vikashkrsharma.tech

The Biden administration on Friday made it more expensive for fossil fuel companies to pull oil, gas and coal from public lands, raising royalty rates for the first time in 100 years in a bid to end bargain basement fees enjoyed by one of the country’s most profitable industries.

The government also increased more than tenfold the cost of the bonds that companies must pay before they start drilling.

The new rules are among a series of environmental regulations that are being pushed out as President Biden, in the last year of his term in the White House, seeks to cement policies designed to protect public lands, lower fossil fuel emissions and expand renewable energy.

While the oil and gas industry is strongly opposed to higher rates, the increase is not expected to significantly discourage drilling. The federal rate had been much lower than what many states and private landowners charge for drilling leases on state or private property.

“These are the most significant reforms to the federal oil and gas leasing program in decades, and they will cut wasteful speculation, increase returns for the public, and protect taxpayers from being saddled with the costs of environmental cleanups,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said.

The government estimates that the new rules, which would also raise various other rates and fees for drilling on public lands, would increase costs for fossil fuel companies by about $1.5 billion between now and 2031. After that, rates could increase again.

About half of that money would go to states, approximately a third would be used to fund water projects in the West, and the rest would be split between the Treasury Department and Interior.

“This rule will finally curtail some of these wasteful handouts to the fossil fuel industry,” said Josh Axelrod, senior policy advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Communities, conservationists, and taxpayer advocates have been demanding many of these changes for decades.”

The rate increase was mandated by Congress under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which directed the Interior Department to raise the royalty fee from 12.5 percent, set in 1920, to 16.67 percent. Congress also stipulated that the minimum bid at auctions for drilling leases should be raised from $2 per acre to $10 per acre.

But the sharp jump in bond payments — the first increase since 1960 — was decided by the Biden administration, not Congress. It came in response to environmental advocates and watchdog groups that have argued for years that the burden of cleaning up abandoned, uncapped wells should be shifted from taxpayers to the oil and gas companies.

“Taxpayers have been losing billions of dollars on a broken leasing system with these ridiculously low royalty rates, rents, and minimum bids for far too long,” said Autumn Hanna, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a fiscal watchdog group. “Adding insult to injury, taxpayers were left holding the bag for damages from wells oil and gas companies left behind, long after they had already profited from them. We own these resources and it’s about time we are fairly compensated.”

The new rules increase the minimum bond paid upon purchasing an individual drilling lease from $10,000 to $150,000. The cost of a bond required upon purchasing a drilling lease on multiple public lands in a state would rise from $25,000 to $500,000.

.

Oil and gas companies said the changes, which could take effect in as few as 60 days, would damage the economy.

“As energy demand continues to grow, oil and natural gas development on federal lands will be foundational for maintaining energy security, powering our economy and supporting state and local conservation efforts,” said Holly Hopkins, a vice president at the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for oil companies. “Overly burdensome land management regulations will put this critical energy supply at risk.”

The oil and gas industry will continue to receive nearly a dozen federal tax breaks, including incentives for domestic production and write-offs tied to foreign production. Total estimates vary widely but the Fossil Fuel Subsidy Tracker, run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, calculated the total to be about $14 billion in 2022.

But more expensive bonds could put drilling out of reach for smaller oil and gas producers, said Kathleen Sgamma president of Western Energy Alliance, an association of independent oil and gas companies. “They are ludicrously high, ludicrously out of whack with the problem,” she said. “They could actually put companies out of business and create new orphan wells.”

The Interior Department estimates that there are 3.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States. When oil and gas wells are discarded without being properly sealed, which can happen when companies go bankrupt, the wells can leak methane, a powerful planet-warming pollutant that is a major contributor to global warming.

The Biden administration has had to navigate challenging terrain when it comes to extraction of fossil fuels on public lands and in federal waters, which is responsible for almost a quarter of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.” He also campaigned to end billions of dollars in annual tax breaks to oil and gas companies within his first year in office.

But since Mr. Biden took office, his administration has continued to sell leases to drill, compelled by court decisions. The Biden administration approved more permits for oil and gas drilling in its first two years (over 6,900 permits) than the Trump administration did in the same period (6,172 permits). Congress has done nothing to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies. And in 2023, the United States produced more oil than any country, ever.

Environmentalists excoriated Mr. Biden for his administration’s final approval earlier last year of an enormous $8 billion oil drilling project in Alaska known as Willow.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Republicans have accused the administration of waging a “war” on fossil fuels that threatens the nation’s economy and national security.

