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On a sweltering morning in early July, Thomas Andrade, the co-owner of Everett Auto Parts in Massachusetts, supervises as a team of workers carefully straps two Chevy Volt hybrid batteries to a pallet, ready to ship out for recycling.

Selling off valuable bits and pieces of a vehicle is, fundamentally, how a salvage yard makes money. And these batteries are, in fact, full of valuable minerals: nickel and cobalt and manganese and lithium. They're headed to a battery recycler who will shred them into a fine, dark powder called black mass, from which those minerals can be recovered and reused in new batteries.

So how much will Andrade make off this particular deal?

Zilch. 

And he's pretty happy with that.

"The good thing with these is, they'll at least take them at no expense," he says of the battery recycler.

The fact that Andrade is quite pleased to make no money at all points to a problem for the vehicle recycling industry — and for society at large.

It's extremely important that EV batteries get recycled. If they're treated like trash, they become hazardous waste due to the risk of toxic leaching or dangerous fires. Treating them like waste is also, well, a waste: It squanders minerals that could be reused.

Recycling battery minerals, the better option, reduces the climate footprint of new vehicle production and eases U.S. reliance on China for those critical minerals. In the best case scenario, it also makes money for everyone involved.

But in many cases, the math for EV battery recycling is not penciling out. That's leaving salvage yards stuck with old batteries nobody wants, not even recyclers.

As Andrade is packing up those T-shaped Chevy Volt batteries, across the state at Westover Salvage Yard, CEO Brian Bachand is staring at another EV battery. This one is a mattress-sized Tesla battery, sitting on a shelf.

It, too, is hypothetically valuable. It still works just fine. If a Tesla driver wants to buy it as a replacement battery, it could be worth up to $2,000, Bachand estimates. But he's priced it at $1,200.

"We try to price our parts to sell," he says. "We don't run a museum here."

So far, this might as well be a museum display. No one's biting. And if Bachand can't sell it, his other option is to ship it off to a recycler — and he hasn't been as lucky as Andrade. The only quote he's gotten from a recycler who will accept this particular battery is negative $1,800.

As in, he would have to pay $1,800 to cover the cost of shipping a hazardous material and to make it worth the recycler's effort to process the battery. If he can bundle together five batteries like this, he might be able to get a recycler to take them for free, but so far, he's only got the one. Which is why it's still here, on a shelf.

"This is a liability," Bachand says. "No one's paying me for it. I have to pay to get rid of it."

Battery recycling can be profitable — for some

At a recent General Motors event in San Francisco, the automaker announced new battery chemistries and a commitment to using old EV batteries to help feed energy back into the grid. It was a celebration of "circularity," the idea of a closed-loop system where old batteries never go to waste. In conversations on the sidelines, executives sounded optimistic about the economics of battery recycling.

J.B. Straubel, the founder and CEO of Redwood Materials, a major U.S. battery recycler, was bullish. "Every year that goes by, every month that goes by, it's getting more economical, it's getting more competitive," he said. "We've got a fundamental economic tailwind because these materials are valuable to recycle."

General Motors itself has a lot of batteries to recycle, including scrap that comes off its own cell manufacturing lines. Andy Oury, a battery engineer at GM, said that while recycling used to be an expense, it's now "a source of revenue" for the company, with battery recyclers paying for that scrap.

"Capitalism is doing its thing, where there's a positive incentive structure to go get those materials," he said.

He acknowledged that the cost of shipping batteries can cut into revenue. But for a huge company like GM, which has large volumes of scrap to recycle, they can optimize the logistics of shipping them.

The view looks different from salvage yards, which don't have those economies of scale. Think of Bachand, who could strike a better deal if he had five batteries instead of just one.

But there's more at play, too.

It's already challenging for scrapyards to make a profit off of disassembling EVs, simply because they have fewer parts than gas-powered cars do, says Emil Nusbaum, the vice president of strategy and government affairs for the Automotive Recyclers Association.

In a traditional gas-powered car, he says, "the two most valuable components are engines and transmissions for reuse and vehicle repairs. We don't have those components in electric vehicles." Instead of a complex engine, there's an electric motor with a single moving part that rarely, if ever, needs to be replaced.

And of course, there's the battery. For a salvage yard, that battery is a wild card. It could be worth a chunk of change, if it's in good shape and can find a second life, either in another car or as energy storage for a building or the electric grid. Or it could be worthless, if it's only useful for recycling and the cost of shipping will cancel out its recycling value. Or it could be a costly liability, if the minerals inside aren't valuable enough to cover the price of shipping and processing it.

When an old EV is up on the auction block, auto salvagers often have no way of knowing whether its battery will be a boon or a burden.

"Is it going to be something that we can actually have as a valuable asset, for recycling or repurposing or repair?" Nusbaum asks. "Or alternatively, is this something that is going to be a substantial cost — in some cases thousands of dollars — in order to find a responsible home?"

More batteries may get stranded 

This is the economic conundrum that can lead to unwanted EV batteries piling up at salvage yards. And the problem is expected to get worse.

