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Tax Day is April 15, three weeks away. If you’ve procrastinated doing your taxes so far, that’s probably for a good reason: After all, the fear of a potential jail sentence for accidentally miscounting something looms over you constantly, turning it into a repetitive, redundant, and reiterative, time-consuming process.

Now, there’s not only a price tag on your returns, but on the effort it takes you to complete them—and it’s costly.

How much does it cost to do your taxes in 2026?

A new analysis from Postal, a virtual mailbox and compliance service, found individual tax returns cost American taxpayers a combined $146 billion in time and out-of-pocket expenses this year—roughly $576 per person in labor hours alone, plus an average of $288 in additional expenses like accountants or software. Reviewing data from the OMB and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the company found Americans will collectively spend 2.1 billion hours on Form 1040 in 2026, or the equivalent of roughly 12 hours per filing—and the IRS expects to receive about 169 million of them.​

Businesses don’t get off any easier. Postal estimates business tax returns cost companies more than $126 billion annually in staffing and expenses, or an average of $9,090 per return. Stack on Form 941—the employer’s quarterly return—and that brings additional costs of $47 billion—with the W-2/W-3 series at $8.8 billion. Even organizations that owe nothing in taxes (those filing to not pay) still absorb more than $6.2 billion in staff and expense burden costs.

“These figures reflect what we see every day,” Max Clarke, cofounder of Postal, told Fortune. “Compliance isn’t difficult because people are careless—it’s difficult because it’s fragmented, deadline-driven, and overwhelmingly manual.”

The numbers are even worse when you consider the labor hours involved in being compliant. The OMB currently lists more than 10,000 forms and documents that individuals and organizations must complete each year. In 2026, federal agencies are projected to receive more than 210 billion responses to compliance forms, requiring an estimated 11.6 billion labor hours. The total federal compliance tab, including out-of-pocket expenses, is nearly $738 billion.

What does tax compliance cost small businesses?

Clarke knows this from the inside. A former M&A attorney and Palantir alum who later built and sold a specialty insurance startup, he started Postal after realizing physical mail—still the primary vehicle for IRS notices and federal agency correspondence—was a massive, unresolved problem for small businesses. His company uses AI to open, scan, and prioritize clients’ mail, flagging what’s urgent and when it’s due. Most small business owners aren’t compliance specialists: They’re people trying to run their companies who suddenly have a 126-page IRS instruction document and a weekend to figure it out.​

“Small businesses and individuals are expected to track dozens of forms and notices across multiple federal agencies, often with little clarity on what’s urgent or what happens if something is missed,” Clarke said. “When deadlines pass, the penalties and follow-on costs can add up fast.”

To quantify how much Americans spend in labor hours each year, the company pulled from an OMB database that legally requires federal agencies to estimate how long each compliance form takes to complete. For cost, Postal cross-referenced those hour estimates against BLS wage data: specifically, average hourly and weekly earnings for all private employees. Multiply the OMB’s estimated hours by those loaded labor costs, add the OMB’s own out-of-pocket expense projections for software, contractors, and external accountants, and you get the total compliance price tag. 

New in 2026: The mailing deadline just got riskier

The physical dimension of tax compliance is easy to overlook in an era when everything is digital. But Clarke points out critical IRS and federal agency notices are still sent by mail—and this year, there’s a new wrinkle. Starting in 2026, the USPS will no longer guarantee same-day postmarks on mailed returns, meaning taxpayers who wait until April 15 to drop their envelope in a mailbox risk having the IRS treat it as late.

“When those documents are delayed, overlooked, or misunderstood, people lose time and money trying to recover,” Clarke said.​ There’s an easy fix: entering the 21st century. 

“Our business shouldn’t have to exist. Everything should be fully digitized. Every business should have one single primary key between itself and the government—and all the information should just be read in there, done seamlessly, electronically, without having to worry about things like, did my Department of Labor form get to me.”

The complexity of the American tax system isn’t exactly accidental. Companies like Intuit and H&R Block—whose business models depend on that 126-page instruction document staying exactly as impenetrable as it is—spent millions lobbying against the IRS’s Direct File program, the agency’s effort to let taxpayers file directly for free. Since 2006, Intuit spent $25.6 million and H&R Block spent $9.6 million on lobbying efforts. Direct File was effectively wound down last year.