At rally in January, former President Donald J. Trump blamed economic inflation on Mr. Biden’s policies. “His inflation that he caused and would’ve been so easy not to. All it was — is energy. Remember this, gasoline, fuel, oil, natural gas went up to a level that it was impossible,” said Mr. Trump, who is running to unseat Mr. Biden. “That’s what caused inflation, and we’re going to bring it down because we’re going to go drill, baby, drill. We drill, baby, drill. We’re bringing it way down.”

Last month, the Republican-majority House passed a bill, sponsored by Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, that would force the administration to withdraw the new royalty regulation, although the measure has little chance of passage in the Democratic-majority Senate.

Endorsing an antisemitic post on X. Withholding Starlink satellite internet service from Ukraine to prevent a drone attack on Russian forces. Reposting conspiracy theorists who claim that the Biden administration’s immigration policies are part of a plot to increase the number of people who vote Democrat.

Elon Musk’s behavior and public statements have clearly offended many people, especially left-leaning consumers who are the most likely to buy an electric vehicle.

As a business reporter who covers Tesla, the company that Mr. Musk is chief executive of, I’m exploring to what extent his public persona is damaging the company’s brand and hurting sales. Or, as Mr. Musk has insisted, do people choose the best car regardless of what the chief executive says and does?

If you own a Tesla, are thinking of buying one or have thought about buying one but ultimately chose another brand, I’d like to hear from you.

I’ll read through each submission and reach back out to some respondents to learn more. I won’t share your contact information outside The Times newsroom or use it for any other reason than to follow up with you. And I won’t publish any part of your submission without reaching out to you and hearing back from you first.

The Biden administration announced an additional $7.4 billion in student loan cancellations for some 277,000 borrowers on Friday, building on plans announced earlier this week to provide debt relief for millions of borrowers by the fall if new rules the White House has put forward hold.

The latest round of relief reflects a strategy the White House has embraced by taking smaller, targeted actions for subsets of borrowers that it hopes will add up to a significant result, after a larger plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in debt was struck down by the Supreme Court last year.

It also comes as President Biden aims to shore up support with young voters who may be disproportionately affected by soaring education costs, but who may be drifting away over his policy on Israel and the war in Gaza.

Taken together with previous actions, the announcement on Friday brought the total to $153 billion in debt forgiven, touching around 4.3 million borrowers so far, the administration said. The administration hopes to forgive some or all loans held by some 30 million borrowers total. The administration said the 277,000 people it identified would be notified by email on Friday.

“We’ve approved help for roughly one out of 10 of the 43 million Americans who have federal student loans,” Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters ahead of the announcement.

The new round of cancellations involves three categories of borrowers who qualified under existing programs, with the bulk of the forgiveness going to around 207,000 people who borrowed relatively small amounts — $12,000 or less — and were enrolled in the administration’s income-driven repayment plan, known as SAVE.

An additional 65,000 enrolled in repayment plans will see reductions in what they owe through adjustments correcting what Mr. Cardona described as “administrative and servicing failures.” The remaining group would see their loans forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, having already qualified after making 10 years of payments while engaging in public service.

Administration officials have said they studied the Supreme Court’s decision rejecting large-scale loan forgiveness and are taking a piecemeal approach that identifies specific groups of borrowers who qualify for cancellation under established law, such as the Higher Education Act.

If the administration’s rules announced on Monday are finalized after a comment period that could stretch through the summer, Mr. Biden has said 25 million borrowers could see some amount of forgiveness — including those whose interest payments surpassed the amount they originally borrowed, and others who were cheated or defrauded by their schools.

But Republican opposition to Mr. Biden’s plans has been pronounced, with legal challenges mounting from state-level officials and an outcry growing in Congress.

Economic analyses have suggested that the administration’s SAVE plan could cost the government as much as $475 billion over the next decade.

The U.S. government is already the largest lender to Americans borrowing to pay for college, and the plan requires the government to shoulder a larger amount of those costs than it has in the past.

The SAVE plan is facing two challenges from Republican attorneys general even as the White House announced that more than eight million people had enrolled as of Friday.

Republicans in Congress have seized on the announcements this week to restate grievances over Mr. Biden’s vision for student debt cancellation, which they have often characterized as unfair to borrowers who struggled to pay off their student debt without assistance.

“You’re incentivizing people to not pay back student loans and at the same time penalizing and forcing people who did to subsidize those who didn’t,” Representative John Moolenaar, Republican of Michigan, said during a hearing on Wednesday, in which Mr. Cardona testified about the Education’s Department’s budget request for next year.

