
Former University of Michigan president gets initial approval to lead the University of Florida
GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — The University of Florida's board of trustees on Tuesday approved Santa Ono to be the next leader of Florida's flagship university, though one more vote is required before it becomes official.
Ono, the past president of the University of Michigan, needs approval by the governing body of the state university system before he becomes the 14th president of the University of Florida.
'The energy here at the University of Florida is palpable, and I am eager to join the wonderful students, faculty and staff of the Gator Nation," Ono said in a statement.
The school's board of trustees selects the president and the appointment is subject to confirmation by the Florida Board of Governors, per state law.
Ono is set to replace Kent Fuchs, who became the school's interim president last summer after ex-U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse stepped down. Sasse left the U.S. Senate, where he had represented Nebraska, to become the university's president in 2023.
Sasse announced in July he was leaving the job to focus on his family after his wife was diagnosed with epilepsy.
Soon thereafter, there were reports that Sasse gave six former staffers and two former Republican officials jobs with salaries that outstripped comparable positions and spent over $1.3 million on private catering for lavish dinners, football tailgates and extravagant social functions in his first year on the job.
The amount was about double the spending of his predecessor, Fuchs, who was brought back to head the university on a temporary basis.

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CNN
8 minutes ago
- CNN
The White House's fuzzy math is starting to haunt the ‘Big, Beautiful Bill'
Elon Musk's 36-word social media missile directed at the cornerstone of President Donald Trump's legislative agenda marked the latest, if most visceral, example of a growing problem for the White House. Nobody buys its math. 'I'm sorry, but I just can't stand it anymore,' Musk posted in the middle of the White House press briefing in a dramatic escalation of his initial objections to the giant domestic policy bill's cost. 'This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.' Musk's post (and its Wednesday follow up) landed at the most delicate moment for an essential pillar of Trump's entire domestic agenda. Senate Republicans are set to launch their high-stakes effort to pass the bill, while Trump and his top advisers seek to aggressively counter the widespread consensus among economists, nonpartisan budget scorekeepers and Wall Street analysts that the bill will pile trillions of dollars onto the soaring US debt. Trump's top economic officials insist, unequivocally and repeatedly, that the 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' won't add to the debt over 10 years. The definitive statements serve as an unabashed outlier among the catalogue of budget scores, growth forecasts and macroeconomic analyses produced since House Republicans passed their version of Trump's agenda by the narrowest of margins. Differences of opinion between economists, scorekeepers and analysts are commonplace, as are the heated rhetorical attacks lobbed at the Congressional Budget Office. They aren't exclusive to this White House. But the near-universal agreement that the bill's combination of tax and spending cuts net out as a significant deficit driver lays bare an unusually dramatic disconnect with the view of Trump's economic team. White House officials defend their outlier projections with their view that the bill will spark a durable surge in economic activity that, paired with their broader economic agenda, will far outpace the median economic forecasts. That, in turn, would drive up federal tax receipts and fill most, if not all, of the hole created by $3.7 trillion loss of revenue to the government projected over 10 years at the same time Trump's tariffs would drive a dramatic surge in revenue not included in any budget score tied to the bill. The $1.3 trillion in mandatory spending cuts over a decade would mark the starting point White House officials will take into the looming spending battle on Capitol Hill, where Trump and Republican leaders will drive a hardline view that any bipartisan agreement must include deep discretionary spending cuts. To put it plainly, the White House rationale is tied to a combination of projections and assumptions that crash head-on with economic, political and geopolitical consensus views of reality. 'There are a lot of arguments Republicans can make here – and the White House makes them, too – about the merits of this package and our long-standing belief that scorekeepers consistently fail to capture the effect of tax cuts,' said a Republican economic official who has served in multiple GOP administrations. 