What the Mayoral Debate Missed

The Gracie Bunch, finally debuted on Wednesday night, just 10 days before early voting begins in the Democratic primary that often functionally decides New York City’s mayor. (This year could be different.)

The debate didn’t make much of an impression, but it did highlight the yawning gap between the city’s politics and the concerns of its residents. 

For starters, only the first hour was actually on TV, with host WNBC relegating the second hour to streaming. (On broadcast, it suddenly and jarringly switched from a partially scripted drama to a totally scripted drama at 8.) There was no audience, and for some reason the press wasn’t allowed inside the venue. 

Even for viewers who watched the whole thing, there was little new here for anyone already paying attention and no break-out moments for low-information voters just now tuning into the race.

Andrew Cuomo, the former governor who resigned before lawmakers could remove him but who now regrets it and has led in every poll to date, continued slouching toward what he wants voters to see as his inevitable and necessary return to power as the one candidate who can redeem a city supposedly in crisis. Never mind the fact that crime is now declining pretty steeply and other things don’t feel as dire to many New Yorkers as they do to the candidate; polls still show New Yorkers in a grim mood, and he’s amplifying it.

The debate was the first time Cuomo has had to engage directly with the rivals his campaign has memorably dismissed as “the seven dwarves.” That was a good thing.

But there were eight rivals crowding the debate stage, each trying to cram too much into 30-second “answers” often without responding to the actual question while frequently speaking over each other and the moderators and with seven of them collectively aiming their fire at Cuomo.

They repeated well-worn campaign lines in the hopes of introducing themselves to a new audience and breaking through while also blasting Cuomo’s and his record on nursing home deaths and sexual harassment charges and budget cuts and ethics and things he said 17 years ago about Barack Obama and on and on. 

The collective idea is to convince voters not to rank Cuomo at all, but the range of attacks, some closer to the mark than others, made it hard to focus on any given one, and the whole exercise felt exhausting as he responded with counter-attacks, half-answers and evasions to run out the clock and move on.

As the night dragged on, the group texts I’m in with political pros and junkies got quieter and quieter as even they lost interest.

The whole thing felt like an argument against New York City’s over-elaborate elections system, with ranked-choiced contests for special elections and primaries like this one while general elections remain simple, most-votes-wins affairs. 

While there’s a lot to like about ranked-choice contests — they eliminate the need for run-offs and allow people to vote for candidates they actually like instead of getting caught up in considering who’s winning — it’s simply ridiculous to have two different systems apply in the same race, with one contest only open to registered party members and the other one to all voters. 

(It’s also ridiculous that the city’s primary, which is low-turnout to begin with, is in late June, but that’s a whole other story.) 

The ranked-choice primary, along with the city’s generous public matching-funds program, means that candidates with no path to victory have no reason to drop out and every reason to stay in the race, use their TV time and continue spending campaign funds. 

The system also means that candidates in broadly similar lanes — with the “dwarves” broadly representing the progressive left and Cuomo and Whitney Tilson the pro-police and pro-Israel centrists, to put it a little crudely — have no reason to go at each other. 

Which is a shame, because some of these candidates are smart and serious, though you wouldn’t have known it if you were just meeting them Wednesday night. 

Don’t hate the players, hate the game. Nine candidates stuffed on a debate stage with a minute or 30 seconds each toengage with specific questions and big topics is an overload of overboiled riffs. 

Part of my job as a journalist is to help digest information for voters, and make sure the map stays aligned to the territory. 

But as it happened, I was watching or listening while also editing a story about family members in agony on the streets of Manhattan Wednesday as ICE round-ups there get crueler and more aggressive by the day. That felt vastly more urgent than hearing candidates talk in generalities about the Trump administration’s assault on the city and their plans to resist it.

Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old socialist with limited accomplishments who’s put himself in second place by captivating younger voters and the media class with fresh messaging, told me last week that “the entire ethos of this campaign is seeking to have the bubble of New York City politics finally connect with the world of New York City itself.”

But he didn’t do much to distinguish himself to viewers just tuning in to the race and finding out who he is in one of the biggest remaining free media availabilities he has. (He did collect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s much-anticipated top-rank endorsement on Monday, with that presumably timed to help him ride post-debate momentum. But he really didn’t have much of it and her nod comes awfully late in the game, which is why I’m skeptical it helps sway many voters who weren’t already Mamdani fans.)

Cuomo, for his part, dismissed Mamdani early on with a clearly rehearsed attack line that had the benefit of being fresh, since he hasn’t felt enough pressure to use it until now.

“Donald Trump would go through Mr. Mamdani like a hot knife through butter,” Cuomo said. “He’s been in government 27 minutes. He passed three bills.”

Cuomo, who at one point actually said that “I was there every day, leading COVID,” was asked if he had any regrets from his many years in politics.

The Democratic candidate replied, ignoring the question as the rest of the candidates did, that “The Democratic Party got to a point that we allowed Mr. Trump to be elected — that we’ve gotten to a point where rhetoric has no connection with reality. The Democratic Party seems okay with that.”