“I don’t see it as unfair. I see it as we’re fixing something that’s broken,” Mr. Cardona said. “We have better repayment plans now so we don’t have to be in the business of forgiving loans in the future.”

The National Academy of Sciences is asking a court to allow it to repurpose about $30 million in donations from the wealthy Sackler family, who controlled the company at the center of the opioid epidemic, and to remove the family name from the endowment funds.

The petition filed by the Academy in Superior Court in Washington, D.C., Thursday aims to modify the terms of the donations so the institution can use them for scientific studies, projects and educational activities.

The move follows a report in The New York Times last year that examined donations from several Sackler members, including an executive of Purdue Pharma, which produced the painkiller OxyContin that has long been blamed for fueling the opioid crisis that has claimed thousands of lives.

“The notoriety of the Sackler name has made it impossible for the Academy to carry out the purposes for which it originally accepted the funds,” Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a statement released on Thursday.

Daniel S. Connolly, a spokesman for the Raymond Sackler family, said it supported the National Academies in “using the funds as they see fit” and would have supported the change.

“We would have said yes if we’d been asked, just as we will still say yes despite this unnecessary court filing and false assertions about us,” Mr. Connolly said in a statement.

Those gifts, valued initially at $19 million, flowed into the institution, which acts as a federal advisory body and convenes panels to offer guidance on opioid policies to authorities like Congress and federal agencies. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine derives 70 percent of its funding from Congress and was founded by Abraham Lincoln to be an objective adviser to federal officials.

The groups weighing in on pain policy included some experts who were criticized over undisclosed conflicts of interests that included ties to Purdue Pharma. In one case, a panel produced findings that suggested that chronic pain was vastly undertreated, a claim used to justify calls for more opioid prescriptions and drug approvals.

Many prominent institutions and universities had publicly moved away from the Sackler largess years ago. Some organizations, including Tufts University and the World Health Organization, undertook reviews to examine the family’s influence on curriculum or guidelines. It is a step the Academies could consider taking, said Dr. Caleb Alexander, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who has studied opioid overuse.

“Equally important is for the National Academies to figure out how, why the Sacklers — and others with financial ties to opioid manufacturers — were able to exert such influence in the first place, and to institute mechanisms to ensure that this never happens again,” he said in an email.

The Sackler family members gave the endowment funds to support scientific conferences, prizes and studies that would bear the family name.

The donations started in 2000, when Dame Jillian Sackler, whose husband, Arthur, died years before OxyContin arrived on the market, began giving amounts that, by 2017, reached $5 million, Academies treasurer reports show.

Members of the Sackler family who were involved in running Purdue Pharma donated the balance of the $19 million in donations beginning in 2008, when Dr. Raymond Sackler, his wife, Beverly and the couple’s foundation began contributing, according to the treasurer reports. Dr. and Ms. Sackler died in 2017 and 2019. A family spokesman said the donations were clearly described publicly as having nothing to do with pain or Purdue Pharma.

After news media outlets and prosecutors began to shed light on members of the Sackler family’s roles in stoking opioid sales, the funds sat in National Academies coffers and gained value as investments.

The Times’s article prompted a stir last year among National Academies members — elite scientists, engineers and doctors elected by their peers. In a letter, a group of 75 members, including eight Nobel Prize winners, called on the organization to explain why it failed for years to return or repurpose the money.

“The long history of N.A.S. co-optation by the Sacklers has stained its reputation for years to come,” Robert Hauser, one of the authors of the letter, said in an email Friday. “My hope is that the N.A.S. will be able to remove the Sackler name from their contributions and repurpose them appropriately.”

Dr. McNutt, the president, said in the statement on Thursday that the money would be used to tackle misinformation or to propose solutions to the unintended consequences of innovations in science.

“We intend for the new fund to be used to bring our expertise and evidence-based approach to bear on many challenges facing society, including the opioid epidemic, which has taken such a terrible toll on individuals, families and our communities,” Dr. McNutt said.

The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the controversial bankruptcy settlement for Purdue Pharma that would funnel billions of dollars into addressing the opioid epidemic in exchange for shielding members of the Sackler family from related civil lawsuits.

Supervised by an independent monitor, Purdue no longer markets the opioids it produces, and the company would be dissolved if the bankruptcy plan is upheld. The Sacklers have not been on Purdue’s board since 2018.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made her first-ever contribution to the campaign arm of House Democrats — a $260,000 donation that is a milestone in the New York Democrat’s long and complicated relationship with her own party’s political establishment.

