Most flights destined for Newark Liberty International Airport were being delayed at their origin airports by more than an hour and 40 minutes on Monday because of a shortfall in air traffic control staffing.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in an advisory that it was delaying the incoming flights from all U.S. airports and some in Canada. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Limited staffing, software and hardware problems that , and runway construction have caused sometimes lengthy delays at Newark in recent weeks.

While incoming flights were being held, few flights to or from Newark had been canceled, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking firm. Delays can have cascading effects on flights around the world.

Monday’s delay is the latest in a string of setbacks for Newark, one of the nation’s busiest airports and a large hub for United Airlines. On Friday, an air traffic control facility that guides planes at the airport had a brief radar outage. A similar outage earlier in the month had left controllers unable to communicate with pilots for about 90 seconds.

The F.A.A. briefly slowed flights to and from Newark again early on Sunday because of a telecommunications problem at the facility. That day, the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he plans to slow flights at the airport to better address the lengthy delays it has seen in recent weeks.

The Trump administration has also promised to install new fiber-optic cables connecting the airport and the facility, which was recently moved from Long Island in New York, to Philadelphia.

In a news conference on Monday, Mr. Duffy repeatedly sought to blame the Biden administration, saying it had “bungled” the move to Philadelphia.

Mr. Duffy said that the F.A.A. had installed software updates on Friday to prevent future outages. The administration also plans to improve the physical infrastructure that supplies and transmits data at the facility. Mr. Duffy said he had also asked the department’s inspector general to investigate how the move was carried out, he said.

“We’re in a situation where telecom is going down,” he said. “I don’t think we’re out of the woods yet.”

When asked if controllers from other air traffic hubs could be moved to the one in Philadelphia, Mr. Duffy said on Monday that it could take one year, at best, to train controllers on managing the new airspace.

At the news conference, Chris Rocheleau, the acting administrator of the F.A.A., also emphasized that flying at the airport is safe. Starting on Monday, he said, the agency had convened a task force to address the problems, including representatives from the F.A.A. and technology and telecommunications contractors.

In the four years since its first flight, Avelo Airlines has gained loyal customers by serving smaller cities like New Haven, Conn., and Burbank, Calif.

Now, it has a new, very different line of business. It is running deportation flights for the Trump administration.

Despite weeks of protests from customers and elected officials, Avelo’s first flight for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement appears to have departed on Monday morning from Mesa, Ariz., according to data from the flight-tracking services FlightAware and Flightradar24.

According to FlightAware, the plane is expected to arrive in the early afternoon at Alexandria International Airport in Louisiana, one of five locations where ICE conducts regular flights. Avelo declined to comment on the flight and ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

The airline’s decision to support President Trump’s effort to accelerate deportations of immigrants is unusual and risky. ICE outsources many flights, but they are usually operated by little-known charter airlines. Commercial carriers typically avoid this kind of work so as not to wade into politics and upset customers or employees.

The risks for Avelo are perhaps even greater because a large proportion of its flights either land or take off from cities where most people are progressives or centrists who are much less likely to support Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration policies. More than 90 percent of the airline’s flights arrived or departed from coastal states last year, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm. Nearly one in four flew to or from New Haven.

“This is really fraught, really risky,” said Alison Taylor, a professor at the New York University Stern School of Business who focuses on corporate ethics and responsibility. “The headlines and the general human aspect of this is not playing very well.”

But Avelo, which is backed by private investors and run by executives who came from larger airlines, is struggling financially.

The money the company stands to make from ICE flights is too good to pass up, the airline’s founder and chief executive, Andrew Levy, said last month in an internal email, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times. The flights, he said, would help to stabilize Avelo’s finances as the airline faced more competition, particularly in and near New Haven, which is home to Yale and where the airline operates more than a dozen flights a day.

“After extensive deliberations with our board of directors and our senior leaders, we concluded this new opportunity was too valuable not to pursue,” Mr. Levy wrote in the email on April 3, a day after Avelo signed the agreement with ICE.

