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Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell delivered a pointed message to the next generation of workers last week: stop worrying about artificial intelligence and start learning to use it.

Speaking before nearly 400 students at a Harvard economics class in a wide-ranging conversation moderated by Professor David Moss, Powell acknowledged that Gen Z is entering one of the more challenging job markets in recent memory—and said AI is both part of the problem and the solution.

Moss put Powell on the spot immediately, asking on behalf of the students in the room: “They’re entering into an uncertain time—an economy where new job formation is lower for many reasons. In particular, jobs that were plentiful a couple of years ago for students coming out of college are no longer so. And AI sits as this remarkable technological transformation that is both promising and existentially threatening.”

Powell said he and his colleagues at the central bank were “well aware of the current situation for students coming out. It’s a time of very low job creation. And also you have AI going on.” Allowing that something “more longer-term, more secular” is probably happening around technology and AI, he was direct: “there’s no denying it’s a challenging time to enter the labor market.”

Powell also cited low job creation, shifts in immigration policy, along with the disruptive force of new technology. But rather than counsel caution, he pointed students toward the tools disrupting their future careers. “I think you’re in a situation where you need to invest the time to really master the use of these new technologies, and that should stand you in good stead.”

Powell spoke from personal experience. “My observation is that these large language models make people much more productive,” he said. “I feel like it’s making me more productive, because I can learn things really quickly.” He added that conversations with his son and others in the workforce had reinforced that view: for those who learn to use AI well, it is an amplifier, not a threat.

The AI washing wave is already here

The remarks come at a delicate moment. The U.S. unemployment rate remains low, but Powell was candid that the headline figure offers little comfort to recent graduates struggling to land their first jobs. New college hires that were plentiful just a few years ago have grown scarce, he noted, as companies assess what work can be automated.

Powell all but confirmed that many large companies are eager to follow Block CEO Jack Dorsey’s lead and lay off thousands of workers, a practice that some, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, call “AI washing.” He said that “major U.S. companies—and we talked to a lot of those people who run those companies—they’re all looking at what they can do” in terms of staff reductions. “The truth is, they can take out a lot of jobs that can be automated by a very smart large language model. They just can, and they will, because their competitors are doing it and they can’t afford to have higher costs than their competitors.”

Still, Powell pushed back against fatalism. He cited the historical pattern of technological disruption—stretching back to the invention of the loom—as evidence that new tools, however threatening in the short term, ultimately raise productivity and living standards.

Jerome Powell on the Luddite era

Powell put on his econ nerd hat for a second, citing all the similar technological advances throughout the history of modern capitalism. “If you look back through history—to generalize, this has been going on for a couple hundred years, since the loom was invented, right, to put all the people who were doing weaving out of business. But in all cases, it has wound up raising productivity and raising living standards—as long as the society keeps producing people who have the skills and aptitudes to benefit from that technology.”

Powell predicted “that will be the case here,” when it comes to AI—just a new version of the loom. “It may take some patience and all that,” he said, “but in the longer term, this economy is going to give you great opportunities. And just be a little optimistic about that.”

The crucial question, though, is just how much longer that longer term ends up being. When mechanical weaving displaced textile workers in 19th-century England, after all, the transition was brutal, sparking the Luddite movement of displaced workers destroying the machines that had taken their jobs and giving economic historians. What if the “long term” is the whole lifespan of the Gen Z generation?

That was exactly Moss’ follow-up question: does longer term mean 10, 20, or even 40 years? “You know,” Powell responded, “it’s so hard to say.” All the AI adoption that he sees happening in the 2020s is focusing on existing middle management, back-office jobs, and Powell speculated that fluent AI users should be unaffected by this, while admitting that he didn’t know the answer. “There can be a period during which it’s challenging,” he acknowledged to the professor, “and this may be one of those. But nonetheless, I would just say it’s out there and it’s out there to be done. And I would be, medium and longer term, very optimistic about this economy compared to any other economy.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government sponsored businesses designed to prop up mortgages, ripped on Monday after billionaire investor Bill Ackman told investors in a late Sunday X post to stop worrying about the war in Iran and start buying.

“Some of the highest quality businesses in the world are trading at extremely cheap prices,” Ackman wrote. “Ignore the MSM. One of the most one-sided wars in history that will end well for the U.S. and the world. And we have the potential for a large peace dividend.”

Then he added, almost as an aside, that “Fannie and Freddie are stupidly cheap. Asymmetry at its best. They could be a 10X and it could happen soon.”

Ackman’s tweet was the only obvious catalyst as Fannie Mae surged as much as 41% in Monday trading, while Freddie Mac climbed as much as 34%. These were the largest single-day moves for each stock since May of last year, when Trump floated the idea of privatizing the two entities. 

Ackman’s post clearly touched a nerve. Investors are feeling “extreme fear” according to CNN’s Fear & Greed Index as the Iran war, now in its sixth week, wreaks havoc on markets. Oil prices are spiking on threats to the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency reported will be used as a toll and blocked off to Israel, and American stocks sold off last week and again on Monday. But Ackman’s message to anyone watching their portfolio bleed: get over it.

Many investors seemed to take that confidence at face value. But Ackman isn’t a neutral source, in fact, he’s the single biggest beneficiary of the trade he’s recommending. Pershing Square Capital Management is the largest common shareholder in both companies, holding more than 210 million shares combined. He’s been in the position for over a decade and has helped lead the charge to get Fannie and Freddie privatized.

The timing also might raise eyebrows, as Monday is the last trading day of Q1 2026, which matters for hedge funds. The price a stock closes at on the final day of the quarter is the price that shows up in performance reports to investors. A 40% pop in your largest position on that exact day is, at minimum very convenient.

Ackman has previous in this regard. On December 30, 2024 — the second-to-last trading day of Q4 — he published a detailed thesis calling the GSE trade his best idea for 2025. That post got 4.9 million views and sent shares surging by similar margins.

Still, the valuation disparity that Ackman is pointing to is genuinely striking. Fannie printed $14.4 billion in net income last year, while Freddie printed $10.7 billion. Their combined market cap before Monday’s move was roughly $10 billion, meaning both companies earn more than twice their market value annually.

