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Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s first big announced changes point toward a quiet revolution, with task forces set up to rethink virtually everything done to set policy and the approach used to get there.
Following his first meeting at the helm Wednesday, Warsh outlined the plan — a sprawling, ambitious endeavor entailing five task forces that will utilize resources and experts within the Fed and from the outside.
The reviews amount to a comprehensive examination of all the areas that define modern monetary policy. No chair in recent history has launched a project that has matched the ambition of this one.
Their job will be to examine communications, data the Fed uses to measure the economy, the view on inflation and its causes, the impact of technology such as artificial intelligence and the size and composition of the Fed’s $6.7 trillion balance sheet and the potential path to cutting the holdings.
The task forces will “start with first principles, ask hard questions, examine current practice, consider alternatives, and ultimately propose next steps for policymaker consideration,” Warsh said.
“Each task force will serve an objective shared by everyone in the system, shared by everyone around that table that I sat with over the last couple of days: a Federal Reserve that is clear-eyed about its mission, fit for purpose, and focused on the future,” he added.
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In announcing the task forces, Warsh was emphatic and deliberate.
But gone was the harsh rhetoric he has used to denounce the central bank over the past year.
Last July, Warsh, in a CNBC interview while he was campaigning for the job, called for “regime change” at the Fed and cited a “credibility deficit” caused by “incumbents” at the institution. In its place were comments about how “incredibly impressed” he was with what he’d seen in his first weeks on the job and how the meeting “exemplified the very best of the Fed’s traditions.”
What once looked like a potentially rancorous atmosphere inside the institution quickly become collegial as Warsh looks to carry through a fundamental rethink of how it does business.
“What I think we’re seeing is regime change, but in a velvet glove,” said Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman. The task forces “basically are going to review and maybe revise all the working aspects of Fed practice, from communications to data sources to the way they approach the balance sheet to the inflation framework. There’s a lot of potential regime change there.”
Warsh’s decision to take the positive view came as little surprise to Fed veterans, several of whom spoke in favor of the direction the new chairman charted.
“All those who’ve been in the Fed know that the way change operates is through just what he did, which is create task forces to build consensus,” former central bank Vice Chair Roger Ferguson told CNBC. “There are some things that one can get rid of that I think would be helpful and there are others where maybe he must be careful.”
Getting started
Former Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester served on a communications subcommittee during her tenure that ran from 2014 to 2024, part of a nearly 40-year career at the central bank. She’s familiar with prior efforts the Fed made to enact change that perhaps weren’t quite as codified as the approach Warsh is taking.
“All the things he’s looking at are things that the Fed has looked at. But he’s organizing the work, and I think he’s putting it on a faster than typical timeframe for some of these projects that the Fed has undertaken before,” Mester said. “So, I think this is all good to be studying. Of course, we’ll have to see what then the recommendations are, and what changes he wants to make.”
One of the most visible areas Warsh has changed is communication.
The post-meeting statement eschewed much of the boilerplate language of its predecessors and instead offered a bare-bones view of what the committee decided and how it views current economic conditions. In format, the statement began with the actual rate action — unchanged, as expected — a callback to how the Fed used to formulate its statements prior to March 2009. Since the financial crisis-era period, the Fed had been starting the statements with an assessment on the economic state of affairs.
Mester said she has no problem with the Federal Open Market Committee returning to the prior format. However, the statement this week also deleted so-called forward guidance language, something she said officials may want to address with more information about the Fed’s “reaction function,” or the outline of how and why the Fed will adjust its position to economic factors.
“I like the fact that they got rid of a lot of what we would call boilerplate language that really wasn’t serving any purpose anymore,” she said. Mester added that the Fed has long had a “Hotel California problem.”
“Once a phrase or sentence got in there, it was very difficult to get it out. So this was a needed sort of purging,” she said.
Other areas likely to be explored will be the elimination of the “dot plot” rate forecasts from individual FOMC participants as well as a potential adjustment to the news conferences chairs have held for the past 15 years.
