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By Tami Luhby, CNN (CNN) — As part of its claims of widespread fraud in the federal safety net, the Trump administration is halting $10 billion in funding for several programs in five Democrat-led states. The biggest chunk that’s being paused is $7 billion in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grants for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. Known as TANF, the program provides cash assistance and other support to low-income households. It’s not clear why TANF is getting caught up in the administration’s probe into potential fraud in federal child care funding in Minnesota. The US Department of Health and Human Services declined to respond to CNN’s query on the issue but said in a statement that Democratic-led states have been “complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch.” Created by the 1996 federal welfare reform law, TANF is dwarfed by better-known safety net programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, which help tens of millions of low-income Americans. By contrast, just under 1 million families — with a total of 2.7 million people, most of them children — received cash assistance from TANF in fiscal year 2024, and there’s no tally of how many receive TANF-funded services, said Elizabeth Lower-Basch, a TANF policy expert and social services consultant. Beneficiaries receiving cash assistance have extremely low incomes with little other sources of support. “It’s a relatively small number of families, but it’s ones who would likely be destitute without it,” she said, noting the freeze could result in families being evicted and unable to pay for basic necessities, including food. What is TANF? TANF replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which was broadly known as welfare. But unlike its predecessor, TANF is a fixed block grant to states — with an annual allocation of $16.5 billion annually since its inception. That means inflation has taken a toll — the value of the block grant has fallen by half, according to The Center for Law and Social Policy, a left-leaning advocacy group. Also, the block grant has not been adjusted for population growth. States typically kick in some of their own funds to meet the law’s so-called “maintenance of effort” requirement. Under the law, states should use their block grants to provide assistance to needy families so children can be cared for in their homes or with relatives; end the dependence of needy parents on government benefit by promoting job preparation, work or marriage; reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and encourage two-parent families. But states have a lot of discretion over how to spend the money and who receives assistance. About a quarter of funds was used for cash assistance in fiscal year 2023, though the figure varies widely by state. That share has fallen drastically from 71% in fiscal year 1997, largely because the number of people receiving TANF aid has plummeted because of the program’s work mandate and time limits. Conservative lawmakers and policy analysts have celebrated the trend, saying the 1996 law has helped put people on the road to self-sufficiency rather than government dependence. But advocates for low-income families say TANF does not provide much-needed support, especially in economic downturns. States also use the block grants for child care subsidies, child welfare services and work-related needs, including job training and search, buying uniforms or covering transportation costs, among other supports. TANF has a work requirement, but it’s not a mandate on individuals. Instead, states are supposed to have a 50% work participation rate among families with non-disabled adults receiving cash assistance or face a penalty. (Many states have reduced their required share by shrinking their caseloads.) Families with adult recipients that receive cash assistance are subject to a 60-month lifetime limit, though states can extend that period for some households based on hardship or by…

By Alicia Wallace, CNN (CNN) — Finding a job continued to be a slog at the end of the year, new data shows: US businesses sought out fewer workers in November and hiring rates wilted even further. The number of estimated job openings – a closely watched indicator of labor demand – fell to its lowest level in more than a year, slumping to 7.15 million at the end of November from 7.45 million the month before, according to the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. With the exception of retail and construction, job openings trended lower across the majority of industries. Hiring activity trended in a similar direction. There were an estimated 5.12 million new hires in November, a drop-off from 5.37 million the month before. Job openings are at their lowest level since September 2024, while hires are at their lowest since June of that year. Very few industries posted net gains during November, and those gains were meek. Information added 12,000 jobs, federal government gained 11,000 and construction got a boost of 11,000 new roles. The hiring rate (hires as a percentage of total employment) slunk back to 3.2%, matching its lowest rate in more than a decade (excluding the pandemic), BLS data showed. But Wednesday’s report showed that fewer employees were laid off in November and there was an uptick in workers quitting their jobs, an important indicator of worker confidence. However, despite the monthly swings, the longstanding trend was clear: It remains a low-hire, low-fire labor market where the all-important turnover activity continues to grind slower and slower. The November JOLTS report is one of several key pieces of