In a freewheeling press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club, President-elect Donald Trump said Monday he would consider pardoning embattled New York Mayor Eric Adams, declared the country was “not going to lose” the polio vaccine, and weighed in on the flurry of drone sightings over New Jersey.
Holding court with reporters for the first time since he won the election and secured a second term, Trump called on the Biden administration to stop selling off unused portions of a southern border wall, threatening legal action.
“We’re going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on building the same wall we already have,” he railed. “It’s almost a criminal act.”
Trump’s performance Monday underscored how he had already forced his return to the center of the national political conversation weeks before he was set to return to the Oval Office. The session was notably less combative than some of the more heated exchanges he held with reporters during the campaign. Trump, looking relaxed at the lectern, joked with those he recognized and talked about how much easier the transition has been than after his first election.
“The first time everybody was fighting me,” he said. “This time everyone wants to be my friend.”
That included the threat of a lawsuit against famed Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, whose final survey before the election badly underestimated Trump’s support in the state, which he won.
“In my opinion, it was fraud and election interference,” Trump claimed of the survey. Selzer, who declined to comment, announced that she would retire her polling operation last month but said she had decided to before the election.
ABC News announced over the weekend that had it agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit he had filed over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping a writer.
Continuing his threats of legal action, Trump railed Monday against the Biden administration over the border wall material sales, saying he has spoken to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other Texas officials about a potential restraining order.
Congress last year required the Biden administration to dispose of the unused border wall pieces. The measure, included in the massive National Defense Authorization Act, allows for the sale or donation of the items to states on the southern border, providing they are used to refurbish existing barriers, not install new ones. Congress also directed the Pentagon to account for storage costs for the border wall material while it has gone unused.
“I’m asking today, Joe Biden, to please stop selling the wall,” Trump said.
The Department of Defense, however, said that further sales can’t be blocked because all the excess border wall material has already been distributed. Most were provided to other federal agencies and state governments, as required by defense legislation signed on Dec. 22, 2023. The rest was sold to GovPlanet, which buys and auctions off government surplus.
While Trump described the handover between Biden and his incoming team as “a friendly transition,” he also took issue with efforts to allow some members of the federal workforce to continue working from home. Trump said that if government workers don’t come back into the office under him, they will be dismissed.
Trump also weighed in on Adams, who is facing federal fraud and corruption charges. Asked whether he would consider pardoning Adams, Trump said, “Yeah I would.”
“I think that he was treated pretty unfairly,” Trump said, while at the same time acknowledging he doesn’t “know the facts.”
Adams has been accused of accepting flight upgrades and other luxury travel perks valued at $100,000 along with illegal campaign contributions from a Turkish official and other foreign nationals looking to buy his influence. He has pleaded not guilty. Multiple members of his administration have also come under investigation.
Adams, who insists he did nothing wrong, told reporters Monday that his attorney was “going to look at every avenue to ensure I get justice.”
Trump was pressed repeatedly on the future of vaccines, amid concerns over his decision to choose the anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which regulates the shots.
Trump again declined to dismiss the long-debunked theory that vaccines cause autism and said Kennedy would be examining that already well-studied question.
But he also assured the public that one of the most successful vaccines would not be barred by his administration.
“You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine,” he said, calling himself “a big believer in it.”
“That’s not going to happen,” he said.
Outgoing Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who had polio as a child, had said Friday that Trump’s nominees seeking Senate confirmation should “steer clear” of efforts to discredit the polio vaccine, calling them not just uninformed, but “dangerous.”
Trump also weighed in on the mysterious drone sightings over parts of New Jersey and the eastern U.S. that have sparked speculation and concern over where they are coming from.
Taking a conspiratorial tone, Trump insisted, without offering evidence, that, “the government knows what is happening.”
“Our military knows and our president knows and for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense,” he said, refusing to say whether he had been briefed on the sightings.
White House spokesperson John Kirby said later Monday that there is no indication that the drones pose a public safety or national security threat and that he would say so if that weren’t the case. While he acknowledged frustrations, he stressed that there are more 1than million legal drones in the country.
“Having closely examined the data,” he said, “we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and even stars that were mistakenly reported as drones.”
Trump has spent the weeks since his victory building out his incoming administration and speaking with what he said were well over 100-word leaders.
But he again played coy on whether that list included Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“I’m not going to comment on the Putin question,” he said.
When it comes to escalating tensions in the Middle East, Trump said he would consider pulling U.S. troops out of Syria after the country’s ousted leader, Bashar Assad, was overthrown by rebels.
“I don’t think that I want to have our soldiers killed,” Trump said of the 900 men and women who were placed there to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State group.
