The Brief

Updated October 29, 2025 at 14:58 PM ET

This story was originally published on Nov. 13, 2023, and has been updated.

It's stressful to fly around the holidays. Airports are packed, tickets are expensive and bad weather can cause significant flight delays and cancellations.

So, if you have to travel, is there an optimal time to do so? Scott Keyes, founder of the travel site Going.com (formerly known as Scott's Cheap Flights), shares his recommendations, including days to avoid and the best time of day to fly.

Don't travel ahead of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve

"It's one of the worst times to travel," he says, due to flight disruptions, crowds at the airport and ticket prices. "My secret, best advice for travel over the holidays is: If at all possible, just don't do it."

If you have to fly for the holidays, do it on the day itself

"You just see far fewer people traveling then," says Keyes. "And with fewer people, you can see lower fares and fewer disruptions," including delays and cancelations. So think about booking tickets to depart or arrive on Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve or New Year's Day.

Avoid peak travel days

For a lot of folks, the whole point of traveling during this time of year is to be with family on the actual holiday, says Keyes. "The few days before and after a holiday are when you see the most crowds."

For Thanksgiving, the busiest travel days are the Tuesday and Wednesday before the holiday and the Saturday and Sunday after, he says. For Christmas, it's between Dec. 20 to Jan. 5.

A travel delay that stretches out over a few days, like a snowstorm, can quickly ruin a trip, he adds. "That's when you're going to have the most competition with other travelers" for a limited amount of seats if you're trying to rebook a flight.

To avoid this situation, Keyes recommends flying a few days before or after these peak travel times. So instead of flying on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, you might consider traveling a few days earlier.

Travel in January — the 8th, to be precise

If you can wait, travel in January, says Keyes. You will probably have a much better flight experience.

Keyes even has a preferred date for that month: Jan. 8, he adds. "It's my favorite date of the entire year. I circle that date on the calendar because whereas flight prices really get inflated over the Christmas-New Year period, around Jan. 8, they just fall off a cliff from the most expensive time of the entire year to the absolute cheapest."

"It's not atypical to see airfares 80% lower on Jan. 10 compared to the same route on Dec. 30," he says.

Take an early and direct flight

"There are two types of flights that have the highest odds of getting you to where you're going on time or at least without a major delay: early morning flights and nonstop flights," says Keyes.

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation's Air Travel Consumer Report for September, flights between 6-9 a.m. had an 86% on-time departure rate, versus 50% for flights between 8-11 p.m.

With morning flights, "Your plane [has been] at the airport overnight. It's sitting there and ready to go when you get there in the morning," he says. Afternoon flights, on the other hand, depend on planes that are flying in from somewhere else and may be subject to delays.

Direct flights have the advantage of not having layovers. "If you take a connecting flight that gets delayed an hour and a half but you only had a one-hour layover, all of a sudden you've missed your connecting flight and you have to get rebooked" — not an easy feat during the holiday season.

Prepare yourself for potential flight disruptions that may keep you at the airport. Keyes likes to pack "noise-canceling headphones and a little snack box, because frankly, airport food is not very memorable," he says. And he likes to download a few books and movies to his iPad — "just in case I'm having to hang out at the airport longer than expected."

The audio was produced by Clare Marie Schneider. The digital story was edited by Malaka Gharib. The visual producer is Kaz Fantone.

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Copyright 2025 NPR

This story was originally published by Boyle Heights Beat on Feb. 6, 2026.

Bad Bunny isn’t just topping charts — he’s landed on college syllabi.

Now, as the Puerto Rican superstar is set to take the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show this Sunday, a Cal State LA professor is inviting the wider community to unpack what the moment says about Latinidad.

José G. Anguiano, a professor and department chair of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, is hosting a plática on Monday to reflect on how Latinos are celebrated and sometimes overlooked during major sports culture moments.

The selection of Bad Bunny as the Super Bowl halftime performer has sparked much interest and controversy, with some perceiving the artist — who only sings in Spanish — as not American or mainstream enough to headline the show.

As part of the conversation — “Pláticas con Profes: ¿Bad Bunny ‘Too Latino’ for the Super Bowl?”— Anguiano wants to explore why some Americans see him as a controversial pick.

Bad Bunny not falling in line with “white American Anglo culture” doesn’t make him any less American, said Anguiano.