labor market data released this week, culminating with the December jobs report on Friday morning. Economists are expecting that the US labor market added about 55,000 jobs in December. That would cap off what was a sluggish year of employment gains as high uncertainty (from sweeping policies such as those related to tariffs) and dramatic shifts in the nation’s immigration flows weighed on hiring. “You’re not seeing a dynamic labor market,” ADP chief economist Nela Richardson told reporters earlier Wednesday morning following the payroll company’s monthly release of private-sector hiring data. A ‘K-shaped’ labor market ADP on Wednesday reported that hiring activity in the US private sector rebounded in December after jobs were shed the month before. Private-sector employers added an estimated 41,000 jobs last month, a higher-than-expected gain after posting a net loss of 29,000 jobs in November, according to ADP’s latest National Employment Report. Health care and education businesses as well as those in the leisure and hospitality sector drove the job gains reported for December, adding an estimated 39,000 jobs and 24,000 jobs, respectively, for the month. The biggest net job losses were in the professional and business services sector (-29,000) and the information sector (-12,000). “Health services is an expensive type of service for most consumers; leisure and hospitality is a discretionary service for all consumers,” Richardson said during the call with reporters. “These two sectors are consistent with a K-shaped economy where higher-income consumers are driving spending.” Businesses of all sizes added jobs last month, which marks a reversal from November, when the smallest firms saw a significant drop-off in employment. “Small establishments recovered from November job losses with positive end-of-year hiring, even as large employers pulled back,” Richardson said in a statement on Wednesday. Pay gains for people who stayed at their jobs held steady in November at 4.4%, while wage bumps for job-changers accelerated to 6.6% from 6.3%, ADP reported. The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved. The post The number of available jobs in the US just hit its lowest level in more than a year appeared first…

By Lisa Respers France, CNN (CNN) — Beef looks a little different these days for some former teen actors from the early 2000s. Along with the return of low rise jeans and trucker hats, the world can also now revel in what appears to be drama between two former Disney channel stars. It all publicly started when The Cut published a personal essay from actress Ashley Tisdale last week titled “Breaking Up With My Toxic Mom Group.” The star, known for her work on “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody” and the “High School Musical” franchise, wrote about how she and some friends had formed a group chat to talk about being new moms, after all being “pregnant through the early pandemic” and missing out “on the activities where you meet other expectant mothers.” Through the chat and the playdates it spawned, Tisdale initially believed she had found her “village,” she wrote. At some point, she “began to wonder whether that was really true.” “I remember being left out of a couple of group hangs, and I knew about them because Instagram made sure it fed me every single photo and Instagram Story,” she wrote. “Another time, at one of the mom’s dinner parties, I realized where I sat with her — which was at the end of the table, far from the rest of the women. I was starting to feel frozen out of the group, noticing every way that they seemed to exclude me.” She recalled other times being left out and feeling distanced from the group, all of which made her wonder “Why me?” “The truth is, I don’t know and I probably never will. What I do know is that it took me back to an unpleasant but familiar feeling I thought I’d left behind years ago,” she wrote. “Here I was sitting alone one night after getting my daughter to bed, thinking, Maybe I’m not cool enough? All of a sudden, I was in high school again, feeling totally lost as to what I was doing ‘wrong’ to be left out.” Quicker than you could say “MomTok” (which has its own drama), internet sleuths quickly deduced by combing social media that said mom group included fellow actresses and child stars Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore as well as some other high profile women living in Los Angeles. Then Duff’s husband, singer/songwriter Matthew Koma, metaphorically entered the chat. On Tuesday, Koma took to Instagram stories to post a photo of himself made to look like Tisdale’s photo in her Cut essay using the outlet’s logo and a fake headline reading “When You’re The Most Self Obsessed Tone Deaf Person On Earth, Other Moms Tend To Shift Focus To Their Actual Toddlers.” He added a subheadline that read “A Mom Group Tell All Through A Father’s Eyes” and included as a caption “Read my new interview with @TheCut.” Duff, who starred in Disney Channel’s hit series “Lizzie McGuire” as a teen, married Koma, who is in the band Winnetka Bowling League, in 2019 and they are the parents of three young daughters. She also shares a son with her ex-husband Mike Comrie. Tisdale’s essay for The Cut is not her first on the subject to go viral. In December 2025, a post on her blog headlined “You’re Allowed to Leave Your Mom Group” under her married name, Ashley French, stirred conversation on social media. CNN has reached out to reps for Tisdale, Duff, Koma and Moore for comment. The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved. The post There’s new ‘toxic mom group’ drama starring Ashley Tisdale and Hilary Duff’s husband appeared first on News Channel 3-12.

