanno-YoungsWhat to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador, by Alan FeuerWhy I.R.S. Audits, Already at Their Lowest Levels, May Fall Further, by Ben BlattThis Kidney Was Frozen for 10 Days. Could Surgeons Transplant It?, by Gina KolataWorth Thousands on the Black Market, Lego Kits Are Now a Target of Thieves, by Aimee OrtizTune 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 Tuesday, April 15th. Here's what we're covering. Harvard has now become the first school to refuse to comply with the Trump administration's pressure campaign on American universities. Yesterday, Harvard's president rejected a list of demands that the administration had sent.

It had called for significant changes to the day-to-day operations of the institution, like ordering Harvard to shut down all programming related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, requiring it to report international students who commit conduct violations to federal authorities, and mandating outside oversight of its academic departments to ensure they are quote, viewpoint diverse among other demands.

In a statement, Harvard's president said, No government, regardless of which party is in power, should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue. Within hours of Harvard's refusal, the Trump administration announced it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal funding for the school. That adds to the billions of dollars the administration has already paused for other elite universities, as Trump and his closest advisors and allies

have been pushing to fundamentally reshape American higher education. They've claimed the schools have allowed anti-Semitism to go unchecked on their campuses. Many conservatives have also argued more broadly that the institutions have been taken over by leftists and need to be overhauled. One of the Trump allies prominently pushing that view

is the conservative activist Christopher Ruffo, who told The Daily in a recent interview that using federal funds as leverage over the institutions is central to their strategy. Nice words, pleasing sounds, promises to change, all of those very pleasant and non-confrontational proposals regarding academia have not worked. And so, look, the raw material of politics is money, power, and status.

And so I'm thinking about how can we take away their money? How can we take away their power, how can we take away their status so that they have to change? At the White House yesterday. How can I return him to the United States? It's like I smuggle him into the United States or whatever I do. Of course, I'm not going to do it. I mean, the question is reposterous.

The president of El Salvador, Najib Bukele, said he will not return the man that the U.S. mistakenly deported to a mega prison there last month, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. Abrego Garcia is from El Salvador, but had legal permission to stay in the U.S. and was living in Maryland with his family before he was detained. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States. Officials have claimed he's a violent gang member, but he's never been charged or convicted of that. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration must take steps to get him back,

but it's been refusing to do so. And in his Oval Office meeting with Bukele, President Trump said he wants to ramp up deportations to El Salvador and send as many people as possible to the country, which the U.S. is paying to jail migrants. And I just asked the president, you know, it's this massive complex that he built, jail complex. I said, can you build some more of them, please?

Trump also said he'd even like to send American citizens there if they'd been convicted of violent crimes. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the chance of being audited, having their tax records checked and investigated, has dropped to historically low levels. A Times analysis of IRS data shows that the audit rate for personal income tax returns dipped to just around a third of a percent in 2023. That's

less than half of what it was a decade ago. Fewer audits have led to less revenue for the government. With its audits of tax returns for the year 2010, for example, the IRS got an additional $11 billion. Its audits for 2019 returns, though, only brought in $4.5 billion. Part of the reason for the drop has been a staffing shortage, something the Biden administration tried to reverse. But the Trump administration's now planning deep cuts, targeting at least 25 percent of the agency's staff,

which would almost certainly make audits even more rare. The president and other Republicans have likened audits to harassment. One IRS employee told the Times she was in the middle of working on an audit, what she called a slam dunk case for the IRS, when she and four other staffers working on it were laid off this year. Now she says it's unclear if it will ever be finished. Music Surgeons in Massachusetts recently pulled off what had seemed impossible.

They successfully transplanted a kidney that had previously been frozen. The patient was a pig, not a human, but researchers hope it might lead to a major breakthrough in organ transplants for people. Right now, kidneys must be transplanted within 24 to 36 hours, a tight window that makes lining up the right match very difficult. If the organs could be frozen and stored, transplant surgeons say that would be a game-changer. For the recent breakthrough, researchers took inspiration from another animal—Canadian wood frogs. In the winter, the frogs can basically freeze themselves.

All of their cellular processes stop, so do their hearts. They're basically dead until spring. Scientists realized the frog's secret was that they flooded their cells with glucose before the cold set in. Scientists used a version of that technique with the pig kidney to protect it from damage in the freezing process.

The research is still ongoing and far from being tested on a human, but the hope is it will eventually help cut back on the wait lists for a kidney transplant. Those lists currently have almost 100,000 people on them. And finally, the price of LEGO sets has been skyrocketing among fans and collectors. Some of the themed kits of plastic bricks are going for way over their original purchase price. One Spider-Man set from 2013 is now valued at over $16,000, which is a lot for something

you could accidentally vacuum up a piece of. The eye-popping prices have come with a dark side. A Pierce County Lego retailer is out of thousands of dollars after someone breaks into their store and loads a U-Haul with high-end collectible sets. There have been Lego heists around the country. More than $400,000 worth of Legos were stolen from Walmarts and Target stores. Stores say they've dealt with it for a few years, but it's been ramping up as people have been clamoring online for limited editions and special kits.

One expert who runs a YouTube channel about investing in Lego told the Times that the sets have basically become just like other coveted merchandise that can be stolen and resold, like jewelry or rare sneakers. One thing I learned this morning, the plural of Lego is Lego, never Legos, according to the company. So if your 7500-piece Millennium Falcon set goes missing, you'll need to say, I'd like to report my stolen Lego. Those are the headlines.

Today on The Daily, a closer look at the case of the man who was wrongfully deported to Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, a closer look at the case of the man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador and how it's become a test of presidential power. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.