Trump administration workforce cuts at federal agencies overseeing U.S. dams are threatening their ability to provide reliable electricity, supply farmers with water and protect communities from floods, employees and industry experts warn.

The Bureau of Reclamation provides water and hydropower to the public in 17 western states. Nearly 400 agency workers have been cut through the Trump reduction plan, an administration official said.

“Reductions-in-force” memos have also been sent to current workers, and more layoffs are expected. The cuts included workers at the Grand Coulee Dam, the largest hydropower generator in North America, according to two fired staffers interviewed by The Associated Press.

“Without these dam operators, engineers, hydrologists, geologists, researchers, emergency managers and other experts, there is a serious potential for heightened risk to public safety and economic or environmental damage,” Lori Spragens, executive director of the Kentucky-based Association of Dam Safety Officials, told the AP.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said federal workforce reductions will ensure disaster responses are not bogged down by bureaucracy and bloat.

”A more efficient workforce means more timely access to resources for all Americans,” she said by email.

But a bureau hydrologist said they need people on the job to ensure the dams are working properly.

“These are complex systems,” said the worker in the Midwest, who is still employed but spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of possible retaliation.

Workers keep dams safe by monitoring data, identifying weaknesses and doing site exams to check for cracks and seepage.

“As we scramble to get these screenings, as we lose institutional knowledge from people leaving or early retirement, we limit our ability to ensure public safety,” the worker added. “Having people available to respond to operational emergencies is critical. Cuts in staff threaten our ability to do this effectively.”

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to rehire fired probationary workers, but a Trump spokesperson said they would fight back, leaving unclear whether any would return.

The heads of 14 California water and power agencies sent a letter to the Bureau of Reclamation and the Department of Interior last month warning that eliminating workers with “specialized knowledge” in operating and maintaining aging infrastructure “could negatively impact our water delivery system and threaten public health and safety.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers also operates dams nationwide. Matt Rabe, a spokesman, declined to say how many workers left through early buyouts, but said the agency hasn’t been told to reduce its workforce.

But Neil Maunu, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association, said it learned more than 150 Army Corps workers in Portland, Oregon, were told they would be terminated and they expect to lose about 600 more in the Pacific Northwest.

The firings include “district chiefs down to operators on vessels” and people critical to safe river navigation, he said.

Their last day is not known. The Corps was told to provide a plan to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management by March 14, Maunu said.

Several other federal agencies that help ensure dams run safely also have faced layoffs and closures. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is laying off 10% of its workforce and the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s National Dam Safety Review Board was disbanded in January.

The cuts come at a time when the nation’s dams need expert attention.

An AP review of Army Corps data last year showed at least 4,000 dams are in poor or unsatisfactory condition and could kill people or harm the environment if they failed. They require inspections, maintenance and emergency repairs to avoid catastrophes, the AP found.

Heavy rain damaged the spillway at California’s Oroville Dam in 2017, forcing nearly 190,000 residents to evacuate, and Michigan’s Edenville Dam breached in storms in 2020, the AP found.

Stephanie Duclos, a Bureau of Reclamation probationary worker fired at the Grand Coulee Dam, said she was among a dozen workers initially terminated. The dam across the Columbia River in central Washington state generates electricity for millions of homes and supplies water to a 27-mile-long (43-kilometer) reservoir that irrigates the Columbia Basin Project.

“This is a big infrastructure,” she said. “It’s going to take a lot of people to run it.”

Some fired employees had worked there for decades but were in a probation status due to a position switch. Duclos was an assistant for program managers who organized training and was a liaison with human resources. The only person doing that job, she fears how others will cover the work.

“You’re going to get employee burnout” in the workers left behind, she said.

Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who pushed a bipartisan effort to ensure the National Dam Safety Program was authorized through 2028, said, “the safety and efficacy of our dams is a national security priority.

“Americans deserve better, and I will work to make sure this administration is held accountable for their reckless actions,” Padilla said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Tim Spector admits he used to have a Pringles problem. The salty, melt-in-your-mouth snack was a weak spot for the professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London and gut health expert.

“I could taste the chemicals on them,” he tells Fortune, “but at the same time there was something that made me addicted to eating them.”

Now, Spector is well-versed in the world of ultra-processed foods as the co-founder of ZOE, a UK-based nutrition company known for its gut health testing, and the author of multiple books including The Diet Myth and Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well.

Spector optimizes his diet with nutrition, longevity, and gut health in mind.

4 foods he never eats

1. Ultra-processed salty snacks

While Spector used to love indulging in Pringles and Cheetos, those crunchy, salty snacks are no longer a part of his diet, and top the list of foods he avoids. 

“It’s the food industry that’s pushed us into this snack culture,” Spector says. Many ultra-processed snack foods are “hyper-palatable,” he adds, which make them easy to overeat. 

The mixture of fat, sugars, and salt combined with a texture that almost dissolves in your mouth can make it hard to stop eating, not to mention their overly processed nature that can potentially threaten your health. That rapidly dissolving texture also disperses something like a Pringle or a Cheeto into the bloodstream much quicker, avoiding the body’s mechanisms that make you feel full, Spector says. 

2. Sugary breakfast cereals

Spector steers clear of  sugar-packed cereals that are “totally artificially created…that have 20 to 30 ingredients,” and look nothing like the foods they’re made from.

“You sort of feel this chemical rush as you’re eating them,” he says.

