Questioned by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill about the low staffing numbers, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has brushed off concerns, testifying in May that slightly less than half of permanent NPS employees work on the ground in the parks, while other staff work at regional offices or at DC headquarters.
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“I want more people in the parks,” Burgum said. “I want less overhead. There’s an opportunity to have more people working in our parks … and have less people working for the National Park Service.”
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But internal NPS data tells a different story, Brengel said, showing that around 80% of National Park Service staff work in the parks. And regional offices play an important supporting staff role, with scientists on staff to help maintain fragile parks ecosystems, as well as specialists who monitor geohazard safety issues like landslides.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska recently pressed Burgum to provide a full list of staff positions that have been cut at the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service since the Trump administration took over. The Interior Department has not provided the list, a Senate staffer said.
The regional offices within the park service are on edge, waiting to see how courts rule on a Trump administration reduction in force plan they fear could gut their ranks, a National Park Service employee in a Western state told CNN.

“If they greenlight the RIF plan, then it’s going to be a bloodbath,” the employee said.

In addition to probationary workers that were fired in February, early retirements are also culling the agency’s ranks, and the continued $1 spending limit on federal workers’ credit cards is making it extremely difficult to do field work in the parks, with a simple overnight trip needing to be requested 10 days in advance, the employee added.

The lack of superintendents and NPS supervisors creates more of a headache, they added.

“These times, when it’s all about fighting for scarce resources, you really need those upper-level people with clout working the system,” the employee said.

Hall, the retired NPS regional director, said losing rangers, maintenance professionals and park superintendents could profoundly alter American landmarks.

“What you’ve lost with all this attrition – you’ve lost all this knowledge that’s going to take years to build back up,” Hall said.

‘Hire back park staff’: Visitors feel the pinch of Trump’s layoffs at National Park Service
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The visitors who trek to America’s national parks are already noticing the changes, just months after President Donald Trump took office.

“I’ve been visiting national parks for 30 years and never has the presence of rangers been so absent,” one visitor to Zion National Park wrote in National Park Service public feedback obtained by CNN.

The visitor said they saw just one trail crew at the iconic Utah park. There were no educational programs offered at any of the five parks they visited on their trip.
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“Hire back park staff. We need them,” the visitor wrote.

At Yosemite, another visitor said there were no rangers at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir entrance station, preventing visitors from picking up wilderness permits.

“More staff would be a BIG and IMPORTANT improvement,” that visitor wrote.
America’s most treasured national parks are getting crunched by Trump’s government-shrinking layoffs just as the summer travel season gets into full swing.
Top officials vowed to hire thousands of seasonal employees to pick up the slack after the Trump administration fired around 1,000 NPS employees as part of wide-ranging federal firings known as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Department of Interior officials said in a February memo they would aim to hire 7,700 seasonal workers at NPS, and post listings for 9,000 jobs.

But those numbers haven’t materialized ahead July 4th — the parks’ busiest time of the year. Internal National Park Service data provided to CNN by the National Parks Conservation Association shows that about 4,500 seasonal and temporary staff have been hired.

The latest Barbie slays in a chic blue polka-dot crop top, ruffled miniskirt, chunky heels and an insulin pump. She is the brand’s first doll with type 1 diabetes.
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Dollmaker Mattel worked with Breakthrough T1D, formerly known the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, to design the doll, which aims to represent the roughly 304,000 kids and teens living with type 1 diabetes in the United States.
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The doll launched Tuesday at the Breakthrough T1D Children’s Congress, a three-day event in Washington that brings in kids and teens living with the condition to meet with lawmakers. This year, they’re asking Congress to renew funding for the Special Diabetes Program, which was first allocated by Congress in 1997. The program’s current funding ends after September.

The advocacy efforts have taken on new urgency this year. With so many deep cuts to federally funded projects in recent months, Breakthrough T1D said it’s anxiously watching to see if this funding will be reupped.

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease, meaning the body mistakenly attacks its own organs and tissues. In this case, rough antibodies go after cells in the pancreas that make insulin, an essential hormone that helps the body turn food into energy. As a result, the body doesn’t make enough of its own insulin, so people have to take insulin by injection or though a pump to survive.

Type 1 diabetes is typically diagnosed in childhood but can be diagnosed in anyone at any age. It differs from type 2 diabetes, in which people are still able to make insulin but their cells stop responding to it.

In addition to the insulin pump that attaches to the new Barbie’s waist, the chestnut-haired beauty has a continuous glucose monitor on her arm – a button held on by a strip of heart-shaped Barbie-pink tape. Her cell phone displays an app that shows her glucose readings. She also has a light blue purse to hold her supplies and snacks to help her manage her blood sugar throughout the day. It matches her shoes, of course.

