The Dictatorship
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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has approved an agreement with Saudi Arabia that could potentially provide the kingdom with uranium enrichment capability for its civilian nuclear program, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The people, who were not authorized to comment publicly about the yet to be formally announced decision, said the agreement is expected to be announced publicly as early as Wednesday.
The deal is expected to last 30 years and is also expected to involve U.S. firms in developing the program. The deal could allow for the building of a uranium enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia following a joint U.S.-Saudi study.
But the deal, which is expected to be submitted to Congress for review, could face headwinds among lawmakers who fear that helping the Saudis fulfill their long-standing desire to enrich their own uranium would open new rounds of nuclear proliferation and competition.
Saudi Arabia is a member state of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a Vienna-based agency which promotes peaceful nuclear work but also inspects nations to ensure they don’t have clandestine atomic weapons programs.
But the agreement is not expected to include the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, which would allow for more monitoring, inspections and verification, according to one of the people.
The expected announcement comes in the midst of the war against Iran launched by the U.S. and Israel, in part, to wipe out Tehran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon. Iran has insisted its nuclear enrichment program is peaceful.
The White House and Saudi officials in Riyadh did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the decision, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Both Trump and former President Joe Biden tried to reach a nuclear deal with the kingdom to share American technology.
But nonproliferation experts warn any spinning centrifuges within Saudi Arabia could open the door to a possible weapons program for the kingdom, something its assertive de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has suggested he could pursue if Tehran obtains an atomic bomb.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright traveled to Saudi Arabia last year shortly before Trump visited the kingdom and discussed building out the kingdom’s commercial nuclear power industry with his Saudi counterpart. The U.S. Department of Energy did not immediately respond to requests for comment late Tuesday.
Already, Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact after Israel launched an attack on Qatar targeting Hamas officials. Pakistan’s defense minister then said his nation’s nuclear program “will be made available” to Saudi Arabia if needed, something seen as a warning for Israel, long believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state.
Enrichment isn’t an automatic path to a nuclear weapon — a nation also must master other steps, including the use of synchronized high explosives, for instance. But it does open the door to weaponization, which has fueled the concerns of the West over Iran’s program.
The United Arab Emirates, a neighbor to Saudi Arabia, signed what is referred to as a “123 agreement” with the U.S. to build its Barakah nuclear power plant with South Korean assistance. But the UAE did so without seeking enrichment, something nonproliferation experts have held up as the “gold standard” for nations wanting atomic power.
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Price reported from Manila, Philippines, and Gambrell from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. AP writers Will Weissert and Matthew Daly contributed from Washington.
NEW YORK (AP) — How many women hold executive-level positions at top U.S. companies? What is the racial and ethnic breakdown of those roles? What is the gender and racial breakdown of the lowest-paid roles at those companies?
The Trump administration is making it harder for the public to know, moving to toss aside a 60-year-old requirement for tens of thousands of private sector employers to submit workforce demographic reports each year to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workplace.
The EEOC’s Republican majority voted 2-1 Tuesday to rescind the data collection requirement, submitting the proposal to a 30-day public commentary period before final approval. The proposal is a quiet but profound salvo in President Donald Trump’s shake up of civil rights enforcementending a practice that has endured through 10 Republican and Democratic administrations.
EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas, an outspoken critic of diversity and inclusion practices who has urged white men to come forward with discrimination complaints, argued that requiring companies to submit the annual demographic reports risks encouraging companies to justify discriminatory practices to diversify their workforce.
“It may promote racial stereotyping at work, and it may encourage employers to engage in discrimination,” Lucas said during a hearing ahead of the vote.
Former Democratic EEOC commissioners and civil rights organizations have denounced the proposal, saying it will deprive the agency of a critical tool for uncovering discrimination patterns and tracking how women and racial minorities have fared since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which created the EEOC and prohibited employment discrimination based on race, color, sex, national origin and religion.
The EEOC, which receives more than 88,000 worker complaints each year, has historically used the data to guide its enforcement priorities and inform some of its investigations.
Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal, the sole Democrat left on the EEOC since Trump moved to wrest control of the agencyvoted against the proposal.
“Today, the commission discusses whether to turn back time to a period before the civil rights movement, kneecapping its ability to protect workers,” Kotagal said.
Here’s what to know about the reporting requirement and the proposal to end it:
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How the EEOC has collected the data
Since 1966, the EEOC has required companies with at least 100 employees, or federal contractors with at least 50 workers, to submit a form called the EEO-1 each year.
The form, which has evolved over time, identifies 10 job categories from “Executive/Senior Level Officials and Managers” to “Laborers” and “Service Workers.” It asks employers to report on the number male and female workers in each job category, as well as the number of workers from different race and ethnicities: Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Asian, Native Hawaiian, American Indian or Alaska Native and two or more races.
The data typically covers more than 50 million employees and 73,000 employers nationwide.