Spector recalls being a kid and loving the sugar rush of a chocolatey cereal so much, that he’d eat it to the point of nausea.

“It’s not ever something you’d find in nature,” he says. While a nice, sweet banana might be tasty, he says, that doesn’t mean you’d want to eat five in a row.

“I now know what the food companies are trying to do,” Spector says. “They’ve got the right mix of the salt, the sugar, and the fat. They know how to light up that bit of my brain.”

One study found that foods high in fat and sugar—like many ultra-processed foods—can trigger a sense of reward and a dopamine response in the brain, making them harder to put down.

3. Low-fat yogurt

While the U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend that Americans include low-fat dairy in their diets, Spector avoids low- or non-fat yogurt—and reaches for full-fat yogurt instead. Part of it is personal preference—he says he enjoys full-fat yogurt more—but it is also for health reasons.

“They’ve just substituted fat with cheaper starch from corn and added all sorts of flavorings and glues to make it feel like it’s still got that milk fat in it,” Spector says.

Additives aside, the processing of low-fat yogurt can also sometimes degrade the quality of the yogurt, he says, removing beneficial fat-soluble vitamins from the yogurt. 

One study stated that fat-soluble vitamins like A and D are removed along with the fat during processing, but they are often added back in to restore the nutritional value—however, since those vitamins are fat-soluble, the body may have more difficulty absorbing them in the absence of fat.

4. Foods labeled ‘low-calorie, high-protein’

Whenever Spector sees a food that is advertised as “low-calorie, high-protein,” it immediately raises red flags. That includes foods like protein bars, powders, and other products infused with protein—which nowadays can include everything from cereals to ice cream.

“That just sends me a red alert that this product has been highly tampered with,” Spector says.

He explains that it’s cheap for companies to add protein to their products—even as they mark up the prices—as they play into the trend of people looking to eat high-protein, low-calorie diets.

Spector’s favorite sweet treat

Despite Spector’s frustration with the pervasiveness of ultra-processed foods in the American diet, he admits that there are some he’s happy to eat. His favorite is Lindt dark chocolate, which Spector considers ultra-processed because of the additive soy lecithin.

Many chocolate brands add the emulsifier soy lecithin, which gives it that velvety texture while binding the chocolate together. Soy lecithin is generally considered a safe additive. One study indicates it could have health benefits like lowering bad cholesterol, but there are concerns about the safety of genetically modified food and the process by which soy lecithin is extracted uses chemical solvents like hexane.

It’s hard to find a chocolate without soy lecithin, he says, “but overall that is a healthy product.”

Dark chocolate does have numerous benefits, as it is rich in flavonols, and important minerals, including iron, magnesium, zinc, copper and phosphorus which support immunity, bone health, and sleep quality.
And in a 2022 study, dark chocolate was found to boost mood due to the polyphenolic compounds in dark chocolate.

For more on nutrition:

• Top nutrition expert shares the No. 1 mistake he sees in American diets
• Just one simple dietary change could help you fight back against cancer and heart disease
• People are adding salt to their water in hopes of helping their hydration and digestion. Are the health benefits real?
• 4 best supplements for an energy boost, according to experts

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

High-frequency traders are the whiz kids of Wall Street. They either code scripts to execute quick trades to eke out small profits that, multiplied by one or ten thousand times over, result in serious cash. Or they’re able to act milliseconds faster than competitors to score big bets on market swings. Speed is paramount, which is why HFT traders have created their own private networks of internet cables—now, a crypto project called DoubleZero wants to do the same to speed up blockchains.

“We can use a whole different set of technologies that have basically been standard and de facto in the high-frequency trading world… but are not available over the public internet, so they’ve never been applied to blockchain before,” Austin Federa, cofounder of DoubleZero and a former executive at the Solana Foundation, told Fortune.

Federa’s project, which has the same obsession with speed as the firms in Michael Lewis’s famous HFT book Flash Boys, has already attracted capital. DoubleZero Foundation, one of the entities behind the project, announced in early March that it had raised $28 million in a seed round led by marquee crypto investors Multicoin Capital and Dragonfly Capital. Other venture capital firms that contributed were Foundation Capital, Reciprocal Ventures, DBA, Borderless Capital, Superscrypt, and Frictionless. In exchange for their cash, investors received token warrants, or promised allocations of a yet-to-be-launched cryptocurrency, Federa said. 

CoinDesk Solana or Ethereum are like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud—but decentralized. 

And like any cloud computing network, blockchains have physical servers that process users’ transactions and run programmers’ apps. Currently, when servers that power the Solana blockchain, for example, need to communicate with each other, those signals run over public internet infrastructure, said Federa. DoubleZero aims to create a private network of cables to speed up a blockchain’s processing power.

Jump Crypto, the digital assets subsidiary of HFT firm Jump Trading, and Malbec Labs are the engineering entities behind DoubleZero. They won’t be laying down physical cables to construct the network, said Federa. Not yet, anyway. Rather, the company is cobbling together underutilized bandwidth from HFT firms, private companies, and even individuals to build out a faster physical network of cables than what is currently available for blockchains.

And to make sure that, just like a blockchain, this physical network is decentralized, Federa’s foundation plans to launch its own cryptocurrency to reward those who contribute bandwidth to the project.

Federa’s other cofounders are Mateo Ward and Andrew McConnell. Ward is the former CEO of Neutrona Networks, a portfolio company of Jump Trading that specialized in building private internet networks. And McConnell was a former top engineer at Jump.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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