In an interview, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said her decision to give to the campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, was driven primarily by the dire threat of Republicans staying in power. She feared a Republican-controlled House would not certify a potential re-election of President Biden this fall.

“The entire country saw a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol that was predicated on not certifying the duly submitted results of a presidential election,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021. “And if anybody thinks that that was not a dress rehearsal for what they may try to attempt in January of 2025, I’m sorry to say, but I think that’s a very naïve assumption.”

The transfer of funds is a symbolic moment in the 34-year-old lawmaker’s own evolution inside the Democratic Party. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said the cash transfer represented her assessment that House Democratic leadership had changed sufficiently to now merit her money. It comes nearly six years after she first won her seat by ousting a top House Democrat in a stunning primary upset.

“If we take a look at it, we have the entirety of House leadership has now changed,” she said, citing the exit of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn from the top of the House Democratic hierarchy.

“We’ve exerted a lot of our power through our existing channels,” she added. “Now it’s time to assert our influence in larger institutions, including the D.C.C.C.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez won her seat in 2018 by defeating one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress at the time, Joseph Crowley, who represented a diverse district in Queens and the Bronx. She arrived on Capitol Hill as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress and as an insurgent instigator who protested in the office of the incoming House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that fall before even being sworn in.

Early reports that she was considering backing a primary challenge to another prominent New York Democrat, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is now the party’s leader, created added friction. And she quickly became the face of a small cohort of progressives known as “the squad” that tried to pull the party to the left politically and on policy. She was a rising star on the left and vilified relentlessly on the right.

In 2019, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee established a blacklist of consultants and vendors who worked for Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other candidates who challenged incumbents. She and others loudly objected, and by 2021, the blacklist was dissolved.

“We spent a lot of time, since first coming into office in 2019, working to change this institution,” she said of the campaign committee. “And we have successfully done so.”

In a statement, Mr. Jeffries thanked Ms. Ocasio-Cortez for “helping us protect the integrity of the electoral process and take back the House in 2024,” calling her “a valuable member of the House Democratic Caucus who is a powerful voice for the voiceless and defender of democracy.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has become one of the Democratic Party’s most prolific fund-raisers; her campaign committee has raised more than $37 million since 2019. She has raised another $11.1 million, according to her office, for nonfederal candidates and causes, including nonprofits, food banks and abortion-rights groups.

But until now, she had never given a dime to her own party’s leadership, even though House Democrats are each assigned “dues” that they are supposed to pay to remain members in good standing.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s $260,000 contribution is earmarked specifically for the party’s Voter Protection Program. It is the first time a member of Congress has given money to a program that works on voter registration, poll observation and litigation.

Her PAC has another $500,000 that she said was intended to defend fellow members of the squad from party challengers, a sum that she noted was larger than her transfer to the campaign arm.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and the party are aware that her financial support could be used against candidates running in swing districts. But she said that with the earmarked funds, “we just tried to make that argument as ineffective for Republicans as possible.”

The “foundational element” of her decision to give now, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said, was to make sure she helped Democrats take back the House, which Republicans only narrowly control now.

She said she had little confidence that Speaker Mike Johnson, who is set to appear at Mar-a-Lago on Friday with former President Donald J. Trump to make an “election integrity” announcement, would rebuff any efforts by Mr. Trump to overturn the election.

“This party has turned into a party of Trumpism and it has turned into a cult of personality,” she said. “I don’t know if Mike Johnson has it in him to defend our democracy against a threat like that.”

The House took a critical first step on Friday toward reauthorizing a law extending an expiring warrantless surveillance law that national security officials say is crucial to fighting terrorism, voting to take it up two days after a previous attempt to pass it collapsed.

Grasping to salvage the measure before the law expires next week, Speaker Mike Johnson put forward a shorter extension — two years instead of five — in a move that appeared to win over hard-right Republicans who blocked the bill earlier this week.

On a party-line vote of 213 to 208, the House agreed to take up the new version of the legislation, which would extend a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act known as Section 702. That cleared the way for a debate Friday on proposed changes to the bill before a final vote on passage.

The preliminary vote on Friday suggested that the measure was back on track after former President Donald J. Trump implored lawmakers this week to “kill” FISA, complaining that government officials had used it to spy on him.

Mr. Johnson’s two-year version of the bill was an attempt to mollify hard-right Republicans, who believe Mr. Trump would be president once again the next time the law expired.

On the House floor, Representative Michael Burgess, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Rules Committee, praised the bill’s shorter envisioned reauthorization. He credited an influential member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, with the idea of cutting back the renewal to two years.

