MONEY

Mother Jones - Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency—an advisory commission led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—isn’t really serious about eliminating government waste and inefficiency. If it were, for example, DOGE would be scouring the Pentagon budget. Instead, the DOGE Bros want to eliminate things like Pell grants, Head Start, veterans’ medical benefits, and the National Institutes of Health—all terrible ideas. Why? Pell grants and Head Start are among our most effective antipoverty programs, and the NIH funds most basic biomedical research, which produces the cutting-edge drugs, procedures, and (yes!) vaccines that have saved millions of Americans from gruesome deaths. 

Robert Reich -  These 5 big corporations:

-General Electric
-General Motors
-Meta
-Tesla
-T-Mobile

…had a combined $70 billion in profits last year.  Yet they paid an effective average tax rate of just 6.9%. Meanwhile, the typical American family pays a tax rate of 13.6%.

NPR -  Two separate judges blocked the $24.6 billion merger deal for Kroger and Albertsons yesterday. One of the cases was brought by federal regulators while the other was presented by the Washington state attorney general. It would have been the biggest grocery merger in U.S. history. Now, after two years of delays, its fate is unknown...

The state judge ruled the merger violated state consumer protection law and the federal case blocked the merger nationwide. Government lawyers argued the merger would leave shoppers worse off. Kroger and Albertsons made the case that the merger was a matter of survival and that their biggest rivals are not conventional supermarkets but giants like Walmart and Costco.

AP - Albertsons is giving up on its merger with Kroger a day after it was rejected in two courts and it is suing the grocery chain, saying it didn’t do enough to secure regulatory approval of the $24.6 billion agreement.