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NEW YORK (AP) — The Small Business Administration said it will cut its workforce by 43%, or about 2,700 jobs, as part of a reorganization.

The SBA was established in 1953 to offer resources to small businesses and helps administer small business and disaster recovery loans. It played a crucial role during the pandemic, helping distribute small business aid. Now the goal is to return to pre-pandemic staffing levels and cut some programs started during the Biden administration, said the new head of the SBA, Kelly Loeffler.

“By eliminating non-mission-critical positions and consolidating functions, we will revert to the staffing levels of the last Trump Administration,” Loeffler said Friday in a statement.

The SBA said its loan guarantee and disaster assistance programs, as well as its field and veteran operations, won't be affected. The staffing reductions, which will cull 2,700 jobs from the agency's workforce of 6,500, will be a combination of voluntary resignations, the expiration of COVID-era and other term appointments, and some job cuts.

The layoffs at the federal agency are part of a larger campaign by the Trump Administration to shrink the federal workforce, an effort has been led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Separately on Friday, Trump announced student loans would be handled by the SBA as part of a plan to shift Education Department responsibilities to other federal agencies. The SBA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The next time you’re due for a medical exam you may get a call from someone like Ana: a friendly voice that can help you prepare for your appointment and answer any pressing questions you might have.

With her calm, warm demeanor, Ana has been trained to put patients at ease — like many nurses across the U.S. But unlike them, she is also available to chat 24-7, in multiple languages, from Hindi to Haitian Creole.

That’s because Ana isn’t human, but an artificial intelligence program created by Hippocratic AI, one of a number of new companies offering ways to automate time-consuming tasks usually performed by nurses and medical assistants.

It’s the most visible sign of AI’s inroads into health care, where hundreds of hospitals are using increasingly sophisticated computer programs to monitor patients' vital signs, flag emergency situations and trigger step-by-step action plans for care — jobs that were all previously handled by nurses and other health professionals.

Hospitals say AI is helping their nurses work more efficiently while addressing burnout and understaffing. But nursing unions argue that this poorly understood technology is overriding nurses' expertise and degrading the quality of care patients receive.

“Hospitals have been waiting for the moment when they have something that appears to have enough legitimacy to replace nurses,” said Michelle Mahon of National Nurses United. “The entire ecosystem is designed to automate, de-skill and ultimately replace caregivers.”

Mahon’s group, the largest nursing union in the U.S., has helped organize more than 20 demonstrations at hospitals across the country, pushing for the right to have say in how AI can be used — and protection from discipline if nurses decide to disregard automated advice. The group raised new alarms in January when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the incoming health secretary, suggested AI nurses “as good as any doctor” could help deliver care in rural areas. On Friday, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who’s been nominated to oversee Medicare and Medicaid, said he believes AI can “liberate doctors and nurses from all the paperwork.”

Hippocratic AI initially promoted a rate of $9 an hour for its AI assistants, compared with about $40 an hour for a registered nurse. It has since dropped that language, instead touting its services and seeking to assure customers that they have been carefully tested. The company did not grant requests for an interview.

Hospitals have been experimenting for years with technology designed to improve care and streamline costs, including sensors, microphones and motion-sensing cameras. Now that data is being linked with electronic medical records and analyzed in an effort to predict medical problems and direct nurses' care — sometimes before they've evaluated the patient themselves.

Adam Hart was working in the emergency room at Dignity Health in Henderson, Nevada, when the hospital's computer system flagged a newly arrived patient for sepsis, a life-threatening reaction to infection. Under the hospital's protocol, he was supposed to immediately administer a large dose of IV fluids. But after further examination, Hart determined that he was treating a dialysis patient, or someone with kidney failure. Such patients have to be carefully managed to avoid overloading their kidneys with fluid.

Hart raised his concern with the supervising nurse but was told to just follow the standard protocol. Only after a nearby physician intervened did the patient instead begin to receive a slow infusion of IV fluids.

“You need to keep your thinking cap on— that’s why you’re being paid as a nurse,” Hart said. “Turning over our thought processes to these devices is reckless and dangerous.”

Hart and other nurses say they understand the goal of AI: to make it easier for nurses to monitor multiple patients and quickly respond to problems. But the reality is often a barrage of false alarms, sometimes erroneously flagging basic bodily functions — such as a patient having a bowel movement — as an emergency.

