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President Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff announcements sent stock markets plunging. On this week’s On the Media, how to make sense of the ever-changing news about the economy. Plus, the policy behind the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ rhetoric.

Amid the aid freeze, FEWS NET has no funding to pay staff in Washington or those working on the ground. The website is down. And its treasure trove of data that underpinned global analysis on food security – used by researchers around the world – has been pulled offline.

Let us all—wherever and whenever—live on what the world’s timekeepers call Universal Time, or UTC (though “Earth time” might be less presumptuous). When it’s noon in Greenwich, England, let it be 12:00 everywhere. No more resetting the clocks. No more wondering what time it is in Peoria or Petropavlovsk. No more befuddled headaches crossing the International Dateline from Tuesday back into Monday.

Other data have also sounded alarms on the economy. Jobless claims were up last week as cuts by DOGE rippled through the labor market, pending home sales hit a record low, and consumer confidence indicators sank on rising fears of tariff-fueled inflation.

Even as Donald Trump has made his fealty to Putin clear, even as his Director of National Intelligence parrots Russian disinformation (protected now by the FBI), Elon Musk has been vacuuming up all the data of all the government. And every claim that he’s been modernizing networks or searching for fraud have fallen apart.

“TASS was not on the approved list of media for today’s pool,” a White House official told CNN in a statement. “As soon as it came to the attention of press office staff that he was in the Oval, he was escorted out by the Press Secretary.”

The billionaire wrote on his social media platform X that 18F and TTS had been “deleted” weeks ago, re-posting another account that called the 18F a “far left government computer office” and pointed to its work on the  IRS’ free tax filing system, Direct File.

The Trump administration has publicly and privately signaled that it does not believe Russia represents a cyber threat against US national security or critical infrastructure, marking a radical departure from longstanding intelligence assessments.

The cuts, which are said to affect between 560 and 1,830 workers at the agency, were planned for at least a week, contingent upon the confirmation of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees the agency. NOAA reported a permanent workforce of 11,758 in fiscal 2023, meaning the cuts could affect more than 10 percent of employees. One source who asked to speak on background told The Hill the firings began Thursday and will continue Friday.

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday that the Trump administration would start handpicking which media outlets were allowed to participate in the presidential pool, the small, rotating group of journalists who relay the president’s day-to-day activities to the public.

“It should be done through layoffs rather than individual, performance-based firings," she said. "The government has processes to do, and we would have 60 days to look for a new job and, most importantly, acknowledgment that these terminations weren't our fault. Private companies have to do that, too.