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U.S. Poised to Provide Abrams Tanks to Ukraine

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WASHINGTON—The Biden administration is poised to send a significant number of Abrams M1 tanks to Ukraine, settling a rift that threatened the unity of the alliance supporting Ukraine at a pivotal moment in the war, U.S. officials said.

The move, which could be announced as soon as Wednesday, would be part of a broader diplomatic understanding with Germany in which Berlin would agree to send a smaller number of its own Leopard 2 tanks and would approve the delivery of more of the German-made tanks by Poland and other nations.

The shift in the U.S. position follows a Jan. 17 call between President Biden and German Chancellor

Olaf Scholz

in which Mr. Biden agreed to look into providing the Abrams tanks against the judgment of the Pentagon, which thought the tanks would be too difficult for Ukraine to field and maintain.

A German-built Leopard tank was used in a military exercise in May in Nowogard, Poland.



Photo:

wojtek radwanski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

A senior German official said that the issue had been the subject of intense negotiation between Washington and Berlin for more than a week, which included discussions between National Security Jake Sullivan and his German counterpart.

The White House declined to comment on the deliberations or say when the first Abrams might be delivered. But some U.S. officials said it might take 12 months.

Germany’s defense minister, Boris Pistorius, told German television last week that German and U.S. tanks don’t need to be provided at the same time, leaving an opening for the U.S. to provide the Abrams at a later point.

A senior German politician said Tuesday that Germany’s government would pledge to provide around 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Kyiv from its stocks and approve third-party requests from other European countries to donate German-made tanks to Ukraine as soon as the agreement with the U.S. is announced.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. and Europe have sent Kyiv tens of billions of dollars in military aid, including heavy artillery, missile launchers, millions of munitions, air defenses and infantry fighting vehicles, but the infusion of new armor would come at a critical moment in the war.

Ukrainian officials have been planning a counteroffensive in the coming months to regain territory, including to the south where Russia has established a land bridge from Rostov to the Crimean Peninsula. Russia, which has been mobilizing hundreds of thousands of additional troops, is planning its own operations.

In a contentious meeting last week at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, the U.S. and its allies failed to persuade Germany to provide the tanks and allow other nations to send their German-made tanks. That exposed the first serious division in the alliance that has supported Kyiv, a coalition of nations assembled since Russia invaded Ukraine last February and that has been more or less defined by consensus.

German officials had initially said that they wouldn’t be the first to send tanks to Ukraine and wouldn’t do so unless the U.S. provided its own Abrams tanks. That put pressure on Germany but also the U.S. to contribute its tanks.

Poland’s defense minister said Tuesday that Poland had asked Germany for permission to send some of its German-made tanks to Ukraine. “The Germans have already received our request for consent to transfer Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine,” Defense Minister

Mariusz Błaszczak

said. “I also appeal to the German side to join the coalition of countries supporting Ukraine with Leopard 2 tanks.”

Publicly, U.S. officials have praised Germany for weapons contributions it has made to Ukraine, including the IRIS-T air defense system and the promise to send a Patriot antimissile battery to supplement the ones pledged by the U.S. and the Netherlands, as well as Marder infantry-fighting vehicles.

Privately, U.S. officials were frustrated by Germany’s refusal to approve the provision of German-made tanks and have debated how to persuade Berlin to change its stance.

Pentagon officials want Leopard tanks for Ukraine, but didn’t want to send the Abrams there now, arguing that the gas-guzzling tanks with their gas turbine engines, fuel requirements and substantial amount of training and logistics makes them less-than-desirable for this moment in the nearly yearlong conflict.

Some State Department and White House officials, however, had been open to meeting the German demands on the Abrams to avoid a diplomatic rupture among Ukraine’s backers and to expedite the delivery of more armor. Some Democratic lawmakers close to the White House, such as Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, have also urged that some Abrams be provided.

The British promised earlier this month to send 14 Challenger 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine, but that wasn’t enough to persuade the Germans to release their hold on the Leopards.

A Ukrainian fighter fired a grenade launcher in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region on Monday.



Photo:

STRINGER/REUTERS

Mr. Pistorius, who was sworn into office as German defense minister last week, has said several times that the ultimate decision about sending German tanks to Ukraine lay with Mr. Scholz.

Under German law, the Economy Ministry is responsible for such requests, which need to be coordinated with the Defense Ministry and ultimately be approved by the Chancellery.

Economy Minister

Robert Habeck,

whose Green Party rules in a coalition with Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats, has come out in favor of sending German-made tanks to Ukraine, as has the Green foreign minister. Mr. Habeck would make sure the request is expedited, said officials familiar with his thinking.

U.S. and other NATO officials have suggested that the Leopard tank is most appropriate for Ukraine because of its availability in several countries and the possibility of quickly building supply and maintenance chains.

But German officials said that Mr. Scholz was concerned about ending up with a fleet of almost exclusively German-made tanks being used to fight the Russians in Ukraine, a scenario that could single his country out as a party to the conflict.

“We absolutely want to have German tanks in Ukraine but they need to be part of a broad coalition that would provide a mix of hardware, including the Abrams,” one official said.

The Engels air base, a key aviation hub, was one of the targets of strikes inside Russian territory. WSJ explains what images and videos of the incidents can tell us about Kyiv’s tactics to destabilize Moscow far from the front lines. Photo composite: Eve Hartley via Planet Labs/Maxar

Ukrainian officials said Western tanks were needed urgently and voiced hope that it would be a matter of time before the country receives them.

“The question of time is a question of life for us,”

Oleksiy Danilov,

the secretary of Ukraine’s Security and Defense Council, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

In Moscow, chief of staff Gen.

Valery Gerasimov,

who led the initial invasion and was recently named commander of the Kremlin’s troops in Ukraine, said Russia was facing the entire “collective West” in the war and hadn’t faced such intensive fighting in its modern history.

In his first interview since the invasion, Gen. Gerasimov told government newspaper Argumenty i Fakty that Russia was forced to mobilize 300,000 reservists last year because of the West’s support for Ukraine. He said the draft, which exposed many of the problems of the Russian military including inadequate training and equipment, had faced snags but that the army had since addressed them.

Though President

Vladimir Putin

has said he doesn’t see a need for another mobilization, Russians are girding for a new round. After Russia suffered a string of losses in the early fall, the draft stabilized the front lines and has since appeared to tilt the calculus of attrition in Moscow’s favor, as Russia claimed a series of gains in Ukraine’s east and south this month.