Speaker Adrienne Adams, who’s tied Cuomo COVID response to her father’s death during the pandemic, interjected, bringing up his cuts to health and childcare spending and asking: “No regrets when it comes to slow-walking PPE and vaccinations in the season of COVID to Black and Brown communities? Really, no regrets? No regrets?”

Here’s What’s in the Big Domestic Policy Bill to Deliver Trump’s Agenda

The bill includes about $175 billion in new spending to enforce President Trump’s ambitious anti-immigration agenda.Credit...Paul Ratje for The New York Times

By Margot Sanger-KatzAndrew DuehrenBrad PlumerTony Romm and Catie Edmondson
Reporting from Washington
May 22, 2025

House Republicans approved a domestic policy bill to enact President Trump’s agenda, prevailing by a single vote after a bitter fight over tax and spending priorities that had divided their conference.

The legislation would slash taxes, providing the biggest savings to the wealthy, and steer more money to the military and immigration enforcement, while cutting health, nutrition, education and clean energy programs to cover part of the cost. To win votes for passage, Republican leaders accelerated the implementation of work requirements in the Medicaid program and the repeal of clean energy tax credits under the Inflation Reduction Act, among other changes.

Republicans in the Senate have said they want to make major modifications to the House product, but it’s still unclear what those would look like.

Here is a look at the bill, and the biggest remaining areas of disagreement within the party.

Cutting taxes

The bottom line: The heart of the bill is a roughly $4 trillion tax cut that would lock in many of the tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017, including lower marginal income rates, a larger standard deduction and a higher threshold for the estate tax, with some tweaks.

The measure also includes several new, temporary tax cuts that Mr. Trump campaigned on, including his promises not to tax tips or overtime. His pitch not to tax Social Security benefits takes the form of a bonus $4,000 deduction available to Americans 65 and older, with the benefit shrinking at higher income levels. Americans would also be able to deduct interest on car loans from their taxable income, though the car has to be made in the United States.

The reductions would last only through 2028, as would a $1,000 addition to the standard deduction and a $500 bonus to the child tax credit, which now maxes out at $2,000. Children born between Jan., 1, 2025, and Jan. 1, 2029 would receive $1,000 deposited in a so-called “Trump account” that is invested in the stock market.

Businesses would receive several tax cuts, including valuable deductions for research and investment spending, as well as a new tax break for building factories. A deduction available to the owners of many businesses would become slightly more generous and be extended indefinitely.

The bill also would hike taxes on universities, as well as some noncitizens and their families. A tax on the investment income that university endowments earn would rise substantially, from 1.4 percent to as high as 21 percent. Immigrants authorized to live in the United States — but who are not citizens or green card holders — would be barred from receiving tax credits covering the cost of health insurance premiums. And tighter eligibility rules for the child tax credit would take the benefit away from roughly 2 million children.

The sticking points: The biggest problem for the tax plan in the House was the state and local tax deduction. Under pressure from Republicans from high-tax states like New York, who demanded a higher cap, the final bill would quadruple the current $10,000 limit to $40,000. The cap would shrink for people making more than $500,000.

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Scaling back Medicaid

The bottom line: The bill makes major changes to reduce the cost of the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. The centerpiece of those efforts is a strict work requirement for childless adults without disabilities, which would require beneficiaries to document 80 hours of monthly work, or prove they qualified for an exception, or else risk losing their benefits. Those new rules would have to take effect by the end of 2026, after the next midterm election, though states could opt to adopt them sooner.

House leaders moved up the implementation date, originally slated for 2029, at the behest of fiscal hawks who demanded larger cuts. But the new timetable may be hard for some states to hit.

More immediately, the legislation would make it easier for states to cancel people’s coverage by allowing them to increase paperwork requirements and drop those who don’t respond to requests to verify their income or residency. It also would require states to impose co-payments for a wide array of medical services for adults on Medicaid who live above the poverty line, a policy some Democrats described as a “sick tax.”

Another provision would reduce Medicaid funding to states that use their own tax revenues to provide health coverage to undocumented immigrants, a change that could affect financing for 12 mostly Democratic-controlled states. The legislation would bar Medicaid from providing funding to Planned Parenthood as long as the organization continued to provide abortions, and would bar Medicaid from covering gender affirming health care to any beneficiaries. And the bill would limit strategies that states have developed to tax medical providers and pay them higher prices for Medicaid services.

Before the last-minute changes, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Medicaid changes would cause 7.6 million more Americans to be uninsured at the end of a decade, while reducing federal spending on health care by more than $800 billion. That estimate will be updated as the office continues to analyze the final bill text.

The sticking points: Democrats have made the Medicaid changes the main focus of their critique of the bill, arguing that Republicans are slashing health coverage for poor Americans to finance tax cuts for the rich. In an effort to insulate their most vulnerable incumbents from backlash, G.O.P. leaders omitted overhaul proposals that would have permanently changed the structure of the program. But one populist Republican, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, has called the cuts a nonstarter, saying they amount to “taxing the poor to give to the rich.”

Changes to Obamacare

The bottom line: The law makes numerous changes to the functioning of the Obamacare marketplaces and the financing of tax credits that help people who use it buy insurance. Those changes will save the government more than $100 billion, but will result in millions of Americans becoming uninsured if they fail to adhere to new paperwork requirements or can no longer afford insurance premiums. Because the budget office score is not final and does not include last-minute changes, the precise effects have not been calculated.

