Jobs Report, White House Crypto Summit, Gaza Ceasefire Uncertainty

Speaker 1 We get a picture today of employment, a snapshot slightly out of date.

Speaker 2 Future job reports will reflect federal job cuts and employers who paused as U.S. trade policy keeps changing.
Where's the economy heading? I'm A.

Speaker 1 Martinez, that's Steve Inskeep, and this is a first from NPR News.

Speaker 1 The president takes an opportunity today to promote cryptocurrency.

Speaker 3 Bitcoin has set multiple all-time record highs because everyone knows that I'm committed to making America the crypto capital we want to see.

Speaker 1 Trump himself has invested in crypto, so how does he plan for the government to promote it?

Speaker 2 Also, why did Israel change its terms for extending a ceasefire in Gaza? With U.S. help, Israelis are pressing Hamas to accept a different deal and withholding food and fuel.
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Speaker 2 Employers added 151,000 jobs in February. That's according to today's jobs report from the Labor Department.

Speaker 2 And 151,000 is a fairly healthy number, although it does not reflect the economic turmoil of the past several weeks. This is a snapshot of the economy, useful but ever so slightly out of date.

Speaker 2 NPR Scott Horsley is here. Good morning, Scott.
Good morning, Steve. So what is in and what is out of this snapshot?

Speaker 7 Well, the monthly jobs report is always based on a survey that's taken around the middle of the month, and that timing is important here because a lot of the federal government job cuts began around the 14th of February, a Friday, which some people have referred to as the St.

Speaker 7 Valentine's Day massacre.

Speaker 7 People who got their walking papers that Friday are still counted as employed in this February jobs report.

Speaker 7 The overall report actually shows somewhat more job growth in February than the month before when cold, snowy weather was blanketing much of the country and keeping a lot of construction workers idle, for example.

Speaker 7 But even though the report looks pretty good on the surface, there are some warning signs out there.

Speaker 2 Okay, when you look below the surface, what are the warning signs that you see?

Speaker 7 Yeah, the outplacement firm Challenger Gray and Christmas keeps a running tally of layoff notices, and its count for February shows the biggest job cuts since 2020, which is the early months of the pandemic.

Speaker 7 Andrew Challenger says there were 172,000 layoffs announced last month, and that includes more than 62,000 in the federal government.

Speaker 8 This is a really big number in terms of what we've ever recorded. The fact that we've reached that level so quickly this year is surprising to us and certainly something worth taking note of.

Speaker 7 Now, the official jobs report today shows just 10,000 federal jobs cut last month, which we know is a fraction of the real total.

Speaker 7 We also know the Trump administration is considering much more widespread layoffs as it seeks to radically downsize the federal workforce.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and it's numbers that couldn't affect the employment numbers in a measurable way. So what would that radical downsizing look like?

Speaker 7 The administration reportedly wants to cut tens of thousands of jobs, for example, from both the VA and the IRS. The IRS already cut more than 6,000 workers last month.

Speaker 7 Eddie Walker represents some of those workers at an IRS office in Austin, Texas.

Speaker 9 Of course, there's a lot of crying. I'm looking at some of the emails and stuff I've got, like they are ripping apart my work family.

Speaker 10 I left a job of 13 years to come here, and what do I get?

Speaker 9 How am I going to survive? I'm a single mom.

Speaker 7 This is obviously painful for the affected workers. Some context important, though.
There are about 2.4 million federal workers, not counting the military and the post office.

Speaker 7 That's about 1.5 percent of the overall U.S. workforce.

Speaker 2 Oh, thanks for the reminder. The vast majority of people are working the state and local government or whatever or in the private sector, of course.
So how is the private sector holding up?

Speaker 7 Yeah, restaurants and bars cut about 27,000 jobs last month. Temporary services cut jobs as well.
There's been a lot of whiplash around the President's trade policy.

Speaker 7 I mean, just this week we saw tariffs imposed, then relaxed, then mostly suspended on Mexico and Canada. Andrew Challenger says a lot of private sector businesses are considering their own job cuts.

Speaker 8 There's just been this extra uncertainty that's entered into some industries around tariffs, around potential trade wars.

