Washington
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos stays silent as employees brace for cuts
While Washington Post employees remain in the dark about an impending round of cuts that could dramatically reshape the publication, the man that many hoped could soften or stop the blow, owner Jeff Bezos, has remained silent.
So far, three staff-organized letters sent by Post employees to Bezos imploring him to protect the Post’s robust coverage have gone unanswered.
The first plea went to Bezos on 25 January, when about 60 people signed a letter asking him to protect the company’s foreign news operation, which is rumored to be a major target of cost-cutting.
Two days later, employees sent Bezos a letter asking him to preserve the newspaper’s local coverage, which is also said to be at risk for heavy cuts.
“Should you allow Post management to lay off the local staff, which has been cut in half in the last five years, the effect on this region and the people in it will be immeasurable,” the staffers wrote. “We care deeply about the DC area, and we know you do, too.”
At the end of last week, the publication’s White House reporters sent a letter to Bezos urging him to avoid cutting coverage areas central to its readership. Post staffers have also filmed and posted videos on social media urging Bezos to “#savethepost”.
While Post chief executive Will Lewis has been included on at least one of the emails, the letters have been addressed to Bezos, who some staffers hope might be more persuadable. (Matt Murray, the Post’s top editor, has had private discussions with several Post journalists in recent weeks, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.)
“As the Post’s [owner], Bezos is ultimately making the call on these cuts,” said a Post staffer who signed one of the letters but was not authorized to comment. “He also has enough money to do whatever he chooses here. Reporters across the newsroom want to be sure he understands the magnitude of the devastating cuts that we all expect are coming.”
Emails sent by the Guardian to Bezos and a representative at the company he founded, Amazon, have not been returned. A Post spokesperson declined to comment on the rumored cuts.
The Post staffer described the mood at the paper as “funereal”, with many expecting the cuts to come in the next few days – though the publication still has not acknowledged or confirmed that anything is happening. A rally to protest the cuts has been scheduled for outside the Post’s headquarters on Thursday.
On Monday, the union representing most Post employees called out Bezos in a series of posts on Twitter/X. “If @JeffBezos follows through with his reported plan to decimate the Post’s newsroom, it will be a huge indictment of his supposed business prowess,” the account wrote. “How else to explain his failure to monetize some of the world’s most award-winning, agenda-setting journalism?”
Some Post staffers also noted that Bezos has not yet commented on the 14 January raid of a Post reporter’s home, even though many groups that advocate for journalists decried the government’s tactics as unprecedented and dangerous. Cameron Barr, a former managing editor of the Post, called out Bezos for his silence in a post on LinkedIn, writing: “It’s not just the chest-thumping overreach of the Trump administration that will crush American freedoms – it’s the silence of its enablers.”
Amazon and Bezos have also faced criticism for spending approximately $75m to acquire and promote a documentary about Melania Trump – particularly after Bezos faced accusations of cozying up to Trump by killing the Post’s planned endorsement last fall of Kamala Harris for president.
Glenn Kessler, who ended a 27-year-long career at the Post last year, expressed cautious optimism about the campaign to reach Bezos. “That kind of pushback might have an impact,” he said. “We don’t really know until we see what the actual result is.”
Kessler said he and a few other reporters had lunch with Bezos, who purchased the paper in 2013, after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election. “He wanted to hear war stories and that sort of thing,” he recalled. “He was quite interested in what people did. He had this great laugh, and he seemed quite engaged.”
But Kessler was heavily critical of Bezos’s handling of the Harris endorsement and his decision to refocus the section’s opinion page to prioritize writing “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”, decisions that led to the resignation of a top editor and quickly cost the Post hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
“Even before these cuts, you can question the quality of Bezos’s stewardship,” Kessler said. “The sense I get is that he’s not nearly as engaged with the Post as he once was. If you’re not really that engaged or invested in the thing that you own, the easiest thing to do is to cut back the money you’re losing on it.”