In addition to meetings with foreign leaders, Trump also talked about a recent dinner with Apple CEO Tim Cook as well as the heads of major pharmaceutical companies, which Kennedy joined. The outreach, he said, made this transition feel markedly different from 2016 when his win shocked the Washington establishment.
Trump was joined at the appearance by SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son, who announced that the Japanese company is planning to invest $100 billion in U.S. projects over the next four years.
It was a win for Trump, who has used the weeks since the election to promote his policies, negotiate with foreign leaders , and try to strike deals.
In a post on his Truth Social site last week, Trump said that anyone making a $1 billion investment in the United States “will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.”
“GET READY TO ROCK!!!” he wrote.
Trump has repeatedly boasted that he has done more in his short transition period than his predecessor did in all four years.
“There’s a whole light over the entire world,” he said Monday. “There’s a light shining over the world.”
At least two internal Amazon studies found a link between how quickly the online retailer’s warehouse workers perform tasks and workplace injuries, but the company rejected many safety recommendations out of concern the proposed changes might reduce productivity, according to a U.S. Senate committee report.
The 160-page review issued Sunday night was compiled by the Democratic majority staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. The report is the final product of a probe into Amazon’s warehouse safety practices that U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders initiated last year.
The Vermont Independent, a frequent critic of Amazon who chairs the panel, released an interim report in July that featured some findings from the investigation. The final report, which was mostly based on interviews with nearly 500 former and current Amazon workers, included more details, such as the two internal studies and the reactions they received inside the company.
Amazon pushed back on the findings Monday, saying in a blog post that Sanders “continues to mislead the American public” about the company’s safety practices and that the report was “wrong on the facts and features selective, outdated information that lacks context and isn’t grounded in reality.”
The Senate report said Amazon launched an internal study in 2021 to determine the maximum number of times a warehouse worker could perform the same physical tasks without increased risk of harm and potentially developing musculoskeletal disorders.
The team conducting the Amazon study, known as Project Elderwand, focused on workers who picked items from robotic shelf units. The study concluded that the “likelihood of back injury increases” along with the number of items picked and identified an upper limit on repetitive movements - 1,940 - per 10-hour shift, the report said.
The study recommended using software to implement breaks “according to each worker’s rate.” It suggested expanding an existing Amazon program that recommended “microbreaks” and making them mandatory for employees who worked above the maximum pace.
The team stated that the success of a mini-pilot program to test out its idea would be conditional on “any negative impact to the (workers) or customer experience,” according to documents cited in the committee report.
Ultimately, Amazon did not make changes to reduce repetitive worker movements, the report said. The company told the Senate committee it chose not to do so due to “technical reasons” involving the proposed software program, the report said.
Amazon also said in its blog post that the Project Elderwand pilot program showed the study team’s suggested intervention was “ineffective.”
Amazon previously had undertaken another study, known as Project Soteria, in 2020 to identify risk factors for injuries and recommend policy changes that would improve worker safety. The multi-team initiative studied two policies Amazon implemented temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic - giving workers more time off and pausing disciplinary measures “for workers who failed to meet speed requirements,” the report said.
The study found that both policies lowered injury risks and asked for their permanent adoption.
But company leaders denied the request, saying it might “negatively impact” productivity, according to Amazon documents cited in the Senate committee report. Amazon leaders also changed the focus of the Project Soteria study by telling the people conducting the review to provide recommendations on how to improve productivity without worsening worker injuries, the report said.
Amazon disputed the report’s characterization of the events.
“Project Soteria is an example of this type of team evaluation, where one team explored whether there’s a causal link between pace of work and injuries and another team evaluated the methodology and findings and determined they weren’t valid,” Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a written statement.
Nantel also said that information about Project Soteria was raised in a Washington state worker safety case in which Amazon was accused of four safety violations. A judge assigned to the case ruled in Amazon’s favor in July. Regulators are appealing the ruling.
“Unfortunately, the senator chose to ignore the facts and all of this context,” Nantel said.
The Senate committee report also alleged that Amazon manipulates its workplace injury data to portray its warehouses as safer than they are, an allegation the company disputed.
Amazon said it produced “thousands of pages of information and data” for the committee. The majority of staff, however, said the company failed to produce documents on the connection between the pace of work and injuries.
The authors of the committee report said they learned about the two internal studies from the Washington worker safety case, not Amazon. Once the committee staff members identified the studies by name, they reached out to the company, which ultimately provided the individual documents.
In January 2023, and continuing throughout the spring, rain swelled many of California’s reservoirs and creeks, engulfing homes and businesses and killing 21 people. One federal estimate says it cost the state nearly $5 billion.