Last-minute revisions to the bill also would fund a canceled set of Obamacare payments for insurers known as cost-sharing reductions. The change will lower the value of subsidies and make insurance more expensive for many purchasers, reducing federal spending overall. It also prevents health plans that receive the funding from offering coverage for abortions, which could change benefit packages and conflict with laws in numerous states.

Ending clean energy programs

The bottom line: The bill would quickly end most of the big tax credits for clean energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Many of those incentives were expected to last a decade and have so far led businesses to announce more than $841 billion in investments, from wind farms in Wyoming to battery factories in Georgia.

Image
Tax credits for low-emissions electricity sources like wind would be available in full only to power plants in service before the end of 2028.Credit...Benjamin Rasmussen for The New York Times


A $7,500 tax break for buyers of electric cars would largely phase out by the end of 2025, with a one-year extension for automakers that have not sold many models yet. Tax credits for low-emissions electricity sources such as wind, solar, batteries and geothermal would disappear entirely, with a small exception for companies that have started construction within 60 days after the bill becomes law and finish by the end of 2028. That’s a narrow window that many projects currently being planned won’t be able to meet.

The sticking points: Slashing the energy credits has been contentious even among some Republicans, since more than three-quarters of the investments driven by the Inflation Reduction Act were set to occur in red districts. Some Senate Republicans have said they might try to protect certain incentives, such as for geothermal power or hydrogen fuels, to encourage innovation and bolster U.S. energy security.

Slashing food stamps

The bottom line: In a bid to save money and restrict benefits, the bill would make a series of changes to scale back the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides monthly aid known as food stamps to about 42 million low-income people.

Under the proposal, food stamp recipients between the ages of 18 and 64 would have to obtain work in order to receive federal aid. That mandate would also apply to parents with children 7 and older. Current law subjects only beneficiaries up to age 54 to work requirements, and carves out parents with dependents.

Additionally, the bill would force states to shoulder some of the costs of SNAP, which historically has been funded by the federal government. It would limit the ability of future administrations to raise food stamp benefit amounts. And SNAP would be restricted to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.

On Thursday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted the consequences could be substantial.

New work requirements, for example, could result in about three million SNAP recipients losing benefits, its analysis found. States could potentially leave the program because of their own budget constraints, further leaving some poor families unable to obtain nutritional assistance. And some proposed changes to the way the government computes benefits could leave some households facing losses in their monthly allowances.

The sticking points: Some Republicans from districts with high concentrations of food stamp recipients have balked in the past at cuts to the program, and insisted on allowing states to relax work requirements, which the bill would limit their ability to do. But so far, there has been no outcry in the G.O.P. against the SNAP cuts.

Boosting national security and immigration enforcement

The bottom line: The plan would devote an additional $150 billion in military spending, to help boost shipbuilding efforts, and to build a new space-based missile defense system Mr. Trump has proposed that the military is calling Golden Dome.

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Military troops listening to Mr. Trump speak in Qatar on Thursday. The bill would include $150 billion in additional military spending.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

It also includes about $175 billion in new spending to enforce Mr. Trump’s ambitious anti-immigration agenda, including for bulking up the barriers at the nation’s southern border and for additional Border Patrol agents and facilities. Those measures are considered the least controversial in the legislative package and are meant to entice Republicans to vote for it.

Cutting education programs

The bottom line: The bill would slice $330 billion out of student loan spending over a decade. The biggest change would eliminate for new borrowers the Biden-era student loan repayment program known as SAVE — which ties loan payments to income and household size — as well as the Pay As You Earn plan and the Income-Contingent Repayment plan.

It would replace those with a single repayment plan that would be more costly for many students.

Total federal loan amounts would be capped by year and by program for graduate student loans, and new limits would be placed on how much parents can borrow to pay for their children’s tuition.

The bill also would make it more difficult for part-time students to obtain Pell Grants, increasing the number of credits per semester required for the maximum award from 12 to 15, and requiring them to be enrolled at least half of the time to qualify at all. But it would allow Pell Grants to be used for shorter-term programs that earn students professional certifications.

Raising the debt ceiling

The bottom line: The legislation would increase the nation’s statutory debt limit by about $4 trillion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this month that the United States could run out of money to pay its bills by August if Congress does not raise or suspend the nation’s debt limit.

Many ultraconservative Republicans have long prided themselves on refusing to back any increase to the nation’s borrowing cap, and refused to do so in December even at Mr. Trump’s urging. But some have conceded they would rather raise the debt limit through the reconciliation bill — which allows them to pass legislation without a single Democratic vote — to deprive the minority party of any negotiating leverage.

The debt limit increase could be a sticking point for fiscal conservatives in the Senate. Already, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky has said he would oppose the reconciliation bill if the debt-limit provision were not removed.

Can the ‘Abundance Agenda’ Save the Democrats?