Other areas of reform
The task forces will take aim at a broad swath of Fed operations.
On the balance sheet, Warsh has long objected to the Fed’s large position in bond markets, which swelled during and after the financial crisis of 2008, as well as in the Covid pandemic in 2020.
There also will be a study of how the Fed gauges inflation after being above its goal for five years following the erroneous “transitory” call in 2021 and 2022. Artificial intelligence and its impacts also will be in focus, as will a comprehensive view of the metrics that the Fed is using to gauge the economy, with an expected look at further using data and analytics for guidance.
BlackRock fixed income chief Rick Rieder, himself a finalist for the nomination that Warsh won, called the chairman’s approach “a new era of monetary policy in the United States.”
“Building a sense of confidence in achieving monetary policy targets will only be enhanced by an impressive consideration of complex subject matter that could be very influential on the economy and Fed targets going forward,” Rieder said in a post-meeting note. “So, this time is different, we are hearing about a different philosophy, different tools, and potentially a very different policy ethos.”
One important way to make it all work is to provide clear lines about what will be moving monetary policy in the future, added Mester, the former Cleveland Fed president.
“It doesn’t have to be numerical, doesn’t have to be very prescriptive, but to get a sense of kind of what are they looking at, what kinds of things are going to persuade them one way or the other,” she said. “I think that’s something that we want our central bankers to be able to articulate to us. Otherwise it’s sort of ‘trust me,’ and ‘trust me’ is not good communication.”

Researchers reported this week a deadly outbreak of plague in Siberia 5,500 years ago, revealing that Yersinia pestis evolved lethal genetic traits far earlier than suspected. A drug developed for heart tissue repair may also help kidney tissue repair and regeneration. And neighborhood socialization opportunities could shape children’s brain development.
Plus: Researchers detected quantum entanglement at a macroscopic scale, intermittent fasting appears to protect myelin and reduce chronic stress, and astronomers are learning to distinguish the different origins of gamma-ray bursts in the universe:
Entanglement embiggened
Quantum entanglement has long been observed in small, isolated groups of particles, but when those particles aggregate into macroscopic objects like coffee mugs or “My Hero Academia” Funko Pops, do they also exhibit quantum characteristics? Well, maybe. Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology have now reported the detection of a high degree of quantum entanglement among particles in a centimeter-sized cube of a so-called strange metal—specifically, a crystal made of cerium, palladium and silicon.
Strange metals have electrical resistivity that greatly increases when they are warmed; at lower temperatures, they are superconductive, though their temperature is much higher than that of standard superconductive materials. In a strange metal, electrons lose their individuality and appear to pass through the material as a diffuse blob, raising the question: What even is an electron? Strange metals are weird in a lot of ways and present fundamental challenges to the standard model of condensed matter physics.
Professor Silke Bühler-Paschen from TU Wien says, “We do not try to bring the crystal as a whole into a superposition of two states. Instead, we ask whether its constituents are—collectively—in such a state of entanglement.”
To do this, the researchers bombarded the material with neutrons and measured its responses. The material did not react like normal matter; its response could not be explained by considering independent particles. Instead, at least nine quantum-entangled entities acted collectively, demonstrating high multipartite quantum entanglement in a solid.
The long search for happier mice
Intermittent fasting has a number of notable health benefits, including improved working memory, higher insulin sensitivity, and better heart health and physical endurance. Observing that intermittent fasting also reduces markers of inflammation, researchers in Japan conducted a study to determine whether it could reduce symptoms of chronic stress in mice.
Through accompanying inflammatory processes, chronic stress can disrupt the integrity of myelin, the fatty insulation sheath that surrounds nerve fibers. So the researchers used myelin integrity as an overall marker of stress in the experiment. After exposing mice to chronic stress, including a forced-swimming test, the researchers divided them into two groups.
The authors write, “Adult male C57BL/6 J mice underwent 14 days of CRS while maintained on either an ad libitum (AL) diet or an IF regimen. CRS induced robust depression-like phenotypes—characterized by increased immobility in the forced swimming test and reduced sucrose preference—without affecting locomotor activity, whereas IF significantly attenuated these behavioral abnormalities.”