Partly, that's just because there will be a lot more old batteries. Right now there aren't many genuinely old EVs on the road.

And EV batteries have been lasting longer than anticipated, meaning that there just haven't been many that need recycling. In fact, most of the EV batteries that get recycled in the U.S. right now are scrap from factories, like defective batteries rejected by quality control, rather than dead batteries from old cars, according to data from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

But that will change. EV adoption is expected to rise over time, and the cars on the road today will eventually reach the end of their lifespans.

Meanwhile, EV batteries themselves are also changing. Increasingly, manufacturers are shifting away from packing them with expensive minerals, like nickel and cobalt, toward cheaper ones, like iron phosphate.

Lithium-ion batteries made with iron phosphate, known as LFP batteries, last longer and are more affordable — those are perks if you're buying one. But the cheaper ingredients are a real challenge if you're trying to recycle one.

"There's really no value in recycling iron phosphate, unfortunately," says David Klanecky, the CEO of Cirba Solutions, a major battery recycler in the U.S.

The lithium in them is still worth something — but for Cirba to make a profit extracting it, they have to charge both the person providing the battery and the buyer of the minerals on the other end.

"If I have to pay anybody to get an LFP battery, we don't make any money," Klanecky says.

Frederick Bloomfield, an analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence who tracks prices along the battery recycling supply chain, uses the term "gate fee" to refer to any time a recycler charges to accept scrap. It's akin to the payment you might have to make at your local dump to drop off trash.

"Crunching the numbers, it is pretty clear to say that there's around $1.50 to $2 per-kilogram gate fee at the moment in North America for LFP," he says. EV batteries can easily weigh a ton or more. Do the math, and that's hundreds of dollars salvage yards have to pay to get an LFP battery accepted for recycling, even before they front the often-substantial cost of transporting a hazardous material.

That's compared to the scrap value of some more expensive EV batteries, packed with pricier minerals, where instead of charging a gate fee, recyclers are willing to pay $2 a kilogram or more for scrap.

A few years ago, when companies were investing in building battery-recycling capacity in the U.S., they didn't anticipate that the cheaper LFP batteries would perform as well as they do, or take off as quickly as they did. So they built facilities that "are now kind of looking a little bit ill-prepared," Bloomfield says, for the kinds of batteries that will actually need recycling in the future.

A problem that stretches beyond scrapyards

Joe Hearn co-founded the SHiFT vehicle retirement initiative, which promotes responsible recycling for all kinds of aging vehicles. He says the risk of holding a battery that will be expensive to dispose of is making some players in the supply chain very cautious.

"The scrappers and shredders are very conservative about what they're willing to receive at this point," he says. "Our auto recycling partners have had loads refused and returned to them because there is an EV or hybrid in that load."

What happens if responsible recyclers are reluctant to take these old batteries? Bloomfield says they might get shipped overseas to places where recycling is done in unsafe and dirty conditions.

Or someone stuck with old batteries might just let them pile up. "There's really a risk of those batteries catching fire, becoming damaged," says Jessica Dunn, a scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists who focuses on battery recycling. "That's a huge cost and also just a huge safety risk."

She says EV and hybrid batteries are already showing up in landfills. "It is illegal to put a battery in a landfill, but they end up there anyway. And then that cost falls on a public entity to try to deal with it," she says.

Colorado tackles the problem with a new law 

One state is trying to get ahead of the problem. This summer, Colorado passed a new law that puts the onus of recycling unwanted EV batteries on the companies that sold them in the first place — an extension of the state's embrace of a philosophy known as "producer responsibility."

"Producer responsibility just means that the people making the trash — or whatever we're considering the trash, the thing we're disposing of — have to take responsibility for recycling it and for taking care of end-of-life," says state Sen. Lisa Cutter, who co-sponsored the bill and previously pushed similar laws for smaller batteries and plastics.

"There's not a magic trash fairy," she says. "We have to plan for these things."

The law serves as a sort of backstop. If an EV battery is dumped at a landfill or stranded at a salvage yard, then the manufacturer who originally sold the EV — Tesla or GM, for instance — will be on the hook to pick it up and make sure it's recycled, at the carmaker's expense.

Dunn, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, notes that the law also requires that a certain percentage of the battery's minerals be recovered, which is a way of requiring that it be recycled well. 

The bill was shaped not just by environmental groups — namely Dunn's group and Western Resource Advocates — but by a remarkably broad swath of industry players. Emil Nusbaum's association representing salvage yard operators enthusiastically supported it. So did battery recyclers; both Redwood and Cirba praised the law in interviews with NPR.

Even automakers who will be footing the bill were on board with the new law, which is less onerous for them than a similar law in the European Union. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, the trade group representing most of the major automakers in the U.S., praised the law as "balanced," and noted in a letter to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis that keeping battery minerals within domestic supply chains is "foundational to America's automotive industrial base."