Dispirited liberals are embracing—and feuding over—a new book’s call for cutting red tape

By Molly Ball
June 1, 2025 5:00 am ET

A recent ‘Abundance Happy Hour’ in San Francisco featured a taping of a podcast whose guests have included prominent Democratic politicians. PHOTO: MOLLY BALL/WSJ

SAN FRANCISCO—A raging political fad has taken over the Democratic Party, coalescing politicians, activists and rank-and-file partisans around an unlikely message: The government is broken.

The party’s postelection angst has found an unexpected life raft in the idea of “abundance,” catalyzed by the recent publication of a book by that name that argues that regulatory obstacles and an obsession with procedure have caused liberal governance to fail to deliver on its promises.

Democratic politicians are rushing to embrace the new mantra. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Colorado Gov. Jared Polis have all name-checked it publicly. New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker discussed it at length in his recent 25-hour Senate speech. Former Vice President Kamala Harris and the U.S. Senate’s Democratic caucus are among the many politicians who have recently sought the authors’ counsel. Not one but two congressional caucuses have recently formed to push legislation advancing the ideas laid out in the book.

It isn’t just party elders who have bought into the idea. Local Abundance clubs have formed in multiple cities and on college campuses. At a recent “Abundance Happy Hour” in San Francisco’s Mission district, hundreds gathered on a weeknight this month to mingle with fellow devotees. Banners at the gathering read “BUILD AMERICA. DEFEAT FASCISM.”
Democrats are pushing legislation to advance the ideas laid out in the book ‘Abundance.’ PHOTO: CAM POLLACK/WSJ

Connor Skelly, 35, the COO of a residential remodeling company, said he was drawn to the ideas of “Abundance” because he wants his four children to be able to afford to live in San Francisco. “I think Democrats are looking for something to be for right now,” he said. “With Trump, there’s so much to be against. People are looking for something positive to be excited about.”

The book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson has been a surprise hit, with a sold-out national tour, hundreds of thousands of copies sold and two months on the bestseller list since its release in March.

The policy tome argues that Democrats must grapple with—and shoulder some blame for—the fact that blue states like California are mired in high-price stagnation, while red states such as Texas and Florida offer a dynamism and quality of life that keep attracting new residents. Regulations intended to protect consumers, communities and the environment, they say, have metastasized to create an administrative regime that prevents anything from getting built, from high-speed rail projects to housing.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently hosted Klein on his podcast for an in-depth 90-minute discussion, where he waxed somewhat defensive about the way the book depicts his state as Exhibit A for Democratic dysfunction; Newsom nonetheless proclaimed the book “essential reading for Democrats” and said he has been handing out copies to the leaders of the state legislature.
Abundance proponents cite decadeslong delays in the construction of California high-speed rail projects, such as this one under way in Fresno County, as an example of government ineffectiveness. PHOTO: GODOFREDO A. VÁSQUEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS

While Klein and Thompson’s diagnosis has echoes in conservative critiques of government and Elon Musk’s DOGE, the authors’ prescription is very different. Instead of taking a wrecking ball to the bureaucracy, the authors propose cutting red tape and unleashing the state as a stimulant to growth and innovation.

“The system is broken. The government is too inefficient and ineffective to meet the challenges of the 21st century,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D., N.Y.) recently wrote on X. “But the answer is not DOGE. It is ABUNDANCE.”

As Democrats grope for a way forward in the wake of their 2024 election loss, advocates hope the party can present a new vision for the future by embracing the book’s call to streamline housing, transit, energy and scientific research.

“I want the 2028 primaries and the presidential race to be about who is for progressive abundance,” Steve M. Boyle, one of the San Francisco happy hour’s organizers and the executive director of the newly formed YIMBY Democrats for America, said in an interview. Proving that government can improve people’s lives, he argued, is the only way to prevent voters from turning to authoritarian strongmen.

The Abundance movement cuts across the party’s ideological fissures, attracting support from elements of the moderate establishment and the socialist left alike. “Look, I’m for Medicare for all and taxing billionaires more, but I also want effective government to make sure when we pass those things it actually works,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.), a progressive ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.).

The book’s call to action has helped popularize and accelerate a movement that’s been brewing for a decade among policy experts and activists. “YIMBY,” or “yes in my backyard,” activists have pushed for housing reform across the country over the past decade and have become a political force in California. An Abundance conference in Washington last November drew 300 participants.
‘YIMBY,’ or ‘yes in my backyard’ activists who push for housing reform have become a political force in California, where a new residential building was going up in San Francisco. PHOTO: PHILIP PACHECO/BLOOMBERG NEWS

“The book has given voice to a feeling that people have had for a while—that it’s just too hard to build things,” said Rep. Josh Harder (D., Calif.), a swing-district moderate who recently launched the Build America Caucus on Capitol Hill. The 30-member bipartisan group hopes to push for policies such as permitting reform for energy transmission.

Among those in attendance at the Abundance happy hour was Nancy Tung, the chairwoman of the San Francisco Democratic Party, who said the book offers an answer to recent political backlash to perceived progressive overreach. Tung was part of a slate of self-styled moderates who won a majority on the party’s publicly elected central committee last spring. Rank-and-file voters want to see “results, not renaming schools,” she said.