That’s not to say Clarke or Postal is against taxes (“taxes are good,” he said, adding people should pay for their use of public goods). Instead, he said this was a system designed around friction, where the friction is profitable for a select few and expensive for everyone else.

“The government already has all the information, because of the way payroll providers are reporting,” he said. “It should be telling me exactly what I owe. It should not be up to me to independently compute that number using a diversity of different sources, and risk fines if I’m wrong.”

But that’s not the system we have. Instead, 169 million Americans will spend an average of 12 hours this spring doing math the government could theoretically do for them—and paying, on average, $864 in time and expenses for the privilege.

“At scale, these 11.6 billion hours represent an enormous opportunity cost for the economy,” Clarke said. “That’s time taken away from building businesses, serving customers, or doing productive work. Until compliance requirements are simplified, the biggest gains will come from reducing friction—making it easier for people to see what they need to do, when they need to do it, and what actually matters.”

You’ll have to do your taxes regardless—the question is just how many hours and how much will it cost you.

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As Nevada regulators continue to investigate safety episodes that have occurred in the tunnels Boring Company is digging below Las Vegas, two Nevada legislators have written a letter to Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, demanding a “comprehensive plan” to address concerns of “structural failures” in the state’s oversight of Elon Musk’s tunneling startup.

The letter, which was shown to Fortune, described “significant concerns about record integrity, administrative accountability, and structural failures within Nevada’s workplace safety system,” and said that “these issues remain unresolved and require clear action from the Executive Branch.”  The letter was sent to the Governor’s Chief of Staff, Ryan Cherry, on Wednesday morning. Assemblymember Howard Watts and Senator Rochelle Nguyen, two Democrats who lead the state’s Assembly Committee on Growth and Infrastructure, signed and sent the letter.

The letter demanded that Gov.Lombardo and his administration conduct an independent review of an incident revealed by Fortune in which a public record had been altered that was part of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) investigation, and commit to making those findings publicly available. The legislators describe the act of altering or concealing public records in the letter as a “serious matter that may constitute a violation of Nevada law and potentially rise to the level of a Class C felony.” The letter also demanded a plan to address year-long backlogs in OSHA cases waiting to be heard by the OSHA Review Board, a Governor-appointed body that hears safety cases employers have contested with Nevada OSHA.

“Questions surrounding withdrawn citations, altered records, and delays in adjudication have created the perception that Nevada’s enforcement system is not operating independently or transparently,” the letter reads, pointing out that “there still remain a number of unanswered questions and outstanding issues regarding The Boring Company and the health and safety of Nevada workers.”

The demand letter follows a legislative hearing in early February, in which state officials testified before Nevada legislators about their oversight of the Boring Company. Representatives from Boring Company and the Governor’s Office declined to attend the hearing. Boring Company, which was founded and is owned by Elon Musk, has been digging an underground public transportation system of ride-hail Tesla vehicles that is intended to eventually go below the entire city of Las Vegas. While its tunneling to date has taken place in the broader County, the company recently received approvals to start digging below the City of Las Vegas proper.

Projects riddled with safety issues

Since construction began, the project has been riddled with safety issues, including employees getting burned by chemicals in the tunnels, employees digging too close to the Las Vegas monorail, a worker getting crushed and another getting shocked, and illegal wastewater dumping—much of which was first reported by Fortune. KTNV, an ABC affiliate television station in Las Vegas, recently reported that OSHA had completed its investigation regarding the employee who had been shocked, and found that the injured employee had been fired for allegedly demonstrating a “a serious lapse in judgement on more than one occasion,” according to the Boring Company.

There are at least three more pending investigations that are still outstanding, according to OSHA’s website, and Boring Company is currently contesting eight citations it was issued regarding chemical burns in 2024. The Review Board has repeatedly pushed back the hearing on those citations, including most recently in February because Boring Company’s lawyer had a conflict, OSHA officials have said.

The latest injury, the one involving the employee who was shocked, “just points to the fact that we need to ensure that our OSHA process is functioning properly—to hold this and other companies accountable, to provide a safe working environment for people in our community,” Assemblymember Watts said in an interview with Fortune. He pointed out that “these tremendous backlogs” are allowing companies to contest citations for over a year and delay addressing the underlying problems.