—Evan Gershkovich contributed to this article.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com, Gordon Lubold at gordon.lubold@wsj.com and Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

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Business

DOJ Sues Google, Seeking to Break Up Online Advertising Business

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The Justice Department is seeking the breakup of Google’s business brokering digital advertising across much of the internet, a major expansion of the legal challenges the company faces to its business in the U.S. and abroad.

A lawsuit filed Tuesday, the Justice Department’s second against the

Alphabet Inc.

GOOG -1.98%

unit following one filed in 2020, alleges that Google abuses its role as one of the largest brokers, suppliers and online auctioneers of ads placed on websites and mobile applications. The filing promises a protracted court battle with wide-ranging implications for the digital-advertising industry.

Filed in federal court in Virginia, the case alleges that Google abuses monopoly power in the ad-tech industry, hurting web publishers and advertisers that try to use competing products. Eight states, including California and New York, joined the Justice Department’s lawsuit.

The lawsuit asks the court to unwind Google’s “anticompetitive acquisitions,” such as its 2008 purchase of ad-serving company DoubleClick, and calls for the divestiture of its ad exchange.

“For 15 years Google has pursued a course of anticompetitive conduct that has allowed it to halt the rise of rival technologies, manipulate auction mechanics, insulate itself from competition, and forced advertisers and publishers to use its tools,” Attorney General

Merrick Garland

said at a press conference Tuesday. “Google has engaged in exclusionary conduct that has severely weakened if not destroyed competition in the ad-tech industry.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland said Tuesday that the digital-advertising industry was harmed by Google’s allegedly monopolistic conduct.



Photo:

Al Drago/Bloomberg News

A Google spokesman said the lawsuit “attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector.”

“DOJ is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow,” the spokesman said.

By calling for specific divestitures from Google’s ad-tech business, the Justice Department lawsuit went further in seeking a breakup than some antitrust experts had expected. Shares of Alphabet fell by about 2% in trading on Tuesday.

Though largely invisible to internet users, the ad-tech tools controlled by Google facilitate much of the buying and selling of digital ads that helps fund online publishers. Google’s business includes a tool publishers can use to offer ad space, a product for advertisers to buy those slots and an exchange that automatically links bidders with webpages as they are being loaded for individual users.

Big tech companies such as Google are under a barrage from lawmakers and regulators across multiple continents who have targeted the companies’ dominance in online markets. Justice Department officials also are investigating

Apple Inc.

The Federal Trade Commission has sued

Meta Platforms Inc.’s

Facebook unit over antitrust allegations and

Microsoft Corp.

to block its planned $75 billion acquisition of

Activision Blizzard Inc.

President Biden recently urged lawmakers from both parties to unite behind legislation seeking to rein in tech giants. The European Union also has opened cases looking at alleged anticompetitive conduct by Google, Meta and other companies.

The Justice Department’s 2020 lawsuit against Google targeted its position in online search markets, including an agreement to make Google search the default in Apple’s Safari web browser. Google is fighting the case, which is expected to go to trial this year.

Alphabet gets about 80% of its business from advertising. The Justice Department’s new suit targets the subset of that ad business that brokers the buying and selling of ads on other websites and apps. Google reported $31.7 billion in revenue in 2021 from that ad-brokering activity, or about 12% of Alphabet’s total revenue. Google distributes about 70% of that revenue to web publishers and developers.

Last year, Google offered to split off parts of its ad-tech business into a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella to fend off the most recent Justice Department investigation. DOJ officials rejected the offer and decided to pursue the lawsuit instead.

For years, Google has faced allegations from advertising- and media-industry executives, lawmakers and regulators that its presence at multiple points of the online ad-buying process harms publishers and gives it an unfair advantage over rivals. Google also operates the most popular search engine and the largest online video-streaming site, YouTube, giving rise to allegations it has tilted the market in its own favor.

Rivals say that Google’s power in digital advertising stems from a series of acquisitions Google used to build its ad-tech business, beginning with the company’s $3.1 billion purchase of DoubleClick. The FTC approved the merger in a controversial decision. Google went on to purchase a host of other startups including the mobile-advertising company AdMob.

“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the complaint read.

Google has said it has no plans to sell or exit the ad-tech business. It has also strongly contested claims in a lawsuit filed by state attorneys general, led by Texas, containing allegations similar to the Justice Department complaint. A federal judge denied the bulk of Google’s motion to dismiss the case last year, allowing it to proceed to the discovery stage and ultimately toward trial.

Google’s Android operating system is the most popular in the world—you can find Android code on everything from Peloton bikes to kitchen appliances and even NASA satellites. WSJ’s Dalvin Brown explains why it is the world’s most-used OS. Illustration: Rami Abukalam

Any divestiture of parts of Google’s ad-tech business would cause big ripple effects across the online advertising industry, which has recently shown signs of weakness as consumers dial back purchases in response to worsening economic conditions.

Breaking off parts of Google’s ad-tech business from the rest of the company could take years of litigation to resolve. Depending on the outcome of the case, ad-tech executives have said the results could range from a higher share of ad dollars flowing to publishers to lower overall spending because digital ads would be less efficient without Google brokering them.

The 149-page complaint makes detailed allegations about the internal workings of Google’s ad-tech operations. The suit alleges, for instance, that Google used anticompetitive tactics to build up the market share of its own ad server, which issues requests for advertisements on behalf of websites, and then used that market power to effectively push publishers into sending their ad inventory only to Google’s in-house ad exchange, AdX.

The Justice Department argues, in part, that this conduct locked out rival ad-tech providers, increasing prices for advertisers and costs of publishers.

“Google keeps at least thirty cents—and sometimes far more—of each advertising dollar flowing from advertisers to website publishers through Google’s ad tech tools,” the lawsuit alleges. “Google’s own internal documents concede that Google would earn far less in a competitive market.”

The lawsuit also alleges that Google executives worked to kill a rival online-bidding technology called “header bidding,” which the lawsuit says the company referred to internally as an “existential threat.” As part of a plan dubbed Project Poirot, the company allegedly changed its own ad-buying tools to underbid on behalf of advertisers when they turned to outside ad exchanges that used header bidding, so those rivals would lose more auctions and “dry out,” the complaint says.