While the military carries out some deportation flights, ICE relies heavily on private airlines. There is little public information about those flights, which ICE primarily arranges through a broker, CSI Aviation, said Tom Cartwright, a retired banking executive who has tracked the flights for years as a volunteer with Witness at the Border, an immigrants rights group. Most are operated by two small charter airlines, GlobalX Air and Eastern Air Express, he said.

GlobalX started operations in 2021 and conducts flights for the federal government, college basketball teams, casinos, tour operators and others. It has grown rapidly and brought in $220 million in revenue last year but is not yet profitable. This year, it has operated deportation flights to Brazil and El Salvador. Eastern Air Express is part of Eastern Airlines, a privately held company.

GlobalX and Eastern Airlines did not respond to requests for comment.

Contracts for such flights provide airlines consistent revenue, and the business is much less vulnerable to changes in economic conditions than conventional passenger flights. By Mr. Cartwright’s count, which is based on a variety of sources, ICE operated nearly 8,000 flights over the year that ended in April, most of them within the United States. CSI Aviation alone was awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in ICE contracts in recent years, according to federal data.

Avelo’s decision last month to join in on those flights was met with a swift backlash.

Within days of Mr. Levy’s internal announcement, the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, a collection of groups that support immigrants’ rights, started a campaign to pressure Avelo to drop the flights. An online petition started by the coalition has gained more than 37,000 signatures. Protests also sprouted up near airports in Connecticut, Delaware, California and Florida served by Avelo.

The Democratic governors of Connecticut and Delaware denounced Avelo, while lawmakers in Connecticut and New York released proposals to withdraw state support, including a tax break on jet fuel purchases, from companies that work with ICE.

William Tong, the Democratic attorney general of Connecticut, demanded answers of Mr. Levy, who deferred to the federal government. In a statement last month, Mr. Tong called Mr. Levy’s response “insulting and condescending.”

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, a union that represents flight attendants at 20 airlines, including Avelo, raised concerns. The union noted that immigrants being deported by the Trump administration had been placed in restraints, which can make flight attendants’ jobs much more difficult.

“Having an entire flight of people handcuffed and shackled would hinder any evacuation and risk injury or death,” the union said in a statement. “It also impedes our ability to respond to a medical emergency, fire on board, decompression, etc. We cannot do our jobs in these conditions.”

Avelo said that under its deal with ICE, it would operate flights within the United States and abroad, using three Boeing 737-800 jets. To handle those flights, the airline opened a base at Mesa Gateway Airport and started hiring pilots, flight attendants and other staff.

In a statement, Mr. Levy, a former top executive at United Airlines and Allegiant Air, said the airline had not entered into the contract lightly.

“We realize this is a sensitive and complicated topic,” he said. “After significant deliberations, we determined this charter flying will provide us with the stability to continue expanding our core scheduled passenger service and keep our more than 1,100 crew members employed for years to come.”

The airline, which is based in Houston, said it had operated similar flights for the Biden administration. “When our country calls, our practice is to say yes,” it said in a separate statement.

In the email last month, Mr. Levy celebrated the fact that Avelo had nearly broken even in 2024, losing just $500,000 on $310 million in revenue. But the airline needs to raise more money from investors, he said. Performance this year has suffered as national consumer confidence has waned, and the airline is facing rising competition.

Avelo was seeking revenue that would be “immune from these issues,” Mr. Levy said in the email, and pursued charter flights, including for the federal government. To accommodate the ICE flights, the airline also scaled back its presence at an airport in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Avelo has raised more than $190 million, most of it in 2020 and 2022, according to PitchBook. Mr. Levy’s email said the airline hoped to secure new funding this summer.

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order asking drugmakers to voluntarily reduce the prices of key medicines in the United States.