Using immunofluorescence and staining techniques, they assessed the state of the myelin in the animals’ brains, finding that free-feeding mice had myelin damage across brain regions. By contrast, the intermittent fasting group appeared to reverse these effects. Additionally, the IF diet mitigated depression-like behaviors in the mice.
Blow’d Up
Gamma-ray bursts were discovered around 50 years ago. These extremely energetic events, the most powerful class of explosion in the universe, are believed to be the result of supernovas. In a new study, a team of astronomers posits that two recent long-duration gamma-ray bursts, believed to result from the merger of two neutron stars, are consistent with nucleosynthesis originating from a massive, fast-spinning star collapsing on itself to form a black hole.
The two bursts were observed in 2021 by the Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. The team modeled the events to determine what elements were created and concluded that they did not result in the formation of heavy elements such as gold, lead or uranium, which might be expected in a neutron star merger. Instead, the team suggests the bursts represent collapsars.
Los Alamos theoretical physicist Matthew Mumpower says, “What we’ve learned is that, contrary to contemporary interpretations, the type of kilonova represented with these long-duration gamma-ray bursts does not inherently imply the synthesis of gold, despite the signal showing a red component typically associated with lanthanide production. A simple explanation arises from this work, requiring only a single-component model, which suggests kilonovae are even more varied and difficult to interpret than we thought in the past.”
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Washington — The federal government awarded a company owned by a Trump donor a $1.7 million contract to install a new water cleaning system for the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, federal records show, as President Trump pushes to overhaul the pool — and struggles with a bout of algae and a peeling paint job.
The no-bid contract to install a “Nano Bubble” filtration system went to Green Water Solutions, an Ohio-based company whose owner is listed on federal contracting documents as “JJ Cafaro Investment Trust.” The president and CEO of that trust is identified as John J. Cafaro on Federal Election Commission filings.
Cafaro has donated to several GOP candidates and conservative causes in recent years. He has donated extensively to Mr. Trump’s campaign and to Trump-linked groups, giving $250,000 to the Trump Victory fundraising committee at one point in 2020. FEC records show he also made donations to Democrats at various points.
A businessman and real estate developer, Cafaro pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations in 2010 over donations to his daughter’s congressional campaign. Nearly a decade earlier, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Democratic Rep. James Traficant, and cooperated with prosecutors.
Cafaro and his wife own a home in Palm Beach, Florida, less than a mile from the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Green Water Solutions is also known as Greenwater Services. Inquiries to Cafaro did not yield a response, and the company referred CBS News to the National Park Service, a division of the Department of the Interior. The New York Times was first to report on Cafaro’s involvement in the Reflecting Pool project.
On its website, Green Water Solutions describes its specialty as purifying water to remove algae, bacteria and other contaminants using a system that injects ozone-infused “nano bubbles” into the water.
Federal contracting records show that the company received one other government contract: A $1 million contract in 2025 for a feasibility study on using its Nano Bubble system to treat sewage flows in the Tijuana River.
Green Water Solutions also appeared to do work on a Trump Organization property. On its LinkedIn page, the company posted photos of water treatment work it performed on a pond at the president’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, more than a year ago.
Now, Green Water Solutions has been hired to take on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, a century-old basin of shallow water that spans more than 300,000 square feet and has struggled with algae blooms for years. Mr. Trump has taken a personal interest in the Reflecting Pool’s overhaul, discussing the project at length, visiting the site and handpicking the color of an industrial-grade sealant that was installed on the pool’s stone floor: “American Flag Blue.”
Green Water Solutions was hired in April by the Department of the Interior to install a Nano Bubble system at the Reflecting Pool, replacing “the existing, failing filtration infrastructure.”
The contract was awarded without a full competitive bidding process. The government cited a contracting rule designed for projects of “unusual and compelling urgency,” pointing to the need to fix the Reflecting Pool in time for the nation’s 250th birthday on July 4. It also called the Nano Bubble system a “highly specialized and niche technology with limited domestic suppliers.”