At one point, Google also approached

Amazon.com Inc.,

to ask “what it would take for Amazon to stop investing in its header bidding product,” the complaint alleges, adding that Amazon rebuffed those requests.

“Google uses its dominion over digital advertising technology to funnel more transactions to its own ad tech products where it extracts inflated fees to line its own pockets at the expense of the advertisers and publishers it purportedly serves,” the complaint read.

The Justice Department case overlaps in some ways with the late 2020 lawsuit from the group of U.S. states led by Texas.

In Tuesday’s complaint, the Justice Department quotes some of the same internal communications as the Texas-led lawsuit, including how one Google executive compared the company’s control over ad-tech to the financial sector: “The analogy would be if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE,” referring to the New York Stock Exchange.

The case also shares similarities with an investigation that the EU’s top antitrust enforcer, the European Commission, opened in 2021, as well as one by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority. Those probes are exploring allegations that Google favors its own ad-buying tools in the advertising auctions it runs, but also look at other elements of Google’s ad-tech business. The EU, for instance, is also looking at Google’s alleged exclusion of competitors from brokering ad-buys on its video site YouTube.

Mr. Garland said Tuesday that the Justice Department filed its own lawsuit because the federal government was harmed by Google’s allegedly monopolistic conduct. Federal agencies have since 2019 spent over $100 million on display ads, the complaint says. The government paid inflated fees and was harmed by manipulated advertising prices because of Google’s anticompetitive conduct, the lawsuit alleges.

Microsoft is deepening its partnership with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Dall-E. That has investors and analysts speculating whether Microsoft could challenge Google’s dominance in search. WSJ Heard on the Street columnist Dan Gallagher joins host Zoe Thomas to discuss how AI could affect search and at what cost.

Jonathan Kanter,

the assistant attorney general for antitrust, said while there are similarities with other lawsuits against Google, the Justice Department’s complaint is based on its own investigation that yielded “meticulous detail” about Google’s ad-tech business.

“We detail many facts, many episodes that in the individual and in the aggregate have maintained numerous monopolies,” Mr. Kanter said.

Google has attempted to settle the claims against its ad-tech business. In addition to offering to split off parts of its ad-tech business to avoid the Justice Department suit, the company last year discussed with the EU an offer to allow competitors to broker the sale of ads directly on the video service.

In 2021, the company agreed to give U.K. antitrust regulators effective veto power over elements of its plans to remove a technology called third-party cookies from its Chrome browser to settle an investigation there into the plan.

In France, Google agreed to pay a fine of 220 million euros, equivalent to about $239 million, and to improve data access to competing ad-tech companies, to not use its data in ways rivals couldn’t reproduce to settle a similar antitrust investigation in the country.

—Keach Hagey contributed to this article.

Write to Miles Kruppa at miles.kruppa@wsj.com and Sam Schechner at Sam.Schechner@wsj.com

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US

Iowa Shooting That Left Two Dead Was Likely Gang-Related, Des Moines Police Say

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Police are investigating a possible gang-related motive after two students were shot dead at an Iowa education center for at-risk youth.

Two male students, 18 years old and 16 years old, were fatally shot when a suspect pulled out a 9mm handgun and began firing just before 1 p.m. local time, a spokesperson for Des Moines Police said.

The gunfire broke out inside a common area used by the Starts Right Here education program in Des Moines. The organization’s president and founder

William Holmes,

a rapper who performs under the name Will Keeps, was injured in the shooting and remains hospitalized in a serious condition.

“The incident was definitely targeted, it was not random. There was nothing random about this,” Sgt.

Paul Parizek

said.

Mr. Walls and the two student victims were affiliated with rival gangs, he added.

Police later charged 18-year-old Des Moines resident Preston Walls with two counts of first-degree murder, along with attempted murder and gang participation. It was not clear who was serving as Mr. Walls’s attorney.

Two other suspects remain in custody.

First responders performed CPR on the victims found at the scene, according to Mr. Parizek. The students were brought to a local hospital but couldn’t be saved, he said.

The Des Moines incident comes after a mass shooting in California over the weekend left 11 people dead and another nine injured. Police are looking at a troubled romantic relationship as a possible motive for the state’s deadliest mass shooting in years. Also over the weekend, a nightclub shooting in Baton Rouge, La., injured over 10.

Des Moines police said Mr. Walls entered a common area at the Starts Right Here building where all three victims were. Mr. Holmes attempted to escort him from the area when Mr. Walls pulled away and began to shoot, Des Moines police said.

Police responding to reports of gunfire saw a suspicious vehicle leaving the area. The automobile was pulled over about 20 minutes later, roughly 2 miles from the education center, police said.

Two other people stayed in the car while Mr. Walls ran from the vehicle. A police dog helped track him down, Mr. Parizek said. Mr. Walls was taken into custody and a 9mm handgun was found nearby. Its ammunition magazine had a capacity of 31 rounds and contained three, police said. 

The Starts Right Here website said it works with at-risk youth in the Des Moines Public Schools. The nonprofit has Des Moines Police Department Chief

Dana Wingert

on its board of directors and Iowa Gov.

Kim Reynolds

on its advisory board. 

“I’ve seen first-hand how hard Will Keeps and his staff work to help at-risk kids through this alternative education program. My heart breaks for them, these kids and their families,” Ms. Reynolds, a Republican, said in a statement. 

Mr. Parizek said the program deals with children “with a variety of challenges, some that many of us can’t wrap our brain around.”

Write to Talal Ansari at talal.ansari@wsj.com

Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the January 24, 2023, print edition as ‘Shooting Kills Two Students In Iowa.’

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Business

Microsoft to Deepen OpenAI Partnership, Invest Billions in ChatGPT Creator

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Microsoft Corp.

MSFT 0.98%

said Monday it is making a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, substantially bolstering its relationship with the startup behind the viral ChatGPT chatbot as the software giant looks to expand the use of artificial intelligence in its products.

Microsoft said the latest partnership builds upon the company’s 2019 and 2021 investments in OpenAI.

The companies didn’t disclose the financial terms of the partnership. Microsoft had been discussing investing as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter. A representative for Microsoft declined to comment on the final number.

OpenAI was in talks this month to sell existing shares in a tender offer that would value the company at roughly $29 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported, making it one of the most valuable U.S. startups on paper despite generating little revenue.