But the order cites no obvious legal authority to mandate lower prices. The order said the administration would consider taking regulatory actions or importing drugs from other countries in the future if drugmakers do not comply.

It was something of a win for the pharmaceutical industry, which had been bracing for a policy that would be much more damaging to its interests.

On Sunday evening, Mr. Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would link U.S. drug prices to those in peer countries under a “most favored nation” pricing model, a policy he attempted unsuccessfully in his first term for a small set of drugs in Medicare. His executive order on Monday does not do that. Pharmaceutical stocks rose Monday morning on the news.

Mr. Trump’s executive order came just hours after House Republicans offered an expansive set of health care policy changes that would cut around $700 billion from Medicaid and the Obamacare marketplaces over a decade and would cause an estimated 8.6 million Americans to become uninsured. Congress declined to include any provisions to directly limit drug prices in that package.

The executive order also called on federal agencies to investigate why European countries get lower prices and to push them to pay more. The Trump administration has limited leverage to drive up prices in Europe.

“I’m not knocking the drug companies,” Mr. Trump said on Monday shortly before signing the order. “I’m really more knocking the countries than the drug companies.”

With his executive order, Mr. Trump opted not to propose measures that could have had more teeth, such as calling for his administration to work with Congress on legislation or writing regulations to change how government health programs pay for some drugs.

Many Republican lawmakers oppose regulations on drug prices, but Mr. Trump has long railed against the current system, in which pharmaceutical companies charge the United States significantly higher prices than the rest of the world.

At Monday’s event, Mr. Trump directed his ire toward European governments that have negotiated lower prices.

“We’re going to help the drug companies with the other nations,” he said.

Mr. Trump threatened to use trade policy to push European countries to pay more for prescription drugs. But drug companies are already locked into contracts with governments, and if they try to charge more for new medicines, European countries may balk at covering them at all.

In his first term, Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully to enact a more substantive policy to reduce drug prices for Medicare, the health insurance program that covers 68 million Americans who are over 65 or have disabilities. That plan would have applied only to 50 drugs, administered at clinics and hospitals, that are paid for by Medicare. A federal court blocked it, ruling that the administration had skipped steps in the policymaking process.

Some experts said that policy could have passed legal muster if it had been pursued by the book, and others said that he would have needed Congress to pass a law.

Monday’s executive order, on its face, calls for changes to a much larger number of drugs, and for all Americans, not just patients insured by Medicare. But it lacks a clear mechanism for enacting the price reductions.

The order said that if the initial actions did not make enough progress in lowering U.S. drug prices, the Trump administration may “propose a rulemaking plan to impose most-favored-nation pricing.”

Democrats have introduced numerous bills to bring American prices more in line with those of foreign peers, and legislation passed during the Biden administration allows Medicare to negotiate directly on the price of a limited set of drugs used in the program. In general, policies that would lower drug prices are very popular among both Republican and Democratic voters.

The drug industry has also been bracing for punishing tariffs on imported medicines, which Mr. Trump has vowed to impose soon. Mr. Trump recently said he was planning an announcement about pharmaceutical tariffs this month. Tariffs would most likely drive up some drug prices in the United States and cut into drugmakers’ profits even if they can pass along some of the added costs.

Pharmaceutical investors were relieved that Mr. Trump did not propose the more substantive policy he had threatened. After dropping in premarket trading, pharmaceutical stocks rebounded when the details of Mr. Trump’s move became clear. Merck’s stock was up 5 percent on Monday morning. Pfizer’s rose by 3 percent. An index of smaller biotechnology stocks was up by 3 percent.

“Better than feared,” analysts at the Wall Street bank Jefferies wrote in a note to investors.

In statements on Monday, lobbying groups for drugmakers said the United States should not look to other countries for how much they pay for drugs.

But the main industry group, PhRMA, applauded Mr. Trump for threatening to use trade negotiations to push foreign governments “to pay their fair share for medicines.”