White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers rebuffed any suggestion of a conflict of interest.
“This contract was awarded by the Department of Interior; the White House did not play any role in the selection process,” Rogers said. CBS News has reached out to the Interior Department for comment.
Cafaro on Friday told The Vindicator, a local newspaper in Youngstown, Ohio, that Mr. Trump “doesn’t know a thing about” his company’s work with the Reflecting Pool, saying he would “never talk to [the president] about it” because “you don’t do things to put friends in awkward positions.”
Cafaro also said, “I have no idea why this is an issue,” arguing “the system is working” to kill algae, and the public attention is driven by “people who don’t seem to like Trump.”
A separate $14.7 million no-bid contract was given to Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings to install sealant on the floor of the Reflecting Pool, federal contracting records show.
Several days ago, after water was pumped back into the Reflecting Pool, issues began to arise. A sheen of algae appeared in the water earlier this week, and by Thursday, the newly installed pool surface appeared to peel off in at least one location.
An Interior Department spokesperson said the algae bloom was caused by “residual algae” from stagnant water that sat in the pool’s supply lines, calling it “part of the normal startup process.” The department later said on X the Nano Bubble system “very effectively killed the algae.” CBS News has reached out to the department about the peeling sealant.
Work crews were then seen cleaning out algae and pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water. Also spotted in recent days: a Nano Bubble system.

President Donald Trump has unveiled a new Boeing 747-8 jet for Air Force One that the Qatari government donated last year as an “unconditional” gift to the US.
The US military has finished modifications to the luxury jumbo jet, which has been valued at an estimated $400m (£300m).
“This plane was transformed into a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said in a speech at Joint Base Andrews on Friday.
The US Air Force said in a press release that the jet will begin initial commissioning flights – a “final exam” to test out the aircraft’s modifications – before it will be used to transport the president.
Modifications to the jet included upgrades in security, mission communications, logistics support, and advanced technology, the Air Force said. Any potential threats from the previously owned aircraft have been “neutralised”, it added.
The interiors of the aircraft have been minimally changed, and the exterior has received a fresh red, white, blue and gold paint job.
In May 2025, the Qatari royal family donated the luxury Boeing 747-8 to the US Department of Defense to be used as part of a fleet of planes dubbed Air Force One, which provides air transport for the president.
When news of the gift of the plane was revealed last year, it sparked backlash from both sides of the aisle, including from some Trump allies. Critics argued that accepting such a high-value donation posed a conflict of interest and may be unconstitutional.
While federal law indicates that US officials can only accept gifts under $480, the White House has insisted that accepting the aircraft is legal, and pledged that it will be donated to Trump’s presidential library once he leaves office.
“The workmanship of this plane is when you see it, you won’t believe it,” Trump said in his speech.
“Actually, the quality of woods, the quality of the materials, the quality of the engines – these engines are the finest, they’re the best in the world, nothing like it.”
“It’s really an honour,” the president added. “And I want to thank the Emir of Qatar.”
Prior to the addition of the Qatari jet, the Air Force One fleet included two 747-200B jets that have been in use since 1990. One of those older models appears to have now been phased out, according to White House communications director Steven Cheung.
“‘Well done, good and faithful servant'”, Cheung wrote on X, alongside a photo of the older plane. “The Last Ride,” he added.
The Air Force said the new jet will be used by the president on an interim basis until Boeing delivers its two long-promised VC-25B jets, which are meant for longer-term Air Force One use but have faced significant production delays.

What’s the most cliche possible gift you can give a relative? A digital photo frame, displaying a rotating slideshow of family photos. Now Aura has completely refreshed this product space with its gorgeous Aura Ink frame, which uses e-ink to create a display that doesn’t even look digital.