In November, a Fortune investigation found that OSHA had issued three citations against the Boring Company after firefighters were burned by chemicals in the tunnels, then withdrew them within 24 hours after Boring Company president Steve Davis reached out to a representative in the Governor’s Office. Federal OSHA, which oversees the state plan, later received a complaint about the matter and opened a federal investigation, which ultimately determined that the allegations were substantiated, and that case file documentation was altered, missing, “and/or removed” from the case file and that the citations had been withdrawn after issuance. Federal OSHA said in its findings that it believed Nevada OSHA “had reasonable justification to withdraw the issued willful citations” and that the legal elements needed to support the “willful” designation had not been met.

Governor Lombardo recently said in an interview with staff at the Nevada Independent that his office had tried to determine who had deleted a line item in the document in the OSHA file, but that the inquiry had apparently been thwarted by a cyberattack against the state that took place several months beforehand in August.

In that recent interview, Governor Lombardo said that “in the long run,” he believed Boring Company would be “very beneficial” to Las Vegas.

“Do I like them in their tactics and how they do business? No,” he said.

The legislators’ letter demanded that Governor Lombardo’s administration submit a written plan that would “detail concrete actions, responsible officials, and implementation timelines” to start the independent investigation and address safety case backlogs by April 17.

The Governor’s Office did not respond to an immediate request for comment.

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The war in Iran could hit a heavy blow to one of the country’s largest industries, one that supports millions of livelihoods.

Now in its fourth week, the conflict has sparked the largest oil supply shock in history and sent gasoline prices soaring worldwide. But fuel products are not the only item to normally pass through the Strait of Hormuz, the critical waterway that has essentially been blockaded for almost a month.

How the Strait of Hormuz blockade is cutting fertilizer supply

Before the war, around one-third of the global fertilizer supply chain passed through the strait, including half of the world’s urea, a nitrogen-based fertilizer vital to many modern farming operations, including in the U.S. The gaping hole in fertilizer supply is, in some ways, a more intractable challenge than the energy crunch, and comes at one of the worst possible times for American farmers.

The U.S. food and agriculture industry does a lot more than putting food on the table: It is a booming business that employs millions and accounts for a huge chunk of the country’s economic output. That value was recently quantified in a sweeping report authored by 35 industry groups and published Monday, shedding light on just how widespread an impact a sustained fertilizer shortage would have on the U.S. economy. 

The $10 trillion sector on the line

The sector generates $10.4 trillion in value, around 20% of the U.S. economy’s overall value, the report found. It also supports more than 48 million jobs, including positions in government, tourism, and retail. The jobs story is actually one of growth, as the report also found direct employment in the food and agriculture sector has risen 6.5% over the past decade.

Fertilizer plays an important role in the agricultural economy. In a statement, Corey Rosenbusch, CEO of the Fertilizer Institute, an industry group that participated in the report, called the impact of fertilizers “essential” to the economy.

“Each year, fertilizer delivers $37 billion in wages, supports half a million jobs, and has an economic impact of $140 billion,” he said.

But curtailed exports from the Middle East threaten to undermine that trade, with ripple effects likely to go far beyond the fertilizer industry alone. While the U.S. produces much of its fertilizer at home, it relies on imports for 25% of its stock, including 18% of its nitrogen use. Qatar and Saudi Arabia were important nitrogen suppliers to the U.S., but supply now remains stranded in the Persian Gulf. And much like oil, fertilizer is a globally traded product, so regional supply disruption can lead to price shifts in the U.S. 

Why spring planting season makes the timing especially painful

Those swings are already painfully evident for U.S. farmers, with benchmark nitrogen costs at U.S. ports rising nearly 30% since the war began. For many producers, fertilizer can be the single largest variable cost in growing major row crops, and the new spike comes at one of the worst possible times in the sector. This is around the time most farmers finalize their fertilizer purchases ahead of their spring planting season, for crops like corn in the Midwest and cotton in the South. 

The extent to which the war in Iran might deal long-term damage to U.S. agriculture remains unclear. There are few alternatives to Middle Eastern fertilizer exports. Unlike oil, which continues to trickle out of the region in small quantities through Saudi pipelines, the Gulf, and the currently blocked strait, is the only way for any significant fertilizer quantities to reach global markets. 