“U.S. patients should not foot the bill for global innovation,” said Stephen J. Ubl, PhRMA’s chief executive.

Brand-name drug prices in the United States are three times as high, on average, as those in peer nations.

That is in spite of the fact that much of the research that leads to new drugs takes place in American laboratories and hospitals.

Drugmakers generate a substantial majority of their worldwide profits from sales in the United States and typically design their business strategy around the U.S. market.

Pharmaceutical companies argue that the higher prices in the United States come with added benefits: Industry-funded analyses have found that patients in the United States get medicines faster, and with fewer insurance restrictions, than those in other countries.

In other wealthy countries, the government generally pays for prescription drugs for the entire population, negotiating substantial discounts from drugmakers. Many other nations do their own comparisons with prices in peer countries to help determine what they are willing to pay.

But in the United States, the government has very little formal involvement in setting drug prices, other than the Biden-era program for a limited number of drugs in Medicare. The Trump administration is now overseeing that program.

This month, Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, and Senator Peter Welch, a Democrat from Vermont, introduced a bill that would limit drug prices in the United States to an average of the prices paid by a group of peer countries.

In an interview, Mr. Welch said he agreed with Mr. Trump that Americans are overpaying for drugs and that international comparisons could help set fairer prices. But he thinks Congress needs to tackle the issue to ensure a durable policy.

“It’s really important to do this legislatively,” he said.

President Trump will sign an executive order on Monday aimed at lowering some drug prices in the United States by aligning them with what other wealthy countries pay, he said on Truth Social on Sunday evening.

The proposal he described, which alone cannot shift federal policy, is what he calls a “most favored nation” pricing model. Mr. Trump did not provide details about which type of insurance the plan would apply to or how many drugs it would target, but he indicated that the United States should pay the lowest price among its peer countries.

“Our Country will finally be treated fairly, and our citizens Healthcare Costs will be reduced by numbers never even thought of before,” he wrote in his social media post.

Any such plan will most likely be subject to challenges in court, and it is not clear whether it will pass legal muster, especially without action by Congress.

In his first term, Mr. Trump tried unsuccessfully to enact a version of this idea for Medicare, the health insurance program that covers 68 million Americans who are over 65 or have disabilities. That plan would have applied only to 50 drugs, administered at clinics and hospitals, that are paid for by Medicare. A federal court blocked it, ruling that the administration had skipped steps in the policymaking process.

The pharmaceutical industry bitterly opposes the idea, which would almost certainly cut into its profits, and has been lobbying against it as discussions of the policy have regained steam in Washington in recent weeks. Companies have warned that such a policy would lead them to spend less on research, depriving patients of new medicines.

“Government price setting in any form is bad for American patients,” Alex Schriver, an official at the drug industry’s main lobbying group, PhRMA, said in a statement. He added, “Policymakers should focus on fixing the flaws in the U.S. system, not importing failed policies from abroad.”

Mr. Trump’s embrace of the idea sets him apart from most Republicans, who have tended to be skeptical of government price setting. Democratic lawmakers have proposed versions of the idea.

Ameet Sarpatwari, an expert in pharmaceutical policy at Harvard Medical School, said that Mr. Trump was tapping into an idea that had “populist appeal.”

Mr. Trump has long complained that the United States pays much more than other wealthy countries do for the same drugs. And he is right. In the United States, prices for brand-name drugs are three times as high, on average, as those in peer nations.

That is in spite of the fact that much of the research that leads to new drugs takes place in American laboratories and hospitals.

Drugmakers generate a substantial majority of their worldwide profits from sales in the United States and typically design their business strategy around the U.S. market.

Pharmaceutical companies argue that the higher prices in the United States come with an added benefit: Industry-funded analyses have found that patients in the United States get medicines faster, and with fewer insurance restrictions, than those in other countries.

A 90-day pause

Stocks, the dollar and oil are soaring on Monday after President Trump’s top negotiators outlined the specifics of a major — though temporary — de-escalation in the U.S.-China trade fight.