That is to say: Everyone in this supply chain has a vested interest in making sure these old batteries become resources, rather than hazards.

Dunn, who worked on the legislation, is optimistic that this broad coalition of support will increase the chances that other states will follow Colorado's lead.

"We see Colorado as the starting place," she says.

NPR's John Ruwitch contributed to this report.

Copyright 2026 NPR

The board game Monopoly has always taught some important economic lessons: The benefits of owning real estate. The profit potential of railroad mergers. The value of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Now a special edition of the board game is teaching a new lesson—about how hard it is to make things in the USA.

The game is being marketed by the WS Game Company, which produces most of its high-end board games in China, just like almost every other toy maker.

After getting hit with a seven-figure tariff bill last year, CEO Jonathan Silva decided to see if it was possible to produce a profitable board game in the United States.

He opted for a custom version of Monopoly, pegged to the country's 250th birthday. But the experiment almost didn't pass go. One big problem: No dice.

"We turned over every single leaf trying to find someone who would make 10,000 dice for us in the U.S.," Silva says. "It requires special machinery. It requires investment. And that type of stuff just can't happen on a random Tuesday and be ready in a couple of months."

Silva ultimately had to settle for imported dice.

He was able to find the rest of what he needed domestically, but it wasn't easy. A former Hasbro factory in Massachusetts prints the Monopoly board. A company called Pioneer Packaging makes the tray that holds the Monopoly money. And a small business in Indiana cranked out custom metal game tokens, in all-American shapes like a cowboy hat, a covered wagon and an apple pie.

Just assembling all those different players took more than a year, so Silva missed the first half of the 250th birthday selling season. And the cost to manufacture the games — which retail for $80 — was at least double what it would have been in China.

"When I place a purchase order in China, they have all those capabilities under one roof," Silva says. "For one item, it took up way too much of our resources and time to bring it to market."

Why so many things are made in China

There's a reason nearly 80% of all toys and games sold in the U.S. are made in China. That country has spent decades building a factory ecosystem to supply not only finished products, but all the specialized parts that go into them.

"That's why the re-shoring and the looking at bringing it back into the U.S. or even looking at other countries and moving it is not as easy as it sounds," says Greg Ahearn, president and CEO of the The Toy Association, an industry trade group.

Ahearn says it makes sense for the U.S. to manufacture some strategically important products, but probably not when it comes to most toys and games, which tend to carry both low prices and low profit margins.

"Even if you could, who in their right mind would take their capital and invest it into creating a toy manufacturing plant?" Ahearn says. "Of all the things you could pick, we'd probably be pretty low on that list."

Instead, the toy industry is lobbying to get a carve-out from future tariffs. The new U.S.-China Board of Trade is considering allowing up to $30 billion worth of Chinese products to enter the U.S. tariff-free. But toys are competing for the tax break with shoes, apparel and many other products.

For now, Silva is busy marketing his Made in the U.S.A. Monopoly game. But he's still making the rest of his company's board games in China. And that's not likely to change.

"We're really good at a lot of great things here in America." Silva says. "But we're not really great at making certain items that are consumable goods. And that's OK."

He's now awaiting a shipment from China of about $6 million worth of games for the upcoming holiday season. He has no idea what the tariff bill might be. But he's prepared to roll the dice.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated July 11, 2026 at 4:40 PM CDT

The New York Times says several of its journalists have been subpoenaed by the Department of Justice over their reporting on Air Force One, describing it as a "brazen act."

On Wednesday, the newspaper published an anonymously sourced story that the Secret Service urged President Trump to leave the recent NATO summit in Turkey on an older version of Air Force One instead of the Boeing 747 donated by Qatar last year because of security concerns. The following day, the Times reported, again citing anonymous sources, that the gifted plane lacked "defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities."

The four reporters bylined on Wednesday's article — Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt — all received subpoenas, according to the Times. The paper said federal agents delivered the subpoenas Friday evening to some reporters at their homes.

The subpoenas "seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday," the Times reported. Their testimony, according to the subpoenas, was requested "in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law."

"The appearance of Federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects," David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, said in a statement. "Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public's right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs."

Before the Times published the Wednesday article, a senior FBI official had contacted a reporter and editor and asked that the story be held, without explaining why, a New York Times spokesman tells NPR. The FBI official also asked that the sources for the story be identified. Both Times employees refused to do either. (The Times itself was first to report an account of these events.)

The subpoenas were issued by U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton of the Southern District of New York, who was recently nominated by Trump to be the next national intelligence director. Both the White House and the FBI declined to comment for this story. NPR reached out to the Southern District of New York but did not hear back.

The president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bruce D. Brown, said in a statement Saturday, "The subpoenas ... issued to journalists at The New York Times break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted. When Jay Clayton appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, members of both parties must not let him escape accountability."

The move to subpoena the Times journalists is the latest escalation in Trump's years-long effort to cow and control U.S. media outlets, following previous financial settlements with ABC News and CBS News' 60 Minutes program, alongside civil lawsuits and federal criminal actions taken against The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the BBC and others since he resumed office last year.

