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The federal government is, by far, the world’s most important source of data, a fount of statistical information on a wide range of subjects touching almost every aspect of human life.

President Trump is trying to break the fountain.

This video, from Opinion Video at The New York Times, tells the story of the Trump administration’s war on data — and the consequences for all of us.

Watch the full video here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

As President Trump and President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing this week, there’s a kind of Cold War atmosphere around the presumed A.I. arms race, Times Opinion columnist Ross Douthat says. But are we even in a race at all? And, if we are, who’s winning? On this week’s episode of “Interesting Times,” Ross speaks to Kyle Chan, a foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.

As opposed to the U.S.’s large focus on artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., China has largely focused on smaller, more efficient A.I. programs, as well as consumer diffusion, practical application and open source models. If we’re focused only on the threat of Chinese A.G.I., Kyle says, we’d need to “get rid of the guardrails. We need to not bind ourselves. We need to not have any kind of regulation or restrictions.”

But that approach is beginning to run into some problems in the U.S., Kyle continues:

>Whether you’re talking about the backlash to data centers, or you’re talking about some of these models now getting so capable that they might not be at whatever A.G.I. level, but they are at the level of potentially causing greater damage, either in terms of cyberattack capabilities or maybe even in terms of augmenting what a relatively unsophisticated group could do with bioweapons.

>There are all these sorts of questions that the A.I. community has been talking about for a long time. But certainly, for the Trump administration, if you recall JD Vance’s speech last year, where he said basically we should not have hand-wringing over A.I. safety slow down the progress of American A.I. development. In other words, in this trade-off — and he viewed it as a trade-off — we should err on the side of going faster rather than putting on a seatbelt.

>Now we’re reaching that point where we need to think about still making progress as fast as possible, competing with China, making sure we do have the best A.I. models — we can keep that. But does it have to come at the expense of wearing a seatbelt or having some basic safeguards?

Watch, listen to or read the full conversation here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

Jessica Grose, a writer for Times Opinion, says in her weekly newsletter:

>When Bonner General Health stopped providing labor and delivery services in 2023, the families of Sandpoint, Idaho, were devastated. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that back in 2014 she had planned on a home birth, but it was not progressing, and her midwife took her to Bonner General, where she had a C-section. It went so well, she became friends with her obstetrician.

>If you’re a pregnant woman in Bonner County, in the northern panhandle of the state, your options for receiving prenatal and postpartum care and giving birth are quite limited. If you want to get an ultrasound, you are probably driving nearly an hour to Coeur d’Alene, or over an hour to Spokane, Wash. That’s in good weather. But try navigating a bumpy dirt road and mountain passes, which sometimes close, in an ice storm, while in labor.

>As a result, many pregnant women in the area are either opting for planned home births with midwives, or, if it’s possible, they are booking short-term rentals or staying with family near hospitals with obstetric units. If a planned home birth goes sideways, fast, some of these women may end up in Bonner’s emergency room, which no longer has obstetricians nor pediatricians to manage neonatal resuscitations. Some of them are buying helicopter insurance in case they need to be airlifted.

Read more from Jessica about the nationwide closure of rural labor and delivery units here, for free, even without a Times subscription.

Housing is the single biggest issue facing California. What will the state’s next governor do about it? On Friday, May 8, Ezra Klein will moderate a forum with top Democratic candidates for governor, giving them a chance to explain how they would actually solve, or at least make progress on, the issue.

Tune into our YouTube livestream on Friday, May 8, at 4:15 p.m. P.T. / 7:15 p.m. E.T.