Michael Burry, of “Big Short” fame, also encouraged Ackman and responded to his post, writing that he “cannot emphasize enough how rare this is in this market.” Burry also added extra thoughts on the housing market in a different post, where he blamed Fannie and Freddie’s long-time conservatorship for keeping the housing supply low, in addition to what he called artificially low interest rates and 6 to 7 trillion in “helicopter cash” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Government created the problem and now maintains policies that prevent free markets from reaching a solution, not the least of which is keeping the GSEs inefficiently run while in conservatorship,” Burry wrote. 

The bullish case for the GSEs, that the Trump administration will privatize the two via IPO, potentially by the end of the year, has been the thesis since they went under government conservatorship in 2008, and it has never materialized. Fannie topped out at around $15.30 in September 2025 due to peak privatization optimism sparked by Ackman and his allies. Even after Monday’s rally, both stocks remain down nearly 60% from that peak. At the ResiDay housing conference in November, White House housing director Bill Pulte said that a decision on the IPO would happen sometime by the end of that quarter or early this year, but that decision has yet to come.

Some critics, like UCLA economist Wesley Yin, argue that a rushed privatization process could raise borrowing costs and risk recreating the conditions that fueled the Great Recession; namely, allowing for-profit companies with access to risk-free government backed borrowing. He raised questions about whether the government would truly risk repeating that mistake. 

In his December post, Ackman acknowledged the uncertainty with some legalese.  “There remains a high degree of uncertainty about the ultimate outcome so you should limit your exposure to what you can afford to lose if you choose to invest,” he wrote. 

That caveat was gone Sunday night. Ackman wrote, “ignore the bears.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

There are an estimated 938 billionaires in the United States. To put that into context, that’s about two full Boeing 747s (each one holds 416 passengers). Or, that’s about half of the seats in The Broadway Theatre (which has 1,763) seats, where you can now catch The Great Gatsby. It’s also the average size of the U.S. college graduating class, and just 1.1% of the 82,500 seats at MetLife Stadium.

Regardless of how you view that 938 number, there’s one overall resounding agreement people have: most voters want billionaires to pay their fair share. With two separate billionaire tax proposals now gaining traction (one nationwide and one in California specifically), a new poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies quantifies just how much the average American thinks the rich should pay up.

The survey, released this month in partnership with the Los Angeles Times, found that 52% of California’s registered voters support a proposed one-time 5% tax on the net worth of the state’s roughly 200 billionaires, while 33% oppose it. 

Responses fell along ideological lines. Seventy-two percent of Democrats back the tax, and so does 51% of no-party-preference voters. But more than seven in 10 Republicans and strongly conservative voters oppose it.

California’s ballot initiative

The California Billionaire Tax Act didn’t come from a politician but from a union. SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, representing 120,000 healthcare workers, filed the ballot initiative in October 2025 with a specific crisis in mind: federal Medicaid cuts threatening to strip healthcare from more than 3 million working-class Californians.

To design the tax, the union tapped UC Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, who calculated that American billionaires currently pay just 1.3% of their wealth in taxes, down from 3.1% under President Ronald Reagan. 

The bill would impose a one-time, 5% levy on the worldwide net worth of any individual worth more than $1 billion who was a California resident as of Jan. 1, 2026, paid in annual installments of 1% over five years. The Jan. 1 cutoff was designed to prevent the exodus that critics predicted and that at least six billionaires—including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—had attempted before the deadline passed.

The revenue is projected to be at $100 billion over five years and would flow 90% into healthcare, with the remaining 10% into education and food assistance. The measure still needs nearly 875,000 valid signatures by June 24 to reach the November ballot.

Bernie’s federal tax on billionaires

There’s a separate measure to initiate a similar 5% tax on billionaires nationwide. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have proposed the “Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act” which would impose a 5% annual federal wealth tax on individuals worth $1 billion or more.

In its first year, the revenue would fund one-time $3,000 checks for households earning under $150,000, covering roughly three-quarters of the country. And like the California tax, the bill would address the $1.1 trillion in Medicaid and ACA cuts, in addition to capping childcare costs at 7% of household income, and establishing a $60,000 minimum salary for public school teachers.

The richest man alive, Elon Musk, has countered that taxing every billionaire at 100% barely dents the $39 trillion national debt. But the billionaire tax isn’t trying to fix the debt—it’s an attempt to address healthcare cuts. 

A separate measure for a $30-an-hour minimum wage

The billionaire tax poll landed in the middle of something already moving: a $30-an-hour minimum wage campaign. It’s co-led by One Fair Wage, the national advocacy group whose president, Saru Jayaraman, helped convene 140 labor and community leaders in Los Angeles last June to declare a new era for the wage movement.

“We all agreed that the fight for $15 is long gone,” Jayaraman told Fortune. “It’s time for a new kind of frame.”

What emerged was the concept of a living wage for all, pegged to what the MIT Living Wage Calculator says it actually costs to live, with no carveouts for tipped workers.

Since then, $30-wage bills have been introduced in New York City, Hawaii, and Los Angeles. Bills for $25 per hour are advancing in DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and federally. Twenty states remain stuck at the federal floor of $7.25, unchanged since 2009.

Two sides of the same coin

The billionaire tax and the $30-wage campaigns share more than timing — they share a target.

“We see these two things in California go hand in hand,” Jayaraman said. “There are two parts to the same plan. Billionaires should pay tax like everybody else to help contribute to society, and they should pay their employees, whose labor they profit from, enough to survive.”

She added: “Right now, billionaires are paying nothing. They should pay their fair share.”

“Minimum wage is by far the most popular issue out there right now,” Jayaraman said. “But the billionaires tax is a close second.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Even amid the torrent of disquieting news from the Middle East in recent weeks, an Iranian suggestion that it might start offering safe passage to oil tankers that paid in Chinese yuan, instead of the U.S. dollar, raised eyebrows.

Sourced to an anonymous Iranian official, the threat sparked a spate of warnings that Tehran might use its control of the Strait of Hormuz not to just threaten the world’s access to petroleum, but also upend the dollar-based international monetary system. By striking a blow against the petrodollar, Iran could initiate the unraveling of the dollar’s dominance, itself a linchpin of U.S. power—or so the argument goes. Those citing such ominous scenarios envisioned other possible dangers, including the debilitation of America’s security guarantees to Saudi Arabia and other Gulf oil exporters.

“The conflict could be remembered as a key catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance, and the beginnings of the petroyuan,” with potentially “significant downstream effects to…the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency,” Deutsche Bank analysts warned in a report last week.

