Colleges nationwide are scrambling to prepare for a potentially disastrous funding gap—but many aren’t totally sure when or where it will hit them. Harvard, an Ivy League university with the world’s largest endowment, is one of several top schools to announce hiring freezes as they wait for the Trump administration to clarify federal funding cuts.

Public and private schools across the US—like the University of Washington, North Carolina State, Cornell, Emory, and Notre Dame—have issued hiring freezes, with others like Northwestern introducing preemptive cost-cutting measures. Some schools have decreased the number of grad students they are accepting or even rescinded offers to PhD candidates.

The funding cuts are coming via a number of avenues to push schools into aligning with the administration’s priorities:

• The Department of Agriculture suspended funding to the University of Maine yesterday because the school refused to ban trans athletes from women’s sports.
• Last week, the administration revoked $400 million in federal funding to Columbia over claims of antisemitism during this summer’s campus protests.
• In February, the Department of Education threatened schools with funding cuts if they didn’t eliminate DEI programs.
• Endowments aren’t off the hook: Congress has proposed bills to raise the current ~1.4% tax rate on university endowments to 10%–20%.

The sciences are in jeopardy

The White House also scrapped $800 million in grants to Johns Hopkins University, the nation’s biggest spender on research and development. University officials and local business owners warn that the funding cuts will affect not only the projects they work on, but also the entire economy of Baltimore, where the university is the largest private employer.

Big picture: The administration laid off 50% of the Education Department’s staff on Tuesday, which Secretary Linda McMahon confirmed was the first step in eradicating the department. A full closure would likely be met with legal challenges.—MM

EU and Canada announce retaliatory tariffs on the US. In response to President Trump’s additional tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, the European Union and Canada said they would impose tens of billions of dollars’ worth of levies on the US. Starting April 1, the EU will slap tariffs on $28 billion of US goods, including whiskey and motorcycles. A second set of levies is scheduled to hit poultry, soybeans, and other goods in mid-April. Canada, meanwhile, announced 25% reciprocal tariffs on steel products and raised rates on tools, computers, sports equipment, and more. Canadian Prime Minister-designate Mark Carney warned after his election that tariffs would remain “until the Americans show us respect.”

The measles outbreak is expanding. Two people have died and more than 200 have gotten sick—many of them unvaccinated children—in Texas and New Mexico following an outbreak of measles in rural Gaines County, TX. Twelve other states have reported isolated cases, the New York Times reported. The CDC said the outbreak “continues to expand rapidly” and emphasized the importance of MMR vaccinations. The two deaths are the first linked to measles in almost a decade and come as the response of new health secretary and longtime vaccine skeptic, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is under scrutiny.

The Roomba’s days could be numbered. iRobot, the maker of the popular autonomous vacuum cleaner, told investors yesterday that it could cease to operate in the next 12 months if it doesn’t find a buyer. Amazon planned to acquire the company for $1.7 billion in 2022, but the deal collapsed amid regulatory pressure. Since then, its CEO has stepped down and it’s laid off more than half of its workforce as competition from Chinese manufacturers dims the path back to profitability. iRobot’s stock was shellacked ~36% on the news.—AE

China’s government gave Walmart the corporate equivalent of a “come to the principal’s office” after the retailer asked local suppliers for discounts to offset President Trump’s tariffs. Chinese Commerce Ministry officials grilled Walmart executives on the issue in person this week, the government-backed social media account Yuyuantantian reported yesterday.

Walmart’s pickle

The made-in-China emporium is particularly vulnerable to the 10% duty on Chinese imports levied last month by Trump, who later raised it to 20%:

• Walmart pushed its Chinese suppliers to discount products like kitchenware and clothes by as much as 10% per tariff round, Bloomberg reported.
• But most wholesalers reportedly aren’t budging due to their margins already being paper-thin.

Yuyuantantian said that Walmart risks disrupting global supply chains and breaching contracts by trying to shift the burden of tariffs onto its Chinese partners. More ominously, it warned the company that it might face consequences beyond merely getting chewed out by officials.

This puts Walmart between two fires: the profit-squeezing US tariffs and the potential ire of a country that is both a source of cheap inventory and a growing market. Walmart’s China revenue rose by 28% YOY last quarter.

China is already targeting American brands. It recently placed Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger owner PVH on a list of companies that can be hit with sanctions, and banned biotech company Illumina from doing business within its borders.—SK

Acquisition, I choose you: Niantic, the studio responsible for your summer 2016 Eevee hunts, announced yesterday that it’s pivoting to AI and selling its games division to Scopely, a mobile developer owned by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund that’s helping the oil-rich country expand its global reach in gaming.

As part of the deal:

• Scopely will pay Niantic $3.5 billion to absorb Pokémon Go and the rest of Niantic’s mobile games operations, which generated more than $1 billion in 2024, Scopely said.
• Niantic will keep the geospatial tech behind Pokémon Go’s augmented reality and spin it off as an AI mapping company called Niantic Spatial. The venture doubles down on Niantic’s longtime goal of creating a 3D world model with users’ visual data.
• Niantic Spatial will get a $200 million investment from Niantic and $50 million from Scopely.

It’s not clear what will happen to the location data of Pokémon Go’s 20 million weekly active users, 404 Media reported.

Evolving: Pokémon Go joins other IP-based moneymakers like Monopoly Go! in Scopely’s Rolodex. Scopely is a US-based company known for “aggressive monetization,” per Polygon. It was purchased for $4.9 billion in 2023 by Savvy Games Group, a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) that dominates 40% of the global esports market.—ML

President Trump and Elon Musk turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom this week, parading a fleet of vehicles for reporters and livestream viewers to boost the company’s struggling stock price. After climbing into a Model S, Trump marveled at the car’s tech, saying in a now-viral clip, “Everything’s computer.”

Grammatical blunder aside, Trump wasn’t wrong—everything really is computer in cars nowadays. Smart tech has taken over the auto industry, the Wall Street Journal reported, and drivers aren’t thrilled. The share of drivers who have “positive feelings” about the intuitiveness of their car’s controls dropped from 79% in 2015 to 56% last year, per a recent survey. Even doors are becoming a nuisance: EV owners reported door handle difficulties ~15x more often last year than in 2020, according to J.D. Power.—AE