Santa Fe, New Mexico
AP — At least three people were missing in a mountain village in southern New Mexico that is a popular summer retreat after monsoon rains triggered flash flooding Tuesday that was so intense an entire house was swept downstream.
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Emergency crews carried out at least 85 swift water rescues in the Ruidoso area, including of people who were trapped in their homes and cars, said Danielle Silva of the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

No deaths were immediately reported, but Silva said the extent of the destruction wouldn’t be known until the water recedes.
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“We knew that we were going to have floods … and this one hit us harder than what we were expecting,” Ruidoso Mayor Lynn D. Crawford said during a radio address Tuesday night.

Crawford said that some people were taken to the hospital, although the exact number was not immediately clear. He encouraged residents to call an emergency line if their loved ones or neighbors were missing.
The floods came just days after flash floods in Texas killed over 100 people and left more than 160 people missing.

In New Mexico, officials urged residents to seek higher ground Tuesday afternoon as the waters of the Rio Ruidoso rose nearly 19 feet in a matter of minutes amid heavy rainfall. The National Weather Service issued flood warnings in the area, which was stripped of vegetation by recent wildfires.

A weather service flood gauge and companion video camera showed churning waters of the Rio Ruidoso surge over the river’s banks into surrounding forest. Streets and bridges were closed in response.

Kaitlyn Carpenter, an artist in Ruidoso, was riding her motorcycle through town Tuesday afternoon when the storm started to pick up, and she sought shelter at the riverside Downshift Brewing Company with about 50 other people. She started to film debris rushing down the Rio Ruidoso when she spotted a house float by with a familiar turquoise door. It belonged to the family of one of her best friends.

Her friend’s family was not in the house and is safe, she said.

“I’ve been in that house and have memories in that house, so seeing it come down the river was just pretty heartbreaking,” Carpenter said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

There were also reports of dead horses near the town’s horse racing track, the mayor said.

Two National Guard rescue teams and several local teams already were in the area when the flooding began, Silva said, and more Guard teams were expected.

The area has been especially vulnerable to flooding since the summer of 2024, when the South Fork and Salt fires raced across tinder-dry forest and destroyed an estimated 1,400 homes and structures. Residents were forced to flee a wall of flames, only to grapple with intense flooding later that summer.

“We know that the water levels seemed to be higher than they were last summer,” Silva said. “It is a significant amount of water flowing throughout, some of it in new areas that didn’t flood last year.”
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Matt DeMaria, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said storms formed in the early afternoon over terrain that was scorched last year by wildfire. The burn scar was unable to absorb a lot of the rain, as water quickly ran downhill into the river.

Preliminary measurements show the Rio Ruidoso crested at more than 20 feet — a record high if confirmed — and was receding Tuesday evening.

Three shelters opened in the Ruidoso area for people who could not return home.
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The sight brought back painful memories for Carpenter, whose art studio was swept away during a flood last year. Outside, the air smelled of gasoline, and loud crashes could be heard as the river knocked down trees in its path.

“It’s pretty terrifying,” she said.

Cory State, who works at the Downshift Brewing Company, welcomed in dozens of residents as the river surged and hail pelted the windows. The house floating by was “just one of the many devastating things about today,” he said.

‘Hire back park staff’: Visitors feel the pinch of Trump’s layoffs at National Park Service
tripskan
The visitors who trek to America’s national parks are already noticing the changes, just months after President Donald Trump took office.

“I’ve been visiting national parks for 30 years and never has the presence of rangers been so absent,” one visitor to Zion National Park wrote in National Park Service public feedback obtained by CNN.

The visitor said they saw just one trail crew at the iconic Utah park. There were no educational programs offered at any of the five parks they visited on their trip.
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“Hire back park staff. We need them,” the visitor wrote.

At Yosemite, another visitor said there were no rangers at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir entrance station, preventing visitors from picking up wilderness permits.

“More staff would be a BIG and IMPORTANT improvement,” that visitor wrote.
America’s most treasured national parks are getting crunched by Trump’s government-shrinking layoffs just as the summer travel season gets into full swing.
Top officials vowed to hire thousands of seasonal employees to pick up the slack after the Trump administration fired around 1,000 NPS employees as part of wide-ranging federal firings known as the “Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Department of Interior officials said in a February memo they would aim to hire 7,700 seasonal workers at NPS, and post listings for 9,000 jobs.

But those numbers haven’t materialized ahead July 4th — the parks’ busiest time of the year. Internal National Park Service data provided to CNN by the National Parks Conservation Association shows that about 4,500 seasonal and temporary staff have been hired.