“That’s important,” Mr. Burgess said. “Reforms that are now incorporated in the new FISA reauthorization will be re-evaluated by the next Congress as to whether or not they’re actually working.”

Mr. Johnson also released a document moments shortly before the vote Friday morning touting the bill as “the largest intelligence reform package since FISA’s inception in 1978.”

Even so, the intelligence community has urged Congress to pass a reauthorization of the legislation before the program enters a sort of legal limbo, where the outcomes of court challenges to it would be uncertain.

At issue is a debate that has roiled Congress for months. Under Section 702, the government is empowered to collect, without warrants, the messages of noncitizens abroad, even when those targeted are communicating with Americans.

As a result, the government sometimes collects Americans’ private messages without a warrant. While there are limits on how that material can be searched for and used, the F.B.I. has repeatedly violated those constraints in recent years — including improperly querying for information about Black Lives Matter protesters and people suspected of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

The F.B.I. has since tightened its system to reduce the risk of queries that violate the standards, and the bill under consideration would codify those changes and add reporting requirements, as well as limiting the number of officials with access to the repository of raw information.

But reformers — including both progressive Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans — want to add a requirement that prohibits warrantless queries in the repository for the contents of Americans’ communications, with certain narrow exceptions.

“Why are we being hustled to do this today?” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, who favors a warrant requirement. She added: “I think we are being hustled here today for a reason: to prevent the Constitution from being applied to FISA.”

Critics led by Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, will have a chance to try to add the warrant requirement to the bill on Friday before a final vote.

National security officials argue that doing so would cripple the program because they typically use it early in investigations, such as to try to learn more about an American phone number or email account in contact with a suspected foreign spy or terrorist, before there is enough evidence to meet a probable cause standard for a warrant.

On Friday, ahead of the vote, a senior national security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, asserted that hostile adversaries were watching the congressional debate closely and hoping that Congress would deprive U.S. intelligence agencies of a key capability.

Senior lawmakers on the House national security committees, including Representatives Michael R. Turner of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and Jim Himes of Connecticut, its top Democrat, have also resisted such changes. They are backing the more modest adjustments in the bill.

The House is also set to vote on several other significant amendments to the surveillance law before voting on the extension itself, including a measure pushed by Mr. Turner and Mr. Himes that would expand the types of companies with access to foreign communications that could be compelled to participate in the program.

A coalition of a dozen liberal organizations and labor unions sent a letter to the White House on Thursday night demanding that President Biden end military aid to Israel until its government lifts restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza, the latest indicator of shifting mainstream Democratic opinion on the war.

The group includes not only progressive groups like MoveOn and the Working Families Party, but also the mainstream Democratic Center for American Progress and NextGen America, the organization founded and funded by Tom Steyer, a billionaire who ran for president in the 2020 Democratic primary. Other signatories to the letter include the Service Employees International Union and the National Education Association, labor unions that make up key elements of the Democratic Party.

The letter calls on Mr. Biden to enforce the Foreign Assistance Act, which bars military support from going to any nation that restricts the delivery of humanitarian aid.

“This will send a clear message that the Netanyahu government is not above the law and that the U.S. will not stand by while the war kills innocent Palestinians and continues to drive escalation throughout the region,” the letter states, referring to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “U.S. law is unequivocal: Countries that obstruct U.S. humanitarian aid cannot receive U.S. military aid under the Foreign Assistance Act or the Arms Export Control Act.”

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen America, which focuses on driving voter turnout among young people, said there was growing risk that Mr. Biden will lose support from a key part of the Democratic coalition if there is not a significant change in the American position toward the war in Gaza.

“We are concerned with the humanitarian and moral implications and the political survival of the administration,” Ms. Tzintzún Ramirez said. “We’ve seen a surge of young people say they care about foreign policy and this issue in a way we have not seen historically.”

Last week, Mr. Biden told Mr. Netanyahu that the United States could withhold support for Israel if it does not do more to protect civilians and ensure adequate supplies for Gaza. And since then the president has repeated that getting more aid into Gaza is a priority.

“They need to do more,” Mr. Biden said of Israel’s government and Mr. Netanyahu during a news conference Wednesday. “There’s one more opening that has to take place in the north. So we’ll see what he does in terms of meeting the commitments he made to me.”

The White House and the Biden campaign declined to comment on the letter.

The letter adds to the growing pressure Mr. Biden has faced from across the Democratic Party as Israel’s war in Gaza enters its seventh month. More than 33,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the local health authorities. About 1,200 people were killed in Israel when Hamas militants launched an attack that instigated the conflict on Oct. 7.