The investment shows the tremendous resources Microsoft is devoting toward incorporating artificial-intelligence software into its suite of products, ranging from its design app Microsoft Designer to search app Bing. It also will help bankroll the computing power OpenAI needs to run its various products on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

At a WSJ panel during the 2023 World Economic Forum, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella discussed the company expanding access to OpenAI tools and the growing capabilities of ChatGPT.

The strengthening relationship with OpenAI has bolstered Microsoft’s standing in a race with other big tech companies that also have been pouring resources into artificial intelligence to enhance existing products and develop new uses for businesses and consumers.

Alphabet Inc.’s

Google, in particular, has invested heavily in AI and infused the technology into its operations in various ways, from improving navigation recommendations in its maps tools to enhancing image recognition for photos to enabling wording suggestions in Gmail.

Google has its own sophisticated chatbot technology, known as LaMDA, which gained notice last year when one of the company’s engineers claimed the bot was sentient, a claim Google and outside experts dismissed. Google, though, hasn’t made that technology widely available like OpenAI did with ChatGPT, whose ability to churn out human-like, sophisticated responses to all manner of linguistic prompts has captured public attention.

Microsoft Chief Executive

Satya Nadella

said last week his company plans to incorporate artificial-intelligence tools into all of its products and make them available as platforms for other businesses to build on. Mr. Nadella said last week at a Wall Street Journal panel at the World Economic Forum’s annual event in Davos, Switzerland. Mr. Nadella said that his company would move quickly to commercialize tools from OpenAI.

Analysts have said that OpenAI’s technology could one day threaten Google’s stranglehold on internet search, by providing quick, direct responses to queries rather than lists of links. Others have pointed out that the chatbot technology still suffers from inaccuracies and isn’t well-suited to certain types of queries.

“The viral launch of ChatGPT has caused some investors to question whether this poses a new disruption threat to Google Search,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note last month. “While we believe the near-term risk is limited—we believe the use case of search (and paid search) is different than AI-driven content creation—we are not dismissive of threats from new, unique consumer offerings.”

OpenAI, led by technology investor

Sam Altman,

began as a nonprofit in 2015 with $1 billion in pledges from

Tesla Inc.

CEO

Elon Musk,

LinkedIn co-founder

Reid Hoffman

and other backers. Its goal has long been to develop technology that can achieve what has been a holy grail for AI researchers: artificial general intelligence, where machines are able to learn and understand anything humans can.

Microsoft first invested in OpenAI in 2019, giving the company $1 billion to enhance its Azure cloud-computing platform. That gave OpenAI the computing resources it needed to train and improve its artificial-intelligence algorithms and led to a series of breakthroughs.

OpenAI has released a new suite of products in recent months that industry observers say represent a significant step toward that goal and could pave the way for a host of new AI-driven consumer applications.

In the fall, it launched Dall-E 2, a project that allowed users to generate art from strings of text, and then made ChatGPT public on Nov. 30. ChatGPT has become something of a sensation among the tech community given its ability to deliver immediate answers to questions ranging from “Who was George Washington Carver?” to “Write a movie script of a taco fighting a hot dog on the beach.”

Mr. Altman said the company’s tools could transform technology similar to the invention of the smartphone and tackle broader scientific challenges.

“They are incredibly embryonic right now, but as they develop, the creativity boost and new superpowers we get—none of us will want to go back,” Mr. Altman said in an interview in December.

Mr. Altman’s decision to create a for-profit arm of OpenAI garnered criticism from some in the artificial-intelligence community who said it represented a move away from OpenAI’s roots as a research lab that sought to benefit humanity over shareholders. OpenAI said it would cap profit at the company, diverting the remainder to the nonprofit group.

—Will Feuer contributed to this article.

Write to Berber Jin at berber.jin@wsj.com and Miles Kruppa at miles.kruppa@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
The design app Microsoft Designer was misidentified as Microsoft Design in an earlier version of this article. (Corrected on Jan. 23)

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US

Jeff Zients to Be Named White House Chief of Staff

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WASHINGTON—President

Biden

is planning to name

Jeff Zients,

an investor and former

Obama

administration official who led the White House’s Covid-19 response, to be his next chief of staff, according to people familiar with the decision.

Ron Klain,

Mr. Biden’s current chief of staff, is expected to step down in the coming weeks after more than two years on the job. The Washington Post earlier reported that Mr. Zients was expected to replace him. Mr. Zients didn’t respond to requests for comment, and the White House declined to comment.

Mr. Zients helmed the White House efforts to increase distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine during the first year of Mr. Biden’s presidency, helping to cobble together a network to make the shots available nationally.

He left the administration in April last year, saying he had no specific job plans, and in recent months was tapped by Mr. Klain to prepare for staff departures and help identify potential replacements, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. Zients co-chaired Mr. Biden’s presidential transition team in 2020.

The president is turning to Mr. Zients as his next chief of staff because of his reputation as a manager with a history of navigating government bureaucracy, the people familiar with the matter said.

Mr. Zients is expected to bring to the job a more decentralized approach than the one favored by Mr. Klain, who was involved in nearly every aspect of day-to-day operations at the White House, some of the people familiar with the matter said. 

While Mr. Zients is expected to focus on policy and governing, other longtime aides to Mr. Biden are likely to be more involved in advising the president on political matters as he faces investigations from newly empowered House Republicans and prepares to announce his reelection bid. 

White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and President Biden greeting each other at a White House event.



Photo:

KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS

In the coming year, White House officials expect to focus on implementing a slate of laws signed by the president since he took office, including measures to fix the country’s aging infrastructure, invest in renewable energy and boost semiconductor manufacturing. Options for major legislative breakthroughs will be limited now that Republicans have taken control of the House.

Mr. Zients was a top economic adviser to President

Barack Obama,

serving as the director of the National Economic Council and a senior official at the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Zients joined the board of

Facebook Inc.

—now part of Meta Platforms Inc.—in 2018 after leaving the Obama administration. He was a top executive with the Cranemere Group, an investment holding company.

At the beginning of Mr. Obama’s presidency, Mr. Zients was appointed the administration’s chief performance officer, a newly created role that centered on making the government more efficient. He later led a mission aimed at fixing HealthCare.gov, the federal website for the Affordable Care Act, when it experienced technological difficulties in 2013. He brought in private companies and technology firms to undertake a rapid review of the platform’s problems.