Santa Fe, New Mexico
AP — At least three people were missing in a mountain village in southern New Mexico that is a popular summer retreat after monsoon rains triggered flash flooding Tuesday that was so intense an entire house was swept downstream.
трипскан вход
Emergency crews carried out at least 85 swift water rescues in the Ruidoso area, including of people who were trapped in their homes and cars, said Danielle Silva of the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

No deaths were immediately reported, but Silva said the extent of the destruction wouldn’t be known until the water recedes.
https://tripscan.live
трипскан
“We knew that we were going to have floods … and this one hit us harder than what we were expecting,” Ruidoso Mayor Lynn D. Crawford said during a radio address Tuesday night.

Crawford said that some people were taken to the hospital, although the exact number was not immediately clear. He encouraged residents to call an emergency line if their loved ones or neighbors were missing.
The floods came just days after flash floods in Texas killed over 100 people and left more than 160 people missing.

In New Mexico, officials urged residents to seek higher ground Tuesday afternoon as the waters of the Rio Ruidoso rose nearly 19 feet in a matter of minutes amid heavy rainfall. The National Weather Service issued flood warnings in the area, which was stripped of vegetation by recent wildfires.

A weather service flood gauge and companion video camera showed churning waters of the Rio Ruidoso surge over the river’s banks into surrounding forest. Streets and bridges were closed in response.

Kaitlyn Carpenter, an artist in Ruidoso, was riding her motorcycle through town Tuesday afternoon when the storm started to pick up, and she sought shelter at the riverside Downshift Brewing Company with about 50 other people. She started to film debris rushing down the Rio Ruidoso when she spotted a house float by with a familiar turquoise door. It belonged to the family of one of her best friends.

Her friend’s family was not in the house and is safe, she said.

“I’ve been in that house and have memories in that house, so seeing it come down the river was just pretty heartbreaking,” Carpenter said. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

There were also reports of dead horses near the town’s horse racing track, the mayor said.

Two National Guard rescue teams and several local teams already were in the area when the flooding began, Silva said, and more Guard teams were expected.

The area has been especially vulnerable to flooding since the summer of 2024, when the South Fork and Salt fires raced across tinder-dry forest and destroyed an estimated 1,400 homes and structures. Residents were forced to flee a wall of flames, only to grapple with intense flooding later that summer.

Rescuers are hailing as a “four-legged hero” a furry Chihuahua whose pacing atop an Alpine rock helped a helicopter crew find its owner, who had fallen into a crevasse on a Swiss glacier nearby.
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The man, who was not identified, was exploring the Fee Glacier in southern Switzerland on Friday when he broke through a snow bridge and fell nearly 8 meters (about 26 feet), according to Air Zermatt, a rescue, training and transport company.

Equipped with a walkie-talkie, the man connected with a person nearby who relayed the accident to emergency services. But the exact location was unknown. After about a half-hour search, the pacing pooch caught the eye of a rescue team member.
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As the crew zeroed on the Chihuahua, the hole the man fell into became more visible. Rescuers rappelled down, rescued the man and flew him and his canine companion to a hospital.

“Imagine if the dog wasn’t there,” Air Zermatt spokesman Bruno Kalbermatten said by phone. “I have no idea what would happen to this guy. I think he wouldn’t survive this fall into the crevasse.”

On its website, the company was effusive: “The dog is a four-legged hero who may have saved his master’s life in a life-threatening situation.”

Job losses
But what about the impact of tariffs on job creation? Surprisingly, an increase in import taxes has been found to result in slightly more unemployment across countries.
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An example provided by Irwin at Dartmouth College points to one plausible explanation — and it has to do with the steeper cost of imported goods.

“A number of studies have shown, on net, we lost jobs from the (2018) steel tariffs rather than gained jobs because there are more people employed in the downstream user industries than in the steel industry itself,” he said.
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A study by the Federal Reserve Board found that a rise in input costs resulting from US tariff hikes in 2018-19 led to job losses in American manufacturing. The damage from those higher expenses was compounded by retaliatory taxes on US exports, more than offsetting a small boost to manufacturing employment from US tariffs — at least so far, the 2024 paper said.

Retaliation by other countries is indeed another danger of pulling the tariff lever. Higher tariffs on American exports would typically raise their prices for foreign consumers, hitting demand for the goods in many cases.

When Trump announced new tariffs this year, America’s major trading partners were quick to strike back with their own levies, although the US then agreed a temporary truce with China and the European Union.

Costs of free trade
While economists generally agree that free trade has benefited the global economy in recent decades, they acknowledge that it comes with certain costs.