The professor reminds the public that Bad Bunny — born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — is an American citizen. The fact that he speaks Spanish, “I would argue is a very American thing,” he said.

“Given the current administration, I think that’s part of the conversation about why he’s so important,” Anguiano said.

Anguiano is also gearing up to teach a special topics course on Bad Bunny in the spring of 2027 at Cal State LA. Bad Bunny, Anguiano said, is an entry point to learn about broader cultural history.

He thinks of the song “El Apagón,” which sheds light on power outages, government corruption and the displacement of native Puerto Ricans. In “Yo Perreo Sola,” which Bad Bunny dedicated to “those who desire to dance alone and safely in the club,” Anguiano finds ways to talk about gender and sexuality.

“I know some people don’t take popular music as a serious subject, but … there’s really important things that are happening through music,” Anguiano said.

Children’s Hospital of Orange County and Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego ended their gender affirming hormone therapy on Friday to people under 19, pending a legal challenge from Attorney General Rob Bonta.

The closure leaves hundreds of patients in limbo at Rady Children’s Health, the largest pediatric hospital system in California.

Growing restrictions and fewer options

When San Diego father Brett heard about the Rady Children’s Health closure, he was shocked.

“The whole world kind of dropped out from under me,” he said.

Brett had been preparing for this after a spate of closures and restrictions last year among California providers and nationwide. But he said he wasn’t ready for the feelings of anger and abandonment that soon followed.

Brett’s son started getting hormone treatment at Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego about a year and a half ago. Brett says they were happy with their endocrinologist, who was “overwhelmingly loving” — and he was also comforted by her assurances that they could go off of the hormone treatments if needed.

Before the announcement, he said his family had no plans to cease hormone treatments before they got the news. But he doesn’t know where he’ll get his son’s testosterone now.

The legal challenge ahead

Bonta filed suit on behalf of the state seeking a permanent injunction citing that the hospital broke its contract when it guaranteed the health care system would maintain the same level of gender-affirming care through 2034.

Though the lawsuit is a narrow one that only applies to Rady Children Health, it was still celebrated by LGBTQ groups and organizers in Orange County.

A CHOC spokesperson told LAist at the time that it would address Bonta’s concerns “through the legal process.”

Bonta filed the suit in the state Superior Court of San Diego County. The court has yet to issue a ruling on Bonta’s request for an injunction.

Providers in California and nationwide feel fear

Experts have said this follows actions from the Trump administration to restrict gender-affirming care through a variety of enforcement mechanisms. The most recent action threatened to pull Medicare and Medicaid funding to hospitals that provide gender-affirming hormones and surgeries to minors.

“People go into pediatrics or adolescent medicine because they care about kids, not because they wanna have some giant fight with the federal government about an existential question of whether their hospital or their clinic can stay open,” said Kellan Baker, senior advisor for health policy at the think tank Movement Advancement Project.

Baker pointed to statistics that hospitals nationwide receive about 50% of their funding from Medicare and Medicaid. At some, such as Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, that percentage is even higher.

Alex Sheldon, executive director of GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality, is also worried about whether the federal government will use these same policies to restrict funding for areas like vaccine and cancer research.

“ This is like forcing a firefighter not to use water because the government doesn't like who lives in the burning house,” they said. “Those flames will spread and everyone will get burned.”

The Trump administration weighs in

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement that gender affirming care did “not meet professionally recognized standards of health care.”

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society and the American Psychological Association have all opposed that view, saying that this care is evidence-based and necessary for trans mental health.

Families forced to make other plans

Other providers, including telehealth providers, can step in to fill the gap, though some families say they aren’t a replacement for in-person services.

“ We'll do everything in our power to protect providers from this large scale efforts of criminalization of care that remains legal,” said Sheldon, who says they’ve been in touch with hundreds of medical providers in California and across the country.

For his part, Brett understands the position his doctors are in and doesn’t blame them for the hospital’s decisions. But his family is now considering moving abroad.

It’ll be a hard pill for Brett to swallow, since he can trace his ancestry back to a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“There's a feeling of having to flee this country,” he said. “ And that means leaving the country that we were all born in, that we all love, that we believed would protect every citizen.”