The war’s consequences will doubtless be serious—but not for the dollar. The U.S. currency’s success rests on robust foundations, and Iran’s petroyuan gambit looks to be just the latest of many episodes in which alarmism over the dollar’s primacy has proven misplaced. Even if the petrodollar system weakens, it would matter little: As massive as world oil markets are, the reasons for dollar dominance lie elsewhere.

The greenback’s status stems from two features that no other currency can match. First is the depth, breadth, and liquidity of U.S. financial markets, in particular the market for Treasury bills and bonds, which can be bought and sold in enormous volumes without causing significant movements in price. This attribute is crucial in a financial crunch, when firms are scrambling to ensure that they can obtain the cash needed to meet obligations coming due.

The second feature is America’s open capital account—that is, the freedom to move money across U.S. borders virtually unimpeded. Many countries have open capital accounts but, importantly, China doesn’t. And no country, even open ones, has the U.S. market’s depth and breadth.

Having defied obituary writers on numerous occasions, the dollar continues to play a role in international transactions far out of proportion to the U.S. economy’s size. It accounts for well over half of foreign currency reserves held by central banks, and a similar share of export invoices for cross-border trade, as well as international bank loans and bond issuance. Network effects entrench its status; everybody has an incentive to use the dollar because so many others do.

Nowhere is the extent of the dollar’s entrenchment more evident than in the working of the little-known but gigantic market for foreign exchange swaps. In this market, global firms—multinational corporations, banks, insurance companies, securities dealers, and pension funds—shield themselves against currency fluctuations. According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the amount of outstanding swaps currently stands above $100 trillion, with some 90% involving the dollar. (Far lower percentages involve the euro, Japanese yen, and other currencies.) This reflects the myriad ways in which the greenback is used for lending, borrowing, and investing.

So why are so many people obsessed with the petrodollar? It mostly comes down to a narrative that is only loosely grounded in facts. As the story goes, in the mid-1970s, the U.S. struck a bargain with Saudi Arabia, offering military aid and protection to the ruling House of Saud, in exchange for a Saudi promise to only accept dollars for oil and invest the proceeds in U.S. Treasuries. That set a precedent for other oil exporters to follow.

Those on the ground at the time remember things differently. One of the few foreigners allowed to live in the desert kingdom then was David Mulford, a young investment banker hired in 1975 by the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA), the nation’s central bank, as an adviser. In his 2014 memoir, he recalled how a team of six professionals struggled in SAMA’s dilapidated headquarters to manage “a portfolio growing at $5 and later $10 billion every thirty days,” relying on a single, sluggish telex machine for communicating with the outside world.

It turns out that oil was already predominantly priced in dollars and, as Mulford explained, Saudi Arabia had little choice but to plow its revenue into dollar-denominated assets. According to Mulford, who later became a U.S. Treasury undersecretary and ambassador to India, “In most markets outside the U.S. in those days a currency trade of just $10 million was enough to move markets, so there were practical limitations on the amount of currency diversification that we could achieve.” Furthermore, “purchases of German [bonds], or Japanese yen bonds, or Dutch guilder bonds, or Swiss franc notes were just not possible in the sizes common in the U.S. market.”

In other words, it was the American market’s unique depth, breadth, and liquidity—and not some secret deal—that led the Saudis to choose the dollar.

Petrodollars were a major reason why the greenback internationalized in the 1970s and the decades thereafter, as much of the income received by oil exporters was deposited in dollar accounts at banks around the world, primarily in Europe. But they are a much less significant factor in the global dollar market today.

While 44% of earnings from oil sales were deposited in offshore dollar bank accounts during the 1970s, that figure shrank to 27% by the early 2000s, noted Jess Hoversen, chief economist at Column, a San Francisco financial services firm, citing research from the IMF. The percentage is now in single digits, she estimates, as oil exporters’ earnings today are directed toward domestic development and sovereign wealth funds, which in turn are invested heavily in international stock markets and startups.

But the dollar market has surged even as the petrodollar took a step back. Hoversen pointed out that the offshore dollar credit market stood at $2.5 trillion in 2000, and hit $14.2 trillion by last year. “This tells us that the dollar is very structurally resilient,” she writes.

The debate about dollar dominance will continue to rage, as the Trump administration shakes investor confidence with actions like attacking the independence of the Federal Reserve. But barring much more serious self-inflicted wounds, the dollar will keep its place at the top of the currency league table for the foreseeable future—even if Iran demands oil payments in yuan.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell offered a sobering assessment of America’s fiscal health on Monday, telling a Harvard economics class audience that while the nation’s $39 trillion debt load is not immediately dangerous, the path the country is on demands urgent attention from lawmakers.

“The level of the debt is not unsustainable,” Powell said during a wide-ranging conversation before roughly 400 students, “but the path is not sustainable. It will not end well if we don’t do something fairly soon.”

The remarks extend a consistent warning Powell has sounded for years, that while the the debt level is manageable in the short term, the fiscal trajectory absolutely is not. His comments also came as the average national gas price neared $4 per gallon amid a war in Iran that shows no signs of resolving soon, despite President Trump’s inconsistent noises about a potential end to hostilities.

Powell was careful to draw a distinction between the stock of debt and its trajectory, noting that the U.S., as the world’s reserve currency issuer and home to the deepest capital markets on earth, can sustain a large debt load in ways smaller economies cannot.

The remarks came in response to a student question about at what point the size of the U.S. debt breaks “the point of natural systems of repayment.” Powell acknowledged that no one knows exactly where that breaking point lies—pointing to Japan as a country carrying a far higher debt-to-GDP ratio than the U.S.—but said the direction of travel was unambiguous.

“What’s clear is that our debt is growing much faster. The federal government debt is growing substantially faster than our economy,” Powell said, “and that ratio is going up. And in the long run, that’s kind of the definition of unsustainable.”

Net interest payments on the national debt are now projected to exceed $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026—nearly triple the $345 billion the government paid in 2020. In the first three months of the current fiscal year alone, interest payments reached $270 billion, already surpassing the nation’s defense spending for the same period. Those are real constraints on real budget choices. But they are constraints, not collapse—and conflating the two distorts the policy conversation. Debt held by the public is projected to surge from 101% of GDP today to 120% of GDP by 2036, eclipsing the post-World War II record, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

Seeking balance

Importantly, Powell did not call for paying down the debt outright. The fix, he suggested, is more modest—and more achievable, if there is political will. “We don’t have to pay the debt down,” he said. “We just need to have primary balance and begin to have the economy actually growing more quickly than the debt.”