Now, nearly two years later, it’s Alexis Ramirez’s job to help pick up the pieces, clearing debris from a damaged park. For him, and hundreds of others across the state, the disaster isn’t just about loss — it’s also an opportunity for temporary work. But these cleanup jobs are precarious and difficult, often requiring physical, back-breaking labor in remote areas under extreme conditions. Some government agencies struggle to manage these workers because of administrative hurdles, shifts in the weather that complicate disaster relief, and delays in the grant awards that make this cleanup possible, according to a CalMatters analysis of eight federal grants and interviews with agencies across the state.
Ramirez is part of one federal program, known as the National Dislocated Worker Grants, that has pumped over $210 million into California since 2015 to provide temporary, disaster-relief jobs to low-income and unemployed workers. The money came from 12 grants, each one in response to drought, floods, wildfires, or the COVID-19 pandemic.
Of these disaster-relief grants, the state failed to use about 20% of the money that was available, according to a CalMatters analysis of public records. That’s partly because of “bureaucratic hoops,” such as delays in receiving grant money, said Michael Cross, executive director of the Northern Rural Training and Employment Consortium. He said his 11-county program in Northern California has sometimes had to delay or “stop work” on relief projects related to the wildfires and floods because the money was slow to arrive.
Around the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ramirez said he got sick and was unable to find steady work that could support himself and his 4-year-old daughter. “I was really in need of a job.” Now, he said he’s making about $21 an hour, almost twice what he made picking blueberries and grapes before the pandemic. But his current job, which began in September, ends in the next few weeks, and he said he has yet to find other work.
Temporary work provides a new start
California’s Central Valley saw some of the worst flooding during the 2023 winter storms, and small agricultural towns were hard hit. In Tulare County, a local river overflowed its banks in March 2023, washing over homes, roads, and parks near the town of Porterville, population 62,000.
Two months later the county received money to hire temporary relief workers, but it was too early, said Priscilla Gonzales-Gray, a career services coordinator with the Tulare County Workforce Investment Board. The initial proposal was to clear debris from Porterville’s waterways, but by the time the money had arrived, winter snowmelt had filled the sloughs with fast-running, deep water. “It was not a safe working environment for employees,” said Gonzales-Gray.
The county decided to send workers to a Porterville park instead, which had flooded around the same time as the waterway, leaving a playground completely submerged.
It was September 2023 before the waters had receded enough to allow workers to begin clearing out the park. Since work began, Gonzales-Gray said the county has hired 23 people, including Ramirez, all for temporary jobs.
Ramirez said he arrives at the park at 6 a.m. and works until 2:30 p.m., four days a week, using hand-tools like shovels and rakes to gather broken branches, tree trunks, and rocks. “It’s not a ton of hours,” he said in Spanish, “but it’s helping me start over.”
The program’s insurance doesn’t allow workers like Ramirez to use power tools, said Gonzales-Gray, so the county puts workers on a team with the parks department, which is authorized to use wood-chippers and chainsaws. “That does make the work go a little slower,” she said. “However, it does provide longer opportunities for these temporary employments.”
The park is scheduled to open in January, and the county is preparing to hire a new round of temporary workers to repair another park. By the time both parks are complete and open to the public, Gonzales-Gray said the county will have hired about 60 workers from a roughly $1.5 million grant.
Why Merced left money on the table
Like Porterville, the town of Planada in Merced County revolves around agriculture and most residents are Latino. Many are undocumented.
In January 2023, floods tore through the town, and Anastacio Rosales, who has lived in Planada for 60 years, was one of many residents whose homes were destroyed. “I have lost all of my most valuable possessions, including family photos and precious keepsakes from my parents,” he wrote in an Op-Ed to CalMatters a few months after the storm. “Sadly, the same can be said for many of my neighbors.”
One study by the University of California, Merced found that more than 80% of Planada’s roughly 4,000 residents suffered financial losses as a result of the storms, such as missed work or property damage.
Erick Serrato, Merced County’s director of workforce investment, said the county won’t claim most of the federal money available for temporary disaster relief jobs. Initially, the county workforce agency planned to hire workers to assist in the town’s reconstruction, such as repairing its community center. But once money arrived in Merced County in May 2023 — five months after the initial flooding — waters had receded and others had already repaired the parks that temporary workers were supposed to fix, Serrato said. “When you have to wait five months to receive the support you need right in the aftermath, it makes it difficult to put those resources to work.”
The grant money also comes with restrictions, Serrato said. Temporary workers can’t repair private property, such as homes or businesses; they can only work on public lands, such as parks or waterways. The repairs can only return public lands to their prior conditions — workers can’t make any improvements that weren’t there before the flood.
Instead of repairing parks or waterways, which Serrato said were in good condition by May, the workforce board repurposed some of the federal grant money to hire workers to perform other services, such as helping homeowners navigate the state’s reimbursement process. This spring, for instance, the state gave the town of Planada $20 million to support recovery, including reimbursements for homeowners and businesses. That money remains largely unspent due to the county’s planning process and state rules requiring residents to verify their damages.