Alternative suppliers exist, including Morocco and several Latin American countries, but high prices for U.S. farmers will likely remain until the strait reopens, with the list of possible economic consequences growing longer by the day. Prices could go higher still if more countries follow the lead of China, which last week restricted its own fertilizer exports in a bid to stockpile its reserves. 

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Bank of America’s spending data tells a rare good-news story about Gen Z — until it doesn’t. After years of being squeezed by surging rents and sluggish wage growth, the youngest adult generation had just begun to really get out there and spend their fun money. Then gas prices jumped 26% year-over-year, and BofA economists are now warning that the recovery could be snuffed out before it fully takes hold.

For the first time in years, Gen Z was winning. Rents had finally stopped devouring their paychecks, wages were rising faster than their housing costs, and a generation that had long trailed older Americans in spending growth was starting to actually open its wallet — on restaurants, new clothes, electronics, even travel. Then came the oil shock, brought on by President Donald Trump’s widely expected and yet also still surprising decision to go to war on Iran.

A recent report from the Bank of America Institute shows that after nearly two years of trailing other generations in spending, Gen Z’s year-over-year spending growth surpassed Baby Boomers’ in mid-2025. Millennials followed suit in December 2025, outpacing older generations for the first time in roughly three years. The turnaround was real, data-driven, and — for a generation that came of age during pandemic shutdowns and an inflation crisis — long overdue.​

“Both Gen Z and Millennials may be even more prone to cutting back on ‘nice-to-have’ spending amid higher gasoline prices,” BofA Institute economists Joe Wadford and David Michael Tinsley wrote in the report.

Rent and tax relief offset by gas prices

The engine behind the surge? Rent relief. In Bank of America’s aggregated card and deposit data, median rent payment growth for Gen Z and Millennials slowed sharply in the 12 months through February 2026. And crucially, wages have been growing faster than rents for both generations — up roughly 9% year-over-year for Gen Z and 5% for Millennials. That gap between rent and wages is the financial breathing room younger Americans hadn’t had in years, and proprietary BofA card data shows they were spending it: on clothing, on dining out, and especially on electronics, which saw the sharpest discretionary jump of any category.​

Tax refunds added extra fuel early in the year. But economists at the BofA Institute stressed that most of the improvement reflects something more structural: younger renters, who make up a disproportionately large share of Gen Z and Millennial households, were finally catching a break after years of rent outpacing everything. Unlike Gen X and Baby Boomers, who are more likely to own their homes, younger generations live and die by the rental market — and for a stretch, that market was suffocating them.​

Now, rising gasoline prices threaten to claw back those gains. The average national gas price is up approximately 26% year-over-year as of March 23, driven by escalating conflict in Iran, according to American Automobile Association data cited in the report. And Gen Z, the analysis warns, is the generation most exposed.​

Even before this spike, Gen Z’s gasoline spending as a share of total card spending was running higher than any other generation’s — and had stayed stubbornly elevated while older generations’ shares fell from pre-pandemic levels. BofA economists attribute this to a straightforward reality: Gen Z is just entering the workforce, commuting for the first time, and doing so on relatively modest incomes. The ratio of gas spending to discretionary spending is highest for Gen Z of any cohort. In plain terms, for every dollar a Gen Zer spends on things they want, a larger share of it now goes to the pump than for a Boomer or a Gen Xer.​

The next wild card

The labor market adds another layer of risk. Young workers aged 22-27 — including recent college graduates — are already experiencing unemployment rates markedly above the national average, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Many work in retail and leisure, the very sectors most likely to feel the pinch from a pullback in discretionary consumer spending, which would, in turn, eliminate the jobs those same young people hold. It’s a feedback loop that could hit Gen Z from both ends of the ledger: higher costs at the pump and fewer hours at work.​

The wild card, BofA says, is whether rent growth continues to cool. If it does, younger consumers may have enough cushion to absorb some of the pain from gas prices. If rents start climbing again alongside fuel costs, the brief, hard-won spending revival that defined the past several months could stall just as it was getting started.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

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In a sit-down interview with Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell, billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla had a dire message: by 2030, 80% of jobs will be AI-capable, and open to potential displacement. Now, he’s warning that’s what’s going to sway politics from now on.