The Fed chair was careful to note that fiscal policy is explicitly not within his jurisdiction. “This is not the Fed’s job, of course,” he said, and he acknowledged with a touch of dry humor that his warnings tend to fall on deaf ears in Washington. “I pretty much limit myself to those high-level points, which essentially everyone ignores.”

To be sure, Powell is not wrong that America’s debt trajectory is unsustainable on paper. But that has been the verdict for decades—and the sky has stubbornly refused to fall. Also, his preferred solution of achieving primary balance, so the economy grows faster than the debt, will be difficult, to say the least. In practice, closing a structural primary deficit of the U.S. government’s current size means either raising revenues significantly, cutting spending in politically explosive areas like Medicare and Social Security, or banking on growth rates that history suggests are optimistic. But as Powell noted, the Fed chair is explicitly not responsible for solving the problem.

The broader context of Powell’s remarks made clear the stakes for the central bank. Powell has spent his tenure fiercely defending the Fed’s political independence, insisting throughout the conversation that the Fed must “stick to our knitting” and resist pressure to deploy its tools for purposes beyond maximum employment and price stability. A fiscal crisis that forced the Fed’s hand would represent exactly the kind of mission creep he has warned against.

Powell made those boundaries explicit when describing his philosophy of Fed governance. “There’s always a time when an administration looks and says, ‘It would be good to use that tool for something else,’” he said. “It happens all the time. And we just have to be in a situation where we’re not trying to work against any politician or any administration, but we have to be careful to stick to what we’re doing.”

There’s also an irony in Powell warning about debt sustainability while leading an institution whose own policies made cheap borrowing the path of least resistance for years. As JPMorgan warned in its 2026 outlook, there could be “a less straightforward path to reduce the U.S. government’s debt load”—in part because of the interplay between Fed policy and Treasury financing needs. Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio has described one possible endgame as an economic “heart attack,” with government investment crowded out by debt service obligations. That’s a serious concern, but that’s an argument for smart fiscal reform, not for treating Powell’s Harvard remarks as a five-alarm fire.

Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen struck a similar tone in January, warning that the ballooning debt could reduce the Fed’s ability to address unemployment and inflation, while noting that legislators were not “adequately acknowledging the risks.” The chorus of credible voices is real. So is the risk of that chorus becoming cover for cuts that disproportionately hurt the Americans least able to absorb them—a tradeoff Powell’s remarks, however honest, did not address.

The debt deserves serious attention. But serious attention means honest accounting of tradeoffs, not just a clean soundbite from Cambridge telling lawmakers to act “fairly soon,” with no guidance on how, and no acknowledgment that acting too aggressively could be just as destabilizing as the debt itself.

Powell’s term as Fed chair expires in May 2026. His fiscal warning, which was offered not from a podium in Washington but to a room of Harvard students, may prove to be among the clearest statements of his tenure: the debt level is survivable, but only if the trajectory changes. “It will not end well,” he said, “if we don’t do something fairly soon.”

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

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

If you’ve spent a lot of time in the past year looking at your bank account balance, you’re not the only one. Nearly all Americans are rethinking their finances as money anxiety increases, according to a new study from Wells Fargo. 

A survey of more than 3,700 U.S. adults found that 86% of respondents said they made changes in what, where, and how they buy, and two-thirds said they have delayed spending or payments. 

People are looking to take charge over their finances and feel more positive when they sense they’re in control, Emily Irwin, head of Private Wealth Planning at Wells Fargo, told Fortune. 

Meanwhile, 84% said they’d rather give up social media for a year compared to just 16% willing to say goodbye to banking apps from Robinhood, Nerdwallet, and traditional financial institutions.

It follows a trend of more Americans trying to be more intentional with their money in a moment where “they feel like their financial lives are messy,” Irwin said. 

“They want to kind of check in on their finances,” she explained. “They want to minimize distractions or minimize temptation—positive ones sometimes—but still temptations, nonetheless. And they want to be able to maintain focus on what their intention for their money is, both short-term and long-term.” 

Turning to social media and AI for financial advice

As people try to take more control of their finances, they’re looking beyond traditional banking for advice. Gen Z is increasingly turning to social media to decide where to put their money, the study found, with 44% relying on YouTube videos and 34% turning to Instagram or TikTok. 

In addition, nearly one-fifth of U.S. adults reported using AI in the past year for financial advice, and twice as many Gen Z adults said they used it. Among the AI users, about 80% said they use it for financial education, like learning the difference between a traditional and Roth 401(k)s, and three-fourths of people ask about financial strategy, Irwin said. 

Two-thirds of people who asked AI for money advice acted on its suggestions, according to the study. Of those in that group, 90% said that the advice was profitable or worthwhile. However, questions remain if AI advice leads to long-term profitability, Irwin said. 

“AI is a wonderful resource to be able to get education, to be able to ask those questions that maybe, you’ve always been a little bit confused on, or you want to learn more about,” she said, but added people should be cautious when AI offers strategic plans. “I would ensure that before there’s implementation of a strategy, even if it’s profitable, that someone understands what all the alternate paths would be in order to appropriately put a strategy in place.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

To non-Canadian eyes, Air Canada CEO Michael Rousseau’s decision to post a message of condolences in English following the airline’s deadly crash at New York’s LaGuardia airport may not seem all that noteworthy. After all, Rousseau has acknowledged himself the limitations of his French. And this was an extremely emotionally fraught moment: In the first Air Canada accident to involve fatalities since 1983, the March 22 runway collision between a plane and a fire truck killed two pilots and injured dozens of others.

Amid such a tragedy, the ensuing outcry over the CEO’s language choice might look like a tempest in a teapot. But Canadians understood immediately why Rousseau’s decision to speak English (other than a “bonjour” and a “merci”) caused such an affront. It has now led to his retirement from the company later this year, as announced on Monday. (A spokesman for Air Canada said, “Mr. Rousseau has reached a natural retirement age” and added that the company’s succession planning had been underway internally for some time.)

Air Canada is headquartered in Montreal, a majority French-speaking city, the largest in Quebec. It’s a region where matters of language are often a third rail in public life. For many Québécois, French is not just a means of communication but a core marker of identity—which helps explain the intense emotional reactions when they feel it is sidelined in official settings.