“I think it’s hard to overestimate how excited the journalists and editors were when Bezos bought the company,” recalled political journalist Chris Cillizza, who worked at the Post from 2006 to 2017. “The richest man in the world buys the company and he says all the right things. I think people were slower to see that something had changed because they wanted to believe so badly that the original sense we had of Bezos was it.”
Cillizza remembered being skeptical when Bezos said he intended the Post to be profitable. “I remember thinking to myself even then, in 2013: ‘Man, that’s going to be tough.’”
While Bezos has stayed silent about potential cuts to the Post, and ignored an effort by the union last year to get him to visit the newspaper, he was more visibly engaged with one of his other companies on Monday, the spaceflight startup Blue Origin.
Bezos was on hand to meet secretary of defense Pete Hegseth, who last November called the Post’s reporting “fake news”, during a visit to the company’s facility in Florida. “Great to see you,” Bezos told Hegseth. “Welcome – it’s an honor to have you.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), “on behalf of the Department of Education (ED),” on Monday released a Notice Inviting Grant Applications for the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program. Applications are due by May 29.
Last November, ED announced that it had entered into an interagency agreement with HHS to administer the CCAMPIS program. This is the first CCAMPIS competition conducted under this arrangement.
Approximately $73.5 million will go to institutions of higher education that awarded at least $250,000 in Pell grants to enrolled students in FY 2025. HHS will award about 148 grants, ranging from $150,000 to $1 million.
The terms of the grant competition are not significantly different than prior competitions. As before, there are two absolute grant priorities that every application must address – leveraging non-federal resources and utilizing a sliding-fee scale for low-income parents.
This year’s competition includes only one invitational priority that reflects the Trump administration’s general educational policy. The new priority, entitled “Expanding Education Choice in Early Learning Settings,” encourages applications that “expand access to education choice … including by empowering parents in choosing the early learning setting that best meets their family’s needs.” Flexible childcare programs that include drop-in care and care during nontraditional hours are also encouraged.
One other notable difference from prior competitions is an expanded “Terms and Conditions” section that not only requires compliance with applicable civil rights laws, but also refers to Trump administration Executive Orders and guidance on racial discrimination that clarify “the application of federal antidiscrimination laws to programs or initiatives that may involve discriminatory practices, including those labeled as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (“DEI”) programs.” This includes any “discriminatory equity ideology [as defined in Executive Order 14190] in violation of a federal antidiscrimination law.”
The exact scope of these terms is unclear because courts have not found many of the practices described in these Executive Orders and guidance documents to be violations of federal law.
The Newsfeed
This week, the team brings you stories about how communities including Filipino immigrants, Sephardic Jews and Somalis arrived in the Pacific Northwest
Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
Group hopes to boost recognition for Seattle’s Filipinotown
By Venice Buhain
The group Filipinotown Seattle hopes to make sure that the legacy of Filipino Americans in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District isn’t forgotten.
One of the group’s current projects is pushing for a Filipinotown placemarking sign in the CID.
“Filipino Americans have had a presence here for over 100 years in Seattle,” said Filipinotown Seattle Executive Director Devin Israel Cabanilla.
He said that the signage is important to remind people that “the International District is not just Chinatown. Japantown. Filipinotown is here as well.”
The group held a poll on what signage might look like and where it might be located. It would be similar to the Chinatown sign on South Jackson Street and Fifth Avenue South, or the Wing Luke Museum
In the early 20th century, the area now known as the CID was a hub full of businesses, entertainment, social groups and housing that served Seattle’s growing immigrant population from Asia and elsewhere. The communities all intermingled throughout the CID.
“This area was a central place for Asian Pacific immigrants simply because of segregation,” Cabanilla said.
Because the Philippines was a U.S. territory from 1898 to 1946, Filipino immigrants were unaffected by laws in the 1920s that restricted immigration from Japan or China. Many Filipinos came to study at the University of Washington or to work in burgeoning industries, like lumber, farming, canneries and factories.
