--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, March 6th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, the debate over where to put the country's nuclear waste, consumers are taking the risk of plastics more seriously, and how scientists are trying to revive the woolly mammoth. But first, to the Internal Revenue Service. Tax season is upon us, but roughly 7,000 employees were recently fired by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Doge team. They've said their goal is to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse in the government.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The IRS has been hit especially hard by these cuts, ProPublica reports, because it did a lot of hiring and training in 2024, which means a lot of people were still in their probationary period a few weeks ago when they found out they were being cut. Last year's hiring wave came after Congress had underfunded the agency for a good part of the last decade, which led to chronic understaffing, poor customer service, and plummeting audit rates.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen current and former IRS employees, most of whom worked for the Large Business and International Division, or LBNI, which audits some of the highest dollar amount tax returns filed in the country. Almost half of the engineer positions in LBNI, that is people who have specialized expertise and can weigh in on more complicated tax returns, appear to have been eliminated in the recent cut.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And these current and former employees told reporter Andy Kroll that could make it more difficult for the agency to audit some of the wealthiest people and businesses in the country. This is the division that handles the most complicated, highest dollar amount, largest tax returns of all the tax returns filed. So we're talking about publicly traded corporations, really complicated private partnerships, and high net worth individuals.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The LB&I specialists focus on auditing big businesses like major tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, and oil and gas companies. A big part of what the IRS does is root out waste and fraud in tax returns to identify places where taxpayers, whether they're people or companies, are claiming tax perks that they shouldn't be claiming or they're claiming too much or they're hiding money from the federal government.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the IRS, you would think, fits squarely within that mission laid out by Trump and Musk. The businesses and individuals that fall under the purview of LB&I, according to a former IRS commissioner, often have access to the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers. So, he told ProPublica, they're typically pushing the envelope as much as they can on their taxes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they're going to say, look, we should try to take more risks. We could probably get away with declaring, you know, more money under this tax credit or trying this tax maneuver. In some cases, LB&I agents discover that the government actually owes the taxpayer more money than expected. But with fewer people on staff the people ProPublica interviewed warned that these types of complicated returns will inevitably receive less attention.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Fewer people on the job at the IRS is directly equated to less capacity to scrutinize these tax returns and bring in more money for the American taxpayer for the American Treasury to fund the rest of the government. One report from 2024 from the Nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found, for every additional hour spent on audits for very wealthy taxpayers, the IRS found savings of $13,000.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to the Supreme Court, where justices are being asked to weigh in on an important environmental question, where should dangerous nuclear waste go? This is a problem the federal government has been trying to solve for decades. It spent almost 30 years trying to develop a permanent underground storage location for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But there was pushback from the state and local communities, funding dried up, and eventually the project fizzled out during the Obama administration. So that left the United States in a position where we have all of these nuclear power plants producing highly radioactive spent fuel, but we don't have any permanent repository to store that fuel.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Dylan Badour is a reporter with Inside Climate News who told us as a stopgap measure, thousands of tons of nuclear waste are stored on site at power plants across the country. And more recently, the debate over where to store nuclear waste turned to Texas as a possible solution.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A company called Waste Control Specialists filed an application in 2016 to temporarily store nuclear waste in the western part of the state. But just like Yucca Mountain, it was met with resistance. First from a local oil company that owns land near where the project would be located, then Texas officials joined them in suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Essentially, what Texas is arguing is that the federal government does not have a right to license a temporary storage facility for spent nuclear fuel like this one here. In this case, the Supreme Court is considering two questions. First, whether Texas and the oil company are allowed to petition the court.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Second, whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is allowed to grant licenses to temporary nuclear waste storage facilities that are not located near reactor sites. The court's conservative majority has generally been skeptical of federal regulation in recent years. Badour says if the court rules in Texas' favor, it would largely maintain the status quo, with no long-term solution to nuclear waste.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But a ruling in favor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could change how nuclear waste is stored, not only in Texas, but nationwide. That does open the door, I believe, to other private nuclear waste storage facilities that are not at operating or decommissioned reactors.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it really kind of opens that up as a business model that if you want to open a high-level nuclear waste storage facility, you can do that, which right now that's all under the purview of either federal ownership or nuclear power plants. Both Texas and the federal government want to expand nuclear power.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Energy Secretary Chris Wright a former fossil fuel executive told senators in his confirmation hearing expanding domestic energy production would be among his first priorities. And Texas is trying to position itself as a national leader in nuclear power. But Badour says the state has no interest in dealing with the waste, which is a problem both the state and federal government will need to address eventually.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If we are going to do a big deployment of nuclear reactors, we're going to have a lot more waste, and eventually it will become urgent to find a solution for storage and disposal. The court's ruling is expected by the end of June.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to a story you might remember seeing pretty much everywhere just before the holidays. A study that examined the toxicity of black plastic in kitchen tools led to a flurry of headlines like, throw out your black plastic spatula, it's probably leaching chemicals into your cooking oil.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In fact, we reported on this very same study for Apple News Today. People were worried they were throwing away black plastic stuff and going out and buying other stuff. That's Leslie Patton, a consumer reporter with Bloomberg News.