Arthur Mensch, tall and lean with a flop of unkempt hair, arrived for a speech last month at a sprawling tech hub in Paris wearing jeans and carrying a bicycle helmet. He had an unassuming look for a person European officials are counting on to help propel the region into a high-stakes match with the United States and China over artificial intelligence.

Mr. Mensch, 31, is the chief executive and a founder of Mistral, considered by many to be one of the most promising challengers to OpenAI and Google. “You have become the poster child for A.I. in France,” Matt Clifford, a British investor, told him onstage.

A lot is riding on Mr. Mensch, whose company has shot into the spotlight just a year after he founded it in Paris with two college friends. As Europe scrambles to get a foothold in the A.I. revolution, the French government has singled out Mistral as its best hope to create a standard-bearer, and has lobbied European Union policymakers to help ensure the firm’s success.

Artificial intelligence will be built rapidly into the global economy in the coming decade, and policymakers and business leaders in Europe fear that growth and competitiveness will suffer if the region does not keep up. Behind their worries is a conviction that A.I. should not be dominated by tech giants, like Microsoft and Google, that might forge global standards at odds with the culture and politics of other countries. At stake is the bigger question of which artificial intelligence models will wind up influencing the world, and how they should be regulated.

“The issue with not having a European champion is that the road map gets set by the United States,” said Mr. Mensch, who just 18 months ago was working as an engineer at Google’s DeepMind lab in Paris, building A.I. models. His co-founders, Timothée Lacroix and Guillaume Lample, also in their 30s, held similar positions at Meta.

In an interview at Mistral’s spartan, whitewashed offices facing the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris, Mr. Mensch said it “wasn’t safe to trust” U.S. tech giants to set ground rules for a powerful new technology that would affect millions of lives.

“We can’t have a strategic dependency,” he said. “That’s why we want to make a European champion.”

Europe has struggled to produce meaningful tech companies since the dot-com boom. As the United States turned out Google, Meta and Amazon, and China produced Alibaba, Huawei and ByteDance, which owns TikTok, Europe’s digital economy failed to deliver, according to a report by France’s Artificial Intelligence Commission. The 15-member committee — which includes Mr. Mensch — warned that Europe was lagging on A.I., but said it had the potential to take a lead.

Mistral’s generative A.I. technology allows businesses to launch chatbots, search functions and other A.I.-driven products. It has surprised many by building a model that rivals the technology developed at OpenAI, the U.S. start-up that ignited the A.I. boom in 2022 with the ChatGPT chatbot. Named after a powerful wind in France, Mistral has rapidly gained ground by developing a more flexible and cost-efficient machine-learning tool. Some big European firms are beginning to use its technology, including Renault, the French auto giant, and BNP Paribas, the financial services company.

The French government is giving Mistral its full-throated support. President Emmanuel Macron has called the company an example of “French genius” and had Mr. Mensch for dinner at the Élysée presidential palace. Bruno Le Maire, the country’s finance minister, frequently praises the company, while Cédric O, the former France digital minister, is an adviser to Mistral and owns shares in the start-up.

The French government’s backing is a sign of A.I.’s growing importance. The United States, France, Britain, China, Saudi Arabia and many other countries are trying to strengthen their domestic capabilities, setting off a technological arms race that is influencing trade and foreign policy, as well as global supply chains.

Mistral has emerged as the strongest European contender in the global battle. Yet many question whether the company can keep up with large American and Chinese competitors and develop a sustainable business model. In addition to the considerable technological challenges of building a successful A.I. company, the computing power needed is staggeringly expensive. (France says its cheap nuclear power can meet the energy demand.)

OpenAI has raised $13 billion, and Anthropic, another San Francisco firm, has raised more than $7.3 billion. Mistral has so far raised roughly 500 million euros, or $540 million, and earns “several million” in recurring revenue, Mr. Mensch said. But in a sign of Mistral’s promise, Microsoft took a small stake in February, and Salesforce and the chipmaker Nvidia have backed the start-up.

“This could be one of the best shots that we have in Europe,” said Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, the managing director of General Catalyst and a founding partner of La Famiglia, two venture capital firms that invested in Mistral. “You basically have a very potent technology that will unlock value.”

Mistral subscribes to the view that A.I. software should be open source, meaning that the programming codes should be available for anyone to copy, tweak or repurpose. Supporters say allowing other researchers to see the code will make systems safer and fuel economic growth by speeding its use among businesses and governments for applications like accounting, customer service and database searches. This week, Mistral released the latest version of its model online for anyone to download.

