President Donald Trump said this week he’ll seek a nuclear weapons deal with US geopolitical foes China and Russia, and that he wants the trio to eventually agree to halve their military spending.

Achieving such a trilateral agreement is a tall order, but that didn’t stop stocks of companies that supply Uncle Sam with the lethal machinery it uses to fight its adversaries from taking a nosedive at the suggestion.

• Shares in the largest US military contractor, Lockheed Martin, which got more than $68 billion in Pentagon business in 2023, dropped almost 5% since Trump’s remarks Thursday.
• Stocks of fellow defense dollar recipients RTX and Northrop Grumman plummeted 4% and 7%, respectively.

But the Department of Defense—which is the federal government’s largest department, with an $800 billion budget—might start tightening its belt long before Trump pitches Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin on a military thriftiness pledge.

DOGE is knocking at the Pentagon

Trump has reportedly directed the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to scrutinize defense spending. Pentagon officials told NPR they expect DOGE to begin its work there in the coming days and that it’ll target an 8% spending cut.

• Defense Secretary Hegseth previously suggested that some top-ranking positions might be eliminated as the department reviews the 3 million people it employs in both uniformed and civilian roles.
• DOGE will also likely audit the equipment the military orders with some services reportedly already floating purchases to cut, per the Wall Street Journal.

Lawmakers and experts of all political stripes have long criticized legacy weapons programs that are plagued with cost overruns and often yield tech of questionable usefulness—with Musk himself recently dunking on the uber-pricey F-35 jets.

But slashing military costs could be politically tricky as defense contractors employ more than 2 million people across the country. Plus, Musk spearheading the effort presents a potential conflict of interest, as Space X is itself a Pentagon contractor.

But not the entire weapons business stands to lose: Trump’s Pentagon is expected to favor autonomous systems, which could benefit defense startups like the AI company Palantir and the dronemaker Anduril. Palantir shares rose over 6% this week.—SK

Thousands of federal workers laid off. On Thursday, one day after the Trump administration moved forward with its voluntary resignation program that 75,000 of the federal governments’ 2.3 million civilian workers signed up for, the administration began to lay off newer employees as part of its Elon Musk-led efforts to cut costs. The layoffs are expected to target most of the 200,000 probationary employees, who have usually been in their jobs for less than a year and do not have the same employment protections as longer standing government workers. Among those let go so far are: 1,000 Veterans Affairs staffers, 3,400 Forest Service employees, and 2,000 Energy Department workers, per the Wall Street Journal.

TikTok is back in Apple and Google’s app stores. Apologies to anyone who planned to live large by selling their old TikTok-installed phone on eBay for $10k: Everyone’s favorite Chinese shortform video app and its siblings CapCut and Lemon8 are available for download again in Apple and Google’s US mobile app stores. The tech giants brought the ByteDance apps back on Thursday night after receiving assurances from US Attorney General Pam Bondi that the nationwide ban on TikTok wouldn’t be immediately enforced—meaning they won’t get hit with fines. Though President Trump halted the enforcement shortly after taking office, the ban still stands, and could kick in later if TikTok isn’t sold to an American company.

DOJ moves to drop charges against NYC mayor after seven prosecutors resign in protest. The resignations from the Manhattan prosecutors’ office came after the Justice Department ordered them to drop bribery charges against Mayor Eric Adams. And in the kind of scorched earth resignation letter that most of us can only dream of sending, the case’s lead prosecutor Hagan Scotten told the DOJ, “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.” Amid the rift between career prosecutors and the DOJ, a prosecutor did eventually sign the motion to dismiss that was filed yesterday…but reportedly only to spare colleagues from being fired over their refusal.—AR

As if nothing is sacred anymore, collapsing into a cracked leather booth and securing a cheap breakfast feast is now at risk. Historically low-cost and popular breakfast staples like eggs, orange juice, and coffee have all seen price jumps, squeezing restaurants and consumers.

It’s never a good time for your omelet to cost more, but the business of breakfast and brunch is booming. Yelp clocked 6,421 morning meal restaurants opening last year (up 23% from 2019), and even fast-food chains are beefing up their breakfast offerings.

Why is your blue plate special so expensive?

• Roughly 159 million birds have been slaughtered because of the avian flu. In response, egg prices hit a record $4.95 per dozen last month.
• Citrus greening, a disease that destroys orange trees, has decimated groves in Florida, leading to some of the worst harvests in 90 years. The average cost of OJ concentrate in the supermarket has jumped nearly 90% since 2020.
• Poor growing conditions in Brazil and Vietnam, the world’s leading producers of coffee beans, caused beans to hit their highest price in 47 years last November.

But people are still going out for breakfast. Foot traffic to restaurants during breakfast has leapt past other times since 2019, and pre-lunch visits accounted for 21% of all trips to restaurants in 2024, according to market research firm Circana as reported by the Associated Press.—MM

An animal microchip company has incurred the wrath of potentially thousands of Bichon Frisé households: Pet owners are scrambling to re-register their furry friends’ rice-sized implants after the pet-chip maker Save This Life abruptly shut down this week, rendering its microchips effectively useless without its database.

Nobody’s answering calls or emails, according to concerned customers, chip distributors, competitors who were interested in buying Save This Life’s data, and even the American Animal Hospital Association, which runs the online registry for looking up a found animal’s chip number. Save This Life lost its business license last year, per Washington Post, possibly over tax payment issues.

“Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands” of pets may have gotten Save This Life chips since its founding in 2012, Tom Sharp, president of an American Kennel Club-affiliated nonprofit, estimated. (Only 6 in 10 microchips actually get registered, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association.)

What to do if you think your baby has this chip: Don’t panic. Veterinary clinics and hospitals that use Save This Life are alerting customers and urging them to re-register their pets with one of the other 40+ microchip companies in the US. You can also check your pet yourself—Save This Life chips start with either 991 or 900164.—ML

If your favorite store clerk isn’t smiling quite as widely as usual when they greet you today, it could be because data released yesterday showed that US retail sales experienced their biggest decline in nearly two years last month. Retail sales dropped 0.9% in January, marking the steepest monthly decrease since March 2023, according to the Commerce Department. The big dip came on the heels of an upwardly revised 0.7% increase in December, the department said.

Why aren’t Americans giving into their inner shopaholic any more? Part of the reason could simply be seasonality as everyone comes down from their holiday-buying binge. Plus, the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and severe winter storms hitting large swaths of the country might have made getting out to brick-and-mortar stores harder than usual. But with sales going down across nine of the 13 categories tracked—motor vehicles, sporting goods, and furniture fell the most—Bloomberg notes that it could be driven by more than just bad weather as consumers continue to contend with high inflation, which could be a worrying sign for the economy.—AR