Digital frames have always been so popular (yet mostly disappointing) because there’s an undeniable allure to the idea of them — it feels like magic to imagine hanging artwork on your wall that you can change depending on your mood. In practice, these devices usually look clunky. You need to plug them in and figure out how to hide a bulky cord, and does anyone even want another bright screen in their home anyway? This problem was already on the Aura founders’ minds when they started the company 10 years ago, but color e-ink wasn’t feasible until now to use in a digital frame.
“E-ink is definitely next level,” co-founder and CTO Eric Jensen told TechCrunch. “We have people tell us that they hung it up, had friends over, and their friends were like, ‘How did you print that picture so quickly?’”
E-ink is the same technology that you see on e-readers, which lets you read a book without feeling the same strain that you get from staring at an LED screen for too long. But there aren’t that many color e-ink devices on the market aside from the Kindle Colorsoft, because the company that manufactures e-ink displays can only currently produce six colors: red, blue, green, yellow, white, and black.
It’s hard to imagine what your favorite family portraits and travel photos would look like with only six colors. But Aura has created a dithering algorithm — a technique that blends a limited color palette into patterns the eye reads as smooth gradients — that renders images close enough to the originals that its e-ink frame could finally go to market.
“I’m learning color theory from our chief scientists, and as far as I understand it, there’s not a good definition for how many colors this represents well,” Jensen said. “It’s all sort of theoretical and comes down to how people perceive it. Everyone’s a little different, so it’s actually taken a lot of testing with a lot of people in a lot of different spaces and different lighting conditions in order to get where we are today.”
All of Aura’s frames connect to the Aura app, which is where you can upload photos from your phone, web, email, iCloud, or Google Photos. I found the process to be pretty user-friendly — easy enough for a less tech-savvy relative to navigate, which matters for a product that lives or dies on whether non-technical users will actually set it up.
The app also has social features, so if your sister has a great new photo of her baby, she can upload it to your shared library and it will appear on your frame. (I didn’t try this, since I don’t know anyone else with an Aura frame, but if I did, I would probably use this feature to prank my family members with ridiculous photos. Am I a bad person?)
In addition to the 13.3-inch Ink frame, Aura also sent me its more classic, 12-inch LED Aspen frame as a point of comparison. But the LED frame surprised me with how good it looks in its own right (it feels like the Prada of digital frames). The lighting is about as unobtrusive as an LED screen can be, and it’s anti-glare, which makes the frame look way more premium. Aura’s frames also benefit by surrounding the LED screen with a paper-like matting display, which helps trick the eye into reading it as a printed photograph.
Aura says it designed its dithering algorithm for portraits of people, since users tend to highlight family photos. I’m a rebel, so I decided to load my frames with travel photos. When comparing the same photo on the Ink and the Aspen, it’s very clear that the colors aren’t exact, but as a digital photographer who isn’t that picky, I didn’t care very much. The distorted color palette almost seems like an artistic choice, even if I know it’s reflective of a technological limitation. But when I showed the two Aura frames to an analog film photographer who painstakingly studies the small color aberrations in his darkroom prints, he thought that the Ink frame needed some work. I disagree, but if you look at the photos below and are bothered that the white balance isn’t perfectly consistent across each of the three image from my phone, then you might not like the Ink frame.
By default, the Ink frame changes photos once per day, and it will usually do this change in the middle of the night, when you’re least likely to be paying attention. If you manually change the pictures via the app, do not be alarmed if the frame looks like it’s glitching — it takes about a minute for the hardware to run the dithering process and render the six-color, e-ink version of your image.
I am very bad with anything involving hammers and nails — all of the art in my apartment is hung up using Command strips — but mounting hardware that Aura includes feels sturdy. It’s easy to take the frame on and off the wall, but you probably only will need to take it down to charge the frame via USB-C once per month. (When the lights are off or you’re not in the room, the display will go to sleep, helping save battery.) I don’t think that the Ink frame looks too out of place, but if it does, maybe it’s because it’s surrounded by art made in other mediums. Or maybe it’s the black frame. Or I did a bad job at placement. Look, I can’t help that I added the Ink frame to a gallery wall that I assembled three years ago!