“It’s the only really new, original thing happening on the left,” said Noah Smith, a center-left economics blogger cited as one of the movement’s intellectual leaders. Democrats, he said, should embrace abundance as a counterargument to President Trump’s zero-sum vision of restricted trade and immigration.

In her short-lived 2024 campaign, Harris’s promise to build 3 million new homes in America was the best-testing of her proposals, according to both her campaign and Trump’s. A “Yimbys for Harris” Zoom fundraiser drew 30,000 participants and raised more than $130,000.

To be sure, “Abundance” has enemies on the left, who have attacked the book in many essays, podcasts and book reviews. Critics argue the authors are blind to—or stooges of—the corporate power that is the true culprit for the problems the book lays out. Abundance, Aaron Regunberg and David Sirota argued recently in Rolling Stone, “encourages Democrats to focus on the wrong solutions, and elevates deregulatory narratives already being weaponized by the right.”

But Abundance proponents say making government more effective and limiting corporate power aren’t mutually exclusive. They argue that their platform is a route to the hearts of working-class voters, who may not follow politics closely but believe that rents are too high and progress too slow. They also hope it can help Democrats win back young voters by explicitly renouncing the prior generation’s failures.

Labor Department says staffing shortages reduced its ability to conduct its massive monthly survey

The CBO’s analysis of the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill” is that it will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade because the $1.2 trillion in spending cuts in the measure do not fully offset the $3.7 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Republicans have met this CBO score with attacks on the CBO, but its estimate is in keeping with those of a wide range of economists and think tanks.

Just how these policies are affecting Americans is no longer clear, though. Matt Grossman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that economists no longer trust the accuracy of the government’s inflation data. Officials from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles a huge monthly survey of employment and costs, told economists that staffing shortages and a hiring freeze have forced them to cut back on their research and use less precise methods for figuring out price changes. Grossman reports that the bureau has also cut back on the number of places where it collects data and that the administration has gotten rid of committees of external experts that worked to improve government statistics.

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Labor Department says staffing shortages reduced its ability to conduct its massive monthly survey


Some economists question U.S. inflation data accuracy due to staffing shortages affecting survey precision.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics used less precise methods for guessing price changes in April’s inflation report due to hiring freeze.

Data issues could significantly affect economy, influencing Social Security benefits, bonds and Federal Reserve decisions.

Some economists are beginning to question the accuracy of recent U.S. inflation data after the federal government said staffing shortages hampered its ability to conduct a massive monthly survey.


The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the office that publishes the inflation rate, told outside economists this week that a hiring freeze at the agency was forcing the survey to cut back on the number of businesses where it checks prices. In last month’s inflation report, which examined prices in April, government statisticians had to use a less precise method for guessing price changes more extensively than they did in the past.

Economists say the staffing shortage raises questions about the quality of recent and coming inflation reports. There is no sign of an intentional effort to publish false or misleading statistics. But any problems with the data could have major implications for the economy.

The inflation rate determines how much Social Security benefits go up each year, and where federal tax brackets are set. Private-sector contracts such as wage agreements between companies and unions routinely reference the inflation rate. Payments on $2 trillion of inflation-protected federal bonds hinge on the inflation rate, as do yields on standard Treasury bonds. Businesses, investors and policymakers rely on the reading to guide their decisions. The Federal Reserve is laser-focused on inflation data when it sets interest rates for the country.

A handful of economists noticed quirks in the April data published May 13. When some asked the BLS for more information, government officials sent back an excerpt of an internal report.

“The CPI temporarily reduced the number of outlets and quotes it attempted to collect due to a staffing shortage in certain CPI cities,” beginning in April, the email read. “These procedures will be kept in place until the hiring freeze is lifted, and additional staff can be hired and trained.”

The Trump administration issued a hiring freeze on Jan. 20 for federal employees, and the Department of Government Efficiency, previously led by Elon Musk, cut thousands of federal workers through layoffs and buyouts. It couldn’t be determined if BLS employees were subject to those cuts.

The quality of U.S. economic statistics has been the envy of global policymakers for decades. The system is the product of concerted efforts that began in the depths of the Great Depression to better understand how the economy works.

For years, advocates have warned that government funding for economic statistics has been falling short. Concerns about data quality grew this year after the Trump administration disbanded committees of external experts convened to help improve government stats.

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Just hours after President Donald J. Trump posted on social media yesterday that “[b]ecause of Tariffs, our Economy is BOOMING!” a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said the opposite. Founded in 1961, the OECD is a forum in which 38 market-based democracies cooperate to promote sustainable economic growth.

The OECD’s economic outlook reports that economic growth around the globe is slowing because of Trump’s trade war. It projects global growth slowing from 3.3% in 2024 to 2.9% in 2025 and 2026. That economic slowdown is concentrated primarily in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and China.

The OECD predicts that growth in the United States will decline from 2.8% in 2024 to 1.6% in 2025 and 1.5% in 2026.

Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged

The attack demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to use relatively cheap drones to take out expensive aircraft and to strike sites far from its borders.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that Sunday’s drone strikes, known as Operation Spider Web, had “seriously weakened” Russia’s military operations.Credit...Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

By Helene CooperJulian E. BarnesEric SchmittLara Jakes and Adam Entous
June 2, 2025

In launching an audacious drone attack on airfields and warplanes deep inside Russia, Ukraine is continuing to change the way wars will be conducted in the 21st century, according to U.S. officials and military analysts.