Rousseau’s message was meant to offer condolences for the deaths and sympathy for the injured—and also to reassure the company’s rattled 37,000 employees and put the spotlight on the heroism of the pilots and crew. He expressed Air Canada’s “deepest sorrow for everyone affected,” and called it a “very dark day here at Air Canada.”

But those messages were overshadowed by the flap over his language. As a former Crown corporation (Canadian jargon for government-owned business) Air Canada is subject to the nation’s Official Languages Act, meaning it is required by law to communicate in both English and French. So it was baffling to many that Rousseau, a Canadian, would not realize that a 3-minute, 45-second video in English would be a big faux pas. Making matters worse: The flight originated in Montreal, so it certainly had many francophone passengers and crew members among the injured, in addition to one of the pilots who died.

Montreal Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada called it “disrespectful of the francophone community.” And even Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney weighed in, slamming Rousseau for his “lack of judgment and lack of compassion.” “We proudly live in a bilingual country, and companies like Air Canada particularly have a responsibility to always communicate in both official languages,” Carney told reporters.

Rousseau himself acknowledged the flub and said last week that he was “deeply saddened” that “his inability to speak French had diverted attention from the profound grief of the families and the great resilience of Air Canada’s employees.”

Why effort matters more than perfect pronunciation

Though speaking in heartfelt way can be hard for someone using a second language, many executives of multinational companies do nonetheless make the effort (even if their public relations staff typically crafts the message). Politicians too: New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made videos in Spanish, Arabic, and Hindi—often including footage of him struggling with his lines—to the delight of immigrant voters who appreciate the effort, even if he’s butchering the pronunciation.

This wasn’t Rousseau’s first time creating a language kerfuffle as CEO of Air Canada. In 2021, soon after taking the reins, Rousseau proudly noted in a speech to the Montreal Chamber of Commerce that he had been easily able to live in the city for more than a decade without learning French. (He grew up in Eastern Ontario, a part of the country with a sizeable francophone minority.)

During the ensuing P.R. crisis, he apologized and pledged to learn French. Bloomberg reported that Rousseau had taken 300 hours of French lessons since 2021, so it’s anyone’s guess why he couldn’t have cobbled together at least a couple of sentences in the mother tongue of many of Air Canada’s stakeholders. (Some commentators suggested that for his compensation of $9.4 million last year, learning conversational French shouldn’t be too much to ask.) Before Air Canada, he spent years as a senior executive of the retailer Hudson’s Bay.

The Air Canada board—which should perhaps have nudged Rousseau along in his French studies—said on Monday that French skills would be a key factor in choosing the next CEO. (Though Rousseau has won credit for guiding Air Canada out of the pandemic, shares are down 33% since he became CEO.)

The language debates permeate many aspects of Quebec life: A few years ago, controversy erupted when the hallowed Montreal Canadiens hockey team hired an anglophone coach who was unilingual. He didn’t last long.

The business risk of offending your home market

Some of Rousseau’s defenders in the Canadian commentariat have raised fair questions about whether a CEO of a global business really needs to speak French, whether such a requirement narrows the talent pool too much, and whether any of this should even be the government’s business.

But ultimately, Rousseau’s inability—or perhaps even unwillingness—to learn French, was just bad business. Angering politicians or columnists is one thing. But 23% of Canadians are native French speakers. Given all the competition in the airline industry, and choices travelers have, offending anyone is dangerous.

Emotional intelligence, empathy, and the ability to read the room are essential skills for CEOs today. Others have learned that lesson the hard way years before Rousseau did: Remember when cloud computing company PagerDuty’s CEO Jennifer Tejada quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in a memo announcing mass layoffs in 2023 and had to apologize? Or howBP CEO Tony Hayward grumbled “I’d like my life back” after an oil spill caused by the company?

Perhaps Rousseau should get credit for not using AI to mask his lack of linguistic fluency. But authenticity, even if expressed in broken French, is the best approach when it comes to soothing nerves and expressing sympathy.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Leslie Sherman-Shafer, an Uber driver in the San Francisco Bay Area, likes to start each shift with a full tank of gas.

It used to cost her around $25 to fill up her Toyota Corolla. She’s spent closer to $40 since the Iran war began and pushed up the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular gasoline by $1. Sherman-Shafer, a retired dental office assistant who picks up Uber passengers five days a week, said she’s putting in extra hours to cover the difference.

“We don’t get reimbursed for gas. We rely on the generosity of the tip,” Sherman-Shafer said. Some passengers have tipped more to compensate for higher gas prices, but most don’t tip at all, she said.

Driving a car, van or truck is a big part of many Americans’ workdays. Nearly 27% of civilian workers cited driving as a physical demand of their jobs last year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Millions of drivers use personal vehicles for their work, from delivery and ride-share providers like Sherman-Shafer to self-employed electricians, nannies, home health care aides and real estate agents.

As the war enters a fifth week and continues to disrupt global oil supplies. many of those workers are now scrambling to make ends meet. The national average price for gas reached $3.99 per gallon on Monday, up 34% from a month earlier, according to AAA.

“With everything going up, it’s impossible to save a dime,” Sherman-Shafer said.

Some companies compensate employees for using their own vehicles, including the cost of gas. In the U.S., the Internal Revenue Service sets a standard mileage rate every year that businesses and private contractors can use to calculate tax deductions. Alpine Maids, a housekeeping company based in Denver, pays cleaners the 2026 federal reimbursement rate of 72.5 cents per mile for the distance they drive to clients’ homes.

But with gas prices spiking, that money is not going as far, said Chris Willatt, a former geologist who now runs Alpine Maids.

“Our maids drive their own cars, so it’s kind of like their paycheck got smaller,” Willatt said. “They’re all upset.”

Willatt said he reduced how often maids must report to the office, from daily to once a week, and rejiggered cleaning assignments so employees aren’t driving as far between clients. If gas prices climb further, he said he might increase what he charges customers so he can pay workers more.

Molly Kenefick, the owner of Doggy Lama Pet Care Inc. in Oakland, California, said she recently raised her gas reimbursement rate to 80 cents per mile for 15 employees who use their own vehicles to pick up dogs and take them for hikes around the Bay Area. The rate increase will stay in place until gas prices in their area drop below $5 for at least a month, she said.

Kenefick said she planned to raise prices for the company’s services in May. But she doesn’t want to increase them too much because she’s worried she’ll lose clients. So Kenefick is also dipping into her savings to pay for gas.

“The economy is hard for people. Everybody’s under strain,” she said. “I can take some of the load and the company can take some of the load, provided this doesn’t go on too long.”