“There will be massive job dislocation” with AI, Khosla said during a panel at the Hill & Valley Forum, a conference bringing together Washington policymakers and Silicon Valley executives on Tuesday. Despite that, people need to see the benefits of the technology before any disruption occurs, he said. “Will there be new kinds of jobs? Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. There’s very few things AI won’t be able to do today in next few years. So I do think we ought to structurally solve this problem by increasing the minimum level of services.”

But instead of looking at AI’s potential benefits, Khosla—who founded Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures and has a net worth of $11.5 billion,—said Americans have AI-caused uncertainty on their minds.

“The single biggest issue I believe in the 2028 presidential election will be fear of AI,” Khosla said.

Khosla has been a leading advocate for AI adoption while tempering the economic impacts on everyday Americans. His comments at the forum, during a panel entitled “Mind and Machine: The Forces Shaping the AI Era” about the role of the government in AI adoption, are not new for the billionaire, who has warned AI will now take over as the country’s most divisive issue from now on.

“I think the single biggest danger to AI is not AI capability or lack thereof. The single biggest danger to AI adoption is politics,” Khosla said. And it’s already playing out at the state level, he said, giving the example of a bill advancing in the New York State legislature that would ban AI from giving medical or legal advice. 

Florida recently passed a bill that would force data center companies to pay for their own utilities, and New York lawmakers are considering a bill that would put a moratorium on new data center permits. This comes as Americans are feeling a growing affordability crisis, especially from rising energy costs, which is expected to be a losing issue for Republicans ahead of the midterms. 

Instead, Khosla argued, Americans shouldn’t fear AI, but think of the endless possibilities it’s capable of accomplishing.   

“The US could develop a free doctor and offer it to everybody on the planet,” he said. “That’s a project doable in the next two, three years, and have more expertise than any doctor.” He pointed to a recent Nature Medicine study that found that AI outperforms human therapists when blindly judged by human therapists. 

He even thinks voters should look at the tax benefits AI can bring to their pockets. Khosla repeated his idea to restructure the tax code and end income tax for anyone who makes less than $100,000 a year, starting in 2030. 

“AI will favor capital over labor in the historical capital versus labor battle, and so there’s no reason in the AI age to have a capital gains tax that’s different than ordinary income tax,” he said. “If we equalize those two, we can be tax neutral and eliminate 125 million people off the tax roll, just anybody making $100,000 or less doesn’t pay any taxes.” That’s a pretty good balance, especially since 40% of capital gains tax is paid by people making more than 10 million a year.

Khosla’s co-panelist, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, demurred at the idea of restructuring the tax code, saying that Congress is “a little better at the near term.” The senator gave the example of the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which committed nearly $53 billion to revitalize domestic semiconductor production. She agreed with Khosla about the need to deploy AI to everyday Americans now. 

“Why aren’t we just giving tools that use sophisticated health information and empowering the public with that health information?” she asked. “I think that would go a long way to making people understand the power of what we need to push towards, she said, adding that there should be privacy protections. 

When asked by moderator and CEO of Varda Space Industries Delian Asparouhov about how the U.S. can lead and control AI adoption, Cantwell said she supports the idea of starting a “tech NATO.”

“The United States should get the biggest democracies and the biggest technology countries to standardize on principles that we believe in for technology adoption,” Cantwell said. “We should basically say, countries who have back doors and do these other things you shouldn’t buy technology from them because you know you’re going to get.”

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Senators raced Tuesday to clinch an emerging proposal to end the Homeland Security shutdown by funding much of the department, including the unpaid Transportation Security Administration airport workers, but excluding ICE operations that have been core to the dispute.

The sudden sense of urgency comes as U.S. airports are snarled by long security lines, with travelers being told to arrive hours before their flights in Houston, Atlanta and Baltimore Washington International. Routine Homeland Security funding was halted in mid-February ahead of the busy spring travel season. Nearly 11% of TSA workers — more than 3,200 — missed work Monday, and at least 458 have have quit altogether since the shutdown began, according to DHS.

Democrats are refusing to fund the department without restraints on Trump’s immigration and deportation agenda after agents killed two citizens in Minneapolis.

A potential breakthrough came late Monday, after a group of Republican senators met at the White House with President Donald Trump after he upended talks and deployed federal immigration officers at some airport security checkpoints — a move some lawmakers warned could lead to heightened tensions.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., called the discussions “positive and productive” and said most of DHS would be funded without big changes.

Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday that after Trump’s “temper tantrum” eased, it appears “things are getting back on track.”

But airport conditions have become increasingly unpredictable with swelling crowds seen in major hubs. Travelers headed to LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports in New York — as well as Newark Liberty International in neighboring New Jersey — still couldn’t check online TSA wait times Tuesday morning.

At Philadelphia International Airport, several ICE agents were in the terminals. A protester was also at one of the checkpoints holding a sign criticizing ICE.

Airport wait times listed in the MyTSA mobile app and other public sources may be outdated because the agency isn’t actively updating its websites during the shutdown.

Hopes high for a quick deal

Next steps in Congress could move quickly, if lawmakers can reach agreement, or sputter out just as fast.

The contours of the deal under consideration would fund most of Homeland Security, but not one main part of ICE — the enforcement and removal operations that are core to Trump’s deportation agenda.

Under the proposal being floated, ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations would be funded as well as Customs and Border Protection. But that would come with guardrails — keeping officers from those divisions in their traditional roles, rather than deploying them in urban immigration roundups.

The plan would also include a number of changes in immigration operations that Democrats have demanded, including mandating that officers wear body cameras and identification. While the ICE officers manning airports are going without face-covering masks, the Democratic demand that they go unmasked during immigration operations does not appear to be part of the deal.

Since so much of ICE is already funded through Trump’s big tax breaks bill, and immigration officers are still receiving paychecks despite the shutdown, both sides are claiming political wins — the Democrats are able to say they stopped the flow of additional ICE funds while achieving already agreed upon changes, while Republicans can claim they prevented more significant restraints on immigration operations.

Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, a chief negotiator, returned from the White House meeting hopeful they had a solution to “land this plane.”

Both chambers of Congress are controlled by the Republican president’s party, and any deal reached in the Senate would also have to be approved by the House.

On Tuesday, Delta Air Lines confirmed it was suspending its specialty services for members of Congress amid the shutdown, meaning those who fly with the carrier will be treated like other passengers based on their SkyMiles status. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution first reported the suspension. Delta’s Capital Desk reservations line still remains open.

Political standoff, long airport lines

Key to the standoff appears to have been the senators’ ability to shift the president’s attention off his plan to link any department funding to his push to pass the so-called SAVE America Act, a strict proof-of-citizenship and voter ID bill that has stalled in the Senate ahead of the midterm elections.

Over the weekend Trump injected his demand for the voting bill as a condition for ending the funding standoff. Some GOP senators have pitched the idea of tackling it in the months ahead as part of a broader legislative package the party could pass on its own, similar to last year’s big tax cuts bill.

The White House on Tuesday stressed that conversations were ongoing. But it also said an agreement to split off immigration enforcement funding, while addressing Trump’s elections bill separately, “seems to be acceptable.”

Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who was not part of the group at the White House, said his understanding was that there was a “sense of urgency” coming from the talks as the airport disruptions worsen.

Senators are expected to discuss the proposals during their private caucus lunches Tuesday afternoon.

“First step is to get the proposal in writing,” said Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine. “I want to see exactly what that means.”

Changes at Homeland Security

The deal could provide a political exit from the standoff over the embattled Homeland Security department, which was stood up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks but has come to symbolize Trump’s aggressive mass deportation agenda, with its goal of removing 1 million immigrants this year.

Under mounting political pressure, Trump ousted Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem amid the public outcry over the immigration operations, and senators late Monday confirmed one of their own, Markwayne Mullin, as the president’s handpicked replacement.

Mullin, an Oklahoma senator who aligns with Trump’s agenda, provides a potentially new face for the department. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin touched on another key demand of Democrats — ensuring a judge has signed off on warrants that immigration officers use to search people’s homes, rather than simply relying on administrative warrants issued by the department.

“This is significant,” Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., said about the progress toward changes. “Noem is gone. That’s a big deal.”

ICE’s budget grew under last year’s bill by $75 billion, which has been untouched by the shutdown. Rather its routine annual funding, some $10 billion, would be cut almost in half under the proposal.

After weeks of missed paychecks, many TSA agents have called in sick or even quit their jobs as financial strains pile up. Union leaders representing the workers have pushed Congress to reach a deal.

___

Associated Press writers Rio Yamat, Wyatte Grantham-Philips, Kevin Freking and Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.

