By KATE PAYNE

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A federal judge has barred state officials from enforcing a Florida law that would ban social media accounts for young children, while a legal challenge against the law plays out. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued the order Tuesday, blocking portions of the law from taking effect.

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The measure was one of the most restrictive bans in the U.S. on social media use by children when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law in 2024. The law would ban social media accounts for children under 14 and require parental permission for their use by 14- and 15-year-olds.

In his order granting the preliminary injunction sought by the groups Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice, Walker wrote that the law is “likely unconstitutional,” but acknowledged that parents and lawmakers have “sincere concerns” about social media’s effects on kids.

Walker wrote that the prohibition on social media platforms from allowing certain age groups to have accounts “directly burdens those youths’ rights to engage in and access speech.”

Also Tuesday, a federal judge in Atlanta heard arguments from NetChoice seeking to block a 2024 Georgia law scheduled to take effect July 1 that would require age verification for social media accounts and require children younger than 16 to get parental permission for accounts. Like in Florida and other states where laws have been blocked, the internet trade group NetChoice argues that the Georgia law infringes on free speech rights, is vague, and overly burdensome.

While siding with the industry groups’ claims that the law limits free speech, Walker allowed a provision of the Florida law to go into effect requiring platforms to shut down accounts for children under 16, if their parent or guardian requests it.

Parents — and even some teens themselves — are growing increasingly concerned about the effects of social media use on young people. Supporters of the laws have said they are needed to help curb the explosive use of social media among young people, and what researchers say is an associated increase in depression and anxiety.

Matt Schruers, the president and CEO of the industry association CCIA, praised the judge’s order blocking the Florida law.

“This ruling vindicates our argument that Florida’s statute violates the First Amendment by blocking and restricting minors — and likely adults as well — from using certain websites to view lawful content,” he said in a statement. “We look forward to seeing this statute permanently blocked as a violation of Floridians’ constitutional right to engage in lawful speech online.”

A spokesperson for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier defended the law and the state’s efforts to insulate kids from social media at a time when platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat seem almost impossible to escape.

“Florida parents voted through their elected representatives for a law protecting kids from the harmful and sometimes lifelong tragic impacts of social media. These platforms do not have a constitutional right to addict kids to their products,” Uthmeier’s press secretary Jae Williams said in a statement. “We disagree with the court’s order and will immediately seek relief in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.”

In Atlanta, NetChoice attorney Jeremy Maltz told U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg that Georgia’s law would impermissibly restrict speech by minors, saying that “before you share your art, before you share your political information, you need to produce your papers, please.”

Totenberg did not rule Tuesday. But citing rulings against similar laws in other states, she expressed skepticism about Georgia’s case, asking Deputy Attorney General Logan Winkles: “What makes today different from all other days?”

Winkles argued the law’s requirement of “commercially reasonable” attempts to verify age could be quite cheap and likened it to banning minors from bars serving alcohol, not restricting their speech.

“There are things about social media that make it dangerous,” Winkles said. “It’s a place where children are being restricted. It’s not about speech.”

Associated Press writer Jeff Amy contributed from Atlanta.

Kate Payne is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

It pains me to say this, as both an economist and a graduate of Columbia, but: It may be time to break up not only Columbia but also America’s entire system of elite higher education.

America’s large private research universities, such as Columbia and Harvard, have long been crucial to its economic exceptionalism. The symbiotic relationship between universities and the federal government, which subsidizes tuition and funds research, has created growth and innovation that is the envy of the world.

Now, instead of being a source of national pride, many elite universities have become a source of national division, with some Americans viewing them as decadent, hypocritical or even hostile to their values.

It was thus inevitable they’d become a target of President Donald Trump’s administration. First it capped NIH grant reimbursements for costs indirectly related to research (utilities, administration, facilities, and so on), and it is now cutting grants entirely at elite research universities such as Harvard. The administration is also threatening to revoke the tax-exempt status of its endowment and trying to prevent Harvard from enrolling foreign students, a critical source of funding and talent.

Universities say these cuts are ending important research projects into diseases such as cancer and ALS. European universities, sensing an opportunity, are trying to poach talented professors and students in the U.S., many of whom are European and came to the U.S. because it is more lucrative.

Federal money helps to pay those higher salaries, as well as to defray research costs. This is why U.S. universities have become the world’s research centers, attracting the most talented students and scientists, many of whom stay and make enormous contributions to the U.S. economy — such as Elon Musk.

This whole system is mostly the brainchild of Vannevar Bush (yes, of that Bush family) who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II and advocated for government support of research in the university system. His view was that if scientific research happened at universities, it would be protected from political influence.

There turned out to be other benefits too: More money and prestige made American universities the best in the world. Universities doing research could attract and retain the best talent, which wouldn’t be satisfied just teaching undergraduates. They could also train graduate students.

Some eight decades after Bush first advertised his ideas, however, many taxpayers have come to see elite universities as overtly political institutions. It is not just the lack of intellectual diversity among the faculty. It’s the research tinged with politics, the canceled speakers, the discrimination in hiring and admissions, the loyalty oaths, the institutional statements on issues that had nothing to do with the university. The response of many universities to the events and aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023, only served to highlight how out of touch they were.

True, most science researchers have little to no engagement with politics. So why should they and their research be punished? The answer is that they shouldn’t — and that’s why the research university model may not work anymore.

Universities played a critical role in the U.S. economy in the 20th century, but in the 21st they have strayed from their mission. If the implicit bargain of Vannevar Bush was taxpayer money in exchange for staying out of politics, then too many universities have not lived up to it. It’s not so much that the scientific research itself is tainted by politics; it’s that the institutions themselves are.