Speaker 8 We're seeing big announcements from very large Fortune 500 companies this month that are tuning down their growth forecasts for the next three or four years.

Speaker 7 So it's just not an environment that encourages a lot of hiring.

Speaker 2 And Pierre Scott Hortsley, thanks.

Speaker 9 You're welcome.

Speaker 2 When he was campaigning for office, the president promised to make the United States the crypto capital of the planet. And he's taken major steps this week when it comes to digital assets.

Speaker 1 Yeah, last night the president signed an executive order creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. He's expected to speak about it at a summit the White House is hosting today on cryptocurrency.

Speaker 2 NPR White House correspondent Deepa Shivram has has more on this. Good morning.

Speaker 5 Good morning.

Speaker 2 Would you just explain for me? I mean, I can understand why the U.S. needs a strategic petroleum reserve.
If there's a shortage of petroleum, you let some out. Supply and demand keeps the price down.

Speaker 2 But why would Americans need a crypto reserve?

Speaker 5 Yeah, the argument the White House is making is that the U.S. is losing money by selling the Bitcoin they already have seized from court proceedings.

Speaker 5 So Trump's crypto czar David Sachs said on social media last night that the government has about 200,000 in Bitcoin, which is worth about $17 billion.

Speaker 5 And the idea is that the reserve will be a, quote, digital Fort Knox. All of that Bitcoin just stays there.
And that was a campaign promise from President Trump.

Speaker 5 But the idea of having a crypto reserve is pretty controversial, even among those in the crypto space, coming down to details like which cryptocurrencies do you keep in the reserve and why is the president picking some over others?

Speaker 5 So there's a lot of lingering questions.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and of course,

Speaker 2 it's an industry in which he's invested. So this is just one move the president is making.
There's this summit coming today. What's going on?

Speaker 5 Yeah, the White House hasn't shared a lot of details about who's attending today, who's going to be speaking, though we do expect the president to make remarks.

Speaker 5 But I will say, the big overarching thing that people are expecting from this summit is a pretty wide open question, which is what are the rules when it comes to cryptocurrency?

Speaker 5 This is a space that involves trillions of dollars, so many players, and a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of volatility and risk and bad actors.

Speaker 5 So, there's a desire here to build a regulatory framework.

Speaker 5 And a lot of folks in the crypto space see this summit as an opportunity to get the ball rolling on those discussions, especially because there are a lot of conversations like this that they feel weren't happening under the Biden administration.

Speaker 2 Well, what was Biden doing then?

Speaker 5 The Biden administration focused on enforcement in trying to crack down on cryptocurrency rather than coming up with the new rules of the road to help the industry and help consumers.

Speaker 5 Trump's approach so far has been to undo that.

Speaker 5 In the last last few weeks, his administration has backed away from a lot of the lawsuits and investigations that the SEC, which is the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been doing on crypto businesses.

Speaker 5 I talked to Campbell Harvey. He's a finance professor at Duke University about the change in approach to crypto.

Speaker 11 Over the past four years, at least, the regulatory complex has been very combative, almost in a warlike situation against the innovators in the space. So it's time to step back

Speaker 11 and to look at the possible benefits of this new technology and weigh them against the costs.

Speaker 5 And he says the summit happening today is important because it's a first step in making a framework for a cryptocurrency that balances that innovation with protection for consumers.

Speaker 2 I'm just thinking, though, when the government changes the rules, there are winners, there are losers. You may be picking winners and losers.

Speaker 2 And doesn't the president himself have a financial stake here?

Speaker 5 Correct. That's very important to point out.
Trump was seen as a very crypto-friendly presidential candidate.

Speaker 5 He received a lot of financial support from people in the crypto industry who also invested in down ballot races.

Speaker 5 And during the campaign, Trump also rolled out his own crypto venture called World Liberty Financial. That's run by Trump's kids, but he has a sizable financial stake in it.

Speaker 5 And right before inauguration, Trump and First Lady Melania Trump rolled out their own meme coins.

Speaker 5 That's a kind of cryptocurrency that the SEC recently said is not subject to oversight, which has raised questions about conflicts of interest.