Ride-hailing and food delivery platforms that rely on gig workers don’t reimburse drivers for gas, but some are offering temporary incentives in response to rising gas prices. DoorDash, Uber, Lyft and Instacart are providing more than the usual cash back on gas purchases for drivers who use company-branded debit cards. DoorDash and Instacart are giving a weekly fuel payment to drivers who travel 125 miles or more making deliveries.

Sarah Noell, who spends about 20 hours a week making deliveries for DoorDash in Lynchburg, Virginia, said the measures help somewhat. But she said she’s noticed more customers declining to add tips to their orders as gas prices have increased.

Noell has started refusing any order that won’t average out to $1 per mile, including the $2.50 per order she gets from DoorDash. That cancels out many users who aren’t tipping or give only small tips.

“It takes nearly double the cost to fill my tank,” Noell said. “Ten dollars used to get me a decent amount. Now it only gets me 3 gallons.”

Owners of diesel-powered vehicles have seen even steeper fuel price increases since the war started on Feb. 28, affecting drivers around the world.

Drivers of diesel-powered “jeepneys” in the Philippines, went on strike for two days last week to protest their higher costs. In France, dozens of buses and trucks drove slowly on the Paris ring road Monday to demonstrate their concerns about rising diesel prices. Drivers and businesses want the French government to provide aid to mitigate the impact.

“The major difficulty right now is finding our balance on our business since we sold services with the vehicles at a certain price for diesel that was much cheaper. And we’re not going to ask customers to pay that difference,” Sarah Bahezre, manager of the bus transportation company Ulysse Cars, told The Associated Press.

Average U.S. diesel prices climbed 44% over the last month, according to AAA.

A few weeks ago, Rachel Hunter paid $3.62 a gallon to fill the single diesel truck used by Cactus Crew Junk Removal & Thrift Store, a Phoenix business she and her husband co-founded. The same fuel now costs $6.09 per gallon in Phoenix, according to AAA.

The truck carries all kinds of heavy cargo, from slabs of solid maple bowling lanes to loads of concrete paver tiles. So fuel costs quickly add up, Hunter said, particularly with a truck that only gets 12 or 13 miles to the gallon.

Hunter has started quoting prices that reflect the jump in prices. She worries she’s in a “vicious circle” that could hurt the business if oil prices remain high.

“We don’t want to get a bad name for being overpriced,” she says. “I’ll be able to explain it where people can understand, but it doesn’t mean they can afford it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Monday that it is important to closely monitor inflation amid a spike in energy prices from the Iran war.

Powell, who spoke before nearly 400 students at Harvard University as gas prices inched toward an average of $4 per gallon in the U.S., said there wasn’t a lot Fed policymakers could do since energy shocks “tend to come and go pretty quickly” and monetary maneuvers work over the longer-term. But a series of energy shocks, nevertheless, could be concerning.

“You have to carefully monitor inflation expectations because you could have a series of big supply shocks and that can lead, you know, the public generally, businesses, price setters, households … to start expecting higher inflation over time. Why wouldn’t it?” Powell said.

In wide-ranging remarks, Powell acknowledged young graduates were entering a challenging job market. He noted the role of artificial intelligence and that while employment is historically low, there is very little job creation right now.

The U.S. job market has been lackluster for the past year. Employers added fewer than 10,000 jobs a month in 2025 – the weakest hiring outside a recession since 2002. This year began with a strong 126,000 new jobs in January, but the United States whipsawed to 92,000 job losses the following month.

Economists refer to a low-hire, low-fire job market in which companies are hesitant to add staff but don’t want to let go of the workers that they have. That’s made it especially hard for young people to find employment. There’s some concern that artificial intelligence is taking over entry-level work that previously would have gone to young jobseekers, or that companies are reluctant to make hiring decisions until they better understand how they are going to use AI.

Powell said he was optimistic over the medium- to long-term, noting that history has shown that technological innovations have repeatedly raised living standards and increased production. Large-language models, he said, make people, including himself, more productive.

“You’re in a situation where you need to really invest the time to master the use of these new technologies,” Powell said. “There’s no denying it’s a challenging time to enter the labor market, It may take some patience and all that, but in the longer term, this economy is going to give you great opportunities. Just be a little optimistic.”

In a question-and-answer session, neither Powell nor the students mentioned President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly criticized the Fed chair. But Powell did stress the importance of the Fed’s independence.

“It’s very hard to build great democratic institutions and much easier to bring them down,” Powell said.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly urged Powell and the Fed to cut interest rates, which would lower the costs to borrow for households, businesses and the U.S. government. Powell’s caution has infuriated Trump.

Some of the economic policies under the Trump administration, however, have complicated the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve, which is to keep prices stable and seek maximum employment.

The U.S. has hit all of its trading partners with new tariffs which can boost retail prices, and the war in Iran has sent energy prices soaring.

The average gallon of gas in the U.S. rose to $3.99 overnight, according to motor club AAA.

Trump escalated his attacks on the Fed in January, when the Department of Justice served the central bank with subpoenas and threatened it with a criminal indictment over his testimony last summer about the Fed’s building renovations.

Trump has nominated former Fed official Kevin Warsh to succeed Powell. But Warsh’s confirmation has been delayed by a Justice Department investigation. Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, has said he won’t vote to confirm any Fed nominees until the investigation is dropped.

Still, Powell took a moment to offer some advice to his would-be successor without naming him, saying it was “very important to stick to your knitting and to stick to the things that were actually assigned.”

“We have very powerful tools. They’re supposed to be for maximum employment and price stability and financial stability,” he continued. “There’s always a time when an administration looks and say it would be good to use that tool for something else … We just have to be in a situation where we’re not trying to work against any politician or any administration, but we have to be careful to stick to what we’re doing.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

How does a kangaroo escape a petting zoo?

It’s not the opening line to a dad joke. If you’re Chesney the kangaroo, you scale an eight-foot (2 1/2 meter) fence and go on the lam for three days, giving your keeper sleepless nights and sending residents of a small Wisconsin town on a search that would end happily on Saturday.

The unprecedented leap at Sunshine Farm in Necedah, Wisconsin, last week was precipitated by some stray dogs that rushed the enclosure and spooked the 16-month-old Chesney, said his keeper, Debbie Marland. She and friends then trekked hither and yon in this town about 160 miles (255 kilometers) northwest of Milwaukee.

