Six minutes of news from around the nation.

White House says Elon Musk isn't in charge at DOGE, but 'advising' the president; CA schools brace for harmful cuts to Medi-Cal; Report says AR students still struggle with COVID-19 learning loss; and UT enacts controversial labor union law.

Transcript

The Public News Service Daily newscast, February 19, 2025.

I'm Mike Clifford.

The White House says billionaire Elon Musk is not technically part of the Department of Governmental Efficiency that is sweeping through federal agencies, but is rather a senior advisor to President Donald Trump.

That's the Associated Press.

They report Elon Musk's exact role could be key in the legal fight over DOJ's access to government data as the Trump administration moves to lay off thousands of federal workers.

Defining him as an advisor rather than the administrator in charge of day-to-day operations at DOJ could help the administration as it pushes back against a lawsuit arguing Musk has too much power for someone who isn't elected or Senate-confirmed.

We head next to California where educators are speaking out against plans in the Congress to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, known as Medi-Cal, in the Golden State.

Medi-Cal pays for health care for more than 37 percent of California's children and more than 51 percent of kids in LA Unified, the state's largest school district.

Corey Tamblyn, a school psychologist at Pajaro Valley Unified School District in Watsonville, says right now schools get federal dollars to do assessments of Medi-Cal eligible kids.

So a lot of times we serve as the intermediary to identify things that are happening in students like autism as well as mental health disorders.

Without these monies, I do think that we're going to be less supportive of our families.

More burdens are going to be put on families.

Studies show that kids who get preventive care through Medi-Cal are less likely to be absent from class, are more likely to graduate from high school and college, and earn higher wages in adulthood.

I'm Suzanne Potter.

And Arkansas ranks 23rd among states in terms of the change in math achievement between 2019 and 24, and 19th in reading.

That's according to the Education Recovery Scorecard from the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University and the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.

The study compares learning before and after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

Harvard professor Tom Kane says chronic absenteeism, which rose from 22 percent in 2019 to 28 percent in 2024, is keeping students in Arkansas from catching up.

The pandemic itself may have been the earthquake, but the increase in absences has been the tsunami that is continuing to roll through American schools.

So it's not just about what happened or didn't happen during that 2021 school year.

He says the scorecard shows the gap between high-income and low-income school districts has increased.

I'm Freda Ross reporting.

This is Public News Service.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox has signed House Bill 267 into law, a controversial measure that takes away the collective bargaining rights of public employee unions.

Many union workers voiced their concerns and urged Cox to veto the bill, which they contend would damage unions.

But the bill's sponsor, Republican Representative Jordan Tushar, says he's heard from many teachers and other public sector workers in the right-to-work state who weren't part of a union and felt they didn't have a voice.

He says now the bill will allow them to negotiate their own employment terms.

Teachers talked about where they had an idea, a change that they wanted in insurance as an example, and they went to the administration to ask them about that.

And the administration said, well, you're going to have to go talk to the union about it.

And so they go to the union to talk about it.

And the union says, well, you're not a member.

We don't really care what you think.

Tushar contends the law will make public employers' wages and benefits more competitive.

I'm Alex Gonzalez reporting.

And FBI data show North Dakotans lost nearly $6 million to cryptocurrency scams in 2019.

A bill advancing in the legislature would try to limit those losses by adding safeguards to a financial trend that has little oversight.

The measure, overwhelmingly approved by the House this week, would require operators of crypto kiosks to be licensed.

Experts say the kiosks, which look similar to a traditional ATM, are used to convert real cash to virtual money like Bitcoin.

But they can also serve as a vehicle for fraud.

Representative Ben Koppelman says someone might pose as law enforcement warning a person about suspicious activity with the funds in their bank account.

They suggest depositing it in this kiosk, and then of course it goes to the fraudsters' account, and it's tough to get that money back.

One of the other provisions says receipts would need to be provided so that law enforcement has a paper trail to work with in the event of a scam.

I'm Mike Moen.

Finally, environmentalists say a bill passed by the U.S. House meant to curtail forest fires in New Mexico and elsewhere will do no such thing and are encouraging senators to vote against it.

The Fix Our Forests Act would reform NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.

The 55-year-old law requires environmental reviews and public input for major federal actions such as new logging, which supporters of the act say would mitigate wildfire risks.

Dan Ritzman with the Sierra Club believes the deceptively named bill would undermine environmental protections.

The Sierra Club has long supported science-based, responsible forest management.

We echo the experts who support prescribed burns, responsible forest management, and we support home and community hardening to make neighborhoods and cities more resilient in the face of fire.

I'm Roz Brown.

This is Mike Clifford for Public News Service.

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