Mr. Zients is known as a meticulous planner. In his beginning days handling the Covid-19 response, he scheduled hour-by-hour what needed to be done to execute his pandemic plan. He and Mr. Biden spoke three to four times a week while he was overseeing the coronavirus response.

While Mr. Zients’ selection to handle the pandemic was initially criticized by some progressives who said he lacked public health experience, he earned bipartisan praise in hearings for his efforts to rapidly disseminate vaccines after a bumpy rollout during the end of the Trump administration. About 65% of the population, or more than 200 million people, were fully vaccinated by the time he announced in March 2022 that he would be leaving his position. 

He also won high marks for shifting the administration from a more reactive approach to the pandemic to responding to Covid-19 as an ongoing public health issue. He pledged a wartime response to the administration’s global response to Covid-19 but some donations to poor countries fell short of targets because of low demand and limited funding.

Mr. Biden was criticized in 2021 for holding a massive July Fourth party on the South Lawn and declaring “we’re closer than ever to declaring our independence from a deadly virus”  just as the Delta variant began spreading in the U.S., causing another round of shutdowns.  

Later that winter when the Omicron wave caused infections to spike, the lack of testing kits caused long lines and concerns across the country. The president acknowledged in a January 2022 speech that the situation was “frustrating.” 

Messrs. Biden and Zients developed a relationship during the Obama administration, and became closer when Mr. Zients was brought on as an adviser to Mr. Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. Mr. Zients doesn’t have the kind of decadeslong relationship with Mr. Biden that some of the president’s closest aides have. But those advisers—including senior White House aides

Mike Donilon,

Steve Ricchetti

and

Bruce Reed

—are expected to continue working closely with Mr. Biden as he prepares to announce his reelection bid in the coming month.

“He has the utmost integrity and that’s why everyone trusts him,” said Andrew Slavitt, who was a senior adviser for the Biden administration Covid-19 response. “He over-communicates and seeks out everyone’s views but does it in a way to push the ball down the field every day.”

Mr. Zients’ experience and ties in the business world has engendered skepticism from some progressive groups, many of whom developed close relationships with Mr. Klain.

Matt Stoller, the director of Research at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit that advocates for strict antitrust enforcement, called Mr. Zients “an ugly choice” for the job, noting that he joined the board of Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Write to Andrew Restuccia at andrew.restuccia@wsj.com, Stephanie Armour at Stephanie.Armour@wsj.com and Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com

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Business

High Turnover of Home Caregivers Makes Life Precarious for Many

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Mary Barket, a 66-year-old widow with a degenerative muscular disorder and no family around to help, has had seven different caregivers come through her home in the past six months.

On a recent Saturday morning, she was told by the home care agency that her caregiver wasn’t coming that day and that it couldn’t send a substitute, she says. Ms. Barket had one meal to last her until Monday, when the next caregiver was due.

“My hands don’t work. I can’t even open a box,” says Ms. Barket, who has ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. “It’s a very tenuous situation.”

High turnover among in-home caregivers is straining the daily lives of America’s aging population, which relies on them to remain in their homes.

The median caregiver turnover rate—or the percentage of all caregivers who left or were terminated from jobs—was about 64.9% in 2021, according to a report by Home Care Pulse, a company that provides data and training to home care agencies. Though the number has improved from a peak of 81.6% in 2018, it represents a major supply gap, according to people in the home care industry.

Turnover among the 1,461 home care agencies participating in the 2022 HCP Benchmarking Report remained relatively stable during the pandemic, says Home Care Pulse president Todd Austin. Agencies increased wages and more offered benefits to recruit and retain workers, while also doing more to recognize workers as “care heroes” to improve job satisfaction, he says.

But the pandemic added to demand, as the high number of Covid deaths at long-term-care facilities contributed to the desire for people to remain in their homes.

Between 2008 and 2018, the number of home care workers more than doubled to 2.26 million from about 900,000, according to a 2022 report from the Home Care Association of America, an industry trade organization representing home care providers.

The Labor Department projects 25% employment growth in the next decade for home health and personal care aides, which includes those who work in group homes and day service programs, compared with an average expected growth rate of 5% for all occupations.

Even with rapid growth, home care agencies can’t meet demand. More than 85% of the home care agencies in the 2022 HCP Benchmarking Report turned down cases in 2021 due to the shortage, and 59.7% consistently turned down clients.

To help address the staffing problem, many home care agencies boosted incentives and bonuses and are offering training in areas like end-of-life care, meal planning and Alzheimer’s care, says Mr. Austin and others in the industry.

Ms. Espinosa helps Ms. Barket, who has ALS, change clothes.

Ms. Barket lives alone with no family in the area available to assist in her care. She relies on help from two home care agencies.

About 40% of agencies now offer signing bonuses, and 94% have increased pay, some by as much as $10 an hour based on experience, according to the 2022 report from the Home Care Association of America.

But wages remain relatively low. Median pay in 2021, the latest figure available, was $14.15 an hour, or $29,430 a year, for home health and personal care aides, according to the Labor Department.

The jobs are difficult in other ways, too—clients can be demanding, the work can be physically and emotionally taxing and the hours inconsistent.

Waiting list

In Lackawanna County, Pa., about 40 older adults are on a waiting list for in-home care, says

Jason Kavulich,

outgoing director of the county Area Agency on Aging, who was recently named Secretary of Aging for Pennsylvania. Six years ago, when he became director of the agency, there was no waiting list, he says.

“This is the postpandemic world,” says Mr. Kavulich. “People are not entering the help field. They have found other work.” To try to help meet demand, the county agency is working on a scholarship program at a local college for students to provide 15 to 18 hours of in-home care a week to older adults.

For families, high turnover adds a layer of uncertainty to the already stressful task of finding care for loved ones. Some families receive last-minute phone calls saying a worker isn’t coming, which leaves them scrambling to find a substitute so they themselves can go to work.

John Giurini, who shares a home with his 93-year-old mother and his sister in the Los Angeles area, says there had been times when he received a call the night before—or even the morning of—from the agency that provides full-time in-home care, saying the worker they expected for the next shift wasn’t available. Usually a substitute was sent but not always. 

“We would not know in the morning who was coming to the front door” other than a name, says Mr. Giurini, assistant director of public affairs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. 