'But I'm not sure why they insist on going this particular route given the design of the bill.' But White House officials, who regularly point to several projections that undershot Trump's first term economy, have elevated that message at a critical moment. The White House's messaging is intended to undercut public opposition from Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Ron Johnson, as well as the private anxiety of a handful of others as the Senate mulls changes to the House-passed version of the plan, according to multiple Senate GOP aides. 'I want to see the tax cuts made permanent, but I also want to see the $5 trillion in new debt removed from the bill,' Paul said Tuesday. 'At least four of us in the Senate feel this way.' But it's also directed at an audience that carries far more sway over Trump's economic agenda than any politician: bond investors, who have grown increasingly jittery in recent months. Escalating concern over stratospheric US debt levels drove last month's credit rating downgrade from Moody's, which helped spark another round of tumult in the world's largest and most liquid bond market. Investors had already signaled unease with Trump's expansive 'Liberation Day' tariffs in April, but as the House moved toward a vote on the bill last month, bond investors once again got jittery. That signaled bond investors' willingness to consider whether the decades-long warnings of a looming, but theoretical, US fiscal collapse may be inching closer to reality. 'You are going to see a crack in the bond market, OK?' said JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon during a May 30 discussion at the Reagan National Economic Forum in California. Dimon, who also said he supports the Republican bill because of the certainty it will bring to US tax policy, said he couldn't predict when exactly that kind of dramatic disruption would occur. But Dimon said the current US fiscal position, absent a major and sustained policy shift, makes a crisis inevitable. 'It's going to happen,' Dimon said. White House officials dismiss that worst-case scenario. They insist the administration isn't rattled by the spike in long-term US borrowing costs or the tumultuous few months in the US Treasury market. They say the bond market's fluctuations aren't aren't tethered to the realities underpinning the world's largest economy. 'I've known Jamie a long time, and for his entire career he's made predictions like this,' Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation. 'Fortunately, none of them have come true.' Bessent's blunt dismissal of Dimon's prediction reflected a prevailing view inside the West Wing that boils down to, essentially (and sometimes, depending on the adviser, explicitly): 'Everyone else is wrong.' After all, the bill represents an essential component of Trump's economic agenda. The package is more or less what every Republican elected in 2024 campaigned on with Trump. This package includes the tax cuts at the heart of his economic agenda and a series of regulatory reforms that accelerate his sweeping deregulatory agenda. The bill also includes significant military and immigration enforcement spending that would fulfill campaign pledges. Narrow majorities in both chambers were always going to make the effort a high-wire act to balance the hardline fiscal hawks' desires with the needs of the more moderate members who populate the conferences in both chambers. But failure – and the devastating economic and political consequences it would bring – isn't really an option here for the White House or GOP leaders. Still, the deficit concerns are very real and pose the most acute risk at this stage of Senate consideration. They also represent a far higher-stakes threat if bond investor jitters turn into something more dire. White House officials are keenly aware they need to aggressively make their case to uneasy bond investors – and make it well. That reality, more than anything else, raises the question of why officials insist on declaring the bill won't drive up deficits by even a dollar over 10 years. The big assumptions that underpin that projection go something like this: 1) Tariffs will produce trillions of dollars in revenue without hurting US economic growth. 2) Courts allow the White House's sweeping deregulatory agenda, including DOGE cuts, to go forward. 3) Business investment surges, even after the front-loaded corporate tax incentives expire in a couple years. 4) Backloaded spending cuts remain in place over a four-year period and Republicans secure major discretionary spending cuts that will require Democratic support. You can see the sheer number of variables, many outside of Trump's control, inherent in those assertions. That underscores the connective tissue between Trump's first and second terms – and the number of Trump advisers who were by his side then and now. Trump's advisers remain animated by the unyielding belief that the economic experts were proven wrong in Trump's first term. They are betting that's the case again, with Trump's entire economic agenda hanging in the balance. Musk's social media unburdening this week certainly wasn't helpful to the cause. But there is no discussion about any major course change at the White House. 'Nothing has changed from our view of the world,' Vought told reporters outside the West Wing a couple of hours of Musk's Tuesday post.