The question is not whether the U.S. system of higher education needs to change, but how. The current arrangement, apolitical graduate scientific research programs paired with highly political undergraduate arts and humanities departments, has become untenable.

Taxpayers may be OK with subsidizing cancer research or an education for the less fortunate, but not with the excesses of what some universities have become. The subsidies may have also blunted market signals, resulting in too many students getting useless degrees.

At the same time, government-supported research is critical to America’s long-term economic success. One option is breaking up universities. For a university such as Columbia, for example, the engineering, medical and business schools, along with some of the hard sciences, could form one entity. The college, the humanities, and the social-science schools and departments could form another and continue with their activism.

Alternatively, if the U.S. wants to keep the private elite research universities in their current form, they will need to make sincere and major changes. Universities have always had professors who say and even teach offensive things. The more recent failure involved extreme views becoming university policy. That is an institutional failure that is not easily remedied.

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Institutions evolve over time, of their own initiative or at the behest of society. One of the strongest criticisms of the Trump administration’s policies is that they are rash; university faculty and administrators are right that Trump has gone too far and suppressed their independence and free speech. The restrictions on foreign students may be his most economically destructive policy yet.

But Trump’s attacks on the U.S. system of higher education didn’t come from nowhere. Given the behavior of America’s great universities over the last decade, it is hard to have much sympathy — or to believe they are capable of a transformation. Their entire economic model, weakened from within, is now under pressure from external forces. The threat of a breakup may be the only thing that can force them to change.

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

Ramsey County commissioners heard public feedback Tuesday on an initial list of projects that could be funded by money previously designated for the Riverview Corridor project.

The county had allocated around $730 million for the project, but canceled the project in September. The 12-mile corridor was to connect downtown St. Paul to the Mall of America in Bloomington through a potential streetcar.

A Transit and Transportation Investment Plan was presented to the county board last week and provides direction for how those funds may be reallocated. A vote on the projects is expected June 10.

Specific projects, funding amounts and anticipated year of construction will be approved through the county’s Transportation Improvement Program, which is adopted annually by the county board. Approval of the 2026-2030 Transportation Improvement Program is expected in the fall.

West Seventh funding

Some community members at Tuesday’s public hearing expressed concern that the Transit and Transportation Investment Plan does not include West Seventh Street, where the Riverview Corridor was to run.

City projects and other investments in West Seventh had been passed over “because it was always thought that a major investment was coming our way with Riverview,” said Meg Duhr, president of West Seventh/Fort Road Federation, a district council representing the West Seventh neighborhood.

“Individual community members and neighborhood organizations have spent years working for or against this project, wasting human capital and time while generating deep neighborhood conflict,” Duhr said. “And now here we are considering a transit and transportation investment plan that details all the ways that the county will spend the funds previously allocated for Riverview without a single project in our community and no mention of the remaining critical needs on West Seventh itself.”

Infrastructure conditions on West Seventh Street worsened as the area lost out on millions in infrastructure and transit investment, Duhr said.

Metro Transit in 2014, for example, backed off of plans for a $28 million rapid bus line from downtown St. Paul to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and the Mall of America. The change in plans came at the urging of St. Paul and county officials who were concerned that it might interfere with the Riverview Corridor.

Roads over public transit

Others at Tuesday’s meeting raised concerns with the plan’s focus on roads rather than public transit and also called for county support of the New West Seventh Corridor, a transportation plan that includes the city of St. Paul, Metro Transit, the state Department of Transportation and other partners.

Speakers included people from the Riverview Corridor’s citizen advisory committee, Sustain St. Paul and Highland District Council’s transportation committee.

In its Transit and Transportation Investment Plan, the county identified five project categories focused on roadways, transportation network improvement projects, corridor improvements, Union Depot and railroad safety and access and other areas. Potential projects, categories and prioritization methods were identified during internal staff workshops held earlier this year.

Community members can submit comments on the plan until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.

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By KEN SWEET

NEW YORK (AP) — The Federal Reserve said Tuesday that Wells Fargo is no longer subject to harsh restraints the Fed placed on the bank in 2018 for having a toxic sales and banking culture.

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It’s a win for Wells Fargo, which has spent nearly a decade trying to convince the public and policymakers that it had changed its ways.

“We are a different and far stronger company today because of the work we’ve done,” said Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf in a statement. Scharf also announced that each of the 215,000 employees at Wells Fargo would receive a $2,000 award for turning the bank around.

Wells Fargo used to have a corporate culture where it placed unreasonable sales goals on its branch employees, which resulted in employees opening up millions of fake accounts in order to meet those goals. Wells’ top executives called its branches “stores” and employees were expected to cross-sell customers into as many banking products as possible, even if the customer did not want or need them.

After an investigation by The Los Angeles Times in 2016, Wells Fargo shut down its sales culture and fired much of its leadership and board of directors. The fake accounts scandal cost Wells Fargo billions of dollars in fines and lost business, and permanently tarnished its reputation, particularly because the scandal broke only a few years after the Great Recession and financial crisis. It was later revealed that Wells Fargo opened up roughly 3.5 million accounts that were not wanted or needed by customers.

Wells Fargo, once thought to be the best run bank in the country, was now the poster child of the worst practices of banking in decades.

In order to push Wells to fix itself, the Federal Reserve took the unusual step of placing Wells Fargo in a program where the bank could grow no larger than it was in 2018. No bank had previously been placed into such a program, known as an asset cap. The Fed required Wells to fix it culture and redo its entire risk and compliance departments in order to address its problems.

Since taking over in 2019, Scharf’s goal has been to convince the Federal Reserve that Wells Fargo had fixed its toxic banking practices. With the asset cap removed, the bank can now pursue more deposits, new accounts and take on additional investment banking businesses by holding additional securities on its balance shet.