Business
AP Accuses White House of Violating First Amendment
The Associated Press on Wednesday accused the White House of violating the First Amendment and called on the Trump administration to stop blocking its reporters from press events.
Julie Pace, the executive editor of The A.P., said in a letter addressed to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, that the White House had blocked A.P. journalists from attending two press events with President Trump on Tuesday: an executive order signing in the Oval Office and an evening press event in the Diplomatic Room.
Ms. Pace said that the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, had earlier informed an A.P. reporter that the news organization’s access to the Oval Office would be restricted if the news organization did not start using the term “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump ordered U.S. authorities to make the change to official maps in an executive order.
“The actions taken by the White House were plainly intended to punish The A.P. for the content of its speech,” Ms. Pace wrote in the letter. “It is among the most basic tenets of the First Amendment that the government cannot retaliate against the public or the press for what they say. This is viewpoint discrimination based on a news organization’s editorial choices and a clear violation of the First Amendment.”
Ms. Pace said The A.P. was prepared to “vigorously defend its constitutional rights.”
The A.P. had issued editorial guidance on the geographical name change, explaining that it would continue calling the body of water the Gulf of Mexico because Mr. Trump’s executive order only carried authority within the U.S. and had not been recognized by Mexico. The outlet did, however, say it would refer to Denali, the peak in Alaska, as Mt. McKinley, a change Mr. Trump declared in the same order.
At the White House briefing room podium on Wednesday, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, talked about the administration’s commitment to the First Amendment while maintaining that the administration was within its rights to single out The A.P.
“It is a privilege to cover this White House,” she said, calling her own role a privilege, too. “Nobody has a right to go into the Oval Office and ask the president of the United States questions.”
She added that other reporters with credentials were not part of the press pool and said, “We reserve the right to decide who gets to go into the Oval Office.”
Asked if the standard was being set for how news outlets would be dealt with if they did not use “Gulf of America,” she did not directly answer but said she’d been clear “that if we feel there are lies being pushed by outlets in this room, we are going to hold those lies accountable.” She maintained that “Gulf of America” was the name for the body of water and said she did not understand why some news outlets were not using it.
Later on Wednesday, another A.P. reporter was blocked from an Oval Office event, this time the swearing in of Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence, according to an A.P. spokesman. Ms. Pace, the executive editor, added in a statement that the outlet was “deeply concerned that the White House continues to prevent AP reporters from doing their job covering the president.”
First Amendment supporters and freedom of the press groups objected strongly to the Trump administration’s moves on Tuesday. Timothy Richardson, the journalism and disinformation program director at PEN America, a free-expression nonprofit, called the actions “retribution, plain and simple, and a shameful attempt to bully the press into ideological compliance.”
The White House Correspondents’ Association president, Eugene Daniels, said in a statement on Tuesday that the White House “cannot dictate how news organizations report the news, nor should it penalize working journalists because it is unhappy with their editors’ decisions.”
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The New York Times, said in a statement on Wednesday: “We stand by The Associated Press in objecting to governmental retribution for editorial decisions that the government disagrees with.”
California added 28,700 payroll jobs in March, lowering its unemployment rate to 5.3% despite a series of high-profile layoffs that have rocked the tech sector.
The gains were driven by nearly 28,000 jobs in the health services and private education sectors, according to figures released Friday by the state’s Employment Development Department.
However, the growth was inflated by the return of thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers who had been on strike in California and Hawaii. But jobs were added in long-term care, in home healthcare and at practitioners’ offices too.
“As we’ve seen throughout the post-pandemic period, healthcare was the big gainer among sectors,” said Michael Bernick, a former director of the state jobs agency.
Health services and private education has gained 160,400 workers since March 2025, according to the EDD.
Recording small gains too were the government, construction and financial sectors, though employment was lower than a year ago.
The job growth since February helped push the state’s unemployment rate down from 5.4% in January and February. Last year, it topped out at 5.6% and it was last at 5.3% in May 2025.
The state jobs picture still lags behind the nation, which recorded a 4.3% unemployment rate in March, when employers added 178,000 jobs.
However, California no longer has the highest state unemployment rate in the nation. It is now surpassed by Delaware at 5.4%. The rate drop was not all good news, though.
Total civilian employment — which includes agricultural workers and the self employed — fell by 39,600 jobs. That was exceeded by a decline of 56,700 workers in the labor force, driving down the unemployment rate.
Bernick said the decline in the labor force could reflect workers moving to other states and the federal crackdown on undocumented workers.
In California, major tech firms have laid off thousands of workers over the last few years. Just this month, Facebook owner Meta; L.A.’s Snap, operator of Snapchat; and corporate database behemoth Oracle announced more.
Hollywood studios also have been laying off thousands of workers amid a wave of consolidation and a slowdown in streaming film production. Disney is expected to lay off as many as 1,000 workers in the coming weeks.
Bernick said that while the layoffs have attracted widespread attention, they account for only a fraction of California’s large economy.
In December, 1.3% percent of workers were laid off in California, a number that has grown since July 2022 when it was 0.6%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
However, the latest figure is in line with rates over the last 25 years, with the exception of the recession in June 2009 and the pandemic in May 2020 when it was markedly higher, the data show.
Helping prop up the state’s economy is the massive investment in AI taking place in Silicon Valley — even as companies cite it as a reason for their layoffs — and the resurgent defense and aerospace sectors in Southern California.