American and European security officials said battle damage assessments were still coming in from the attacks, which took place Sunday, but they estimated that as many as 20 Russian strategic aircraft may have been destroyed or severely damaged, dealing a serious blow to Russian’s long-range strike capabilities.

Officials said Russia’s losses included six Tu-95 and four TU-22M long-range strategic bombers, as well as A-50 warplanes, which are used to detect air defenses and guided missiles.

The attack, known as Operation Spider’s Web, hurt Moscow’s prized strategic capabilities. But just as significantly, it demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to strike nearly anywhere in Russia, and to destroy warplanes costing $100 million or more with drones with price tags as low as $600, according to one U.S. defense official.
Russian Tu-95 long-range strategic bombers, shown during a military parade rehearsal in Moscow in 2018, were among the warplanes destroyed by Ukraine’s attack.Credit...Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

U.S. officials said that Ukraine did not give the Trump administration advance notice that forces with Ukraine’s Security Service, or S.B.U., were planning the attack, which targeted several air bases inside Russia, including one in Siberia.

In carrying out the strikes, Ukraine deployed agents far from its borders. For instance, the distance from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to Belaya Air Base, one of the targets, is more than 3,000 miles. The drones were smuggled into Russia and packed inside wooden transport containers that had remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto trucks, the S.B.U. said in a statement.

One U.S. defense official compared the Ukrainian move to the Israeli operation last year that targeted the pagers of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that the drone strikes had “seriously weakened” Russia’s military operations.

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“‘Spiderweb’ showed what modern war really looks like and why it’s so important to stay ahead with technology,” he wrote on social media.

American Antisemitism

In Boulder, Colo. Michael Ciaglo for The New York Times

By Jonathan Weisman
I’m an editor based in Chicago and the author of a book about being Jewish in the age of Trump.

Three times in as many months, people who claim to fight for Palestinian rights have attacked Jews on American soil.

Sunday’s Molotov cocktail assault in Boulder followed the killing in May of two young Israeli embassy aides in Washington, D.C., and the April firebombing of the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg, Pa., where Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family were celebrating Passover.

This is what a resurgence of violent antisemitism looks like.

The attacks were also acts of anti-Zionism — a clear response to the war in Gaza. There is a useful distinction between the clear bigotry of Jew hatred and the political and historical debate over Zionism — the support for a Jewish state. But, partly in response to the Oct. 7 war, the categories are collapsing. Salvos against Israel are colliding with longstanding prejudice, sometimes with deadly effect.

Today’s newsletter is about that collision.
The collapse

It is a moment of despair for advocates for Palestinian rights. Many are desperate: More than 50,000 have died in Gaza, and much of the territory has been razed.

The Trump administration appears to believe any defense of Palestinian lives is evidence of Jew hatred. (As my colleague Tyler Pager put it last night, the president has lots to say about antisemitism and little to say about Jews.) It has used pro-Palestinian speech as a pretext for assaults on higher education, science funding, foreign students and immigrants.

But attacks on Jews for the actions of an Israeli government a world away are collective punishment, and collective punishment is bigotry. This was not even a question when Muslims in America were attacked as retribution for the murderous actions of Al Qaeda on 9/11.

What resistance, though, is permissible? For a story I wrote last year about when garden-variety criticism of Israel spills into antisemitism, I had fraught conversations with non-Jews and Jews, many of whom have felt frightened since Oct. 7, 2023. On campus and at protests, they hear the slogan “Globalize the Intifada,” for instance. Intifada is the Arabic word for “uprising,” and the term used to describe the often violent Palestinian resistance movements of the early 2000s and late 1980s.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, which for a century has been patrolling the dark worlds of bigotry, told me “there is no debate”: In his view, opposition to a Jewish State in the land of Jewish ancestry is antisemitism.

A protest against Benjamin Netanyahu outside the U.S. Capitol last year. Eric Lee/The New York Times

But there is debate. Zionism has always been a political idea, debated fiercely by Jews from the start. Increasingly, young Jews on the left say they are skeptical. Are they antisemites?

That debate aside, the violent antisemitism of the right, which manifested six and a half years ago in the slaughter at a Pittsburgh synagogue, has now been joined by antisemitic violence on the left. In 2018, while I was on tour to promote my book about being Jewish in America, a woman in Orlando who identified herself as a “threat analyst” told me I was right to focus on the antisemitism of the right. Bigots on that end of the political spectrum were armed and already killing people.

But, she said, I had given the antisemitism of the left short shrift, isolating it largely to Europe, in distinct pockets where Islamic extremism was thriving along with anti-Israel sentiment. Such antisemites were on the periphery of the “threat matrix” in the United States, she allowed, but they were moving to the center.

Many acts of extremism since then — including the attacks this year — show they have now arrived.

The Colorado attack

Officials said the attack injured 12 people. At least two remained hospitalized yesterday.

Federal officials charged Soliman with a hate crime. They said he had planned for a year.

