Mortgage insurer FHA to make major cuts

The Trump administration is planning to lay off at least 40% of the workers at the federal agency that provides mortgage insurance on loans for people who otherwise wouldn’t qualify for one, according to two sources familiar with the agency’s plans.

Federal officials are preparing to cut employees at the Federal Housing Administration, the office that helps certain homebuyers secure a loan if they can’t afford a down payment or have below-average credit scores, the sources said. It also protects lenders against losses on those loans.

The FHA is one of the largest mortgage insurers in the world and has insured more than 40 million home loans since 1934, according to the agency’s website.

The Trump administration cut thousands of employees in recent days, after President Donald Trump directed agency heads to do so. He told officials to focus on firing workers who “perform functions not mandated by statute,” including “diversity, equity and inclusion programs.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the parent agency for the FHA, plans to discharge 50% of its workforce, Bloomberg previously reported.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. eliminated employees on Monday. The FDIC insures deposits in U.S. banks.

Ford cuts bonuses for some managers

Ford Motor Co. is eliminating stock award bonuses for about half of its middle managers in an effort to boost performance as the automaker confronts declining profits and high costs.

Ford has told employees roughly half of middle management won’t get stock award bonuses, which are typically granted in March and vest over three years. The move affects about 3,300 of Ford’s 76,000 global salaried employees. Chief Executive Officer Jim Farley is pushing his salaried ranks to improve performance as Ford forecasts a year when earnings before interest and taxes will fall by $2 billion or more.

Ford has struggled to rein in warranty repair costs and other expenses that Farley has said puts the company at a $7 billion to $8 billion disadvantage compared to rivals. The automaker also is projecting losses of up to $5.5 billion in its electric vehicle business this year, which it is overhauling after losing $5.1 billion on battery-powered cars last year.

Ford is aiming to cut $1 billion in costs this year.

Musk debuts Grok-3 AI to rival OpenAI

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI debuted its updated Grok-3 model, showcasing a version of the chatbot technology to challenge OpenAI days after the billionaire’s unsolicited cash bid to buy the company was rejected.

Grok-3 claims to beat OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Alphabet’s Google Gemini, DeepSeek’s V3 model and Anthropic’s Claude across math, science and coding benchmarks, xAI said Monday. Grok-3 has “more than 10 times” the compute power of its predecessor and completed pretraining in early January, Musk said in a presentation alongside three xAI engineers.

Musk’s performance claims, which have not been independently verified, ramp up an increasingly bitter rivalry between his startup and OpenAI. He launched xAI in 2023 as an alternative to the ChatGPT maker, which he’s publicly criticized for its plans to restructure as a for-profit business.

Musk, the world’s richest person, has filed two lawsuits against OpenAI for allegedly straying from its founding principles and offered to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit arm for $97.4 billion in a bid that was rejected last week.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman classified the bid as a tactic to “slow us down.”

Compiled from Bloomberg reports.