The donor-advised fund affiliated with Charles Schwab, DAFgiving360, has suspended account holders’ ability to give money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group.
Last week, the Justice Department indicted the group and accused it of financial crimes. This week, the donor-advised funds that bear Fidelity’s and Vanguard’s names also cut the group off.
A spokeswoman for the Schwab-affiliated fund said, “If a governing body of a charity declares an investigation into a charity it oversees, DAFgiving360 may suspend grants to the organization.” She would not provide a list of other organizations that it has suspended.
Donor-advised funds allow individuals to create accounts, donate cash or securities into them and take a tax deduction for the full amount that year. Then they can parcel out donations to charities and other nonprofits over many years.
“Giving to your favorite charity has never been easier” is the language that DAFgiving360 uses on its website. Charles Schwab lists the account balance right next to investment account balances on its own website.
DAFgiving360 is also careful, however, to use specific language that gets to the legal reality of how the funds work. Users can “recommend” grants to “eligible” charities, for example, which means DAFgiving360 controls the money and the account holder is technically just advising.
This is almost never a practical issue for account holders; donor-advised funds generally rubber-stamp donation requests. But in the wake of the criminal indictment, which accused the S.P.L.C. of paying informants money that contributed to the extremism that it opposes, President Trump said he believed that the S.P.L.C. was behind the racist Charlottesville, Va., riots in 2017.
Mr. Trump did not provide evidence for his allegations against the center. And many Fidelity and Vanguard customers are furious about the move against the S.P.L.C.
DAFgiving360 customers are expressing similar sentiments. “This is too safe a position, and they shouldn’t have done it,” Jani Rachelson, a retired labor lawyer in New Jersey who was unable to donate to the S.P.L.C., said of Schwab’s action. “Compliance in advance is the scourge of our life these days.
DAFgiving360 said in its statement that it applies its policies consistently across all charitable organizations, regardless of political viewpoint or orientation. In the past, a Schwab predecessor charitable-fund entity stopped granting money to National Rifle Association-affiliated charities when an active investigation was underway. The N.R.A. does appear in DAFgiving360 search results now for people making grant requests.
Prudent trustees with decision-making authority do consider indictments of charities before approving donations to them.
At Merrill Lynch, however, the donor-advised fund operation relies on the Internal Revenue Service for guidance. Since the agency hasn’t revoked S.P.L.C.’s nonprofit status, Merrill Lynch’s donor-advised funds are allowing donations to go through for now.
Meanwhile, Fidelity’s, Schwab’s and Vanguard’s actions raise complicated questions.
“Why not other charities that have also been attacked by the administration, including many major universities,” said Roger Colinvaux, a nonprofit law expert and professor at Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, via email. “The incident thus raises questions of how DAF sponsors draw the line and whether they are succumbing to political pressure or advancing their mission.”
In March, the Justice Department filed a civil lawsuit against Harvard University, accusing it of civil rights violations and saying it “tolerated antisemitic mobs of students.” As of Friday morning, the “recommend a grant” page of the DAFgiving360 website returned many options from a “Harvard University” search.
Eight technology companies, including Google, Nvidia and SpaceX, have struck deals with the Pentagon to help the U.S. military gain an edge on the battlefield.
“These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare,” the Department of Defense said Friday.
The companies will deploy their AI technology on the department’s “classified networks” for “lawful operational use,” according to the agency.
OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Oracle and AI startup Reflection are among the companies that agreed to work with the Pentagon.
The agreements underscore how tech companies are expanding their work with the U.S. military even as some workers raise concerns about the use of AI for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Anthropic, the San Francisco company behind the chatbot Claude, clashed with the Pentagon earlier this year over whether there were adequate safeguards around the military’s use of its technology.
The Department of Defense accused Anthropic of trying to “seize veto power” over military decisions, though the company pushed back against that characterization. The agency labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk, and the Trump administration directed federal agencies to stop using the company’s tools, setting off a legal battle over that designation.
This week, hundreds of Google employees urged its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, to reject the use of its AI systems for classified workloads to ensure that its technology isn’t used in “inhumane or extremely harmful ways.” Harmful use may occur without their knowledge since the work is classified, workers said in the letter.
Google, Reflection and SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Department of Defense didn’t say how much each company was being paid. A Pentagon official said some of the companies have active contracts while others have made agreements but formal contract are forthcoming.
In an interview with CNBC, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, said the department wanted to diversify the companies it worked with following its dispute with Anthropic.
“Guardrails are something that are negotiable based on what they are with all the companies, and they have different views on that,” he told CNBC. The guardrails also have to be consistent with the government’s values and restrictions, he added.
A source familiar with Nvidia’s Pentagon deal said the agreement involves work with its “Nemotron” AI models, which are used to build AI agents that can complete tasks, not its chips. The deal includes language that the use of the models will be consistent with civil liberties, constitutional rights and applicable law, the source said.
OpenAI said the deal announced by the Department of Defense refers to the agreement they struck with the agency earlier this year.
The company said that it wanted “the people defending the United States to have the best tools.”
OpenAI, which faced backlash for striking a deal with the Pentagon after the Anthropic fallout, said in March that its technology wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance, high-stakes automated decisions or to direct autonomous weapons.
Other tech companies, such as Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services, have also said they want to support the military and ensure they have access to the best AI tools.
“We look forward to continuing to support the Department of War’s modernization efforts, building AI solutions that help them accomplish their critical missions,” Amazon Web Services spokesperson Tim Barrett said in a statement.
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