In an unusual step earlier this year, the FBI searched the property of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her phones and laptops, as part of an investigation into leaked information. Natanson had written a series of in-depth stories about the Trump administration's attempts to reduce the federal workforce.

Trump is currently embroiled in several simultaneous personal legal disputes with the Times over its coverage of him. He has accused the publication of disparaging his reputation, undermining his efforts to win reelection and defamation. The newspaper has rejected his claims.

The Times has also launched its own legal action against the Defense Department for seeking to restrict Pentagon access to reporters, and the paper is involved in a separate claim and counterclaim with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The commission accuses the paper of discriminatory employment practices based on a complaint filed by a white male editor who said he had been passed over for a promotion, while the Times said the commission's lawsuit was part of the Trump administration's retaliation for its coverage of the president.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Updated July 10, 2026 at 11:40 PM CDT

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Democrats in Congress hailed it as the biggest housing bill in decades. Republicans called it a win for families across the country. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described it on X as "one of the most significant pieces of housing legislation in American history." And in June, both houses of Congress passed it with broad bipartisan support.

President Trump called it "a big yawn" and refused to sign it on June 24, shortly after it passed.

On Truth Social that month, Trump dismissed the bill — officially called the 21st Century Road to Housing Act — as "of minor importance" and canceled a White House signing ceremony, stipulating that he would only sign if Congress passed a strict voter ID bill called the SAVE America Act. That bill would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot. It has stalled in the Senate, where it doesn't have the 60 votes to pass.

"To me, compared to the SAVE America Act, just about everything is a big yawn," Trump told reporters in June.

Then on Friday morning, Trump doubled down on that refusal, posting on Truth Social: "I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT."

When reached for comment, the White House referred NPR to the president's post.

But a bill can become law even without the president's signature, and the clock had already started ticking on June 29, when House Speaker Mike Johnson delivered the legislation to Trump for either a signature or veto. That 10-day clock was set to expire at 11:59 p.m. ET Friday. Without action from the president, the bill would become law automatically.

That's how, at the stroke of midnight, the bill became law without Trump's signature.

The housing law aims to make homeownership more affordable, primarily by encouraging homebuilding across the country.

It's packed with more than 40 provisions, contributed by both Republicans and Democrats, on everything from corporate home ownership to manufactured home construction, which helps explain why it passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

So does lawmakers' recognition that home prices have skyrocketed past what many families can afford. According to Realtor.com, a household making $75,000 a year can afford fewer than a quarter of the home listings available.

Housing affordability is a potent electoral issue, and both parties are hoping to claim credit for passing legislation meant to address it ahead of the midterms.

What's in the housing law? 

Despite Trump downplaying the law, it includes an idea he promoted: capping how many single-family homes big investors can buy. The law says corporate landlords that own at least 350 houses won't be able to buy more. The goal is to make the housing market more competitive for individual buyers, who are often outbid by investors who can make all-cash offers.

Some Democratic lawmakers had long supported such a ban; Republicans were more skeptical until Trump backed the idea. Still, House Republicans did quash part of the ban that would have required developers of build-to-rent homes to sell off those rentals after seven years.

It's not clear yet how much of a change this cap will make on the housing market. Nationally, these large investors only own about 3% of the single-family rental market, although private equity owns a much larger slice of the real estate in some cities and neighborhoods.

Researchers at the government-backed housing finance company Freddie Mac say private equity is only a small driver of the housing shortage, since they typically buy up cheap homes in need of significant repair. And staff at both the left-leaning Urban Institute and right-leaning Taxpayers Protection Alliance argue private equity can actually improve the housing shortage by renovating homes that would have otherwise fallen out of the market.

Other provisions are meant to boost homebuilding, such as by allowing developers to skip an environmental review if a house is going up between two buildings that were already reviewed.

Another provision creates a grant program communities can use to develop "pattern books," a collection of preapproved housing designs that would need fewer approvals before construction.

Manufactured homes, which are generally cheaper than homes built on site, also get a break. The law removes a requirement that they have a permanent chassis, a steel frame that makes those homes movable. Housing policy experts say that could save $5,000 to $10,000 in construction costs per home and make more elaborate designs, such as a second story, easier to build.

And while the law doesn't add any new housing funding to the federal budget, it's designed to encourage home construction by sending more of the existing funding to communities that build more.

The limits of the housing law

Decisions in Washington typically have less influence on housing markets than those made within the halls of local government or a private developer's office.

Local zoning rules can slow down or prohibit construction — and the federal law doesn't make changes to those rules. Homebuilders may choose to not pick up their hammers if market conditions aren't right, and developers have been pessimistic about those conditions for the last three years, partially due to high material and labor costs.

And Congress doesn't control mortgage rates, another important factor in housing affordability. Rates for a 30-year fixed mortgage are currently around 6.5% on average, much higher than they were a few years ago during the pandemic.