OpenAI and Anthropic, by contrast, are keeping their platforms closed. Open source is dangerous, they argue, because it has the potential to be co-opted by for bad purposes, like spreading disinformation — or even creating destructive A.I.-powered weapons.

Mr. Mensch dismissed such concerns as the narrative of “a fear-mongering lobby” that includes Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which he said were seeking to cement their dominance by persuading policymakers to enact rules that would squash rivals.

A.I.’s biggest risk, Mr. Mensch added, is that it will spur a workplace revolution, eliminating some jobs while creating new ones that will require retraining. “It’s coming faster than in the previous revolutions,” he said, “not in 10 years but more like in two.”

Mr. Mensch, who grew up in a family of scientists, said he was fascinated by computers from a young age, learning to program when he was 11. He played video games avidly until age 15, when he decided he could “do better things with my time.” After graduating from two elite French universities, École Polytechnique and École Normale Supérieure, he became an academic researcher in 2020 at France’s prestigious National Center for Scientific Research. But he soon pivoted to DeepMind, an A.I. lab acquired by Google, to learn about the industry and become an entrepreneur.

When ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, Mr. Mensch teamed up with his university friends, who decided that they could do the same or better in France. At the company’s airy work space, a corps of sneaker-wearing scientists and programmers now tap busily at keyboards, coding and feeding digital text culled from the internet — as well as reams of 19th-century French literature, which is no longer subject to copyright law — into the company’s large language model.

Mr. Mensch said he felt uncomfortable with Silicon Valley’s “very religious” fascination with the concept of artificial general intelligence, the point when, tech leaders like Elon Musk and Sam Altman believe, computers will overtake the cognitive ability of humans, with potentially dire consequences.

“The whole A.G.I. rhetoric is about creating God,” he said. “I don’t believe in God. I’m a strong atheist. So I don’t believe in A.G.I.”

A more imminent threat, he said, is the one posed by American A.I. giants to cultures around the globe.

“These models are producing content and shaping our cultural understanding of the world,” Mr. Mensch said. “And as it turns out, the values of France and the values of the United States differ in subtle but important ways.”

With his growing clout, Mr. Mensch has stepped up his calls for lighter regulation, warning that restrictions will damage innovation. Last fall, France successfully lobbied in Brussels to limit regulation of open-source A.I. systems in the European Union’s new Artificial Intelligence Act, a victory that helps Mistral maintain a rapid development pace.

“If Mistral becomes a big technical power,” said Mr. O, the former digital minister who led the lobbying effort, “it’s going to be beneficial for all of Europe.”

Speaker Mike Johnson may not have a functional majority in Congress, but his job is similar to the Republicans who preceded him in at least one respect: The duties include the difficult task of managing Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Johnson on Friday will travel to Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida estate, to join him for what the speaker has billed as a “major announcement on election integrity.” No further details have been forthcoming.

The two men had been planning to get together for a political meeting, but Mr. Johnson’s team suggested a joint public appearance on a topic Mr. Trump cares deeply about, according to two people familiar with the planning.

It will afford Mr. Johnson the opportunity to stand shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Trump at a precarious moment in his speakership, as he works to corral a minuscule and deeply divided majority around a legislative agenda many of them oppose — all while facing the threat of an ouster from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Georgia Republican and ride-or-die Trump ally. Making matters even trickier, Mr. Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee, is helping to undermine that agenda.

Even so, Republicans generally consider it good and politically helpful to be physically near Mr. Trump.

“It’s about Trump embracing Johnson,” former Speaker Newt Gingrich said of Friday’s joint appearance. “This is Trump saying, ‘He is the speaker, I am his friend, we are together.’ That’s a pretty important thing for him. He just has to endure.”

Mr. Trump does think of Mr. Johnson, who defended him in two impeachment trials and played a key role in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, as something like a friend, people close to him said. He likes the Louisiana Republican, and likes his loyalty even more. (He especially appreciated that Mr. Johnson quickly endorsed him after becoming speaker, a move that his predecessor Kevin McCarthy always resisted). The two speak regularly, and Mr. Trump has even come around on some of the congressional endorsements Mr. Johnson has lobbied him on.

Still, if this is what an embrace looks like, it’s not clear that it’s so much better than the alternative.

Mr. Trump earlier this week weighed in against legislation that Mr. Johnson put forward to extend an expiring warrantless surveillance law that national security officials say is crucial to fighting terrorism and gathering intelligence. Mr. Trump urged lawmakers to “kill” the law undergirding the program, and ultraconservatives in the House banded together to block it from coming to the House floor in an embarrassing defeat for Mr. Johnson.

