The Headlines - How Car Tariffs Will Hit Consumers, and a Fight Over Funding Elmo

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Plus, a farewell in space. On Today’s Episode:Trump Announces 25% Tariffs on Imported Cars and Car Parts, by Ana Swanson, Jack Ewing and Tony RommIntelligence Officials Face a Fresh Round of Questions About Signal Leak, by Julian E. Barnes and Robert JimisonElmo and Elon Musk Are Cited as G.O.P. Lawmakers Grill PBS and NPR, by Benjamin Mullin and Michael M. GrynbaumTrump Administration Abruptly Cuts Billions From State Health Services, by Apoorva Mandavilli, Margot Sanger-Katz and Jan HoffmanH.H.S. Scraps Studies of Vaccines and Treatments for Future Pandemics, by Carl Zimmer and Apoorva MandavilliFederal Government Detains International Student at Tufts, by Jenna Russell, Safak Timur, Anemona Hartocollis and Eduardo MedinaFarewell to Gaia, the Milky Way’s Cartographer, by Katrina MillerTune 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 Thursday, March 27th. Here's what we're covering. This is very exciting. So we're signing a executive order today that's going to lead to tremendous growth in the automobile industry. President Trump has announced a new round of tariffs, saying he will impose a 25 percent

surcharge on imported cars and car parts starting next week. Right now, a car would be made here, sent to Canada, sent to Mexico, sent all over the place. It's ridiculous. Trump said the tariffs are meant to force car companies to dismantle their global supply chains and move all of their manufacturing to the U.S. It's really hard to overstate the extent to which these tariffs will impact not only automakers and their profits, but entire economies of countries across the world and consumers across the U.S. and consumers across the US. River Akira Davis is a Times economics reporter. She says it would cost carmakers billions of dollars

to relocate their operations, a move that could devastate the countries where a lot of that work happens now, like Canada and Mexico. And at least in the short term, all of the upheaval and the tariffs themselves will likely lead to higher price tags for anyone shopping for a car.

In the months ahead, analysts expect consumers in the US to be paying potentially thousands of dollars more for cars. And that's not only for foreign brands, it's also for American brands as well that rely on importing parts. In fact, I've already spoken to car dealers. Most recently, I spoke with a car dealer in Maine who said that already his business is being significantly impacted because consumers are essentially panic buying vehicles in anticipation of future price hikes that would be caused by these tariffs. At the Capitol yesterday, things got heated in two separate hearings. It is completely outrageous to me that administration officials come before us today with no acceptance of responsibility. Excuse after excuse after excuse.

In the House Intelligence Committee, Trump administration officials faced another day of grilling about the Signal group chat, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared details of an airstrike that was about to be carried out. This is not okay. Communicating these sorts of things in Signal is not okay. Targets, times, those kinds of things are absolutely classified and we all know it. Democrats argued the messages were vulnerable to interception by America's adversaries and could have endangered American troops if the details fell into the wrong hands. But when questioned, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard,

said the conversation was not a security breach. Ideally these conversations occur in person. However, at times fast-moving coordination of an unclassified nature is necessary, where in person conversation is not an option. On their part, most Republican lawmakers followed the lead set by President Trump of downplaying the incident and denying its seriousness. And in the other hearing, For far too long, federal taxpayers have been forced to fund

biased news. This needs to come to an end and it needs to come to an end now. Republicans led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene laced into the leaders of PBS and NPR. Greene accused the public media networks, which serve news and educational content to tens of millions of Americans, of promoting propaganda and indoctrinating children with LGBTQ programming. PBS is one of the founders of the trans child abuse industry, all while taking taxpayer money.

Democrats in the hearing, though, mocked the idea of questioning the motives of classic children's programs on PBS, like Arthur or Sesame Street. The American people want to know, is Elmo now or has he ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States? Over the course of the hearing, the public media executives defended their work and its value to the public. Though NPR's chief executive said she regretted past social media posts she'd made criticizing Donald Trump. She also said the network should have more aggressively covered the story of Hunter Biden's

laptop, a story right-wing media covered extensively, claiming the laptop held proof of corruption involving the Biden family. The Department of Health and Human Services has abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in grants that states were using for a range of urgent health issues, from addiction treatment to tracking infectious diseases. The funds were originally allocated during the COVID-19 pandemic, but starting last year, states were allowed to put any remaining money toward other health issues. In Texas, for example, the grants were supporting the state's response to the ongoing measles outbreak there.

But this week, state health departments began getting notices that the funds were terminated, effective immediately, and that all work should stop. A statement from the Department of Health and Human Services said, quote, The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago. Some state health officials tell the Times they were always planning for the funds to expire, but the abruptness of the decision has caused chaos. There are half-finished projects that cost millions of dollars that may now never be completed.

One health official said, quote, this is just like throwing money out the window. It's a total waste. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has also canceled funding for dozens of studies seeking new vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 and other pathogens that may cause future pandemics. The goal of the projects was to have vaccines and drugs ready to go if a new pandemic hit, rather than spending months having to develop them from scratch. In Massachusetts, surveillance footage shows immigration officers arresting another university student who participated in pro-Palestinian activism.

In the video captured earlier this week, agents approach Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen who's in the U.S. on a student visa, attending Tufts University. Plane clothes officers in masks then detain Oz Turk on the sidewalk outside her home, while bystanders ask what's happening. She was then handcuffed and driven away in an unmarked car. In a statement, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security claimed that Oz Turk had acted in support of Hamas and said that that was grounds for revoking her visa. She wrote an op-ed in the student newspaper last year asking Tufts to, quote, acknowledge

the Palestinian genocide. The Trump administration has said it can start deportation proceedings against any non-citizen that it's deemed a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests, even if they're in the country legally. It made a similar claim earlier this month when it detained Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. The Massachusetts attorney general called Ozturt's arrest disturbing, saying this isn't public safety, it's intimidation that will and should be closely scrutinized in court. And finally, scientists are saying goodbye to a spacecraft that changed how we understand the universe. Gaia was launched back in 2013.

It's a powerful space telescope that was sent up to build a precise three-dimensional map of billions of stars. In all the data that it gathered, astronomers found hints of new planets and black holes, including the black hole that's the closest known one to Earth. Scientists also used data from Gaia to help measure how fast the universe is expanding. After more than a decade of documenting space, the telescope closed its eyes to starlight this January. It's low on fuel, and today mission specialists will switch it off and set it to go orbit around the Sun, essentially sending it to that big

graveyard in the sky for spacecraft. Scientists who've worked on the project say while they're sad to see Gaia go, it's not actually the end of their work. The spacecraft collected so much data, they've only been able to go through about a third of it so far. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, the Trump administration has released thousands of documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy.

Times reporter Julian Barnes explains what we did and didn't learn from them. 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.