California is again updating the system it uses to decide which polluted communities get cleanup funding. The tool, CalEnviroScreen, has already steered billions of dollars to the state’s most burdened neighborhoods, but critics say it still overlooks some of them.

The update is reigniting a long-smoldering debate: officials promise they're listening to communities more than ever, while advocates say the state's data gaps leave some areas invisible to the system designed to help them.

What’s new

Officials at the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, the state agency managing the tool, said they worked with eight community organizations to design this fifth update – including the Environmental Health Coalition, UNIDOS Network and Comite Civico del Valle. The update adds two indicators: diabetes prevalence, because people with diabetes are more vulnerable to air pollution; and small air toxic sites, to track additional risks from sources like urban oil wells and dry cleaners.

EnviroScreen also incorporates data improvements among some of the 21 other indicators it uses, such as adding children’s blood lead levels to a risk assessment for lead exposure from housing. The state will hold virtual and in-person public meetings this month to gather feedback; officials said they expect to publish a final version in the summer.

“We listen to stakeholders, community groups, academics, government agencies to understand any new layers that might be needed to better characterize both the pollution burden and the population vulnerability,” said Álvaro Alvarado, the environmental agency’s supervising toxicologist. “It's a constant work in progress.”

State law requires at least 25% of California's cap-and-invest funds — money raised through greenhouse gas auctions — go to the most disadvantaged communities. Since 2014, the state has used CalEnviroScreen to define them, including the top 25% of census tracts in that definition.

Laura August, the agency’s environmental program manager, said the update does not dramatically shift the census tracts identified as among the most polluted. She said the Bay Area and Central Valley decreased in the ranking slightly. About 80% of communities designated as disadvantaged remain unchanged in the new update, she said.

How the tool works and what it’s missing

Disadvantaged communities have received at least $5.8 billion in cap-and-invest funds since 2015.

Environmental advocates said that although the tool is essential and provides important resources, it still leaves out important information. Some critics want to see additional indicators, such as tree canopy coverage and wildfire smoke data.

“It would need to have the kind of ground-truthing work … which is to literally walk the neighborhood and count and calculate all the different polluting sources (and stressors) like heat islands and lack of tree cover and water stress,” said Rebecca Overmyer-Velazquez, a coordinator for the Clean Air Coalition of North Whittier and Avocado Heights.

State environmental officials said they plan to incorporate climate data and data about pollution magnets, like warehouses, in future versions of the tool.

Questions about the methodology

Beyond what data to include, researchers have also questioned whether the tool's design itself creates blind spots.

In 2024, researchers with Johns Hopkins University found the previous version of the tool, CalEnviroScreen 4.0, was subjective enough that certain communities could be losing out on billions of dollars.

“If you're the model developer, even if you don't feel that you have any personal biases or you're not thinking about it, all those choices that you make when you make the model, you are implicitly deciding who gets funding and who doesn't,” said Benjamin Huynh, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For example, the current version of CalEnviroScreen includes data about emergency room visits for asthma as an indicator of how sensitive to air pollution people in a particular area are. But some people, including immigrants, are less likely to visit an emergency room than others – or even visit doctors in the first place, to get diagnosed.

August said the agency took researchers’ criticism seriously. Late last year, she and other state scientists defended the tool in a published report, finding that the state’s methods "prioritize generalizability, dissemination, and utilization without sacrificing accuracy."

Advocates want real change 

But even with improvements to the data, advocates said the bigger problem is how the tool gets used — or not used.

CalEnviroScreen was a product, in part, of advocacy from environmental justice leaders in the 1990s. But advocates said they aren’t sure whether the programs funded by the money are actually leading to pollution reduction, and agencies aren’t using the tool aggressively enough in their own policies.

Parents and children join the Lincoln Heights Community Coalition in a rally outside Hillside Elementary School, protesting the development of a warehouse across the street that activists say would harm the health of local residents, in Los Angeles on Nov. 26, 2024.

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Bradley Angel, director of the environmental group Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, faulted the state for not using the tool to deny waste permits to polluters.

“It's great that CalEnviroScreen exists … but when communities and environmental justice groups were advocating for what became CalEnviroScreen, they weren't looking at dollar signs. They were looking to protect our health,” Angel said.

State agencies do use the tool in some policy decisions. The Air Resources Board used EnviroScreen to determine which communities would be a part of its Community Air Protection program, which aims to reduce air pollution.