Rosales acknowledged that the community center is functional again but in a recent interview, he said that other public lands still need repairs. “Around the creeks and canals, they haven’t cleaned them up like they’re supposed to.”
He said debris is gathering in the storm drains and waterways once again, and if another storm comes, they could flood.
Moving money around
Following floods in 2017 and dangerous, deadly wildfires in 2018, California’s workforce agencies spent over $80 million in federal funds to hire temporary workers to clean debris. In both cases, the state used more than 90% of the money it was allocated. But after wildfires in 2020 and 2021, the state left around $20 million — about 55% — in federal funds unclaimed.
If California doesn’t use all of the money, then the federal government reallocates it to other places that need it, said Monica Vereen, a spokesperson for the US Department of Labor, which provides these disaster relief grants to states. She said it’s common for states not to claim all of the money, but that every dollar ultimately gets used.
Greg Lawson, a spokesperson for California’s Employment Development Department, said there are various reasons why federal money goes unclaimed. “The cleanup may not take as much time as initially estimated, the impact on jobs in the area may not end up as big, or people may be able to return to their jobs more quickly,” he said.
“These funds weren’t as critical to us as maybe other parts of the state,” Serrato said about the workforce money that Merced County never claimed.
Of the federal workforce grant, the county ultimately spent $165,000 — about 16%. Because the state awards the dollars in installments, Merced never had to return any money; it just never asked for the remaining cash.
The U.S. Census Bureau is changing how it counts immigrants in annual estimates by including more people who were admitted for humanitarian, and often temporary, reasons.
The change is being made to better reflect population shifts this decade, officials said Monday. Population estimates, including immigration, are due to be released Thursday showing how the populations of the United States and the 50 states changed this year. However, the new approach to counting immigrants will only be reflected nationally.
The percentage of U.S. residents who were foreign-born rose to its highest level in more than a century in 2023. It could be even higher under the new methodology. Census Bureau officials wouldn’t say Monday how much larger they expected the immigration figures to be in Thursday’s release because of the change.
Capturing the number of new immigrants is the most difficult part of the annual U.S. population estimates. Although the newly announced change in methodology is unrelated, the timing comes a month before the return to the White House of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations of people in the United States illegally.
“We feel confident that this was a good approach to make our estimates more current and reflect recent trends that we’ve seen,” said Eric Jensen, a senior research scientist at the Census Bureau.
The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated that 1.1 million immigrants entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate was 3.3 million people.
The group of people being included in the international migration estimates are those who enter the country through humanitarian parole, which has been granted for seven decades by Republican and Democratic presidential administrations to people unable to use standard immigration routes because of time pressure or their government’s poor relations with the U.S. The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based research organization, said last week that more than 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.
Trump appears certain to dismantle humanitarian parole, saying during his campaign that he would end the “outrageous abuse of parole.” The annual population estimates released by the Census Bureau are calculated from births, deaths, migration to the United States, and migration between states. The population estimates provide the official yearly population counts between the once-a-decade census for the United States, the 50 states, counties, and metro areas. The figures are used for distributing trillions of dollars in federal funding.
US President-elect Donald Trump has announced that Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank Group will invest $100 billion to boost the economy and create at least 100,000 jobs.
Trump made the announcement at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate on Monday. He was joined by SoftBank CEO Son Masayoshi.
Trump said, "This historic investment is a monumental demonstration of confidence in America's future, and it will help ensure that artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and other industries of tomorrow are built, created,d and grown right here in the USA."
The $100 billion figure is double the amount SoftBank pledged to invest during Trump's first term.
Son said: "President Trump is a double-down president. I'm going to have to double down $100 billion and 100,000 jobs. This is, you know, my confidence level." He added that his trust in the US economy has "tremendously increased" since the election.
Son spoke exclusively with NHK after holding his joint news conference with Trump.
He said the two had breakfast on Sunday morning and spent about seven hours together until late afternoon.
Son expressed confidence about the viability of the 100-billion-dollar investment, saying the SoftBank Group has hundreds of billions of dollars in assets plus various means to procure funds.
Son said: "We will carry out various AI-related investments, including data centers for AI. We already have many group firms, but will likely add more or strengthen existing ones."
He added that since the generative AI sector is rapidly growing, he is optimistic that Trump's positive efforts to promote artificial intelligence will become even more active.
The SoftBank Group CEO also stressed the significance of announcing the investment plan proactively.
He said: "Trump is likely to receive many other proposals from various firms. By acting first with speed, we can broaden our reach into various businesses and partnerships. It's better to make decisions quickly."