u/fortune

There’s an idea about how political power is supposed to work in the U.S. To guard against anything resembling monarchy, the founders vested Congress, not the president, with the power of the purse. The premise was simple: kings tax and spend at will. American presidents aren’t supposed to. Of course, it’s well known that this boundary is being stress-tested by President Donald Trump. What isn’t is that it’s related to his solution to the crisis at airports, with TSA agents going unpaid due to the partial government shutdown related to Trump’s controversial immigration regime.

Trump signed an executive order last week to pay TSA agents. The order directs the Secretary of Homeland Security “to use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations to provide TSA employees with the compensation and benefits that would have accrued to them if not for the Democrat-led DHS shutdown.”

Some policy and legal experts say Trump’s order relies on funding from legally questionable sources. The White House hasn’t exactly specified where within the tax and spending bill the money is coming from. But Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, said in an interview with CNBC, there’s just one section deep in the more than 300 pages of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act where the money can be coming from.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/04/03/donald-trump-tsa-funding-slush-fund-budget-experts-warn/

Leslie Sherman-Shafer, an Uber driver in the San Francisco Bay Area, likes to start each shift with a full tank of gas.

It used to cost her around $25 to fill up her Toyota Corolla. She’s spent closer to $40 since the Iran war began and pushed up the average U.S. price for a gallon of regular gasoline by $1. Sherman-Shafer, a retired dental office assistant who picks up Uber passengers five days a week, said she’s putting in extra hours to cover the difference.

“We don’t get reimbursed for gas. We rely on the generosity of the tip,” Sherman-Shafer said. Some passengers have tipped more to compensate for higher gas prices, but most don’t tip at all, she said.

As the war enters a fifth week and continues to disrupt global oil supplies. many of those workers are now scrambling to make ends meet. The national average price for gas reached $3.99 per gallon on Monday, up 34% from a month earlier, according to AAA.

“With everything going up, it’s impossible to save a dime,” Sherman-Shafer said.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/03/30/iran-war-gas-price-inflation-25-to-40-per-tank-uber-driver/

It was showtime for the employees of CoolIT.

In the late afternoon of March 25th, as an unexpected snowstorm blanketed Calgary, Canada, around 600 mainly front-line workers of CoolIT Systems gathered under an immense tent for a highly anticipated Town Hall. Less than three years earlier, private equity colossus KKR had purchased CoolIT, and as it does for all its acquisitions, awarded equity to everyone. In this case, that meant everyone from thermal mechanical engineers to security guards at the liquid cooling purveyor for big tech infrastructure.

Five days earlier, these folks got the official word that KKR and its partner the sovereign wealth investor of Abu Dhabi, were selling their employer to Ecolab, the industrial water treatment giant, for $4.75 billion, or around 18 times CoolIT’s roughly $270 million valuation when KKR took charge.

The employees knew they were shareholders, and that a sale would trigger cash payouts for everyone, and the crowd was about to find out how much. The new deal, and the money it would bring them, was still another stunner in what had been a dizzying rise under KKR, a moonshot that already left the old-timers I spoke to amazed.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/03/29/kkr-coolit-checks-employee-ownership-payout-private-equity/

The ski season of 2025-2026 is winding down—and it was a tough one for Vail Resorts, the world’s largest operator of ski hills. With snowfall 60% below normal for the season through February in its home state of Colorado and low in neighboring Utah, Vail has seen skiers and snowboarders stay away in droves.

Adding to the pressure on Vail, it has been the second difficult winter in a row. Last year, in addition to insufficient snow in many locales, the company saw a 12-day ski-patrol strike close most runs at its largest resort in Park City, Utah, leaving countless customers disappointed, including venture capitalists energetically taking to X to air their dissatisfaction over having to wait in long lift lines. The crisis led to the departure of former CEO Kirsten Lynch a few months later.

Now the focus is on next season: Sales of the Epic Pass have been slow for a couple of years now, and Vail brought back its former long-time CEO Rob Katz to steer the company through the effects of climate change, a slow-growing industry, and growing competition from other sports.

“We’ve had some challenges, some of which were on us, some of which were not,” Katz, CEO from 2006 to 2021 in his first go around, told Fortune earlier this month. “In coming back as CEO, the most important thing was realizing that the industry is different now, the consumer is different, the company is different.”

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/03/26/vail-resorts-snow-climate-change-ceo-rob-katz/