One is the loss of jobs in communities that are particularly exposed to new competition from foreign manufacturers.

That is similar to the impact of technological progress on workers. “Manufacturing jobs as a share of the labor force have come down everywhere. It isn’t a US-specific story,” said Gimber at JPMorgan Asset Management, pointing to automation.

He drew a parallel between helping workers affected by higher imports and what is known as a just transition — the idea that the drastic changes needed to move toward a greener economy should be fair to everyone and minimize harm to workers and communities.

In both cases, providing workers in impacted industries with new skills or retraining them could be key, Gimber said.

Another potential cost of free trade is dependency on far-flung manufacturers. That took on new relevance during the pandemic, which snarled global supply chains, contributing to shortages of products such as face masks and respirators in the US and elsewhere.

However, economists do not typically see tariffs as a good way to build up domestic manufacturing, Fatas at INSEAD said, noting that subsidies for specific industries are viewed as a better tool “because they work more directly.”

But perhaps the strongest argument in favor of free trade is its importance to maintaining peace between nations.

As Gimber’s colleague David Kelly noted in March, closer trade relations give countries more to lose in any conflict.

More than 200 firefighters are struggling to tackle an out-of-control wildfire on Crete — Greece’s largest island and a tourist hotspot — as authorities order mass evacuations.
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The fire broke out Wednesday afternoon near Ierapetra, a town on the island’s southeast coast, amid unusually high temperatures, 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9 Fahrenheit) above average, and gale-force winds of around 50 miles an hour.

The conditions are creating “new outbreaks, making firefighting work very difficult,” the Fire Department’s press spokesperson, Chief Vasilios Vathrakoyannis, said in a statement Thursday.
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More than 230 firefighters, along with 46 vehicles and 10 helicopters have been deployed to fight the blaze, according to fire officials.

The flames have spread rapidly, reaching homes as well as hotels and other tourist accommodations.

Authorities asked residents of four settlements to evacuate and move toward Ierapetra. About 1,500 people have been evacuated so far, according to the Greek public broadcaster ERT.

The Ierapetra municipality has converted an indoor training center facility into a makeshift camp, where hundreds of tourists and residents who abandoned their homes spent the night Wednesday.
The police, medical services and the coast guard have all been called to the area.

“We are entering the third and most difficult month of the fire season,” Vathrakoyannis said. July is typically the hottest month in Greece and is often accompanied by strong winds. “These conditions favor the spread of fires and increase their danger,” he said.
Wildfires have ripped through other European countries this week as the continent endures a brutal heat wave.

Tens of thousands were evacuated in Turkey as blazes ripped through the western Izmir and Manisa provinces and southern Hatay province, damaging nearly 200 homes.

Blazes also broke out in France and in Spain, where two people died.

Europe experiences wildfires every year, but they are becoming more intense and frequent due to human-caused climate change, which fuels heat and drought, both helping set the stage for fierce, destructive fires.

When wildfire ripped through Hawaii’s Maui last August, the impact was devastating: a whole town reduced to ashes, more than 100 lives lost. The inferno was described as the “largest natural disaster in state history.”

But some on Instagram suggested, without evidence, there was something much more nefarious at play.
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Health influencer @drmercola suggested to his 504,000 followers whether, while the media focused on climate change, the fires might have been deliberately set to “to facilitate a land grab” to make the area a “smart city” — referring to a technology-focused urban design idea.
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A natural parenting influencer, whose Instagram page is filled with soft-focus pictures of herself against pretty pastel backgrounds, implied to her 76,000-strong community that Hawaii’s wildfires were started by “directed energy weapons” — systems which use energy such as laser beams.

These posters are all wellness influencers — a loosely-defined umbrella term for a wide range of accounts including yoga, lifestyle, fitness, alternative health and new age spirituality.

While conspiracy theories about the Hawaii wildfires spread across the internet last year, it may seem surprising they were also seized upon by part of the wellness community.

But for years there has been a merging of wellness, disinformation and conspiracy, as a subset of influencers use the backdrop of aesthetically pleasing, pastel-colored posts to spread much darker messages, weaving together alarming conspiracy theories with calls for users to buy their supplements or services.

This phenomenon exploded during the pandemic, when anti-vax sentiment took hold in large parts of the wellness community. As interest in the pandemic waned, experts say some wellness influencers have latched on to climate change to galvanize followers.

Their concern: Those influencers — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — are exposing new, and younger, audiences to a slew of misinformation and undermining efforts to tackle the climate crisis.

Colin Goodson knows more about energy than most people.

