The Brief

UCLA’s winter quarter started Monday — and the first full week for Julio Frenk as the school's new chancellor.

Frenk brings experience as a university and health administrator as well as multinational experience after serving in the cabinet of Mexican President Vicente Fox in 2000. That background will be put to work against a growing to-do list.

On the one hand, UCLA is an economic engine in Southern California, one of the flagship campuses of the UC system. It conferred 15,000 degrees in 2024.

On the other, it’s faced several high-profile problems over the past year, including a scathing audit of how it handled protests last spring related to the war in Gaza.

Internal problems

Some students say the university’s decision to call on police to clear an encampment last spring of people protesting the war in Gaza still looms over the campus.

“That caused a really huge rift in trust,” said fourth-year undergraduate Javier Nuñez-Verdugo, who says they’ve seen more police and security guards on campus since then.

“Especially a lot of non-white students, especially Black students, especially Indigenous students, do not feel safe with heightened police presence here on campus,” Nuñez-Verdugo said.

One of Frenk’s first tasks: input on who will fill the job of UCLA police chief.

Nuñez-Verdugo, who is external vice president for UCLA’s Undergraduate Students Association, would like Frenk to hold regular, in-person town halls with students in order to hear first hand concerns about campus life.

External problems

Others say the new Trump administration may harm students at UCLA and other campuses.

“Chancellor Frenk's main priority should be protecting our undocumented students and our trans students from the coming attacks from the incoming Republican administration,” said UCLA political science professor Michael Chwe via email.

A UCLA spokesperson said Frenk was not available for comment on Monday. But in a video released online on Tuesday, Frenk said “We must renew our commitment to fostering a welcoming and inclusive academic environment that safeguards free expression."

Frenk said he’s been visiting the UCLA campus monthly since his appointment in order to meet with various members of UCLA communities.

The University of California Office of the President gives campus chancellors wide powers over the direction of each university. Frenk said he needs to meet with more UCLA constituencies to shape a plan.

“The insights I gather from each of you will be central to shaping a collective vision for UCLA’s future. I will share this vision at my inauguration in the spring,” Frenk said in the video.

Lost funding, new funding

This fiscal year’s state budget led to a $134 million net cut in funding for the University of California campuses. The system's chancellors are deciding how to carry out those and likely future cuts.

UCLA is also trying to be designated as a Hispanic-serving institution. The university’s Hispanic student population was just under 20% in the fall of 2023. It rose about 1% in each of the previous years.

The designation would allow UCLA to access new federal funds, but would also require administrators to offer Hispanic students more support, including financial aid.

A new labor contract

Labor negotiations are set for later this year for the union that represents nearly 50,000 UC academic workers. Frenk will have input.

“We're looking forward to working with Chancellor Frenk and to resetting the relationship between the administration and our members who do the bulk of teaching and research at UCLA,” said UCLA doctoral student Rafael Jaime, who’s also president of UAW Local 4811, the UC-wide union that represents nearly 50,000 academic workers at the 10 campuses.

His union went on strike in 2022 during the academic term and upended education for thousands of students.

High hopes in the Big Ten

Sports have recently become an even bigger part of UCLA’s budget and identity with UCLA's entry into the Big Ten sports conference. Now, can the university compete on that level and can it bring in the money that leaders expect?

UCLA football ended 14th out of 18 teams in its first season in the Big Ten. Frenk knows about college sports: In his last job as president of University of Miami, he managed high expectations of the legendary Hurricanes’ football program.

In some states that kind of record by a university football program could lead to pressure on a university’s president from as high up as the governor’s office.

“I don't see Gavin Newsom applying pressure on the chancellor at UCLA to get their athletic program to be more successful,” said Dennis Farrell, commissioner of the Big West Conference for 28 years until 2019.

But that doesn’t mean Frenk won’t step in to hold athletic administrators accountable, Farrell said, if UCLA football continues to have losing seasons like this inaugural one.

“The pressure upon a chancellor at a University of California system school probably comes from alumni and boosters. Certainly the media plays a factor in that as well,” Farrell said.

As SpaceX prepares for its public offering, it's undergoing a critical test of the largest rocket ever built.

Later on Thursday, the company is set to conduct a launch of a heavily redesigned version of its Starship rocket. The new rocket will fly using dozens of new Raptor 3 engines powered by a novel fuel system in the booster. It will also carry upgraded avionics, satellites, and test ports for a future refueling system that could allow Starship to one day reach other destinations like the Moon and even Mars.

The launch comes a little under a month before investors expect SpaceX's much-anticipated initial public offering. Many analysts expect SpaceX to raise up to $75 billion, and to be valued at up to $1.5 trillion. The amount raised could make this the largest IPO ever, and make SpaceX one of the most valuable companies in the world.

But a lot of that may rest on how Starship performs.