“You’re trying to focus on your work but then you’re getting all these distracting alerts that may or may not mean something,” said Melissa Beebe, a cancer nurse at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. “It’s hard to even tell when it’s accurate and when it’s not because there are so many false alarms.”

Even the most sophisticated technology will miss signs that nurses routinely pick up on, such as facial expressions and odors, notes Michelle Collins, dean of Loyola University’s College of Nursing. But people aren't perfect either.

“It would be foolish to turn our back on this completely,” Collins said. “We should embrace what it can do to augment our care, but we should also be careful it doesn’t replace the human element.”

More than 100,000 nurses left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to one estimate, the biggest staffing drop in 40 years. As the U.S. population ages and nurses retire, the U.S. government estimates there will be more than 190,000 new openings for nurses every year through 2032.

Faced with this trend, hospital administrators see AI filling a vital role: not taking over care, but helping nurses and doctors gather information and communicate with patients.

At the University of Arkansas Medical Sciences in Little Rock, staffers need to make hundreds of calls every week to prepare patients for surgery. Nurses confirm information about prescriptions, heart conditions and other issues — like sleep apnea — that must be carefully reviewed before anesthesia.

The problem: many patients only answer their phones in the evening, usually between dinner and their children’s bedtime.

“So what we need to do is find a way to call several hundred people in a 120-minute window -- but I really don’t want to pay my staff overtime to do so,” said Dr. Joseph Sanford, who oversees the center’s health IT.

Since January, the hospital has used an AI assistant from Qventus to contact patients and health providers, send and receive medical records and summarize their contents for human staffers. Qventus says 115 hospitals are using its technology, which aims to boost hospital earnings through quicker surgical turnarounds, fewer cancellations and reduced burnout.

Each call begins with the program identifying itself as an AI assistant.

“We always want to be fully transparent with our patients that sometimes they are talking to a human and sometimes they’re not,” Sanford said.

While companies like Qventus are providing an administrative service, other AI developers see a bigger role for their technology.

Israeli startup Xoltar specializes in humanlike avatars that conduct video calls with patients. The company is working with the Mayo Clinic on an AI assistant that teaches patients cognitive techniques for managing chronic pain. The company is also developing an avatar to help smokers quit. In early testing, patients spend about 14 minutes talking to the program, which can pickup on facial expressions, body language and other cues, according to Xoltar.

Nursing experts who study AI say such programs may work for people who are relatively healthy and proactive about their care. But that’s not most people in the health system.

“It’s the very sick who are taking up the bulk of health care in the U.S. and whether or not chatbots are positioned for those folks is something we really have to consider,” said Roschelle Fritz of the University of California Davis School of Nursing.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Is Elon Musk the Wizard of EV, or is he just the man behind the curtain? That’s the question investors and investigators are increasingly asking, as they look at the financial state of Tesla. Since January, the company’s diluted market cap has dropped from $1.7 trillion to $800 billion. And Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio, at 104, is more than 150% higher than the Nasdaq’s average P/E at 40.

“In one sense — and not a good one — Tesla isn’t a car company,” Bloomberg columnist Liam Denning wrote recently, noting the “carmaker” ended 2024 with big sales of zero-emission credits and a Bitcoin gain. “Factor in interest income on cash balances as well and you could be forgiven for thinking Tesla ended 2024 being more like a money manager specializing in crypto, green credits and Treasuries with a sideline in making cars.”

That’s only gotten worse in 2025. Tesla is losing market share around the world. In Europe sales are down 50% since Trump took office and Musk emerged as the face of DOGE. Investors and analysts complain Musk has let the company drift, and it’s gone years without a new model. Tesla’s European sales continued their freefall in February, with registrations down 44% compared with February 2024, following a 45% percent drop in January, according to market researcher Dataforce. According to the South China Morning Post, the company’s market share in China has dropped from 16% in 2022 to 4.3% in February 2025. In the U.S., Tesla sales slumped to 43,650 in February, their worst since 2022.

In a deep dive this week, The Financial Times reports that $1.4 billion in cash seems to be missing from Tesla’s books. “Compare Tesla’s capital expenditure in the last six months of 2024 to its valuation of the assets that money was spent on, and $1.4bn appears to have gone astray,” the newspaper wrote. Another red flag it pointed to: “Why [has] a business with a $37bn cash pile raised $6bn of new debt last year?” The newspaper doesn’t have an answer but suggests there may be some creative accounting here—though whether that is for longer-term investments or something less beneficial, it doesn’t say.