Even if builders start new development projects, additional homes will take time to hit the market and any affordability improvements won't be felt for years, according to Sarah Brundage, president of the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders. She said this also explains why Congress hasn't bothered with housing legislation for so long: A single development — from construction start to market — can take longer than an elected official's term.

But Brundage said housing affordability has reached the point where lawmakers can no longer do nothing. In June, the median existing home cost $440,600. And while local reform needs to happen, Brundage said, the federal law is a needed first step.

"We have to take the time to celebrate that we have bipartisan champions," Brundage said. "Moving forward in 2028 and beyond, I don't think anyone can run for public office without having a perspective of how housing needs to be prioritized."

Copyright 2026 NPR

U.S. agricultural goods make up a piece of the trade pie among the U.S., Mexico and Canada. The U.S.'s neighboring countries are important markets for Oklahoma.

Last week, the U.S. declined to renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced the North America Free Trade Agreement in 2020. That doesn't mean the agreement is canceled. Instead, the countries now have 10 years to hammer out details of how they trade in the future.

The agreement is a big deal for Oklahoma crops, said Todd Hubbs, grain marketing specialist at the Oklahoma State University Extension. He said Mexico is the state's largest wheat, corn, milo and oil seeds export market.

"All of these things would impact Oklahoma growers if for some reason down the line USMCA got torn up," Hubbs said. "It just goes into a yearly review unless there's a formal withdrawal, and we haven't heard that yet."

This comes as farmers are facing high input costs, particularly on fuel and fertilizer because of the War in Iran. Crop prices are also relatively low. Hubbs said generally, there were large crops around the world last year and the industry has been working through them.

Although the USMCA has its critics, farm groups pushed for renewal. Hubbs said people working in the crops sector have not been upset with the trade setup – loads of corn and wheat go to Mexico, and ethanol or corn moves to Canada.

"It's very difficult from a crop markets perspective for me to see a positive in this," he said. "Now, if they had negotiated a whole new deal, right? That was really positive for us. But how can it get any more positive than it is now?"

The countries also trade a lot of beef back and forth across their borders. While the U.S. exports cattle to Mexico and Canada, it imports even more. That's because the U.S. is larger, said Derrell Peel, livestock marketing OSU extension specialist.

He said there won't be a major price shock immediately – but long-term uncertainty behind the scenes could impact cattle markets.

"It's probably lost opportunities is really the real impact here and that comes from the uncertainty of just not knowing," Peel said. "Parties on both sides of the border are going to be a little more cautious and a little more conservative in their plans, relative to what they might have done if we had more certainty about the fact that we were going to continue to have this trading relationship."

The cattle industry operates on a long time frame, it's not instantaneous. Peel said having more certainty among producers is important.

The U.S.'s cattle herd remains low. Supplies just got tighter because the southern border is closed to live cattle to help prevent the spread of the New World screw worm, a parasitic pest.

"It's created some additional challenges for the beef industry in the U.S. because we're in kind of a short volume situation right now," Peel said.

This report was produced by the Oklahoma Public Media Exchange, a collaboration of public media organizations. Help support collaborative journalism by donating at the link at the top of this webpage.

Barbacoa, brisket and carne asada are taco staples in Texas, but beef prices are on the rise. The number of cattle in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest point in decades. From Houston Public Media, Natalie Weber tells us the state's taco restaurant owners and customers are feeling the pinch.

LUCINEA CANYFER VAZQUEZ: (Speaking Spanish).

NATALIE WEBER, BYLINE: Lucinea Canyfer Vazquez is ringing up a customer at Monchy's, a taqueria in Houston. Her mother owns the restaurant, which opened nearly 20 years ago. Vazquez says beef prices have increased by about $2 a pound since last year. In response, she says, the restaurant has had to increase its prices, including for its Taco Tuesday special.

VAZQUEZ: We increased 50 cents. That hurt my heart, but we had to do it.

WEBER: According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wholesale beef prices were up nearly 16% from May of this year compared to the same time last year. And the USDA says those prices are expected to increase by more than 9% in 2026. Taqueros across Texas say these price hikes are the latest hit to business amidst a backdrop of rising fuel costs and inflation in general. Kelsey Erickson Streufert with the Texas Restaurant Association says it's harder for these businesses to offset rising costs with higher prices.

KELSEY ERICKSON STREUFERT: They really can only raise that price so much before a big benefit of the taco, which is its affordability, disappears.

WEBER: Mando Rayo, who hosts the "Tacos Of Texas" podcast, says taco trucks in particular are struggling. They can't purchase in bulk in the same way that a taco chain or even a singular brick-and-mortar restaurant could. And Rayo says they're even less likely to raise their prices than traditional stores because they often rely on a small customer base in a specific neighborhood.

MANDO RAYO: They'd rather be loyal to their community and to their neighborhood than to raise prices by even $1.