Speaker 2 And Pierre's Deepa Shivaram, who so far as we know, has not yet released the Deepa coin, but we'll look forward to that.

Speaker 7 Stay tuned. All right.
Thanks so much.

Speaker 5 Thank you, Mary. Thank you.

Speaker 2 President Trump says his own threats forced a ceasefire in the war in Gaza.

Speaker 1 But that was six weeks ago, and that phase of the ceasefire deal ended with no agreement between Israel and Hamas on what comes next.

Speaker 1 Now, this week, the president issued what he called the last warning to Hamas after meeting with former Israeli hostages.

Speaker 2 NPR International Correspondent Aya Batraoui joins us now from Dubai to explain. Hi there.

Speaker 5 Hey, Steve.

Speaker 2 I'm just trying to think this through.

Speaker 2 There was a ceasefire that lasted six weeks. Hamas released some hostages in exchange for Israel freeing some Palestinians.
But why haven't they agreed to the second phase yet?

Speaker 12 Well, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Inyahu, he never actually sent negotiators to hammer out the details of a second phase.

Speaker 12 And he wants a different deal now that does not permanently end the war, but frees more hostages taken in the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023.

Speaker 12 So instead of proceeding with the original deal, Trump's Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff came up with a different plan in recent days that gives Netanyahu what he wants.

Speaker 12 And to pressure Hamas into this new deal, Israel's blocked all food, fuel, and aid into Gaza for six days now.

Speaker 12 Now, countries around the world, aid organizations, and several Israeli rights groups say this violates international humanitarian law.

Speaker 2 So, So how again is this plan, this proposal from the Israelis and from the United States different from what was expected?

Speaker 12 So the main difference is the original deal agreed to would have ended the war now, basically an agreement lasting truce.

Speaker 12 And then all remaining Israeli hostages still alive would be freed over the next six weeks and Israeli troops would withdraw from Gaza and more Palestinian prisoners would be freed.

Speaker 12 In contrast, the Witcoff plan would have Hames release half the remaining hostages still held in Gaza now with only the promise to negotiate a lasting end to the war after six weeks.

Speaker 12 Hames has not agreed to that, and Netanyahu may decide not to end the war because of pressure from his far-right coalition.

Speaker 12 He's in a bind because he has vowed to return all the hostages and eliminate Hames, but a return to war doesn't guarantee either.

Speaker 2 Okay, so we are maybe at this moment not getting closer to a permanent end to the war, but people still talk about what that's supposed to look like. What are some of the visions on the table?

Speaker 12 Okay, so you may have heard Trump's idea that everyone in Gaza is going to be displaced to other countries like Egypt and Jordan, and then then the U.S.

Speaker 12 takes over the Gaza Strip somehow, turning it into a world-class real estate development without Palestinians who live there now.

Speaker 12 Now, Israel's government has embraced this plan and is drafting up ways to implement it, but Egypt has been clear it will not be a part of Trump's plan to permanently expel Palestinians off the land.

Speaker 12 And Egypt says the plan is destabilizing to the region and would unravel its decades-old peace treaty with Israel.

Speaker 12 So instead, Egypt drew up a detailed reconstruction plan for Gaza of its own, and it got the backing of all Arab states at a summit in Cairo this week.

Speaker 12 They also all rejected any displacement of Palestinians. So, Israel and the U.S.
immediately criticized this lengthy Egyptian plan. But then, Steve Witkoff said this yesterday.

Speaker 13 I just finished reading it. There's a lot of compelling features to it.
We need more discussion about it. But it's a good faith first step from the Egyptians.

Speaker 12 So, Steve, the plan doesn't address every single concern that Israel or Gulf Arab states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have about

Speaker 12 what would come next. And they'll be needed to help fund the reconstruction, but it would exclude Hames from any governance, and James says they agree to that.

Speaker 2 Oh, interesting. Aya, thanks so much.

Speaker 12 Thank you, Steve.

Speaker 2 That's NPR correspondent Aya Batrowi in Dubai.

Speaker 2 And that's it first for this Friday, March 7th. I'm Steve Inskeep.

Speaker 1 And I'm Martinez. Now, one of the impending legal battles for the Trump administration is over birthright citizenship for people born in the U.S.
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