Visa overstays like Soliman’s are common: More than 40 percent of the undocumented immigrants in the U.S. arrived with a visa and then stayed unlawfully, according to one estimate.

The man accused of Sunday’s assault is Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian immigrant who arrived on a tourist visa before applying for asylum. Most likely, the Trump administration will supercharge its search for would-be terrorists among those carrying the cause of Palestinian rights, especially among the foreign-born. Yesterday, Trump called the attack “yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”

Trump’s focus on antisemitism is also not without merit. American Jews watch attacks like those in recent months with alarm — and say they no longer feel safe in a nation where they have found freedom and acceptance for centuries.

At the same time, antisemitic incidents and civil debate over Israel’s conduct in Gaza can be two different things. Anti-Zionist arguments are not, as some Jewish civil rights groups have argued, inherently bigoted positions promoted only by supporters of Hamas. Sometimes, that’s just politics.

The Knicks Just Fired Their Best Coach in Decades. Are They Back to Being the Knicks?

PHOTO: DYLAN BUELL/GETTY IMAGES

After a noisy revival season, Tom Thibodeau is out as New York’s coach. Is it a sign the team is close to a title—or a reversion to the old, baffling management style?

By Jason Gay
Following
June 3, 2025 5:19 pm ET


Tom Thibodeau has been sacked as head coach of the New York Knicks following a season in which he led this comically forlorn franchise to the edge of the NBA Finals for the first time in a quarter-century.

I used to feel happiness for whomever got fired as a Knicks coach—finally, they are free from this cave! Fly away! This time, it’s hard not to feel bad for Thibs, a grinding lifer who transformed one of the most thankless jobs in sports.


You can look at the team’s decision a couple of ways. I’ll do the optimistic rendering, naturally followed by the irritated, pessimistic one.

This Shows the Knicks are Serious. An optimist may choose to see Thibodeau’s ouster as a signal that New York’s front office believes the team is close to a championship, and only a few key changes are needed to get them over the hump. Under this theory, relieving Thibodeau—a former head coach in Chicago and Minnesota who was hired by the Knicks for the 2020-21 campaign—is a painful but necessary move.

It’s painful because Thibodeau was undeniably successful: He built the Knicks into an overachieving unit that finished in third place in the Eastern Conference, and knocked off both Detroit and defending champion Boston in the playoffs. He wrung the best out of imperfect lineups and gave the freedom to Jalen Brunson to become a generational New York superstar. He carved Josh Hart and OG Anunoby into warriors. Thibodeau also coached Karl-Anthony Towns for 18 playoff games without opening a bottle of bourbon on the sideline.
Knicks guard Jalen Brunson blossomed into a generational New York star under the coaching of Tom Thibodeau. PHOTO: MARY ALTAFFER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thibodeau isn’t for everyone. He’s a no-nonsense obsessive who always looks like he can’t find his rental car. He isn’t going to get a job hosting the “Today” show, although I would totally watch that. Instead he gave the Knicks an identity to match their city: tough, resilient, hard to kill. His team, Brunson especially, is beloved. Thibs’s resistance to change could be maddening, but Madison Square Garden rocked in a way it hadn’t since the Ewing/Starks days.

As for why his firing is necessary…well, the Knicks must feel they are ready to go up a level, and didn’t think Thibodeau was the guy to get them to take the leap. Maybe they’ve been ready to do it for a while, and then this playoff run made the optics weird.

Much has been said about Thibodeau’s stubbornness about using rookies and bench players, which led to him milking a ton of minutes from his starters. This led to injury worries, plus some frustrating moments in the playoffs, especially when Thibodeau needed to dust off his bench versus the frantic Indiana Pacers.

Moving on from Thibodeau signals a change in approach, which presumably means utilizing the bench more and keeping the team fresher into May and June.
New York Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau talks with players during Game 2 of the Eastern Conference finals. PHOTO: ADAM HUNGER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

But still! They just won 51 regular-season games and went deeper in the playoffs than any Knicks team in eons! They reached the postseason in four of Thibodeau’s five seasons! Do you realize how sad this team was not long ago? Do you remember the soul-crushed atmosphere in the Garden, the easy punchlines about ownership and ineptitude? Do you think Kylie Jenner was going out on a date to watch THAT? Absolutely not.

Under Thibs, New York found hope again. Do you see how old those Clyde Frazier and Earl Monroe championship banners are in the rafters? They’re old enough to still be reading a sports column in a newspaper.

Which leads to this natural but nagging worry:

This Shows the Knicks are Still the Knicks. This is the fear: that maybe the Knicks maxed it out this season, shocked a Boston team that didn’t take them seriously, and might not be as close to a title as they appear. The Celtics aren’t looking like a huge threat as long as injured Jayson Tatum is out, but Indiana’s clearly arrived, the Cavs should be solid, Detroit’s rising, and Orlando might be ready to get serious. (I’m choosing to completely ignore the Western Conference and the loaded Oklahoma City Thunder, which might fire Indiana into the sun when the Finals begin on Thursday.)