Under a draft regulation, officials with the Department of Toxic Substances Control said it will use CalEnviroScreen as a proxy for cumulative impacts in permitting decisions. But environmental advocates have called the regulation flawed because those impacts cannot prevent the department from issuing a hazardous waste permit.

“Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, (the department) pays lip service to CalEnviroScreen’s own information,” Angel said.

Looking to other states

At least one other state proves that more aggressive responses to environmental justice indicators are possible, advocates said.

New Jersey has developed a data tool, influenced by CalEnviroScreen. Two years ago, New Jersey started requiring polluting facilities to use its tool to analyze cumulative impacts of different pollution sources in a community. State regulators must deny permits to facilities that can’t avoid harm to overburdened communities.

“The tool is just a tool,” said Caroline Farrell, director of the Environmental Law and Justice Clinic at Golden Gate University. “You've got to be able to figure out how you want to utilize it in a way that actually changes things on the ground for communities.”

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

In October 2020, President Donald Trump unveiled a plan to grant himself the power to fire vast numbers of civil servants for any reason should they get in the way of his agenda.

Five and a half years later, that plan has come to fruition, despite vast public opposition.

Starting March 9, an unspecified number of federal employees could lose their current job protections and be converted into at-will employees at Trump's discretion. That's according to a final rule issued Friday by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the agency that handles many human resources functions for the federal government.

Under current law, the civil service is meant to be apolitical, providing continuity for the government from one presidential administration to another. But over the past year, Trump has shown a willingness – and at times an eagerness – to fire those career federal employees whom he perceives as political opponents, such as rank-and-file Justice Department attorneys involved in Jan. 6 prosecutions.

The rule would make firing such staff much easier. Entitled "Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service," it allows for the president to move federal employees in "policy-influencing" roles into a new category of employees called Schedule Policy/Career. OPM previously estimated some 50,000 positions could be reclassified.

The rule explains that while federal agencies will review their workforces and ask OPM to recommend positions be moved, the president will make the final call on which positions are reclassified.

OPM received more than 40,000 comments during the public comment period – 94% of which opposed the rule. The administration chalked up a lot of the opposition to misunderstandings – of existing federal laws and of the intentions of the rule.

The Trump administration has argued that the change is a necessary step to make the bureaucracy more efficient and accountable, citing the widely-held sentiment that it's too hard for the government to fire poor performers as well as reports of federal employees "slow walking" or otherwise obstructing Trump's directives.

The president's critics say the rule further allows Trump – and any future president – to politicize the civil service, and they warn of consequences for the American people.

"Our government needs serious improvements to make it more effective and accountable, but one thing that doesn't need changing is the notion that it exists to serve the American people and not any individual president," said Max Stier, president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service in a statement. "This new designation can be used to remove expert career federal employees who place the law and service to the public ahead of blind loyalty and replace them with political supporters who will unquestioningly do the president's bidding."

Max Stier is the president of the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service.

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Currently, around 4,000 political appointees within the federal government can be fired at will, a number Stier says is already far higher than in other democracies.

Unclear which positions or how many will be reclassified

It remains unclear which positions will be subject to reclassification. The rule applies to "policy-influencing positions," which, according to the 255-page document, would include supervisors of individuals in such positions.

In the rule, OPM insists that "the vast majority" of those appointed under Schedule Policy/Career will still be protected from prohibited personnel practices including retaliation against whistleblowing. However, they will no longer be able to file complaints with the Merit Systems Protection Board, the federal agency that hears employee challenges to such actions. The Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistleblower complaints, no longer operates independently since Trump's firing last year of the Senate-confirmed leader of that agency.

While reclassified employees would theoretically retain the right to file discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the rule notes that the president himself is not subject to federal employment anti-discrimination laws.

Legal challenges ahead

The rule, which was first announced last year, already faces multiple lawsuits, including one filed by Democracy Forward. The legal organization has filed numerous lawsuits seeking to block the Trump administration's overhaul of the federal government.

"This is a deliberate attempt to do through regulation what the law does not allow — strip public servants of their rights and make it easier to fire them for political reasons and harm the American people through doing so," said Skye Perryman, the group's president and CEO, in a statement. "We have successfully fought this kind of power grab before, and we will fight this again."
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