The Headlines - How DOGE Hides Its Work, and Trump Targets Climate Rules

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Plus, an explosive new Facebook memoir. On Today’s Episode: E.P.A. Targets Dozens of Environmental Rules as It Reframes Its Purpose, by Lisa Friedman and Hiroko TabuchiDOGE Makes Its Latest Errors Harder to Find, by David A. Fahrenthold and Jeremy Singer-VineSenate Democrats Balk at Funding Extension, Raising the Risk of a Shutdown, by Carl HulseColumbia Activist Has Not Been Allowed to Speak Privately With Lawyers, by Jonah E. Bromwich and Anusha BayyaU.S. Inflation Eased More Than Expected in February, by Colby SmithMeta Seeks to Block Further Sales of Ex-Employee’s Scathing Memoir, by Mike IsaacMaker of Pokémon Go Agrees to Sell Unit to Saudi Fund, by Yan ZhuangTune 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 13th. Here's what we're covering. Today I'm pleased to make the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history. The Environmental Protection Agency is initiating 31 historic actions. Lee Zeldin, head of the EPA, has announced that the Trump administration is repealing dozens of the country's most consequential environmental policies, from its limits on

pollution from cars and factories to its protections for wetlands. The EPA will be reconsidering many suffocating rules that restrict nearly every sector of our economy. Most significantly, Zeldin wants to undercut the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions at all. To do that, the agency will have to argue that those emissions pose no foreseeable threat to public health, going against decades of science that show otherwise. Yesterday's announcement underscores the administration's approach to climate science. For years now, President Trump has disputed the science of climate change and made it clear

that he has very little interest in supporting a transition to an economy powered by renewable energy. My colleague David Gellis covers climate policy. We even saw during his campaign last year, he went to Houston and asked a group of oil and gas executives to raise a billion dollars for him with the promise that he would then strip away regulations in order to help their business. Now, the final figure was closer to $75 million, roughly. Nevertheless, President Trump is now

making good on that promise to create a series of policy moves that are really detrimental to the clean energy business and quite favorable to the fossil fuel industry. We appreciate it. We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud. Since President Trump took office, his administration and its allies have been boasting about the huge savings they say they're bringing for American taxpayers. This is a $3.4 million contract, a council for inclusive innovation at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, another DEI contract that Doge identified. At the

center of that effort has been Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. And we bring the receipts so people say like well is this real? Just go to Doge.gov. Musk promised that the effort to cut government spending would be quote, maximally transparent. But as Doge has posted what it calls a wall of receipts to its website, the Times has found the data has been riddled with errors, like confusing billions with millions or triple counting a single contract. And now, amid increased questions about its work, my colleagues have found that Doge has made it harder

to track exactly what it's doing. Before when Doge celebrated the cuts it made, it would post details about what it had cut. It would post the name of the contractor whose contract had been cut, and it would post an ID number. So you could go back and look up that specific contract in federal contracting databases.

What they've done now is to start posting new claims, new savings they say they've achieved, without that kind of detail. David Farenthold is an investigative reporter at The Times. Here's why this is important. Doge is making a generational overhaul in how the government works. And there's only one place where they show their work, this website. The concern now is that that one little window they provided into their work is closing. That what they're doing is providing uncheckable data

and removing the opportunity for the public to try to verify their claims. Now three quick updates on stories we've been covering. Funding the government should be a bipartisan effort, but Republicans chose a partisan path without any input from congressional Democrats. Senate Democrats say they will refuse to vote for a Republican-led funding bill. That makes a government shutdown tomorrow at midnight significantly more likely. The Democrats say they've had to weigh two bad options.

If they were to go along with a Republican plan, they'd face backlash from constituents who want them to stand up to the Republicans' agenda. But if they vote to block the spending bill as they're currently planning to, they risk taking the blame for the disruption of a shutdown. Also, every day Mahmoud spends in detention in Louisiana as a day too long. Lawyers for Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate who was arrested by immigration officers, spoke outside the first court hearing in his case yesterday to denounce the government's plan to deport him. Khalil's illegal permanent by immigration officers, spoke outside the first court hearing in his case yesterday to denounce the government's plan to deport him.

Khalil's a legal permanent resident and hasn't been charged with any crime. But the Trump administration claims he sided with terrorists when he protested the war in Gaza and has said it wants to revoke his green card. At the hearing, his legal team told a judge that they hadn't been able to talk with Khalil in private since he was arrested over the weekend. And new economic data shows that prices did not jump as much for U.S. consumers last month as some analysts had expected. Instead, inflation eased a little overall. But prices for some staples, like groceries, are still rising sharply. Egg prices in particular continue to soar. They cost about 60% more than they did a year ago, largely due to an ongoing outbreak of bird flu.

An explosive new memoir about working at Facebook has set off a legal battle. Sarah Wynn Williams worked at the company from 2011 to 2017 before it changed its name to Metta. It was a pivotal period when Facebook was becoming one of the most influential and frequently used platforms on the planet. In her book, Careless People, which came out this week, she describes the company's executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, as status-obsessed and self-absorbed. On a tour Zuckerberg took through Asia, Wynne Williams says she was told to somehow gather

a crowd of more than a million people to mark his visit. For Sandberg, the book claims she and her assistant would take turns sleeping in each other's laps and stroking each other's hair. The book also details how Facebook struggled to wield its growing power, especially when it came to content moderation. For example, Wynne Williams says the company was unprepared to handle a surge of hate speech on the platform that ultimately helped incite a genocide in Myanmar. The Times Review called the whole book, quote, genuinely shocking, an ugly detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world. Metta has vehemently denied the allegations in the book and the companies arguing that Wynne Williams violated

the non-disparagement contract she signed when she worked there. Yesterday, an arbitrator ordered her to stop promoting and distributing copies. The decision does not appear to limit the publisher from continuing to sell the book. And finally, the company that owns Pokemon Go, the runaway hit game that once had the whole world nerding out, announced it will be sold to a company owned by a Saudi Arabian wealth fund. Pokemon Go became a cultural phenomenon when it first launched.

The augmented reality game sent people running around the streets, even onto private property, trying to capture cartoon monsters on their phones. It's still popular, with 20 million active players each week. Now it will be part of the vast portfolio owned by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund. As part of its plan to diversify its economy beyond oil, the Saudi government has said it will invest $38 billion in video games by 2030.

The plan mirrors what the country's done with sports, buying into soccer teams and launching its own golf league. Critics have said the investments are part of an effort to polish the country's reputation after accusations of human rights abuses. First they say it was sports washing, now it's games washing. Now, it's games washing. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how President Trump's aggressive stance towards Canada has riled up Canadians.

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.