By Harmeet Kaur, CNN (CNN) — When Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah first learned over the weekend that US forces had struck Venezuela and abducted its leader, he wanted answers. Without the approval of Congress, he wondered, what justified this attack inside another country? Two hours later, he got an answer from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “Just got off the phone with @SecRubio,” Lee wrote on X. “He informed me that Nicolás Maduro has been arrested by U.S. personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.” That “kinetic action,” Lee concluded, “likely falls within the president’s inherent authority … to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.” “Kinetic” — from the Greek kinētikos, meaning putting in motion — has become a recurring word for government officials talking about US aggression against Venezuela. As the Trump administration has blown up boats from Venezuela and Colombia over the past several months, ostensibly to protect Americans from the scourge of drugs, it has repeatedly called its actions “kinetic strikes.” You probably know the word “kinetic” from physics lessons about kinetic energy, meaning the energy that an object has when it’s moving, as opposed to the unreleased potential energy it has sitting still. When “kinetic” first entered the military lexicon, it was used in this context, to describe munitions that did damage through sheer speed and mass, rather than with explosive force. As linguistics researcher Neil Whitman noted in 2011, the 1978 “Code Name Handbook: Aerospace, Defense, Technology” lists the acronym SKEW, meaning shoulder-fired kinetic energy weapon. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative also used the term “kinetic energy weapons,” which it defined as nonexplosive projectiles moving at high speeds to inflict damage. Over the years, the military use of “kinetic” took on a broader meaning. Per CNN senior military analyst James Stavridis, kinetic now indicates physical impact, like “a bullet, a bomb, a knife,” as opposed to “non-kinetic,” which denotes “cyber, intelligence, things that don’t have physical impact in an operation, but can still be very very important.” Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and co-author of the Substack newsletter Comment is Freed, characterizes this usage as a product of the digital age. As military capabilities expanded to include cyber warfare and other, less overt forms of conflict, military officials began using “kinetic” to delineate the more obvious violence typically associated with war. If “kinetic” became military lingo out of a desire for greater precision, it soon enough acquired vague and metaphorical uses. During the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush’s defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld frequently used “kinetic” to denote taking action — unleashing the potential violence of the US military in actual combat. As Bob Woodward wrote in his book “Bush At War:” “For many days the war cabinet had been dancing around the basic question: how long could they wait after September 11 before the U.S. started going ‘kinetic’ as they often termed it, against al Qaeda in a visible way? The public was patient, at least it seemed patient, but everyone wanted action. A full military action—air and boots—would be the essential demonstration of seriousness—to bin Laden, America, and the world.” In 2010, the American Dialect Society voted “kinetic event,” which it described as the Pentagon’s term for violent attacks on troops in Afghanistan, as the most euphemistic words of the year. That didn’t stop it from being used to obfuscate. When President Barack Obama launched air strikes in Libya in 2011, then-White House aide Ben Rhodes used “kinetic” to assert that these actions were something other than war. “I think what we are doing is enforcing a…