They chased reports of sightings and even rented heat-seeking drones, which proved effective in narrowing down the wanderings of the high-jumping adventurer.

“I was putting on about 37,000 steps per day looking for him,” Marland said Sunday. “I haven’t done so much exercise in a very long time.”

Chesney and his roommate Kenny are named for country-music star Kenny Chesney. They’re among 25 animals at Sunshine Farm, with horses, sheep, alpacas, Kunekune pigs, Highland cows and a Bactrian camel. The farm is generally open Fridays through Sundays from mid-May through mid-November and tours are offered to visitors who can interact with the animals.

Chesney escaped about 11:15 a.m. last Wednesday. Though he stayed within a three-mile (5-kilometer) radius of the farm, he kept his pursuers guessing.

Colton Johnson, owner of Midwest Aerial Drone Services, has used heat-sensing drones to help hunters recover deer and reunite missing dogs with their owners. Add a kangaroo to the list.

Johnson spent three days trailing Chesney alongside Marland and a team of volunteers. His strategy was similar to the ones he uses to find lost pets, but Johnson said the appearance of Chesney’s heat signature on the drone footage was unique.

“It almost looked like a dinosaur running through the woods,” Johnson said. “It’s got a long tail, and the way it was moving and hopping, that’s the only way that I can describe it.”

The team caught up with Chesney on Wednesday and again Thursday night, but Johnson said the frightened kangaroo slipped away — once by jumping into a cold river — and Johnson lost track on the drone.

According to Marland’s friend, Stacy Brereton, who helps out at the farm routinely, Friday was a tough day. No one had spotted Chesney all day and searchers feared he had wandered farther afield into even more unfamiliar territory, Brereton said.

Then, Friday night, Chesney was discovered nestled under a tree in a wooded area. A group of searchers surrounded him, but ever fleet of foot — 20 mph (32 kph) is no stretch for him — Chesney eluded them.

Marland returned to the area Saturday morning with Chesney’s favorite treats and pieces of material that had his and Kenny’s scent. Other searchers later joined her. But with no sign of the kangaroo, they started packing up. Just then, they spotted the long-eared kangaroo with outsize back legs approaching.

Brereton stepped up with a delicate touch.

“He had a very calm attitude when he walked up, obviously you could tell he wasn’t in fight-or-flight mode, so I just went with that,” Brereton said. “I just stayed calm with him and I just kind of went and sat and let him come to me.”

Chesney heard the voices and wanted attention, said Brereton, who eventually scooped up the 40-pound (18-kilogram) animal.

“I do believe he heard our comforting voices, he smelled the familiar smells of home and it just made him feel safe,” said Brereton, adding, “I’m just glad he loves me as much as I love him.”

Marland said the “the community really did come together” for the kangaroo, who is now something of a celebrity. A Sunshine Farm fan has written a children’s book about Chesney’s adventures, which Marland hopes to publish and sell to recoup some of the search costs.

Kenny, who with his marsupial mate has the run of Marland’s house, was happy to be reunited with Chesney. Though hungry and tired, Chesney was otherwise healthy but will get a checkup with the veterinarian shortly.

To be safe, Marland added, a new mesh top will be placed over the kangaroo enclosure to prevent any more high-jumping hijinks.

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Associated Press writer Savannah Peters in Edgewood, New Mexico, contributed.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Trump administration sued Minnesota and its school athletics governing body on Monday, carrying out a threat to punish the state for allowing transgender athletes to compete in girls sports.

The lawsuit is part of a broader fight over the rights of transgender youth. More than two dozen states have laws prohibiting transgender women and girls from participating in certain sports and some have barred gender-affirming surgeries for minors. Courts have blocked some of those policies.

In the lawsuit filed Monday, the Justice Department alleges the state Department of Education and the Minnesota State High School League are violating Title IX, a federal law against sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal money.

“The Trump Administration does not tolerate flawed state policies that ignore biological reality and unfairly undermine girls on the playing field,” Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement.

Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison called the lawsuit “a sad attempt to get attention” over an issue that has already been in litigation for months. He said he’ll keep fighting.

“It is astonishing that any president would try to target, shame, and harass children just trying to be themselves, let alone a president with so many actual problems to address,” Ellison said in a statement.

League officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The administration has filed similar lawsuits against Maine and California, and has threatened the federal funding of some universities over transgender athletes, including San Jose State in California and the University of Pennsylvania.

Minnesota officials have long resisted the federal push to ban trans athletes from girls sports. Ellison filed a preemptive lawsuit last April, saying Minnesota’s human rights act supersedes executive orders issued by President Donald Trump last year. The lawsuit also says the state is already in compliance with Title IX. A ruling is pending on the federal government’s motion to dismiss that case.

The Justice Department said in a statement that Minnesota violates Title IX “by requiring girls to compete against boys in athletic competitions that are designated exclusively for girls and allowing boys to invade intimate spaces designated exclusively for girls, such as multi-person locker rooms and bathrooms.”

To buttress its claims that trans athletes have an unfair advantage, the lawsuit highlights the case of a trans pitcher on the Champlin Park High School girls varsity fastpitch softball team who helped lead the school to a 6-0 victory in a state championship game in 2025.

The Trump administration also reversed the Biden administration’s interpretation of Title IX, which held that its provisions prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex also extended to gender identity.

According to the Justice Department, Minnesota’s Department of Education receives more than $3 billion annually in federal funding from the U.S. Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. It says that funding is contingent on compliance with Title IX.

The lawsuit asks a federal court in Minnesota to declare the state in violation of Title IX and order it to prohibit transgender girls from competing in girls’ prep sports.

The civil rights offices at the Education and Health and Human Services put the state and league on notice last September that they faced legal action if they didn’t stop violating the federal law.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

U.S. stocks are swinging again Monday as oil prices keep climbing because of uncertainty about when the war with Iran could end.

The S&P 500 fell 0.3% and deepened its losses following its worst week since the war with Iran began. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 130 points, or 0.3%, as of 2:35 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.6% lower.

Caution was prevalent throughout financial markets. After jumping to an initial gain of 0.9%, the S&P 500 quickly erased nearly all of it before seesawing lower. Stock indexes rose in Europe but fell sharply in some Asian markets, while the price for a barrel of benchmark U.S. crude oil rose 3.3% to settle at $102.88.