Maybe the Knicks are being irrational here, dismissing a coach who knew how to win basketball games, and will now do what irrational teams do, which is to find a shiny new replacement who will struggle to match the prior coach’s success. The Knicks have historically craved big names, and you can expect some to surface soon. Whoever’s hired will say the right things, and hit the right notes, but it doesn’t mean anything until next year, when you find out if they can find a way to stop Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam.

Here’s the panic: Maybe this spring was as good as it got. Maybe the Knicks are heading backward, moving fast and breaking up a good thing. There will be intense pressure on who comes next—not just as coach, but to supplement Brunson, Towns and the overworked starters. There will be agony if it doesn’t work.

New York City, a hard-to-please town, got used to losing a lot of basketball games. Tom Thibodeau taught it how to win again.

 

In Jabaliya, Gaza.  Saher Alghorra for The New York Times A food crisis By Lauren Jackson I’m an editor on The Morning. Israel’s decision to change how food is distributed in Gaza hasn’t just been disruptive — it has been deadly. Last week, the military empowered private, mostly American contractors to deliver aid. They began getting food to some Gazans after an Israeli blockade stopped supplies for nearly three months. The war has decimated farmland that once grew wheat and olives, and without crops or food shipments, Gaza has become the “hungriest place on Earth,” according to the U.N. As the first cardboard boxes of food arrived, people sprinted, scaled barriers and joined surging crowds to get them. And Israeli troops stationed near the aid sites have repeatedly opened fire. Nearly 50 people have been killed and dozens wounded, according to Red Cross officials. All of the new sites suspended operations today, and Gazans are desperate for food and water. Below, I explain what is happening and why. A new program For most of the war, experienced groups like the United Nations have distributed aid. It has been contentious. Aid groups say their work has been unsafe and constrained: Israel has targeted aid convoys and facilities that it erroneously determined to be a threat and repeatedly blocked deliveries. At the same time, Israel said some aid workers had ties to Hamas. And it claimed that Hamas had diverted many of the supplies. (That couldn’t be verified by The Times, and the U.N. said it was exaggerated.) So last week, Israel implemented a new system. It transferred the responsibility to a private group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which pays American contractors to deliver food. Israel conceived of the plan and said the process would be “neutral” and “independent,” but the group’s leader said he didn’t think that was possible, so he resigned. A chaotic rollout In southern Gaza.  Abdel Kareem Hana/Associated Press The group began operating last week after Israel lifted an 80-day blockade on aid deliveries. The contractors were quickly overwhelmed. Hungry Palestinians have walked for miles and gathered before dawn at the distribution sites. The crowds have panicked and shoved in the dark for a chance to get one of the limited cardboard boxes of food. Israeli soldiers stationed near the sites have repeatedly opened fire. The circumstances are contested, but the Red Cross reported that at least 27 people were killed yesterday morning and at least 21 people were killed in a shooting on Sunday. In response to one shooting, the military said the troops had fired near “a few” people who it said had strayed from the designated route to a food site and who did not respond to warning shots. The statement said these people had “posed a threat” to soldiers, though a military spokeswoman declined to explain the nature of the threat. Israel has blocked international correspondents from reporting on the ground in Gaza, and Hamas restricts what journalists can report on within the territory. Given the conflicting accounts, “it’s hard to say with certainty how these incidents have unraveled,” Patrick Kingsley, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, told me. “Our interviews left us with the impression that those sudden surges have alarmed Israeli soldiers, prompting them to open fire.” Abdulrahman Odeh, 21, said he saw several bodies carted away after the shooting, but was eventually able to get a carton of aid. “There’s no system or order to receive it,” he said. “It’s survival of the fittest.” Others weren’t able to get a box: “We go, we see dead and injured people in front of us, and we leave empty-handed,” Rasha al-Nahal, a displaced Palestinian, said. “The only thing we get from going is humiliation.” The context Hussein Hajjaj, 6, suffers from severe malnutrition. Saher Alghorra for The New York Times The chaos has several causes: Widespread hunger: Israel’s recent blockade left all of Gaza on the brink of famine, according to the U.N. “There’s enormous desperation and need,” my colleague Aaron Boxerman, a reporter in Jerusalem, said. “Finding enough food and clean water is often a daily struggle for many Gazans.” People have dug holes to get unsanitary water and ground animal feed into makeshift flour to survive. (These photos show how emaciated many children have become.) Scarcity: There are few places to get food. The new program has announced only four distribution points; the previous, U.N.-coordinated system had 400. It’s rare that all four sites are open, and there isn’t enough food for everyone. Military strategy: Israel says the new system is needed to stop Hamas stealing, stockpiling and selling food, all of which could help the group, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization, sustain its power. The U.N. claims Israel may have another goal — displacing people from northern Gaza by concentrating aid sites in the south. The response The shootings come at a particularly bad time for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Even Israel’s allies have condemned its approach to delivering food. Britain, Canada and France also denounced his plans to expand the war as “disproportionate” and “egregious.” “The bloodshed heightens international scrutiny on Prime Minister Netanyahu at a time when he faces growing foreign demands, including from President Trump, to reach a truce with Hamas,” Patrick said. “The bigger the global outcry, the greater pressure he will face to compromise in the cease-fire negotiations.” For more: “People were stepping on dead bodies”: See a video of witnesses recounting yesterday’s shooting.