The speaker was set on Friday to try again to push the measure through the House, just before boarding a plane for his audience with Mr. Trump.

The former president has also said it is “stupid” for the United States to send aid to Ukraine and railed against doing so, even as Mr. Johnson has made it clear that it is a top priority of his to bring up a bill to provide an infusion of American military assistance to Kyiv.

(It was also Mr. Trump who helped to kill a bipartisan immigration deal that Mr. Johnson had demanded in exchange for the Ukraine aid package.)

The dynamic means that even as they present a united front at Mar-a-Lago, the pair will be at odds on many issues they could be asked about. Such is life with Mr. Trump. And for Republican speakers, it always has been.

For a short time after Mr. Trump first arrived in the White House in 2017, he deferred to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill on their legislative efforts, which included trying to repeal Obamacare and seeking tax cuts. Former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who had refused to campaign for Mr. Trump, benefited from the fact that the new president had a personal interest in the success of a shared Republican agenda.

Even so, managing the relationship required both hand-holding and hand-wringing about who was going to be the last person in Mr. Trump’s ear. In 2018, for instance, Mr. Trump threatened to veto a big spending bill that had been approved by Congress. Mr. Ryan had to work to convince him to sign it.

“It would be these fire drills where you had to send five or six people to walk him back,” recalled Brendan Buck, who served as a top adviser to Mr. Ryan. “You’re always going to be fighting the last person who talked to him, emotional whims, the thing he read. It’s a constant battle you always have to be fighting.”

That same year, Mr. Trump almost scuttled a version of the surveillance legislation he tanked this week when he tweeted criticism of it — breaking with his administration — apparently after watching a segment on Fox News. “Everyone was calling him, the national security adviser rushed over, people were rushing over to the White House,” Mr. Buck recalled. Mr. Trump eventually walked back his post 90 minutes later.

But Mr. Trump now has less of a stake in the Republican agenda in Congress — it’s not his. And he is not surrounded by a national security apparatus that can weigh in and help keep him on a track that is more in line with that of party leaders in Congress.

As he settled into the White House, Mr. Trump also started keeping his own counsel more and relying less on congressional leaders for direction. He was not interested in taking Mr. Ryan’s advice, for instance, about trying to avoid a government shutdown at the end of 2018.

Mr. McCarthy spent years nurturing his relationship with Mr. Trump, going so far as to sort out his favorite flavors of Starburst to curry favor. He visited the former president at Mar-a-Lago after the Jan. 6, 2021, mob attack on the Capitol in an attempt to smooth over any divisions.

Mr. McCarthy had an up-and-down relationship with Mr. Trump during his short tenure as speaker. He succeeded in steering some of Mr. Trump’s endorsements during the 2022 midterm campaigns, and his biggest win might have been keeping the former president silent during his negotiations with the White House over the debt ceiling — Mr. Trump waited until after the deal was signed to criticize it.

Mostly, Mr. McCarthy benefited from timing: The former president was not yet the presumed Republican nominee during his tenure and was less involved in the agenda in Washington.

Mr. Johnson may have the worst of both worlds: Mr. Trump is not the president, so he does not have a shared interest in the Republican speaker’s legislative success, but at this stage of the presidential campaign, he is attuned enough to potentially complicate anything he tries to do. Mr. Trump continues to carry enough influence with Republicans on Capitol Hill that his opposition can be enough to sink a bill outright, and Mr. Johnson has not had as long to cement their relationship.

“Johnson has the hardest speakership of anyone since maybe the beginning of the Civil War,” Mr. Gingrich said. “His major goal has to be to hold the system together to get to an election in which Trump increases Republican turnout.”

People close to Mr. Trump said he values Mr. Johnson’s political insights and has deferred to him at times on endorsements. Mr. Johnson lobbied him hard to back Representative Mike Bost, Republican of Illinois, over Darren Bailey, a competitive challenger running a spirited MAGA campaign. It was a difficult endorsement for Mr. Trump to come around to, people familiar with it said, but he ultimately did so at Mr. Johnson’s urging.

Ms. Greene, for her part, said she would not back down on her criticism of Mr. Johnson or drop the threat to try to oust him, even if Mr. Trump gives the speaker a public boost.

“Things like that don’t bother me,” she said of Mr. Trump hosting an event with Mr. Johnson. Of the speaker, she added: “Right now, he does not have my support.”