WEBER: Taco trucks are as much a part of Texas culture as cowboy boots and hats. On a recent Thursday morning, 26-year-old Alonzo Peraza wiped down the counter of his food truck, Trap Tacos. Peraza says he shops at different food suppliers to try to reduce his costs. Still, he hasn't changed his menu or his prices.

ALONZO PERAZA: People come to me for the flavor, for the meat. Yeah, I don't want to change that.

WEBER: Back at Monchy's in East Houston, a steady stream of customers comes in and out of the restaurant between the breakfast and lunch hour rush. Vazquez says she's noticed some customers turning to cheaper options like chicken and pork, but not everyone is changing their order. Jessey Rojas, a regular, says his favorite taco filling is steak fajitas, even with rising prices.

JESSEY ROJAS: If it calls, it calls, but you only live once, and you might as well eat. You know what I mean?

WEBER: And that, he says, is what keeps him coming back.

For NPR News, I'm Natalie Weber in Houston.

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The latest escalation between the U.S. and Iran prolongs a war that has made life expensive for American households. Amid uncertainty over the ceasefire, costs are still piling up in a way that could have major implications for the midterm elections that are just four months away. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, has put a number on that financial pain. Mark, so you're trying to figure out what the average household in the U.S. is paying for the war? What did you find?

MARK ZANDI: Well, if you tote it all up, then we can kind of go through the accounting, but if you add it all up, the cost for the typical American household, is about $1,100. So, you know, it's consequential for a lot of Americans, particularly low- or middle-income Americans. And just to give you context, if you look at the typical American household spending patterns, that's roughly the amount we spend on, let's say, all the fruits and vegetables we buy in a given year or all the money we spend on public transportation. So it's consequential. It's adding up, and, you know, it's really hard on many middle- or lower-income Americans.

MARTÍNEZ: Actually, I'm intrigued how you calculated those figures. How did you get to that number?

ZANDI: Well, it is a bit of an accounting exercise. I mean, the most obvious is the higher cost of gasoline. That's the biggest increase. And that's pretty straightforward, right? 'Cause everyone sees that when they drive to work or go to school every morning, and we know what the price is, and we know what people are spending, how much gas people are buying. So we can - that adds up pretty easily. Then there's the cost of diesel. And diesel's important because that is the cost of transporting goods. And, you know, that's when it impacts grocery prices because you have to get the food from the seaport or the farm to the store shelf. Anything you get delivered by Amazon and UPS.

MARTÍNEZ: Yeah.

ZANDI: If most Americans are like my household, that's a lot of packages, so that costs money. Jet fuel, that goes to, you know, the cost of airline tickets, and airlines have been operating at full capacity, so they pass through a lot of the higher cost. That's the biggest cost, the higher energy costs. That's pretty straightforward.

MARTÍNEZ: Right.

ZANDI: Then there's the cost of interest rates. You know, they're up a lot. We can talk about that as well. And, of course, the military. And if you add it all up, it comes to just about $150 billion - almost, not quite. And there's a lot of uncertainty around that, obviously. But there's 133 million American households, so you do the accounting, you do the arithmetic, it's $1,100 per household.

MARTÍNEZ: Mark, who do you think gets exposed the most? Because you mentioned how, you know, the gas the price of gas, obviously is the one that goes up. But if someone, say, maybe needs to drive more than other people or maybe someone on a fixed income, who gets exposed most to the cost of this war?

ZANDI: Yeah, it's really folks in the bottom part of the income distribution, lower-income, middle-income Americans, 'cause they have to spend - they devote a higher share of their budget to the cost of energy, cost of gasoline. And it varies a lot by where you live in the country. I mean, obviously, if you live in New York City, that's one thing. But if you live in the southeast U.S., the people tend to drive longer distances to work or school or shopping or whatever. So they have to spend a lot more. But, you know, it varies quite a bit, but at the end of the day, it's folks that have lower incomes 'cause just a higher share of their budget goes to that particular expenditure.

MARTÍNEZ: One more thing, Mark, really quick. I mean, how have Americans adjusted to the fact that they are going to have maybe less money to spend?

ZANDI: You know, so far, it's - they've cut back on their saving. If they were saving anything, they've cut back on that. Saving rates are now about as low as they've been. They've been lower, but rarely, and there's a lot of other reasons why saving rates are down, but that's the principal way so far. They haven't cut back on their spending, but I suspect if the war continues on and the costs continue to amount, that's what they'll be doing. They'll have to pull back on their spending.

MARTÍNEZ: Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, Mark, thanks.

ZANDI: Thank you.

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The Federal Reserve cares a lot about inflation and about jobs. That is because Congress gave the Fed what's known as a dual mandate. But President Trump's new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, is talking less about employment. The Indicator's Wailin Wong and Darian Woods explain why jobs and inflation are tricky to balance, and what the new Fed chair could be signaling.

WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: The Federal Reserve's current mission is kind of recent. It wasn't until the late '70s that Congress changed the Fed's mandate to be about price stability and maximum employment. Economists like Claudia Sahm have their own way of describing this concept. Claudia used to work at the Federal Reserve.