The launch is "super important for the IPO," said Franco Granda, a senior researcher who covers SpaceX for the data firm, PitchBook. He believes that if Starship's launch goes badly, it could cause investors' excitement for the IPO "to diminish quite dramatically."

"Even though tests are inherently tests, and failure typically doesn't dictate what happens later on, I think SpaceX will want to get this one right," he said.

Financial disclosures released on Wednesday show just how critical the test is. SpaceX is spending billions of dollars per year developing Starship. The development is eating up the profits from its launch business, which operated at a $662 million loss in the first quarter of this year.

Cheap, frequent launches key to the business model

Starship is unlike any rocket ever built. Standing at around 400 feet in height, it's made of durable, but heavy, stainless steel. To overcome its bulk, the spacecraft sits atop an enormous booster called "Super Heavy" that shoots it skyward with 33 Raptor engines. After Starship separates from the booster, it can ignite its six engines to get to space, while the booster is capable of flying back to earth and landing at its launchpad.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that the ultimate goal is to make Starship return to the pad, allowing the entire system to be reused almost instantaneously. If it works, it would radically lower the cost of launches.

That's key to SpaceX's short-term and long-term vision. The rocket is expected to carry larger, more capable satellites for the company's Starlink internet service. It's also being developed into a lunar lander for NASA and as a possible rocket to Mars. Most recently, Musk proposed that Starship could be used to launch data centers into space, where they could use solar power to run AI chips.

"Starship is a critical piece of the puzzle," Musk said during an event in March to unveil a new chip fabrication facility. To achieve SpaceX's goals, "you need massive payload to space, and Starship will enable that."

The new financial disclosure document reveals just how much of SpaceX's future relies on Starship's development. 

"Any failure or delay in the development of Starship at scale or in achieving the required launch cadence, reusability and capabilities thereafter would delay or limit our ability to execute our growth strategy," the document says. 

It also puts real numbers on how much money SpaceX is spending to develop the giant rocket. In 2025, the company spent a little over $3 billion dollars. In the first quarter of 2026, it spent another $930 million on Starship development.

SpaceX's new Raptor 3 engines deliver more thrust and contain numerous technological improvements, but they have yet to be tested in flight.

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Success is far from assured. The first version of Starship launched in April of 2023, but failed to separate from its booster and tumbled out of control before exploding. It took three tries before the rocket eventually reached space. The second version of the spacecraft was plagued by multiple failed attempts throughout 2025, though its final two launches went as expected.

This third version is an ambitious redesign, said Scott Manley, an engineer and YouTuber who closely tracks Starship's development. Manley said that the latest version of Starship is more refined. Heat tiles appear more carefully placed, and clunky, temporary fixes, like a "hot staging ring" that was bolted onto the booster after the first accident, have been integrated into the design.

"It looks more like a rocket and less like a bunch of grain silos welded together," he said.

Manly said he's particularly interested in how the rocket's new Raptor 3 engines perform. The engines have been heavily redesigned to increase thrust and eliminate the need for bulky shielding on the bottom of the rocket. The engines have been extensively tested, but they haven't been to space before. "We don't know how they're going to perform under flight circumstances."

Even if the newest version of Starship flies as expected, the space launch company faces a long path towards making the behemoth rocket work as a business proposition. Starship's heat shield has not yet proven durable enough to survive multiple trips through the atmosphere and the spacecraft itself has yet to attempt a landing at the pad in Brownsville, Texas.

Getting all the parts of Starship to work as planned is far more complex than what SpaceX has done with its existing rocket, the Falcon 9, said Tim Farrar, the president of TMF associates, which analyzes mobile satellite services. Starship is "a multidimensional problem that they haven't actually solved yet," he said.

"You can't justify a valuation well in excess of a trillion dollars based on what SpaceX is doing today," Farrar said. "You've got to believe that Musk will come up with something much bigger than that."
Copyright 2026 NPR

Amid tech layoffs, anxiety around artificial intelligence and a forthcoming run for president, Gov. Gavin Newsom today signed an executive order that calls for state agencies to explore ways to mitigate job losses stemming from AI.

The order, among other things, tells state agencies to explore severance policies, subsidized employment and other ways to help displaced workers. It also calls for a report on the impact of AI on the California labor market.

In addition, it calls for the study of increased job training , stock compensation, cooperative business ownership for workers and how unions are negotiating over AI.

Newsom signed executive orders last month and in 2023 simultaneously putting in place AI protections and encouraging state agencies to use the technology.

The latest order comes a day after Facebook owner Meta laid off 8,000 workers, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg citing AI in a memo to staff after the cuts. Tech companies Cisco and Block also recently cited AI after laying off thousands of workers. The order also comes two days after the California Senate passed the No Robo Bosses Act, which prevents businesses from using decisions made by AI and other automated systems as the sole reason a person gets fired or disciplined. Newsom vetoed a similar bill last fall.