A view into gender and race in the private sector
The EEOC launched during the Biden administration an interactive tool allowing the public to explore historical demographic metrics across industries and job categories. The most recent data is from 2023. Under the Trump administration, the EEOC last collected EEO-1 data for the year 2024 but has not publicly disclosed it. Collection of the year 2025 would have begun this year.
The data shows white men dominating executive and senior manager roles at private companies, though women and minorities have made inroads, especially in the years following the #MeToo and Black Lives Matters movements.
Women remain underrepresented in the top ranks of companies. While they make up nearly half the workforce at the companies surveyed, women held just 34.5% of executives and senior manager roles in 2023. That was up from 29.2% a decade earlier.
White and Asian women made the fastest gains, and by 2023, were no longer underrepresented in senior roles compared to their numbers in the overall workforce. In contrast, Black and Hispanic women remained sharply underrepresented in executive and senior manager roles despite making modest gains.
Asian men have been proportionally represented in senior roles for years, while Black and Hispanic men remained underrepresented in 2023.
Of those demographic groups, only one was overrepresented in senior roles: white men, who made up a third of the overall workforce at the companies surveyed but held 52.7% of executive and senior management roles.
Why the government wants to end the data collection
Lucas said the annual reporting requirements impose “hundreds of millions of dollars” on costs on employers, a burden she argued was unnecessary absent “any allegation, indication, or evidence of discrimination.”
The move was recommended by Project 2025the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint that has guided many of the Trump administration’s policies.
A group of former Democratic EEOC commissioners and legal counselors said there is little evidence that companies are routinely using employment data to engage in quotas or race-based hiring.
“This is simply inaccurate and unsupported speculation, at odds with the ways in which this data is actually collected, managed and used,” the former officials said in a statement.
Instead, the officials said, tracking such data encourages companies to proactively examine their hiring, promotion, benefits and other policies to ensure they are not unnecessarily erecting barriers.
Kotagal said the agency has used the data to determine whether a discrimination charge might be part of a deeper pattern at a company. She cited a recent investigation of California supermarket chain Vallarta Food Enterprises, in which the EEOC alleges the grocer failed or refused to recruit, hire or promote non-Hispanic individuals. In that case, EEO-1 data showed that “nearly 100 percent of its employees were Hispanic,” Kotagal said. “It’s a key tool in our toolbox.”
The agency has also issued special reports on demographic employment trends across certain industries or roles.
Kotagal highlighted a 2024 report on the tech sector, which showed that women had made virtually no gains between 2014 and 2022, and that workers under 40 years old had actually lost ground. The report also found tech company workers were more likely that others to file age or pay discrimination charges, suggesting systemic barriers to women and older workers in the industry.
The report has been removed from the EEOC’s website.
Corporate retreat from demographic disclosure
The EEOC is prohibited from publicly releasing an individual company’s EEO-1 form, only publishing the information in the aggregate. In recent years, however, a growing number of the country’s top companies began publicly releasing their forms in response to pressure from shareholders and Democratic elected officials to show transparency in their diversity efforts.
Many of those companies have complained that job categories in the EEO-1 forms don’t align with their internal structures, a point Lucas echoed Tuesday, saying the categories don’t reflect the modern workforce. But advocates of EEO-1 disclosure argued it’s the only standardized form that allows for comparison across companies, and offer more detail.
However, the trend toward transparency has started to reverse.
Companies have started to pull back on publicizing both EEO-1 forms and their own diversity reports, which conservative advocates and the Trump administration have seized on to argue that companies are using discriminatory tactics to add women and minorities to their ranks.
In 2025, 24 companies in the S&P 100 — the largest U.S. publicly traded companies — chose not to disclose their EEO-1 data after having done so the year before, according to Andrew Jones, principal researcher at The Conference Board Governance & Sustainability Center. Still, 60 S&P 100 companies did release the data.
Meanwhile, fewer companies are publicizing any form of demographic metrics. The number of Russell 3,000 companies that disclosed metrics on women in the workforce fell from 75% in 2024 to 62% in 2025, according to a study by The Conference Board. Those disclosing metrics on minority representation fell from 30.9% to 26.5%.
Why companies may keep gathering data
Companies are still likely to keep track of their demographic data, whether or not they disclose any of those metrics publicly, and even if they are no longer required to submit annual EEO-1 reports. That’s because Title VII requires employers to keep records that could be pertinent to any discrimination investigation, and the EEOC is empowered to request them.
“What we are generally advising is to stay the course,” Jennifer Robins, counsel in law firm Saul Ewing’s Labor and Employment Group. “Private litigants, employment discrimination lawsuits are not going away, and this data is helpful to defending oneself.”
