1/ 2.1 million more Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week. Nearly 41 million people have filed for unemployment benefits since the coronavirus pandemic started in mid-March — the equivalent of one out of every four American workers. The pandemic has resulted in a national unemployment rate exceeding 14% – the highest rate since the Great Depression. This is the eighth week in a row, however, that new jobless claims have continued to fall from their peak of around 6.9 million. (New York Times / CNBC / Washington Post)

2/ The Trump administration will not release updated economic projections this summer, which are expected to show the country in a severe economic downturn as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. White House officials are supposed to release a federal budget proposal every February, and they usually follow that up with a “mid-session review� in either July or August that includes updated projections on economic trends such as unemployment, inflation, and economic growth. No other administration has failed to provide economic forecasts in its mid-session review since at least the 1970s. “It gets them off the hook for having to say what the economic outlook looks like,� said a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. (Washington Post)

The U.S. economy shrank at an annual rate of 5% in the first quarter – the biggest quarterly decline in more than a decade. (Politico)

Around 110 publicly traded companies each received $4 million or more in emergency aid from the Paycheck Protection Program. Of those subject to taxes, 12 of the companies used offshore accounts to cut their tax bills. These 12 companies also received more than $104 million in loans from U.S. taxpayers, and seven of them paid no U.S. tax at all for the past year. (Reuters)

3/ Trump signed an executive order seeking to limit the legal protections that shield social media companies from liability for the content users post on their platforms. The order seeks to make it easier for federal regulators to argue that companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter are suppressing free speech when they suspend users or delete posts, among other examples. “Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election,� Trump tweeted late Wednesday after Twitter applied a fact-checking notice to his tweets about voter fraud. Trump, an attempt to portray the order as an attempt to stamp out political bias on social media platforms, announced on Twitter that “This will be a Big Day for social media and FAIRNESS!� The order directs the Commerce Department to petition the Federal Communications Commission to set up a rule-making proceeding to clarify the scope of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The executive order is expected to draw immediate court challenges. (Washington Post / Axios /