He says rotating people in and out of the home is stressful for the family, but even more so for their mother, who has dementia and gets confused. One caregiver became combative with their mother about how much toothpaste she was using, and another young man ran personal errands instead of staying at the doctor’s office while their mother had a medical appointment, he says. He and his sister explored other options, including hiring a caregiver directly, rather than relying on an agency, but decided against it.

“Say you hire someone and are fortunate to find a good person. What happens when that person is sick?” he asks. An agency, at least, has other workers. Mr. Giurini says they have lucked out in the past six months with a caregiver from their agency who is attentive and professional.

They pay the agency $32 an hour and rates will increase to $35 an hour in February.

In-home care workers are generally employed by home care agencies, which are paid by individuals and families, or through private long-term-care insurance or Medicaid, Veterans Affairs or Medicare Advantage insurance, or by some nonprofit organizations.

Some home care companies have adopted technology to help provide consistent scheduling and care.

Jisella Dolan,

chief advocacy officer for Home Instead, which has 1,200 home-care franchises across the U.S., says the company uses a technology platform that coordinates scheduling and allows family members, using a downloaded app, to see who is coming each day, when, and if there are any changes.

Home Instead, which is a subsidiary of Honor Technology Inc., doesn’t guarantee it will find replacements if a scheduled worker isn’t available, but it strives to do so, she says. The company no longer has the waiting list for services that it did last year during the height of Omicron infections, she says.

Extra training

Home Instead also has training for those working with clients who have special conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Routine and regularity are especially important for those with Alzheimer’s, says

Amy Goyer,

the family caregiving expert at AARP, who cared for and managed paid caregivers for her parents, including a father with Alzheimer’s, before they died.

“Every time you get a new paid caregiver, you have to train them,” she says. “ ‘This is what time my parents get out of bed. This is when they eat breakfast and lunch. These are the clothes my dad wears, the TV shows he watches and the music he listens to.’ ”

She advises families to have at least two caregivers, each with a different shift so one can fill in when the other can’t work, and to keep a checklist of daily routines with tasks and times listed for showers, meals, medications and getting in and out of bed, so those coming in on short notice know what to do. Families that can afford it can also hire a geriatric care manager to coordinate care and find backups, which is especially helpful if family members live out of town.

Ms. Espinosa, who was referred by the local ALS chapter, preps meals for Ms. Barket.

Frances Copeland says she had 10 caregivers in a 15-month-period between 2021 and 2022 for her 91-year-old mother, with the longest lasting eight months. “We had an occasion where two caregivers showed up and they stood outside arguing about whose day it was to be there,” she says.

Ms. Copeland, who is a certified nursing assistant and has been a caregiver for others, understands why some quit. “The pay isn’t great, and the clients can be demanding and critical,” she says. She recalls driving 45 minutes to one client’s house and being told to turn around and go back because she wasn’t needed that day.

Not all home healthcare agencies are comfortable working with people who have ALS or Alzheimer’s because of their advanced needs, says Jessie Meier, a social worker with the ALS Association Greater Philadelphia Chapter.

“The care is so personal and deeply intimate. You are helping a person shower, bathe and toilet,” she says, which makes familiarity even more important.

Ms. Barket, the widow, who lives in Bethlehem Township, Pa., says her family is small and distant. One brother lives in North Carolina and an aunt lives more than an hour away. Her daughter lives closer but has mental-health challenges and is unable to help with care.

Ms. Barket relies on caregivers from one agency, who come three hours a day, five days a week. Another caregiver, referred to her by the ALS Association, comes on a sixth day for three hours. The caregivers assemble meals in takeout containers, the lids laying across the top because she can’t get them off. She can’t carry a plate.

“My hands and wrists are too unstable at this point,” she says. If something falls to the floor, she tries to use a hangar to get it up to her. “I try to MacGyver everything,” she says. Unable to open drawers, she keeps clothes in a basket.

Each time a new caregiver arrives, she asks them if they know anything about ALS. If they don’t she tells them to Google it, so they understand her limitations. “I can’t fault caregivers, who are doing their best,” she says. “Ninety-five percent of them are wonderful.”

The unpredictability, though, is frightening, especially since her disease is progressive. On the recent Saturday when the caregiver couldn’t come, she says she had the “wherewithal” to call a friend who brought meals.

“Down the road, I won’t be able to speak,” she says. “Then what? It’s very scary at times.”

Ms. Barket says she has had seven different caregivers come through her home in the past six months.

Write to Clare Ansberry at clare.ansberry@wsj.com

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Health

For Future Viral Threats, Health Officials Look to Sewage

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When the virologist Kirsten St. George learned last summer that a paralyzed patient in New York’s Rockland County had tested positive for polio, she turned her attention to the state’s sewers.

Polio is particularly stealthy because most infected people never develop symptoms but can still spread the virus. A wastewater-surveillance network established during the Covid-19 pandemic helped officials at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center track polio’s spread in several counties.

New York is now expanding wastewater monitoring and starting to look for flu, RSV, hepatitis A, norovirus and antibiotic-resistant genes in parts of the state, as health officials across the U.S. consider wastewater as a more permanent public-health tool for watching a variety of threats.

“Are we on the brink of another outbreak, if it’s rising? Is it just sort of holding steady?” asked Dr. St. George, Wadsworth’s director of virology. “These are all important public health questions.”   

Dr. Kirsten St. George of the Wadsworth Center is looking for clues in the state’s sewage.
An analysis conducted at the Wadsworth Center indicates the presence of the hepatitis A virus.

Dr. Kirsten St. George of the Wadsworth Center, which is starting to track the spread of pathogens including the hepatitis A virus.

For decades, researchers around the world used wastewater primarily to track poliovirus, which spreads through contact with an infected person’s feces. At the onset of the pandemic, scientists found that the Covid-19 virus’s genetic material could be detected in sewage. That meant sewage might help track other respiratory viruses, too.

Researchers built surveillance networks around the country to track Covid-19 and monitor for variants. 

Now they are starting to leverage that system to search for other pathogens they had wanted to track through the sewers for years including norovirus and antibiotic-resistant microbes, said Amy Kirby, program lead of wastewater surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“Once you have this system, it’s much easier to activate it for a new pathogen,” Dr. Kirby said.

Sewage samples from treatment plants are sent to labs, where genetic material that can come from hundreds of thousands of people is isolated. Researchers usually test samples for pathogens with the PCR technology used in a Covid-19 lab test administered at the doctor’s office.  