--:-- Leslie Patton: By the end of January, sales of stainless steel kitchen products climbed more than 13 percent year over year. and silicone products were up by about 70%.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, there was a problem with the study. It contained a pretty significant math error. But the authors say even after correcting their calculations, they stand by their initial conclusion that the levels of toxic chemicals in certain black plastic cookware are still concerning.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And there's been a wave of other research in recent years about the dangers of plastic. Studies have found microplastics in our food and drinking water. One study from 2021 concluded that microplastics are so small that even freshly grown fruits and vegetables are not always safe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They can absorb these small plastics through their root systems. Now, a lot is unknown about the impact of all these tiny plastic particles on human health. The FDA says the presence of plastics in food alone does not indicate a risk.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But science journalist Matt Simon, who I spoke to for Apple News and Conversation a few years ago, told me the risks are not well understood because not enough research has been done. The tricky thing about this is that the plastics industry is not required to tell us what's in these plastics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And even then, it would be very difficult given the diversity of plastic products around us. So what chemists have to do is they actually have to reverse engineer these plastics in the lab and pick apart which chemicals are in them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And we just need more studies on what these chemicals are doing to our bodies. But it's stuff that plastics producers, I don't think, would ever thought would end up in the human body. Looking at plastic kitchen tools in particular, many companies insist their products are safe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Still, some are moving away from plastic products. Leslie Patton with Bloomberg told us about the company OXO, which by one estimate sells roughly one out of every 12 kitchen utensils in the United States. They told me they had been exploring different woods, like acacia and walnut even, that they say these new alternatives don't just meet that non-plastic requirement that more and more people are having these days but in some cases they look nicer too.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oxo says their plastic kitchen utensils are safe as long as they used correctly. But ultimately what this so Black Spatulageddon saga reveals is that consumers are beginning to take more seriously the risks of plastics. And manufacturers are taking notice by investing in alternatives.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories we're following. First, to a flurry of updates from the Trump administration in Washington. The Supreme Court denied the president's request to cancel $2 billion in foreign aid, siding with a lower court judge who recently ordered the administration to immediately release the money owed under existing contracts.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In further fallout from Friday's disastrous meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump ordered the CIA to halt intelligence sharing with Ukraine. The U.S. has shared intelligence with Kiev since the early days of the war to help Ukrainian forces target invading Russian forces more effectively.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's not clear if the pause will be temporary or permanent. And less than 48 hours after imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico, Trump agreed to make an exception for one month for automobile imports that qualify for duty-free treatment under a trade agreement negotiated during his first term.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This move came after he spoke with executives from three of the largest automakers in the U.S., General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. Staying in Washington for a moment, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser confirmed that the city will remove Black Lives Matter Plaza, a two-block stretch in downtown D.C. near the White House, which got that name along with a mural after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, a Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to the House requiring Bowser to rename the area or risk losing federal funding from Congress. And when the local NBC affiliate asked her why she agreed to make the change, the mayor said it was fair to say the White House didn't like it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, the woolly mammoth is making a comeback of sorts. Scientists are working toward that goal, but in the meantime, they've made some significant strides in genetically engineering mice that carry some of the key characteristics of the extinct woolly mammoth, like their thick, hairy coats.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Picture a normal lab mouse, but poofier. Here's what one of the researchers, Beth Shapiro, told NPR. This is really validation that what we have in mind for our longer-term de-extinction projects is really going to work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The company says reviving extinct species like the mammoth and the dodo could help repair ecosystems. But critics have questioned if they'll be able to thrive in today's environment and if that money is better spent trying to save species currently at risk of extinction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, we've got a narrated article coming up next. New York Magazine takes you behind the scenes of how this one-stop shop that sells everything from cashmere to caviar recruited a generation of consumers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: If you're listening in the podcast app, follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story. And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