Another question bugging Tesla right now is just how good its technology is. Tesla’s Cybertrucks have been involved in eight recalls this year, and it’s only March. The latest recall is for a strip of metal below the front windows that can delaminate and fly into the roadway.

But even scarier is the problem with Tesla’s self-driving technology. While many other cars use Lidar, a form of laser-generated radar that scouts the terrain for obstacles ahead, Tesla uses cameras. And if it’s too dark or cloudy or foggy or rainy, the cameras are only about as good as the human eye. YouTuber Mark Rober, a former NASA scientist, tested Tesla’s camera-based self-driving tools, and boy, was it a bad day for the crash test dummy he planted in the middle of the road. The Tesla not only couldn’t see through fog, but it drove right through a wall painted with a realistic road scene, Wile E. Coyote–style.

Then there’s the political ill will Musk has generated. His comments on everything from Jews to the LGBTQ community have driven away his most logical customers, tree-hugging leftists who want a cleaner world. But it’s also angered people who would never have bought a Tesla to begin with. Across Europe, protesters have been burning Teslas and spraying them with swastikas after Musk’s Nazi salute at Tump’s inauguration. Now anti-Musk protesters are calling for 500 demonstrations at Tesla showrooms across the world on March 29, organizers said on a mobilizing call Wednesday.

Perhaps the biggest worry, and the sign that the shares are nothing more than a meme stock, is the share price itself. Shares are down 45% from their January 18 peak. Trump’s televised Tesla sale on the White House lawn did nothing to help, and shares fell again Thursday after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged Fox News, “If you want to learn something on this show tonight, buy Tesla.” On Wednesday, Tesla closed at $235.86. By late Thursday morning it was down to $230.17 before eventually closing at $236.25.

That may be why some Tesla insiders are dumping their shares. Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal sold $27 million worth and Tesla board chair Robyn Denholm sold $75 million. Not exactly a vote of confidence.

“We struggle to think of anything analogous in the history of the automotive industry, in which a brand has lost so much value so quickly,” JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman said in a research note last week.

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• Fed preps for uncertainty: Leaving interest rates unchanged Wednesday for the second time in a row, the Federal Reserve said it was bracing for further inflation and warned that Trump’s policies had increased uncertainty about the economy’s future. Trump’s ongoing tariff taunts to U.S. trading partners mean “further progress may be delayed” on getting inflation back to the Fed’s ~2% target, chair Jerome Powell said. “In the current situation, uncertainty is remarkably high,” he added. Most officials still say they expect rates to drop from the current 4.25%–4.5% to 3.75%–4%, but they say the economy may only grow 1.7% this year, down 0.4% from earlier forecasts. What does that mean for you? Mortgage and credit card rates will stay high, and nervous consumers are keeping their money in their wallets, increasing the likelihood of a recession.
• Harry Potter and the House of Mouse? No, it’s not the latest Hogwarts fanfic. In fact, Orlando, Florida, is set to be the new battleground for Disney to defend its turf against Comcast’s NBCUniversal in May, when the owner of the Harry Potter and Mario Bros. franchises opens Epic Universe, a theme park showcasing more of its vast library of entertainment properties. Disney is concerned that its empire may be crumbling (just a bit). Disney’s parks have faltered in the run-up to Epic’s launch. Theme parks are usually its biggest money spinner, but revenue there was flat last year, even as ventures like streaming turned a profit for the first time. Disney shares are down 14% over the past 12 months, compared with an 8.5% jump for the S&P 500.
• Netflix and bill: It was one of Netflix’s biggest debacles: A $55 million write-off for a sci-fi series called Conquest, which was never completed. Now Conquest’s director, Carl Erik Rinsch, has been indicted for bilking the streaming company out of $12 million, which he spent on cars, furniture, stocks, and cryptocurrency. Did Netflix hire Rinsch for the wrong job? Investing a portion of the money he allegedly embezzled netted Rinsch a $27 million profit, The Wrap reported. 
• Et tu, R2D2? Disney Research, Google DeepMind, and chipmaker Nvidia have joined forces to develop a physics engine that can simulate robotic movements in real-world settings, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday. Disney says it will use the engine to power Star Wars–inspired droids at its theme parks starting next year. Newton is supposed to help robots be more “expressive” and “learn how to handle complex tasks with greater precision,” Nvidia said.
• The TikTok Oracle? In barely two weeks, TikTok must find a buyer or shut down in the U.S. because its current owner, China’s ByteDance, has ties to the Chinese Communist Party that raised questions in Washington about China’s influence and U.S. national security. Oracle already processes and serves TikTok’s user data in the U.S., which could make it an early favorite. And then there’s Oracle founder and executive chair, Larry Ellison, a Trump buddy who had a front-row seat at the inauguration. Oracle met this week with congressional aides to discuss “compliance issues.”
• Did Ben & Jerry get mugged? It was really just a question of time. A quarter century after their 2000 sale to consumer products giant Unlever, iconic antiestablishment ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s has been smacked by its corporate parent, allegedly for being socially conscious. Ben & Jerry’s makes no secret of its SJW mission, but now the ice cream maker’s board said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday its CEO, David Stever, was fired by the Amsterdam-based food giant “to silence the social mission.” The corporate sale let Ben &Jerry’s keep an independent board to oversee the brand.