Expectations were sky-high for some kind of breakthrough. The market reaction suggests mission accomplished in terms of reaching an important détente, though significant trade barriers remain and plenty still needs to be worked out.

“The consensus from both delegations is that neither side wanted a decoupling,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was a point person in the U.S.-China talks in Geneva over the weekend, said on Monday. “Now we have the mechanism in place for further talks,” he added, noting that the framework agreement expires after 90 days. Those talks could come in “the next few weeks,” Bessent told CNBC.

Here’s what is in the agreement:

• The U.S. will lower tariffs on Chinese imports to 30 percent from its current 145 percent.

• China will lower duties on U.S. goods to 10 percent from 125 percent.

• Sector-specific tariffs are not part of this deal, according to Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative. Trump has imposed targeted levies on items including Chinese-made semiconductors, medical devices, and aluminum and steel imports.

• China will remove nontariff export controls, but did not say whether it would lift restrictions on critical mineral shipments to the U.S. Beijing said it looked forward to stable and sustainable trade relations.

Both sides appear to see futility in clobbering each other with huge tariffs. The tit-for-tat measures had created “the equivalent of an embargo, and neither side wants that,” Bessent said. Companies have been warning that the levies would upend global supply chains and force them to raise prices. (Apple is weighing raising prices on its fall lineup of iPhones, but is determined not to blame tariffs publicly for the move, according to The Wall Street Journal.)

That uncertainty has virtually paralyzed corporate investment and hiring, analysts say, and pushed the Fed into limbo on interest rates as it watches for any fallout on inflation and the labor market.

Trump seems onboard with Monday’s agreement. Yesterday, he hailed the state of talks on Truth Social, calling it “a total reset negotiated in a friendly, but constructive, manner.”

But the terms are far more dovish than what he called for just three days ago: 80 percent tariffs on China “seems right,” he wrote on Friday, adding it would be “up to Scott B,” an apparent reference to Bessent.

Investors had regarded the China impasse as the toughest trade hurdle to surmount. Any progress there is likely to fuel optimism for further deals. “The worst of his trade wars and much of the crippling uncertainty could be over within two months from now,” Holger Schmieding, the chief economist for Berenberg, wrote in a research note on Monday.

However, higher tariffs will stick, and the biggest damage would be to American businesses and households, Schmieding added.

Among those rallying in premarket trading are tech giants with big exposure to China, including Nvidia, Amazon and Apple.

DEALBOOK WANTS TO HEAR FROM YOU

We’d like to know how the tariffs are affecting your business. Have you changed suppliers? Negotiated lower prices? Paused investments or hiring? Made plans to move manufacturing to the U.S.? Or have the tariffs helped your business? Please let us know what you’re doing.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

President Trump’s drug-pricing plan rattles pharma stocks. The president announced on Truth Social that he would sign an executive order on Monday seeking to lower drug prices to levels that peer countries pay. (In his first term, Trump unsuccessfully tried to do something similar with dozens of drugs covered under Medicare.) The move is likely to face stiff court challenges; still, shares in global drugmakers fell sharply on Monday. Separately, House Republicans yesterday released a proposal that would vastly weaken Medicaid coverage, as the party seeks cost savings to pay for expansive tax cuts later this year.

Air travel could be disrupted nationwide, U.S. official says. After another radar outage at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told NBC’s “Meet the Press With Kristen Welker” yesterday that he would begin discussions about scaling back flights there — and that the problems at Newark may be affecting other airports. Duffy said regulators had been finding “antiquated systems” at airport traffic control sites nationwide.

Inflation will be front and center this week. The Consumer Price Index report for April is scheduled for publication on Tuesday, with economists expecting to see new evidence of Trump’s trade war reigniting inflation. The health of the consumer will come into focus on Thursday with the release of retail sales and Walmart’s latest quarterly earnings. On Friday, the University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey is set for publication, as some polls show Trump’s handling of the economy eroding his approval rating.

