Trump’s new $1.8bn fund under fire

Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Thursday, May twenty first, and this is your FT News briefing. The chip group at the heart of the AI boom keeps on cruising, and critics say Donald Trump has created a fund using tax dollars that will reward his allies. Plus, the Ebola outbreak in Africa has health expectations. Concerned. Suddenly infectious diseases and the devastation they can wreak and the reminders of the COVID-19 pandemic that they provoke are in everyone's minds again.

I'm Mark Filipino and here's the news you need to start your day.

NVIDIA reported quarterly earnings, and the world's most valuable company did not disappoint. The chip designer saw an astounding eighty five percent growth in revenue year on year last quarter, bringing it to eighty one billion dollars. And the company said it expects ninety one billion dollars in sales for the current quarter.

Now I know I'm throwing a lot of numbers at you right now, but here's one you should definitely remember.$80 billion. NVIDIA said it's approving that amount in stock buybacks and that it's increasing its quarterly dividends. Just to give you a sense of how well NVIDIA is doing, it alone powered nearly a fifth of the SP 500's gains since the beginning of the year.

U.S. President Donald Trump has settled with the federal government over his tax returns, which were leaked in 2019, and the settlement is an unusual one. The Justice Department will set up a fund, and if you think the current or previous administrations wronged you, you can apply for a payout from it. But critics are calling the new so-called anti-weaponization fund an illegal use of taxpayer money.

The FT's Joe Miller has been reporting on this financial vehicle and he joins me now to talk through all this. Hi Joe. So what is this fund? Who is it for? And who's footing the bill for it? Well the last part of that is the easiest to answer. The American taxpayer is footing the bill. Uh because this fund comes about as part of a settlement, as you just mentioned, in a suit that Donald Trump bought against his own government. over the leaking of his tax records.

a few years ago. He sued for ten billion dollars and the government earlier this month suggested a settlement and this settlement would come in the form of this so called anti weaponization fund. uh worth approximately one point eight billion dollars and it would be used to pay people who were wrongly investigated or convicted by previous administration. Uh and what are critics saying about this, Joe?

Well the criticism is coming from many quarters. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, was up before Congress this week and he was asked whether those involved in the January sixth riot on Capitol Hill in twenty twenty one would be eligible for this scheme, and he declined to rule them out. He said anyone

uh would be eligible to apply and then a decision would be taken by the Commission. So many Democrats are calling this a slush fund for the President's allies and essentially a way of paying off his donors and people who've been loyal to him over the years. Okay. That's a lot right there. How does it work, Joe?

Well, we have very few details because the settlement agreement and the terms of this were filed to a court and it's about a nine page document. But what we do know about how it will work is that the fund will be administered by a five-member commission, which will be appointed by whoever's the attorney general at the time, so Trump's attorney general, with just one member of that

commission chosen in this is quotes consultation with congressional leadership and we're not quite sure what that means. But more strikingly, this commission would be able to decide who gets apologies, who gets cash awards. without any congressional approval, and their decisions will not necessarily be made public and won't be subject to appeal. Wow, so is this legal?

That is the question I've been trying to get to the bottom of, and I've been speaking to various constitutional law scholars throughout this week. And there are certainly areas of this that some scholars think are potentially illegal. And the most concerning part is if if any of the fund ends up in the hands of Trump or his family, because that would seem to be a straightforward violation of the emoluments clause which prevents the president from enriching himself from his own government.

However, the administration has come out and said that none of the money will go to Trump and his family. We're now waiting to see whether any entities connected with Trump will apply for some of this money because that could also potentially be a violation, even if he's not in charge of those businesses at the moment, but if he's the ultimate beneficiary of them, that could be unconstitutional. Is the White House saying anything else about this?

The White House has said that there are other settlements in history for people who have been wronged by the Department of Justice or by the Government. And they say that this will benefit the American people uh and will help keep the government accountable. Joe Miller is a special correspondent for the FT. Thanks, Joe. You're most welcome.

OpenAI could file to go public as soon as this week, and the listing is expected to be worth over a trillion dollars. As according to people familiar with the matter, they tell the FT that the company's chief executive, Sam Altman, has his eye on a potential September IPO. Altman's been pushing the startup to go public before its main rival Anthropic does. Anthropic's also planning to list as soon as this year.

OpenAI spent the past year clearing any hurdles that stood in the way of a public listing. For example, it converted to a for-profit and in recent months cut back on costly, quote, sidequests. Plus, we told you this week that the company also won a long running legal battle with Elon Musk, the world's richest man. OpenAI declined to comment to the FT about the IPO filing.

Health authorities are scrambling to find a vaccine for the deadly Ebola outbreak in Africa. The virus surfaced in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda at the end of April. Here to discuss the latest is the FT science editor Michael Peel. Hi, Michael. So tell me, what do we know about the current Ebola outbreak so far?

Well, it's an outbreak that is already uh in two countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda and has killed at least The crisis has already led the World Health Organization to declare this a public health emergency. of international concern. And one of the problems is that the Bundy Budjo species of the virus does not have a vaccine. And so efforts are now underway to urgently hunt for a jab against this lethal virus which has fatality rates uh of up to fifty percent.

Wow. Now you've been reporting that this outbreak went undetected for quite a while, and that allowed it to spread quickly to different areas, and it really got public health officials worried. What's the larger backdrop that this is happening up against? This is a very, very tough environment for global health efforts. A number of rich countries have cut back significantly.

on international health aid. The United States and Argentina have withdrawn from the World Health Organization and all of these things obviously have a negative impact.

on uh efforts to surveil for lethal outbreaks as we're already seeing with Ebola, um and indeed the Hanter virus aboard the cruise ship which um has been in the news over the last month or so, but also for diseases which have the potential to drive a new pandemic, which of course, in the light of the COVID nineteen pandemic, is the thing that really scares people in the health world. Wait, so are you saying that Ebola or Hontavirus is not likely to cause another pandemic?

Health experts say that these, thankfully, are not viruses that threaten to cause a pandemic. And the main reason is that they're much less transmissible than COVID nineteen. Whereas COVID nineteen was a disease you could catch in the air. Generally with both the Hunter virus and with Ebola, the contact has to be much closer. And so there does at least mean it can be to some extent contained

Michael, what are you going to be looking out for next? Could some of the countries that rolled back public health funding maybe restart some of it? Well I think suddenly infectious diseases and the devastation they can wreak And the reminders of the COVID-19 pandemic that they provoke are in everyone's minds again. And I think we've now moved into a different stage of what one health expert described to me as a cycle of panic and neglect.

What she meant by that was that during and after COVID there was the panic stage where everyone said, Well, we must stop this happening again. But then of course, as the intensity of the event recedes, and other politics and other financial priorities intrude, the funding gets withdrawn, people don't pay as much attention to these prevention measures until there's then another disease outbreak, or in this case two in the last few weeks that have made headlines around the world.

That's FT Science editor Michael Peel. Thanks so much, Michael. Thank you. Before we go, a quick correction. In yesterday's show, we said the Trump administration opened a lawsuit against Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell. We should have said that the administration threatened a lawsuit. You can read more on all these stories for free when you click the links in our show notes. This has been your daily FT News briefing. Check back tomorrow for the latest.

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