The EEOC has demanded extensive demographic data from companies to bolster Lucas’ own marquee cases. Those include an investigation into diversity, equity and inclusion practices of sports giant Nike, which Lucas has alleged discriminate against white employees; a lawsuit against the New York Times for allegedly discriminating against a white man who was passed over for a promotion, and an investigation into alleged antisemitism against staff at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lucas emphasized Tuesday that the EEOC would continue to demand data in the course of its investigations. Kotagal warned employers that under future leadership, the EEOC could reinstitute the EEO-1 collection.
Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, said she sees the elimination of EEO-1 data as part of an effort to obscure the prevalence of discrimination against racial minorities and women and create of a sense of urgency around protecting white workers from DEI-related policies.
But Frye said the data “doesn’t suggest that their top priority ought to be discrimination against white men.
“If the chair is moving forward with an agenda that thinks she ought to be focused on men and ought to be focused on white people, my answer is, ‘Well, does the data tell you that?’” Frye said.
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The Associated Press’ women in the workforce coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
The Trump administration on Tuesday said it was deferring more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to Minnesota and California because of “suspected fraud and noncompliance,” the latest in a series of punitive steps it has linked to allegations of fraud in mostly Democratic-led states.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the new actions — which come after previously announced Medicaid funding deferrals in those states — are part of the administration’s strategy to “stop the fraud before it happens” rather than claw back problematic spending after bad actors are prosecuted, as previous administrations had done.
“We have a duty to stop the payments, demand answers and then follow the evidence wherever it leads,” Kennedy told a news conference.
The tactic is part of the administration’s sweeping campaign to show it’s cracking down on fraud and saving taxpayers money when rising healthcare costs and other economic stressors have made affordability a top voter concern in November’s midterm elections.
In March, Vice President JD Vance launched a new anti-fraud task force at the request of President Donald Trump, bringing together officials from various departments to use data and technology to identify and investigate suspected wrongful use of federal dollars.
But the federal government hasn’t provided “data or explanation on how the deferral amount was calculated or what it was based on” to Minnesota, said John Connolly, the temporary commissioner and state Medicaid director for Minnesota’s Department of Human Services.
“Today’s actions show that the federal government is acting again in unprecedented and punitive ways as part of their war on Medicaid and its recipients,” he said in a statement. “Partnership — not politics — is required to stop criminals and protect services for the people who need them.”
Minnesota’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz suggested the Republican administration was deferring the funds to pay for Trump’s tax cuts to wealthy Americans. California’s Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom accused the administration of targeting it for political reasons.
The Trump administration intensified anti-immigration efforts in Minnesota earlier this year, sending in a robust force of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers whose actions there caused weeks of counterprotests and included the shooting deaths of two civilians. Trump himself has frequently denounced California as a badly governed state.
States are facing obstacles because of the actions
The strategy has led to some false starts and headaches for states.
In April, for example, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services acknowledged to The Associated Press it made a significant error in figures it used to help justify a fraud probe in New York. Last month, California’s Medicaid director told a congressional committee that CMS had not yet provided “any instances of fraud, waste or abuse” to the state in its justification of a $1.3 billion Medicaid funding deferral announced in May.
And in Minnesota, state officials have been executing a thorough corrective action plan to defray CMS concerns that have led the agency to defer some $260 million in federal money and to threaten future cuts.
“We have cooperated in good faith and proactively engaged the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to first raise the alarm on fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid program, to effectively investigate fraud and to institute further safeguards against future misuse of funds,” Connolly said.
Kennedy didn’t specify in Tuesday’s announcement whether the new deferrals — $867.5 million in federal Medicaid payments to California and $199 million to Minnesota — are in addition to, or overlap with, earlier deferrals announced this year.
CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz didn’t provide concrete examples of fraud in the two states in justifying the deferrals. He did mention some patterns the agency noticed that it found questionable, including that some providers were billing for four or more patients at the same time, or billing after the date of a Medicaid beneficiary’s death.
Oz also highlighted a fast rate of growth in California’s home care program as a reason for concern. California officials have disputed that idea, explaining that the state’s home care program has grown because of an intentional strategy to keep people out of more expensive nursing homes.
“In-home care growth reflects intentional, federally encouraged expansion, not improper spending,” said Anthony Cava, spokesperson for the California Department of Health Care Services. “California is calling on CMS to stop threatening care for California’s most vulnerable residents.”
Flow of money could be restored — with documentation
Kennedy and Oz said states could restart the flow of federal funding by providing documentation proving the payments in question were legitimate.
Officials in both states have previously acknowledged they are working with the federal government to provide the requested information. Oz said Minnesota had already returned documents to the federal government and they were being “reevaluated very carefully.”
Kennedy also suggested Tuesday that he would extend the power to exclude providers from Medicaid, Medicare and other federal health programs to CMS. In the past, that authority has rested solely with his department’s Office of the Inspector General.
“This is going to be a full force multiplier,” HHS Inspector General Thomas March Bell told a news conference. “It’s going to create additional momentum, and it’s going to exclude additional bad actors.”
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