What Qatar might gain from a gifted 747

Critics of President Trump were outraged over the weekend by reports that he is poised to accept a Boeing 747-8 from Qatar — valued at $400 million — as an upgraded Air Force One.

While White House officials said such a move would be done in compliance with federal law, skeptics said it represented a clear violation of ethics rules and a conflict of interest. It’s worth noting what Qatar has already gotten from Trump, and what it might gain in the future.

A recap: Qatar is in talks to give the 747, currently owned by the emirate’s royal family, to the administration, The Times reports, with the plane later being donated to Trump’s presidential library. That might mean he could use it after his term ends.

Trump has long complained about the state of the U.S. government’s current Air Force One planes, and excoriated Boeing as being slow in providing replacements. That said, the jumbo jet wouldn’t be available right away, since a U.S. contractor would still need to retrofit it to meet military standards.

ABC News, which broke the news, reports that administration lawyers concluded such a gift would be acceptable because it isn’t conditioned on a specific request, and the plane would be given to the federal government. A Qatari official added that such a gift would be a temporary loan.

Critics didn’t mince words about what they saw as a clear violation of federal law. The Qataris have an expansive array of business interests tied to the U.S., including energy projects and investments. Good-government advocates also noted that Trump’s family business just announced that it will build a new golf resort in Qatar, which will be developed in part by a state-owned business.

“The corruption is brazen,” Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, wrote on X. “Nothing says ‘America First’ like Air Force One, brought to you by Qatar,” added Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader. “It’s not just bribery, it’s premium foreign influence with extra legroom.” (Trump pointedly dismissed such criticism on Truth Social.)

The president has already faced criticism over an array of seeming conflicts of interest, including his family’s business interests in cryptocurrency, a sector he and Republicans are pushing to deregulate.

Worth watching: Trump’s visit to three Middle Eastern allies — Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi — starting on Monday, which will be his first major international trip. (A deal for the Qatari 747 isn’t expected to be announced during the trip.)

Among Trump’s priorities is striking “economic agreements” with the three governments to invest more in the U.S., CNN reports.

Why was a copyright regulator fired?

The Trump administration has drawn criticism for dismissing scores of government officials suddenly and seemingly without explanation.

But one of the latest such moves is notable because of its timing — and for a potential benefit to a corner of the tech industry that President Trump has championed, artificial intelligence.

Shira Perlmutter was fired as head of the U.S. Copyright Office on Saturday, after holding the post since October 2020, in the first Trump administration. No reason was given.

The legality of the move is unclear: Politico reports that her position is appointed and supervised by the librarian of Congress, who must be nominated by the president and approved by the Senate — except that the last librarian, Carla Hayden, was dismissed on Thursday.

Critics of the move pointed to a report on A.I. that Perlmutter’s office published last week, which questioned how much data A.I. developers need to train their models. From the document:

When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research — the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness — the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training. But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.

Still, the report didn’t urge direct action by the government, at least for now.

A.I. companies have argued for more permissive copyright rules to keep creating more-capable models, with Elon Musk suggesting last month on X that he favored scrapping all intellectual property laws. (Disclaimer: The Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

A.I. is an industry that Trump has championed, having announced the expansive Stargate data center project led by OpenAI and SoftBank. OpenAI’s Sam Altman also donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, while Musk remains a close ally of the president.

“It’s surely no coincidence” that Perlmutter was fired “less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyright works to train AI models,” Representative Joe Morelle, Democrat of New York and the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, wrote on X.

The White House has not responded to news organizations’ requests for comment on Perlmutter’s firing.

• In other A.I. news: Pope Leo XIV this weekend said that it would be a focus of his papacy, suggesting that he will continue his predecessor’s calls for greater worker protections amid the technology’s rapid commercialization.

THE SPEED READ

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