President Trump's new budget lays bare the transformation of his presidency, pairing a historic surge in military spending with historic cuts to domestic programs, Axios' Zachary Basu writes.

• Why it matters: The most powerful populist of this century is at risk of becoming what he ran against — a deficit-spending interventionist asking working-class Americans to shoulder the cost of war.

The timing couldn't be worse: Trump is bleeding support over the Iran war, hitting the lowest approval ratings of his second term as rising gas prices erode his economic credibility.

• Even as Trump insists the conflict will end soon, his $1.5 trillion budget request for the Pentagon — plus an additional $200 billion ask for Iran costs — would lock in a wartime level of spending.

🔭 The big picture: Trump's new budget — more a statement of the White House's goals than a legislative draft — would reorient the U.S. government around military power at the expense of virtually everything else.

• Defense spending would rise 42% — a buildup the White House itself says exceeds the Reagan administration's and approaches the pace of spending just before World War II.
• The massive Pentagon budget is framed as a response to an increasingly dangerous world that predates the Iran war, and envisions permanent U.S. military dominance as a governing principle.

Non-defense spending, which includes categories like public health, scientific research, housing and education, would take a 10% cut, or $73 billion.

• The steepest cuts would fall on the EPA, down 52%; the National Science Foundation, down 55%; and the Small Business Administration, down 67%.
• Agencies spared from the proposed cuts include the Justice Department, which would get a 13% increase to "maximize its capacity to bring violent criminals to justice."

🔎 Between the lines: The administration is using a familiar argument to justify the cuts — fraud, waste and abuse.

• The White House said in a fact sheet: "Savings are achieved by reducing or eliminating woke, weaponized, and wasteful programs, and by returning State and local responsibilities to their respective governments."
• In a Truth Social post yesterday, Trump christened Vice President Vance his "Fraud Czar" — directing him to focus on Democrat-led states where, Trump claims, recovered fraud could balance the federal budget.

🔮 What to watch: The combination of foreign adventurism and domestic austerity cuts against the political instincts that brought Trump to power.

• The coalition that delivered Trump his second term — working-class voters, older Americans, rural communities — relies disproportionately on the programs being compressed to fund the military.
• Congressional Republicans face a brutal choice: Back a budget that guts programs their working-class constituents depend on ... or break with a president who's made loyalty the price of survival.

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Both the U.S. and Iran are frantically searching for a U.S. airman who bailed out of an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet over Iran yesterday. A second crew member was rescued.

• It's the first shoot-down of a U.S. warplane by Iranian forces in five weeks of war.
• And it's the first U.S. plane shot down by enemy fire in over 20 years. The last was during the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Another U.S. Air Force combat plane, an A-10 Warthog, crashed in the Persian Gulf region at about the same time. The lone pilot was rescued.

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A growing number of software developers say AI coding tools are frying their brains, Axios' Megan Morrone reports.

• The most popular agentic AI systems — Claude Code, Codex and OpenClaw — can write, test and ship software autonomously. That's triggered something that looks a lot like addiction among some of tech's highest performers.

What they're saying: OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy — coiner of the term "vibe coding" — told the No Priors podcast he's been in a "state of AI psychosis" since December, trying to figure out what's possible and "pushing it to the limit."

• Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has called his experience grinding with coding tools "cyber psychosis" and posted in January that he "stayed up 19 hours yesterday and didn't sleep til 5AM."

🎲 How it works: There are elements of gambling and addiction in the way people are using these tools, AI developer and blogger Simon Willison, who has 25 years of pre-AI coding experience, said on Lenny's Podcast:

• "There is a limit on human cognition, in how much you can hold in your head at one time. And it's very easy to pop that stack at the moment."

🍳 Lingo: Researchers from Boston Consulting Group and UC Riverside call the phenomenon "brain fry" — mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity.

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The Southeast is home to almost all of the fastest-growing U.S. metro areas, Axios' Alex Fitzpatrick writes from new census data.

• Ocala, Fla. (+3.4%), Myrtle Beach, S.C. (+3.2%) and Spartanburg, S.C. (+2.8%) were the fastest-growing metros between 2024 and 2025.
• That's by percentage growth, and among those with 20,000-plus residents.

🏜️ The one outlier: St. George, Utah, a hot desert town near Zion National Park, at +2.5%.

The winners in raw numeric terms: Houston (+126,720 people), Dallas-Fort Worth (+123,557) and Atlanta (+61,953).

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Criminals are growing bolder, stealing priceless art, jewels and truckloads of goods — but it's tough to cash in on the heists, Axios' Josephine Walker writes.

• Why it matters: Because massive heists immediately dominate global news cycles, thieves quickly find themselves stuck with highly recognizable merchandise that even underground buyers are too afraid to touch.

🖼️ Thieves smashed into a small museum in the Italian countryside late last month, stealing three paintings worth over $10 million — a Renoir, a Cézanne and a Matisse.

• That follows a similar heist last year at Paris' Louvre Museum, where thieves stole $104 million worth of France's crown jewels.

How it works: "The trend is typically going to be smash-and-grabs," Geoffrey Kelly, an original member of the FBI's Art Crime Team who's now with a cultural-property consulting firm, tells Axios. "That's the easy part. Once you've stolen it, now you have to figure out how to monetize it. And it's really impossible."

• While rare black-market deals occur, raiders often abandon unsellable stolen artworks at police stations or museums — hardly the underground lair beloved by Hollywood.

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Artemis II controllers yesterday in the White Flight Control Room at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The dream workstation of Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston.

• The latest on Artemis II.

Cocoa prices have plunged from last year's record highs. But shoppers are staring down purchasing Easter chocolate that's more expensive than ever, Axios' Kelly Tyko writes.

• Why it matters: Once food companies raise prices, they're slow to bring them back down.

By the numbers: Major chocolate companies raised prices by up to 20% during the cocoa spike in 2024-2025, per a Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute report.

• Cocoa prices, an upstream input for retail chocolate, have dropped from over $12,000 per metric ton in late 2024 to about $3,000 to $3,300 today.
• But Easter chocolate is still costing shoppers about 14% more year over year in early 2026, according to Datasembly data.

🐰 Between the lines: Most Easter candy was made months ago, when cocoa was still far more expensive.

• Chocolate makers are also still working through higher-cost cocoa they locked in earlier — and protecting margins after the recent price shock.
• Executives at companies like Hershey and Mondelez say they remain hedged above current cocoa prices, limiting how quickly they can pass along savings.

Insult to injury: Jonathan Horn — CEO of Treefera, a market-intelligence firm — tells Axios that U.S. chocolate consumers are seeing higher prices, smaller sizes and less cocoa in some products.

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Age gap, wealth gap, swag gap ... Luke Fortney, in The New York Times, adds another to the annals of American relationship mismatches: the "restaurant gap."

• Put simply, it's "a misalignment in tastes, spending habits and culinary curiosity."
• Or, in the context of our age: "One partner secured a reservation by setting an alarm a month before; the other didn't know you needed one at all. ... You check Resy by the hour. Your date couldn't care less. A misalignment in dining tastes is the ultimate test of compatibility."

Don't laugh. It says something about us, especially if the romance is new.

• "How a couple handles where to eat is a low-stakes rehearsal for bigger conversations," psychologist Jourdan Travers tells The Times.

Read "restaurant gap" tales (gift link).