While the physical Filipino presence in terms of buildings and storefronts in the CID dwindled in the later 20th century with redevelopment, Seattle Filipinos and Filipino Americans continued to make impacts locally, regionally and nationally.
“It may not have been in terms of storefronts, but our presence has always existed in terms of politics, culture as well,” Cabanilla said.
The Seattle Department of Transportation said it is aware that the group is working on its signage request, but the Department of Neighborhoods has not yet received a formal request. They are also working to develop a clearer process for this and other similar neighborhood signage proposals.
Filipinotown Seattle said it hopes that the sign helps remind Seattle of the CID’s unique designation as a neighborhood shaped by many immigrants and migrants to Seattle.
“Is it Chinatown? Is it Japantown? Is it Little Saigon? It’s all those things. And I think re cultivating that this is a multicultural district, Filipinotown is helping establish: Yes, it’s more than one thing,” Cabanilla said.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
Venice Buhain is a multimedia journalist at Cascade PBS. She previously was the Cascade PBS’s associate news editor and education reporter. Venice has also worked for KING 5, The Seattle Globalist and TVW News.
The state of Washington is getting a seventh temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The Marysville Washington Temple was announced Sunday night during a devotional in the Marysville Washington Stake by Elder Hugo E. Martinez, a General Authority Seventy in the church’s United States West Area Presidency.
“We are pleased to announce the construction of a temple in Marysville, Washington,” the First Presidency said in a statement. “The specific location and timing of the construction will be announced later. This is a reason for all of us to rejoice and express gratitude for such a significant blessing — one that will allow more frequent access to the ordinances, covenants and power that can only be found in the house of the Lord.”
The other temples in Washington are the Columbia River, Moses Lake, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma and Vancouver temples.
The church has 214 temples in operation. Plans for another 170 temples have been announced; many of those temples are in various stages of planning and construction.
Sunday’s temple announcement follows the new practice of the church’s First Presidency, which determines where temples will be built — and when and how they will be announced.
The First Presidency directed a General Authority Seventy to announce the first temple in Maine at a fireside there in December.
In January, church President Dallin H. Oaks said the Maine announcement set the pattern for future temple announcements.
“The best place to announce a temple is in that temple district,” he told the Deseret News.
The First Presidency will continue to decide where future temples will be built. It then will “assign someone else to make the announcement in the place where the temple will be built,” he said.
This pattern came to him as a strong impression after he assumed leadership of the church in October, following the death of his friend, President Russell M. Nelson.
This came as a strong impression to him shortly after he assumed the leadership of the church, President Oaks said.
The church remains in the midst of an aggressive temple-building era. President Nelson announced 200 new temples from 2018 to 2025. All but one were announced at general conference.
Five dozen temples are now under construction.
President Oaks now has overseen the announcement of two temples, neither at a general conference.
At the October conference he said that “with the large number of temples now in the very earliest phases of planning and construction, it is appropriate that we slow down the announcement of new temples.”
Ten new temples are scheduled to be dedicated in the next six months.
- May 3: Davao Philippines Temple.
- May 3: Lindon Utah Temple.
- May 31: Bacolod Philippines Temple.
- June 7: Yorba Linda California Temple.
- June 7: Willamette Valley Oregon Temple.
- Aug. 16: Belo Horizonte Brazil Temple.
- Aug. 16: Cleveland Ohio Temple.
- Aug. 30: Phnom Penh Cambodia Temple.
- Oct. 11: Miraflores Guatemala City Guatemala Temple.
- Oct. 18: Managua Nicaragua Temple.
Two-thirds of the 170 temples still to be built are outside the United States.
Temples are distinct from the meetinghouses where Latter-day Saints worship Jesus Christ each Sunday. Temples are closed on Sundays, but they open during the week as sanctuaries where church members go to find peace, make covenants with God and perform proxy ordinances for deceased relatives.
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