In February, AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler, members of the California Labor Federation and labor leaders in Democratic primary states pledged to pull support for a Newsom 2028 presidential campaign if he didn’t take steps to protect workers from artificial intelligence. Newsom’s veto of the predecessor of the No Robo Bosses Act was named as a reason for that pledge.

In a statement shared with CalMatters, California Labor Federation president Lorena Gonzalez said the executive order is welcome but not enough.

"We are glad that Governor Newsom is acknowledging the potential harm of AI on workers, but it's not enough to just study the issue, we have to take action now. Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it's a political choice,” she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Los Angeles Metro is suing Burbank over its refusal to grant construction permits for the local portion of a rapid bus route from North Hollywood to Pasadena.

The Burbank City Council only learned about the lawsuit halfway through a six-hour meeting about the bus on May 20. After the revelation, council members wondered aloud if Metro was watching the live stream and questioned what the purpose of the meeting was if they were now, apparently, in active litigation.

The special meeting was called to update the public over staff’s concerns about how a new state housing law could affect zoning around the long-planned bus stops along Olive Avenue.

“It turned out the update was more than we thought,” Burbank City Attorney Joseph McDougall said during the meeting. McDougall said the city hadn’t yet been served as of Wednesday evening.

According to a copy of the complaint filed on May 19 in L.A. County Superior Court, Metro argues that Burbank doesn’t have the authority to refuse the construction permits under the California Environmental Quality Act and an agreement forged between the countywide transportation agency and the city.

Metro is asking the court to direct Burbank to “cease conditioning issuance, approval, or processing” of project permits on any of the city’s issues with the design of the bus route.

Fast facts about the project

In 2022, Metro’s Board gave final approval for a 19 mile-long bus rapid transit route that features 22 stops through North Hollywood, Burbank, Glendale, Eagle Rock and Pasadena.

Bus rapid transit projects are those that typically feature dedicated bus lanes, signal priority and enhanced stations. Think of a bus rapid transit as a light rail on wheels instead of tracks.

The bus rapid transit project is funded in part with nearly $270 million of local sales taxes collected through Measure M, which county voters approved in 2016.

Metro is looking to break ground in July 2026 so the bus is operational in time for the 2028 Olympic Games.

The center of the ongoing battle between Burbank and Metro is the section of yellow in the Burbank portion of the bus rapid transit route showing that the countywide transportation agency wants to construct side-running dedicated bus lanes.

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Competing perspectives on the bus lanes

The city of Burbank has been resolute through the bus route’s design process that it doesn’t want dedicated lanes along Olive Avenue. The city’s position is that dedicated bus lanes would leave only one driving lane in each direction on the arterial street, causing congestion and spillover traffic on smaller, neighboring streets.

It has instead advocated for the bus to run with other traffic to preserve all the driving lanes.

Metro’s position, according to the lawsuit, is that removing dedicated bus lanes would “materially increase travel time and reduce reliability and ridership … undermining the premium transit service that justified the public investment under Measure M.”

What does housing have to do with this?

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 79 in 2025, which establishes regulations that allow for higher and more-dense housing around specific kinds of transit stops than what local zoning rules would otherwise permit.

The qualifying transit stops in the region have yet to be determined. Still, David Kriske, Burbank’s assistant community development director for transportation, said the bus rapid transit could trigger the law since the five of the six stops in the city would be serviced by buses traveling along full-time, dedicated lanes.

In January, Burbank requested Metro do an additional environmental impact review of the project, specifically on any new land use impacts in light of the bill’s passage.

In a March letter to the city, Ray Sosa, Metro’s chief planning officer, said “the adoption of statewide legislation that could potentially result in development or redevelopment of parcels near project stops does not require Metro to re-open an environmental review concluded nearly four years ago.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, city officials displayed a poster board showing the potential areas that could be upzoned around the planned bus stops. One incensed public commenter pointed at the map and said it looked like “detonation zones and blast radiuses from Metro into Burbank.”

Metro's Board voted earlier this year to oppose implementation of the law.

This image displayed on a poster board facing the public at the May 20 shows where the city of Burbank thinks SB79 would apply because of Metro's bus rapid transit project.

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More on the lawsuit

Metro’s legal action isn’t entirely surprising. According to a letter to the city attorney attached to the lawsuit, Metro’s outside counsel had presented a draft of the complaint to the city on May 8.

Metro said in a statement that it “had little choice but to file a suit” since Burbank has “decided to withhold all permits unless Metro removes dedicated bus lanes or conducts additional environmental review because of the passage of SB 79.”

The countywide transportation agency’s lawsuit says it has spent nearly $44 million so far on design and pre-construction of the bus route and that “each day of delay increases Metro’s damages and threatens its ability to deliver the project” by the 2028 Games.

Jonathan Jones, communications manager for Burbank, said the city won't comment on pending litigation.