The Hill
9 minutes ago
- The Hill
Inflation data threatened by government hiring freeze as tariffs loom
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Labor Department has cut back on the inflation data it collects because of the Trump administration's government hiring freeze, raising concerns among economists about the quality of the inflation figures just as they are being closely watched for the impact of tariffs. The department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces the monthly consumer price index, the most closely watched inflation measure, said Wednesday that it is 'reducing sample in areas across the country' and stopped collecting price data entirely in April in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Provo, Utah. It also said it has stopped collecting data this month in Buffalo, New York. In an email that the BLS sent to economists, viewed by The Associated Press, the agency said that it 'temporarily reduced the number of outlets and quotes it attempted to collect due to a staffing shortage' in April. The reduced data collection 'will be kept in place until the hiring freeze is lifted.' President Donald Trump froze federal hiring on his first day in office and extended the freeze in April until late July, suggesting future inflation reports will also involve less data collection. The cutbacks have intensified worries among economists that government spending cuts could degrade the federal government's ability to compile key economic data on employment, prices, and the broader economy. The BLS also said last month that it will no longer collect wholesale prices in about 350 categories for its Producer Price Index, a measure of price changes before they reach the consumer. The cutbacks are also occurring at a time of heightened uncertainty about the economy and the impact of Trump's sweeping tariffs on hiring, growth and inflation. 'The PPI is cutting hundreds of indexes from production, and the CPI is now being constructed with less data,' Omair Sharif, chief economist at the consulting firm Inflation Insights, said in an email. 'That alone is worrying given that we're heading into the teeth of the tariff impact on prices.' Earlier this year, the Trump administration disbanded several advisory committees that worked with BLS and other statistical agencies on fine-tuning its data-gathering. The BLS said that the cutbacks 'have minimal impact' on the overall inflation data, but 'they may increase the volatility' of the reported prices of specific items. Alan Detmeister, an economist at UBS, an investment bank, said the cutbacks likely had little impact on April's inflation figures. But 'if these types of cuts continue, they will degrade the reliability and efficacy of these statistical agencies,' he said.


Fox News
10 minutes ago
- Fox News
Schumer warns Trump budget bill Medicaid cuts could jeopardize GOP senators: 'We Are All Going to Die Act'
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on Wednesday renamed President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill" the "We're All Going to Die Act," slamming the package over cuts to Medicaid. The Senate Minority Leader said Republican senators who support Trump's budget bill are "tenured at best, suicidal at worst," implying a vote for the legislative package will have negative consequences at the ballot box. "For many Americans, health care coverage is the difference between life and death," Schumer said. His new name for Trump's budget bill comes from a recent remark by Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa. In response to jeers from a crowd about how cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would cause people to die, Ernst retorted at a recent town hall event, "Well, we're all going to die." "According to Ernst, 'Fear not. We're going to die anyway.' Tell that, the American people have heard. Let me be clear. Democrats are ready. We are ready to fight,' Schumer said. "We are doubling down. We're ready to show Americans what's really at stake here, because this fight won't be won in just the Capitol. As Abe Lincoln said, public sentiment is everything. And when public sentiment hears about this 'We're All Going to Die Act,' they're going to hate it, and they're going to tell their senators they hate it. And if the senators think they can get away with a yes vote and explain it, they're sadly mistaken. The cuts are too deep. The cuts are too real. The cuts are too devastating for people." He continued, "Why are they being so mean? Why are they being so cruel? And why are they being so politically tenured at at best, suicidal at worst? All to give tax breaks to billionaires. They are in total obeisance. Donald Trump is, and his colleagues are to very very, the small group of very wealthy, greedy people who say, 'I don't care what you do to everyone else, cut my taxes. And by the way, get rid of any regulations.'" Schumer said that the Congressional Budget Office found that the estimated number of people who would lose their health insurance coverage if Trump's budget bill passes could increase from 13.7 million to up to as many as 16 million people. "New calculations show Medicare is under the knife," Schumer said. A handful of Republican senators have expressed hesitation to Trump's "big, beautiful bill" over concerns it will increase the national debt and budget ceiling, but Senate Majority Leader John Leader said the upper chamber remains on track to pass the package by a July 4 deadline as negotiations are ongoing. Trump and the White House, meanwhile, insist the bill will evoke massive growth for the nation. Schumer alleged Trump "is just lying about the bill." "We've been told 11 million people cut off from affordable food tax cuts for billionaires. "We're All Going to Die Bill.' And that shows the callousness, the callousness of this Republican majority in the House and the Republican majority in the Senate. Repeal and replace. It's that by another name, that by another name." Schumer addressed Republicans' pledge to fight waste, fraud and abuse by making the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts permanent through the bill. "Now, Trump and the Republicans claim they want to fight fraud. Bull, bull," he said. "Let me tell our Republican Senate colleagues what will be enacted is not Donald Trump's soothing words, but the actual reality of harsh cuts where people lose health care, where people's premiums go up, where hospitals close, nursing homes close, and people are laid off," Schumer claimed. "So anyone who thinks they're voting for the nice words of Donald Trump will face a harsh reality when this is implemented."