CLAUDIA SAHM: Maximum employment, broadly speaking, is the idea that everyone who wants a job has a job. It's like the sweet spot for the economy.

DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Maximum employment can't really be measured, and this goal poses a couple of different complications for the Fed. So the Fed has one main tool at its disposal - interest rates. Lowering rates makes it cheaper for people and businesses to borrow money and then demand for stuff goes up.

SAHM: If consumers are out buying and businesses are investing, well, they're going to need workers to make it happen. And so then that can kind of indirectly lead to more employment.

WONG: But what if there aren't enough workers to fill those jobs at current wages?

SAHM: Then all of a sudden, you can point a lot of demand into the economy, have labor shortages and end up causing inflation and a lot of stress on businesses. It's - again, it's a pretty blunt instrument.

WOODS: And this bluntness of the instrument is the second complication for the Fed when it comes to promoting maximum employment. Raising or lowering interest rates can only do so much for a system as complex as the American labor market.

SAHM: The labor market has had big structural inequities, discrimination, differences across workers. There's a lot of unequalness.

WONG: The Fed can't use interest rates to boost a specific group of workers, so that's a pretty big constraint on its ability to promote maximum employment.

WOODS: In 2020, the Fed updated its language around its strategy. The bank described maximum employment as a, quote, "broad based and inclusive goal."

WONG: New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has expressed skepticism around this phrasing.

WOODS: Last month, during his first press conference, Warsh critiqued how some of his predecessors tackled the dual mandate.

(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)

KEVIN WARSH: I don't share the view that was expressed a few generations ago that you're going to have to decide whether you're willing to tolerate higher inflation to put more people at work.

WONG: Warsh said he believed low prices and strong employment could be mutually compatible, but he didn't say much more about jobs. And economist Claudia Sahm and other Fed watchers clocked some important changes in the Fed's statement.

WOODS: For starters, the statement was shorter. And while the statement did mention the Fed's dual mandate, it removed an explicit reference to maximum employment. Claudia says she doesn't like these changes.

SAHM: There are these questions about, well, what would Warsh want the committee to do if the labor market did start to wobble? Would they come to the rescue? Would they stand firm on inflation? There's so many ways to think about and define maximum employment. We've never heard from Kevin Warsh how he thinks about it.

WOODS: Claudia says that historically, when the two parts of the Fed's dual mandate have been in tension, the Fed will focus on the more urgent matter. And right now, inflation is the priority. Darian Woods.

WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.

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When it comes to Xbox, Microsoft is doing a hard reset. This week, the company began reducing its gaming division by 3,200 jobs. Microsoft calls it the most significant restructuring in Xbox history. From member station KUOW, Monica Nickelsburg has been speaking with workers who feel like the gaming industry has become an impossible gauntlet.

MONICA NICKELSBURG, BYLINE: Autumn Mitchell has been an avid gamer since she was 5.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID WISE'S "THEME")

AUTUMN MITCHELL: I was gifted a Super Nintendo, and I played Donkey Kong Country, and I was absolutely obsessed.

(SOUNDBITE OF DAVID WISE'S "DK ISLAND SWING")

NICKELSBURG: Then, in 2021, she landed her dream job. Microsoft subsidiary ZeniMax would pay her to test video games.

MITCHELL: The people, the industry, the work itself is really dynamic and challenging and just really fulfilling stuff.

NICKELSBURG: But on Monday, that dream came to an end. Mitchell was one of thousands Microsoft laid off as part of a big reboot of its gaming division.

MITCHELL: I would say it's like having the wind knocked out of you and you never really get your breath back.

NICKELSBURG: Mitchell isn't optimistic she'll find another job in gaming. The industry has always had boom-and-bust cycles. Studios staff up to build a new game, but then there can be a long lag time until the next one. Often, there's not enough money to bridge the gap. But experts say this moment is different. Gaming companies are fighting social media, AI and so many other things for people's attention. Gil Luria is head of technology research at the investment bank brokerage D.A. Davidson.

GIL LURIA: The more our time gets divided up, the less time we have to spend on gaming, and therefore the less money we're inclined to spend on gaming.

NICKELSBURG: Microsoft says the number of game players and playing hours are down. Xbox has been spending billions on studio acquisitions, and some of those were flops. In a memo to employees, Microsoft said the business has become unhealthy, with profit margins three to 10 times lower than competitors. I asked Microsoft President Brad Smith about the prospect of layoffs in an interview last week, and he said, even though these decisions aren't easy...

BRAD SMITH: You do have to remain healthy in order to be successful, even to just stick around from decade to decade to decade.

NICKELSBURG: If the gaming industry was facing an uphill fight before, soaring hardware costs have turned it into an epic battle.

JOOST VAN DREUNEN: The current layoffs are an unfortunate mix of both internal inefficiencies and this apocalyptic degree of hardware prices going up because of the AI frenzy.

NICKELSBURG: Joost van Dreunen teaches the business of video games at New York University. He says a combination of tariffs, increased fuel prices and, most importantly, surging demand for chips is eating into Xbox's margins.