The mixed movements followed a whirlwind of action in the war over the weekend, including an entry into the fighting by Houthi rebels in Yemen. The main issue for investors is whether oil and natural gas can resume their full flow from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide and prevent a brutal blast of inflation.

Shortly before the U.S. stock market opened for trading Monday, President Donald Trump said on his social media network that “great progress has been made” with “A NEW, AND MORE REASONABLE, REGIME to end our Military Operations in Iran.”

But he also threatened the possibility of “blowing up and completely obliterating” Iranian power plants if a deal is not reached shortly and if the Strait of Hormuz, an integral waterway for the flow of oil, is not opened immediately.

The statement fit and condensed last week’s pattern, where Trump would tout progress being made in talks and offer some optimism for the market, only for doubts to rise quickly afterward about whether the war can end soon.

All the back and forth has some investors saying they’re giving Trump’s pronouncements less weight than before. But stock prices are nevertheless cheaper than they were before the war, which has some investors waiting for an opportune time to buy.

The S&P 500 is roughly 9% below its all-time high, which was set in January. The Dow and Nasdaq both finished last week more than 10% below their records, a steep-enough fall that professional investors call it a “correction.”

Taking into account how much profits are expected to grow in the coming year for companies in the S&P 500, the index looks roughly 17% cheaper than before the war, by one measure. That’s in a similar range as where prior growth scares for the market ended, as long as they didn’t result in a recession or the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates, according to strategists at Morgan Stanley.

That’s one of the signs that the strategists led by Michael Wilson point to as “growing evidence the S&P 500 correction is getting closer to its ending stages.”

Of course, the Federal Reserve could upset that if it decides oil prices are threatening to stay high for long enough that it needs to raise interest rates. Higher interest rates would help keep a lid on inflation, but they would also slow the economy and push down on prices for all kinds of investments.

Treasury yields have been leaping in the bond market since the war began because of such worries, but they eased somewhat on Monday.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.34% from 4.44% late Friday. That’s a significant move for the bond market and offers some breathing room for Wall Street. But it remains far above its 3.97% level from before the war.

On Wall Street, Sysco fell 14.2% to help lead the market lower after it said it was buying Jetro Restaurant Depot for $21.6 billion in cash and enough Sysco shares to value the company at about $29.1 billion.

Alcoa jumped 8.4% for one of the market’s biggest gains on speculation it could get more business after attacks damaged rival aluminum facilities in the Middle East over the weekend.

In stock markets abroad, the FTSE 100 in London climbed 1.6%, and the CAC 40 in Paris rose 0.9%. That followed drops of 3% for Seoul’s Kospi, 2.8% for Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 and 0.8% for Hong Kong’s Hang Seng.

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AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama and Matt Ott and AP journalist Ayaka McGill contributed to this report.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The federal, bureaucratic push to expedite power grid interconnections is picking up steam, but a key headwind is the lack of “aptitude” and communication from hyperscalers as they rush to electrify their AI data center hubs, said Laura Swett, chairwoman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees grid connections and pipeline approvals.

A combination of Supreme Court rulings, federal rulemaking, and a renewed congressional push for infrastructure permitting reform are all helping speed up approval and construction timelines—while reducing environmental reviews. But a big roadblock is the “tension” between Big Tech hyperscalers wanting to move faster and the “lack of understanding” of the processes, Swett said at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference last week.

“I see difficulty and a breakdown of communication in many instances,” Swett said.

“They (hyperscalers) are very diverse in their aptitude of how things work,” she added. “I see some very successful examples, and some that just continue to butt heads.”

In their defense, she said, the bureaucratic process is a “wonky, very nerdy…morass and a black box” to most people. But the hyperscalers are not reaching out to FERC as much as she hoped, Swett said. She speaks to traditional utilities “probably nine times” more than the hyperscalers. They need more “very strategic communication and very pointed education,” she said.

“The hyperscalers, when they do come speak to us, they don’t speak FERC,” Swett said. “Their complaints about the utilities, quite frankly, to me show a lack of understanding of how the utilities normally function.”

Speeding up the rulemaking

FERC has until the end of April to make a decision on rulemaking after the Energy Department took the unusual steps of asking FERC to take greater jurisdiction of grid interconnects for loads larger than 20 megawatts to accelerate the process.

Whatever the result, fights could develop over the federal government taking more authority from states’ rights on the power grid.

“Our electric grid…is very old, and we haven’t had any growth in demand for decades, and now we’re looking at exponential, explosive demand,” Swett said. “So, how do we get this very slow-moving ship to turn into a speedboat that’s going in several directions at the same time?”

She insisted that FERC will not slash regulations in a way that results in endless litigation. “I don’t want you to be in court for nine years because we made a crappy order that didn’t keep the law in mind,” Swett told energy leaders, arguing for “well thought out and durable” rulemaking.

One major victory for the energy sector, she said, was last year’s 8-0 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (Justice Gorsuch recused himself due a client conflict) in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County over construction of a Utah railroad to carry crude oil.

In FERC’s view, the ruling means that indirect emissions from projects no longer need to be considered in the National Environmental Policy Act environmental (NEPA) review process. Essentially, if a natural gas pipeline is being approved, the process doesn’t need to consider the indirect effects of burning the gas at a power plant.

Swett said FERC already has cut 70 days off the NEPA process because of the court ruling and additional internal efficiencies.

 “We’re on the brink of a cliff in our country, and we need to get this generation on as quickly as possible,” she said.

Permitting reform for infrastructure

Energy Secretary Chris Wright touted his optimism for congressional permitting reform, which is being considered to expedite the timelines for all energy sources, from wind and solar farms to powerline transmission to gas pipelines.

“There are a lot of Democrats that are becoming very common sense about energy,” Wright said. “I love it.”

Indeed, given the AI data center boom and the growing geopolitical issues of energy security from the Iran war, Democratic senators Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., put out a statement in early March saying they will “reopen negotiations on permitting reform,” so long as the Trump administration stops attacking already-permitted wind projects.

“We look forward to working on a bipartisan bill that will speed infrastructure development, lower energy costs, and create good-paying jobs,” they said.

Rich Powell, CEO of the Corporate Energy Buyers Association and the nonprofit Clean Energy Buyers Institute, said he is very supportive of reform if it is “technology neutral,” so politicians cannot target either renewables or fossil fuels. And there is growing bipartisan support, he said, although he’s been optimistic before too.

“This is the third congress in a row we’re taking a great, big run at permitting reform,” Powell said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com