The tall, bearded Mainer is an engineer on an offshore oil drilling ship in the Gulf of Mexico. But when it came time for him to build a home in Southern Maine, Goodson largely bypassed fossil fuels.
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The house he built is entirely off the grid, powered from rooftop solar and batteries that convert the sun’s energy to electricity. Electrons power much of his two-story home; it is heated and cooled with heat pumps, and Goodson and his wife cook meals on an induction range. Incredibly well-insulated, the entire home is heated by a small wood stove.
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Goodson loves his new house, even though it has raised the eyebrows of his drilling ship colleagues.

“All the guys at work think I’m crazy,” Goodson said during a recent tour of his home. “They think I’m living in a shack out in the woods somewhere and I go outside to use the toilet, but that’s clearly not the case.”

The house, built by New Hampshire company Unity Homes, is a far cry from a shack. Modern and spacious, it has running water and three bathrooms.
Despite also having initial concerns about her husband’s off-the-grid aspirations, Katie Goodson is a convert as well – especially after the lights stayed on during an intense storm that knocked their neighbors’ electricity out.

“I would never go back,” she told CNN. “When I tell co-workers or neighbors that we live off-grid and they see the house, they’re always like, ‘Whoa, this isn’t what I was expecting!’ It’s really fun surprising people; I live a totally normal life.”

The Goodsons are part of a small but growing number of homeowners who are choosing to build energy-efficient “panelized” homes that are pre-made in a factory. The homes are better for the climate, and although they have a high upfront cost, several homeowners say their energy savings, quality of life and overall cost of living has greatly improved since moving in.

Extreme views can give influencers higher clicks, more audience and a more lucrative brand, Caulfield said, so the incentive is clear to steer towards those ideologies. “And the sad thing is that, the more it becomes about ideology, the harder it is to change people’s minds, because it is about belonging to a community.”
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There are strategies to counter the misinformation, though. It’s important to do it in a respectful and constructive way, even when it comes from influencers some may dismiss as “frivolous,” Caulfield said. “Pre-bunking” can also help, he added — getting out ahead of the misinformation, and making people aware of the tactics used to push it.
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For others, the focus is much more on the other platforms hosting these influencers. Hood is pushing for more clarity on climate policies, and for measures including bans on amplifying and monetizing content that clearly contradicts climate science.

He also called on regulators to take a hard look at the products and services being sold on Instagram and other platforms. “It is the Wild West,” he said.

Meta, which owns Instagram, declined to comment. The company has policies to counter misinformation, including international teams of fact checkers which evaluate climate science content. When they rate posts as false, they can reduce distribution and add warning labels, and accounts that repeatedly offend can lose the ability to advertise or monetize.

But for experts like Hood, there is simply not enough being done to tackle a problem with such alarming implications.

As the climate crisis continues to fuel more frequent and more severe extreme weather events, it is creating perfect conditions for climate denial and misinformation to flourish across these parts of the wellness community.

“The dark side of wellness has always been there. It’s just now we see it,” Simmons said.

The levies are also likely to reduce America’s economic output, as has happened before. A 2020 study, based on data from 151 countries, including the US, between 1963-2014, found that tariffs have “persistent adverse effects on the size of the pie,” or the gross domestic product of the country imposing them.
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There are a number of possible explanations for this.

One is that, when tariffs are low or non-existent, the country in question can focus on the kind of economic activities where it has an edge and export those goods and services, Gimber told CNN.
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“If you raise tariffs, you’re not going to see that same level of specialization,” he said, noting that the result would be lower labor productivity. “The labor could be better used elsewhere in the economy, in areas where you have a greater competitive advantage.”
Another reason output falls when tariffs are raised lies in the higher cost of imported inputs, wrote the authors of the 2020 study, most of them International Monetary Fund economists.

Fatas at INSEAD suggested the same reason, providing an example: “So I’m a worker and work in a factory. To produce what we produce we need to import microchips from Taiwan. Those things are more expensive. Together, me and the company, we create less value per hour worked.”

Yet another way tariff hikes can hurt the economy is by disrupting the status quo and fueling uncertainty over the future levels of import taxes. That lack of clarity is particularly acute this year, given the erratic nature of Trump’s trade policy.

Surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business in the US suggest the uncertainty is already weighing on American companies’ willingness to invest. The share of small businesses planning a capital outlay within the next six months hit its lowest level in April since at least April 2020, when Covid was sweeping the globe.

“The economy will continue to stumble along until the major sources of uncertainty (including over tariffs) are resolved. It’s hard to steer a ship in the fog,” the federation said.

Whichever forces may be at work, the IMF, to cite just one example, thinks higher US tariffs will lower the country’s productivity and output.