VAN DREUNEN: And that's, you know, a scenario in which the easiest answer is to just cut jobs, as unfortunate as that is for everybody involved.

NICKELSBURG: But some say turning things around will require listening to the people making these games, not firing them. Christopher Hays has been working on games like Doom and Rage for Id Software for 16 years. It was acquired by Xbox in 2021. He hasn't been laid off yet, though he worries he could be. He thinks the problem is comparing Xbox with higher-margin parts of Microsoft's business like software and AI.

CHRISTOPHER HAYS: Gaming makes a lot of money.

NICKELSBURG: But not AI money. Plus, he thinks Microsoft has invested in games and other projects that maybe they wouldn't have if they had listened more to their developers.

HAYS: Most of the time, when there's a lot of money lost, it's people in power chasing a trend and then ignoring developers who actually know the industry, are gamers themselves and know what people want.

NICKELSBURG: He'd like to see Xbox spun out of Microsoft. And some gaming experts say that may ultimately be where all this is headed. For NPR News, I'm Monica Nickelsburg in Seattle.

DETROW: And a note, Microsoft is a financial supporter of NPR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

To say gas prices have been unpredictable this year would be an understatement.

On Thursday morning, drivers across the U.S. were spending an average of $3.85 per gallon of regular unleaded, according to AAA.

The average cost of a gallon this year peaked in May at $4.56, and plunged as low as $2.79 in January, the organization reported.

Oil prices have spiked around the world in recent months after the U.S. and Israel launched a war on Iran, which has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. But the on-and-off hostilities have done more than simply raise gas prices in a straight line — they've caused gas to become more expensive one week, only for the price to fall the next. Prices go up when fighting rekindles or the strait is closed, and drop when peace talks resume. They're climbing again after Trump said the tenuous ceasefire was over.

Now, drivers are unsure of what price they'll find when they pull into a gas station, said Emily Blain, an accredited financial counselor in Minnesota.

"'How bad is it going to be this time? Is it going to be not as bad as I think, or is it going to be worse than I think?'" Blain said. That can contribute to stress, she added, "and since many people are going to the gas pump fairly often, that absolutely adds up."

How volatile prices affect consumer behavior

When it comes to price, gas is one of the more volatile consumer goods. U.S. motor fuel prices jumped as much as 35.8% annually over the last two decades and fell by as much as 27.8% in the same period, according to the USDA's Economic Research Service.

That unpredictability can influence consumers' buying habits — and it's been doing so in recent months.

Data from the cash back app Upside found that when gas prices rose in the first two and a half weeks of March, drivers visited gas stations more often but bought less fuel each time.

"Some drivers can't afford to fill up their tank at a given time, so there's definitely some cash constraints," said Upside principal research economist Thomas Weinandy. Other drivers might be in the habit of spending a set amount on fuel, which now buys less than it did weeks or months earlier, he added. "Someone might be used to just saying, 'put $20 on pump 1,' and they continue that behavior."

When prices fall back down, drivers typically buy more gas per visit, a phenomenon Weinandy says began to appear in the June data.

Experts say that consumers can expect price swings to stick around. Lauren Swift, senior editor for Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book, told NPR over email that historically when "gas prices have seen a sharp uptick due to war or other global conflicts, they take a very long time to come back down, typically years."

What drivers can do

Though changes in the price of gas can often appear minimal, increases can put a dent in household budgets over time. The financial website NerdWallet found that a $0.50-per-gallon spike could cost drivers in some states around $500 more per year.

"There is not much control you have over the prices, so all we can really do is to prepare to pay more at the pump," said Kimberly Palmer, personal finance expert at NerdWallet. But drivers still have a say in what they spend on fuel, she said.

Here are a few strategies consumers can use to deal with fluctuating gas prices:

• Assume the price will be high, and build that into your budget. "If we plan ahead knowing that gas prices are expected to be higher, then it can be a nice surprise if they end up going down that week," Palmer said. If prices drop instead, you'll have some money left over.
• Use websites or apps to shop around for the best price. Palmer said driving even a few miles out of your way could be worth it to pay substantially less per gallon.
• Use less gas. That could mean cutting back on driving, if that's an option for you. It could also mean adopting fuel-saving driving habits, such as driving more smoothly, ensuring your tires are inflated and removing excess weight from your vehicle. You may also consider switching to an electric vehicle, if that's within your budget. Spending less money on gas now gives you a financial cushion should prices rise again later.

For most people, the monthly cost of gas will be dwarfed by other household expenses like housing. But Blain, the financial counselor, said rent increases and property tax hikes typically occur annually and then appear as predictable monthly expenses. Fluctuating expenses, like groceries and gas, are different and can have a more immediate impact on consumers — even if they're a smaller share of your budget.

"You never know what you're going to get, to a certain extent," Blain said. "That feels really uncomfortable regardless of the actual dollar-and-cent impact, which can also be significant at times."

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