Health officials use the data to track changing concentrations of a virus, which can help them monitor the spread of pathogens including flu and RSV for which many people might not be tested. The technique has yielded early evidence of Covid-19 outbreaks and helped officials tailor public messaging and decide where to open testing sites.

Biobot Analytics Inc., which works with the CDC to monitor Covid-19 and the renamed mpox, started tracking opioids in wastewater before the pandemic. It has collected data on substances including fentanyl in more than 100 counties across 47 states. Officials in Cary, N.C., used that data to encourage people to dispose of drugs properly and to distribute more overdose-reversal drugs, Biobot said.

Not everything can be tracked through sewage, and there isn’t a standard national system for collecting data and comparing readings from site to site. Privacy can be a concern in smaller communities or when tracking illicit substances, researchers said, though wastewater data is processed as an anonymous group sample. And some communities that collect wastewater data aren’t using it to guide public-health policy, researchers said. 

The wastewater treatment plant in Schenectady, N.Y., is participating in the study of sewage.
Workers at the Schenectady treatment plant collect samples and ship them for analysis.
Analysis of the wastewater samples is conducted at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, N.Y.

The wastewater treatment plant in Schenectady, N.Y., where workers collect samples and ship them for analysis at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, N.Y.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said in a report Thursday that the U.S. should invest more in the CDC’s wastewater-surveillance network and expand its reach. The report recommended that the CDC should have an open process for picking which pathogens to track and establish an ethics committee, among other steps.  

“We’re at a critical juncture where it has gone from being a grass-roots effort to a more nationally recognized tool,” said Megan Diamond, head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s wastewater-surveillance program, who wasn’t involved with the report.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Do you think sewage monitoring will help communities respond more quickly to future health threats? Join the conversation below.

After a polio case was confirmed in New York in July, health officials reviewed stored wastewater samples and found poliovirus in wastewater from several counties, including as far back as spring. Health officials urged people who weren’t vaccinated against polio to get the shots and alerted doctors.

The CDC extended poliovirus wastewater testing to a handful of counties with low vaccination rates or potential connections to New York’s polio case.

“What you might expect a virus to do when it starts circulating is exactly what we saw in the wastewater,” said Dan Lang, deputy director of New York’s Center for Environmental Health and head of the state’s wastewater-monitoring program.

No samples tested positive for poliovirus by the end of November, but it was detected again in Orange County last month. Health officials are planning to analyze past samples from additional counties for traces of the virus before deciding whether to widen poliovirus wastewater monitoring when the weather warms and the virus can spread more readily. 

“We’re worried about a big sort of roaring back,” said Dr. Eli Rosenberg, a lead epidemiologist who coordinates New York’s polio response. “We’re using this time now to prepare.”

Poliovirus was found in Orange County, N.Y., last month.

Write to Brianna Abbott at brianna.abbott@wsj.com

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Health

These healthy diets were associated with lower risk of death, according to a study of 119,000 people across four decades

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Eat healthy, live longer.

That’s the takeaway from a major study published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine. Scientists led by a team from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that people who most closely adhered to at least one of four healthy eating patterns were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, cancer or respiratory disease compared with people who did not adhere as closely to these diets. They were also less likely to die of any cause.

“These findings support the recommendations of Dietary Guidelines for Americans that multiple healthy eating patterns can be adapted to individual food traditions and preferences,” the researchers concluded, adding that the results were consistent across different racial and ethnic groups. The eating habits and mortality rates of more than 75,000 women from 1984 to 2020 over 44,000 men from 1986 to 2020 were included in the study.

The four diets studied were the Healthy Eating Index, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet, the Healthful Plant-Based Diet Index and the Alternate Healthy Eating Index. All four share some components, including whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes. But there are also differences: For instance, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet encourages fish consumption, and the Healthful Plant-Based Diet Index discourages eating meat.

The Alternate Mediterranean Diet is adapted from the original Mediterranean Diet, which includes olive oil (which is rich in omega-3 fatty acids), fruits, nuts, cereals, vegetables, legumes and fish. It allows for moderate consumption of alcohol and dairy products but low consumption of sweets and only the occasional serving of red meat. The alternate version, meanwhile, cuts out dairy entirely, only includes whole grains and uses the same alcohol-intake guideline for men and women, JAMA says.

The world’s ‘best diets’ overlap with study results

The Mediterranean Diet consistently ranks No. 1 in the U.S. News and World Report’s Best Diets ranking, which looks at seven criteria: short-term weight loss, long-term weight loss, effectiveness in preventing cardiovascular disease, effectiveness in preventing diabetes, ease of compliance, nutritional completeness and health risks. The 2023 list ranks the top three diets as the Mediterranean Diet, the DASH Diet and the Flexitarian Diet. 

The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet recommends fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, poultry, fish and low-fat dairy products and restricts salt, red meat, sweets and sugar-sweetened beverages. The Flexitarian Diet is similar to the other diets in that it’s mainly vegetarian, but it allows the occasional serving of meat or fish. All three diets are associated with improved metabolic health, lower blood pressure and reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes.

Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the latest study, said it’s critical to examine the associations between the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans and long-term health. “Our findings will be valuable for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which is being formed to evaluate current evidence surrounding different eating patterns and health outcomes,” he said.

Reducing salt intake is a good place to start. In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance for restaurants and food manufacturers to, over a two-and-a-half-year period, voluntarily reduce the amount of sodium in their food to help consumers stay under a limit of 3,000 milligrams per day — still higher than the recommended daily allowance. Americans consume around 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day, on average, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people consume less than 2,300 milligrams each day.

Related: Eating 400 calories a day from these foods could raise your dementia risk by over 20%

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Technology

Why It’s So Hard to Sleep After Looking at Our Screens

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We’ve all reached for our phones in the middle of the night, only to be pulled into some kind of rabbit hole that keeps us awake. (If you haven’t, please share your secrets for self-control.)

A good night’s sleep is important for your health. Chronic sleep troubles can lead to cognitive impairments and increase the risk of stroke and heart attack. And getting enough rest is a huge problem for teens, who are facing a sleep crisis due to factors including nighttime technology use, busy schedules and heavy homework loads. American adults also have trouble sleeping, with 70% of adults reporting they get insufficient sleep at least one night a month, according to the American Sleep Apnea Association.