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• Decommissioned: Trump fired the two Democratic commissioners on the five-member Federal Trade Commission Tuesday, saying their service was “inconsistent with [the] administration’s priorities.” As Vox reports: The president can only lawfully fire FTC commissioners — who serve seven-year terms — for incompetence or malfeasance.
• Drop those eggs! Wholesale egg prices have fallen to a national average of $4 a dozen, down from $8 at the end of February. But eggs have a four-week shelf life, so consumers may not see a drop at the supermarket till the end of March. Part of the reason for the fall: no new outbreaks of avian flu. But also pushing it: Demand is down.
• Big Oil is bummed: The U.S. oil industry spent at least $75 million to help get Trump elected, but since his inauguration, oil prices have dropped about 14% to just $67 a barrel, and Trump economic adviser Peter Navarro has said a $50 barrel would be great for the economy. Trump’s tariffs on Mexico and Canada have also raised the cost of oil imports that the U.S. refines, and shrunk the market for the refined products the U.S. then exports. And there are the steel tariffs. If you wanna “Drill, baby drill,” you need a lot of increasingly expensive steel pipe. Oil execs are unhappy, The New York Times reports. 
• Forever bankrupt: Forever 21 filed for bankruptcy protection, again, this week, listing assets of $100 million to $500 million, and liabilities of $1 billion to $5 billion. The company also filed for bankruptcy in 2019.
• LMGTFY! A group of Israeli army veterans sold their cyber security startup Wiz to Google parent Alphabet for $32 billion on Wednesday in the largest-ever acquisition of a privately funded startup. The move would give Google’s cloud services an edge over rivals as customers become increasingly concerned about hacking in an AI-powered world.
• Foul ball? As pro sports remains one of the few entertainment products still attracting huge audiences, the San Francisco Giants have sold about 10% of the team to private equity group Sixth Street, the New York Times reports. The team will use the cash to upgrade their stadium. The price was not disclosed, but the Giants were last valued at $3.8 billion by Forbes. The Giants, who once played in New York City’s Washington Heights, are owned by a syndicate of 35 owners. About 15 MLB teams have private equity owners.

A U.S. energy pipeline company won a massive judgment against the environmental group Greenpeace that could cost the nonprofit $660 million for its support of peaceful protests held a decade ago against an oil pipeline that traversed sacred Native Ameican territory.

Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners sued Greenpeace in 2019, accusing the environmental group of masterminding the protests, spreading misinformation and causing the company financial loss through damaged property and lost revenues. After a three-week trial, CNN reported, the nine-person jury took two days to return their verdict, awarding more than $660 million in damages to Energy Transfer.

More than half the jurors in rural Mandan, North Dakota, said they had ties to the fossil fuel industry, and during jury selection, the Guardian reported that potential jurors appeared to largely dislike the protests.

But Kristin Casper, legal counsel to Greenpeace International, one of three Greenpeace groups sued by Energy Transfer, said the organization’s fight would continue, and they were not going to let themselves be stopped a SLAPP suit (strategic lawsuits against public participation), which are illegal in some jurisdictions. “Energy Transfer hasn’t heard the last of us in this fight. We’re just getting started with our anti-SLAPP lawsuit against Energy Transfer’s attacks on free speech and peaceful protest,” he said. “We will see Energy Transfer in court this July in the Netherlands. We will not back down, we will not be silenced.”