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Roughly $580 million worth of oil futures changed hands in a single minute early Monday morning, only about 15 minutes before President Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had been engaged in “productive conversations” with Iran to end the war.

Now Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is calling what he sees: treason.

“We have another word for situations in which people with access to confidential information regarding national security — such as plans to bomb or not to bomb another country — exploit that information for profit,” Krugman wrote in a Substack post Tuesday. “That word is treason.”

Iran’s parliament speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, denied that any negotiations with Washington had taken place, calling the claim “fakenews” used to “manipulate the financial and oil markets.” Stocks pulled back slightly and energy prices stymied their free-fall on his statement, but ultimately traders seemed to trust that Trump was telling the truth about winding down the war. 

Rory Johnston, an oil market analyst, said the pattern has been hard to ignore even without a smoking gun.

 “Everyone—every analyst, every oil trader—has been questioning downward pressure on prices,” he told Fortune. He added that whether or not there’s been direct market manipulation by Washington, the administration’s jawboning has spooked participants out of trading where physical fundamentals would otherwise push prices. “I think that probably goes a long way towards it.”

The White House did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. 

The suspicious trading activity

The trades involved roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate futures contracts that were sold between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m. New York time. Trading volumes for S&P 500 futures also spiked moments later, meaning that any potential insider got upside on both ends. After Trump announced the pause of his ultimatum at 7:04 a.m., there was a sharp selloff in oil markets and a jump in equities; precisely the outcome someone holding those positions would have wanted. It is not known whether one entity or several were behind the trades.

Krugman argued that insider trading on national security decisions is illegal for reasons besides unfairness: it presents a strategic vulnerability. Trading on classified information effectively broadcasts government plans to foreign adversaries, he wrote, adding that “who needs to bribe agents within the government” when you can infer the same intelligence from futures markets.

He also raised an unsettling question: whether the possibility of insider profits may be influencing the policy decisions themselves. 

“Are decisions about war and peace in part serving the cause of market manipulation rather than the national interest?” he wrote. “If you dismiss this as unthinkable, you just haven’t been paying attention.”

Krugman joins a chorus of Trump critics and investors who called foul on the move Monday. Trump had spent the weekend threatening to bomb Iranian power plants unless Tehran reopened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. His Monday morning reversal, which he attributed to ongoing talks, blindsided markets—and, apparently, Iran.

As for whether insiders are profiting from advance knowledge of policy announcements, Johnston said it “would not surprise me,” but but stressed he didn’t have direct evidence.

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Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin company, announced on Tuesday that it has signed a Big Four accounting firm to complete its first full audit. The move stands to give the company, which has long faced criticism over its lack of transparency, a stamp of legitimacy. 

In a statement, Tether announced that the audit will review Tether’s assets, liabilities, and reserves and be conducted by one of the Big Four—a term that describes Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC—but did not specify which one. Five years ago, Tether was fined $41 million for falsely claiming that its stablecoins were fully backed by fiat currencies. 

The announcement comes two months after the company launched USAT, a stablecoin designed to be compliant with U.S. regulations. Tether’s return to the U.S. further cemented its dominance in the stablecoin industry, where it currently owns about 60% of market share. Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency pegged to a stable asset like the U.S. dollar. 

“The Big Four Firm was selected through a competitive process because the organization is already operating at Big Four audit standard; the audit will be delivered,” said Simon McWilliams, chief financial officer of Tether, in the statement.

Prior to President Donald Trump’s second term, Tether had several run-ins with regulators. In 2021, the company reached a settlement with the New York attorney general’s office after it allegedly covered up roughly $850 million in losses. Three years later, in 2024, the Department of Justice reportedly investigated the company for violations of anti-money-laundering and sanctions rules. That same year, blockchain analytics company TRM Labs found that Tether’s network had been used to finance terrorism.

Since Trump took office last January, the stablecoin giant, along with other major crypto companies, has benefited from more lenient regulation out of Washington. The connections between the president and Tether are not hard to find. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, is the former CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, which is the company that manages the reserves of USAT.  And the president’s former top crypto official, Bo Hines, is now the CEO of Tether’s U.S. operations

“Tether’s mission has always been to build trust through action, not promises,” said Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s CEO, about the audit in the statement. “Trust is built when institutions are willing to open themselves fully to scrutiny.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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