Much ado has been made about the blue light our devices emit, but the ways in which tech hijacks our sleep go far deeper than that. It’s the content we see that has the biggest impact on our slumber, sleep experts say. 

So what should we do about it? Sure, you could leave your phone in another room at night, but that might not be feasible for adults who want to be reached in an emergency. The simplest fix is to eliminate the temptation to scroll altogether. Tools from tech companies can help, including new features from TikTok and Instagram, two oft-cited sources of nighttime distraction. 

If we come across alarming news, a scary movie or an annoying work email right before bed or in the middle of the night, the stress hormone cortisol can rise. A spike in cortisol provides an energy boost by moving glucose from a stored state in the body to an active state. “It’s like eating a candy bar,” says

Jamie Zeitzer,

co-director of the Stanford Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences. Coming down from that energy rush can be difficult.

Positive content can be just as disruptive because it can increase the amount of dopamine or norepinephrine in the brain, two neurotransmitters Dr. Zeitzer says can excite the thalamus—the brain’s information-relay center—and disrupt the brain-wave oscillations needed for sleep.

Fretting about not sleeping can make things even worse. When we worry about not being able to go back to sleep, Dr. Zeitzer explains, we actually can’t go back to sleep because that worry is causing more cortisol to be released. 

TikTok is testing a new feature that will remind people when it’s time to go to sleep.



Photo:

Watchful.ai

If any of this sounds familiar, don’t despair. Sleep and digital-media experts suggest trying these things:

Know your triggers. Not all screen activities are bad for sleep. Start by assessing what stresses you out or excites you when you look at your phone—and what helps you calm down. You should also be more aware of the time you’re spending on your device. We tend to lose track of time when we’re on our phones, which can eat into the seven hours of nightly sleep doctors say adults need (teens need eight to 10 hours).  

Reconfigure your habits. Once you identify which screen-related activities rile you up, shift those activities earlier in the evening and do more relaxing activities closer to bedtime, says

Nitun Verma,

a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Telling patients not to use screens an hour or two before bed is too jarring for some people, he says, and ends up being unsustainable. Instead, he advises people to taper their level of screen-induced emotion and excitement over the course of an evening so it’s “like landing a plane.” 

Make a list. If you’re one to worry at night about what lies ahead the next day, some sleep experts suggest making a to-do list before bed, so you don’t keep yourself awake making mental lists. You don’t have to get out paper and pen: The notes app on your phone makes it easy, or try one of the note-taking apps I mentioned here. 

Use tech to combat tech. You might soon be able to curb late-night TikTok scrolling. The video-sharing app, owned by ByteDance Ltd., is testing a new sleep-reminders feature. When you designate a bedtime in TikTok, the app will mute push notifications for the next seven hours and nudge you to close it. TikTok in 2021 began disabling notifications during nighttime hours for teens.

Thanks to a new feature introduced this week, Instagram users have the ability to set times in the app when they don’t want to be bothered. When Quiet Mode is enabled, you won’t receive notifications, and the app owned by

Meta Platforms Inc.

will send an auto-reply to anyone who DMs you to let them know you’re offline. The app will prompt teens to turn on Quiet Mode when they’re on Instagram between midnight and 4 a.m.

Instagram’s new Quiet Mode setting will let you schedule downtime from the app and inform followers when you’re offline.



Photo:

META

There are even more choices on the phones themselves.

You can turn on Do Not Disturb on an iPhone or an Android phone during the hours you choose, during which time you can allow calls or notifications only from certain people or apps. In the iPhone’s Sleep Focus setting, you can set a sleep goal and create bedtime reminders as well as enable Sleep Screen, which dims your lock screen at bedtime. 

iPhones also have a Wind Down feature while Android phones have Bedtime Mode, both of which silence your phones at a time of your choosing.

Only glance at the time. Many of us tap our phone screens to check the time in the middle of the night. That can tempt us to unlock our phones and scroll. If you’ve followed the other steps listed here, you should be able to resist. You can also buy an alarm clock just for that purpose. 

Create a family tech plan. Leaving your phone outside the bedroom might not be practical for many adults, but I advise parents to keep all devices out of kids’ bedrooms.

Andrea Davis,

founder of Better Screen Time, a company that educates families about healthy digital habits, suggests parents create a tech plan with their kids, which spells out when, where and how devices can be used. She says parents should follow the rules, too. She didn’t trust herself not to look at her phone while in bed, so she agreed, along with her children, to charge her phone in another room at night. Her husband keeps his phone in the bedroom in case of an emergency.

Restart your sleep routine. If you still wake up in the middle of the night and find yourself ruminating, don’t continue to toss and turn, says

Vijay Ramanan,

a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic. He suggests getting up for 15 minutes and restarting the routine that helped you fall asleep in the first place. Only turn to your phone to find a soothing meditation, audiobook or podcast.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

What strategies help you avoid late-night or early-morning scrolling? Join the conversation below.

—For more Family & Tech columns, advice and answers to your most pressing family-related technology questions, sign up for my weekly newsletter.

Write to Julie Jargon at Julie.Jargon@wsj.com

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Business

T-Mobile Says Hackers Stole Data on About 37 Million Customers

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T-Mobile

TMUS -0.52%

US Inc. said hackers accessed data, including birth dates and billing addresses, for about 37 million of its customers, the second major security lapse at the wireless company in two years.

The company said in a regulatory filing Thursday that it discovered the problem on Jan. 5 and was working with law-enforcement officials and cybersecurity consultants. T-Mobile said it believes the hackers had access to its data since Nov. 25 but that it has since been able to stop the malicious activity.

The cellphone carrier said it is currently notifying affected customers and that it believes the most sensitive types of records—such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers and account passwords—weren’t compromised. T-Mobile has more than 110 million customers.

The company said its preliminary investigation indicates that data on about 37 million current postpaid and prepaid customer accounts was exposed. The company said hackers may have obtained names, billing addresses, emails, phone numbers, birth dates and account numbers. Information such as the number of lines on the account and plan features could have also been accessed, the company said.

“Some basic customer information (nearly all of which is the type widely available in marketing databases or directories) was obtained,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “No passwords, payment card information, social security numbers, government ID numbers or other financial account information were compromised.”

The company said its systems weren’t breached but someone was improperly obtaining data through an API, or application programming interface, that can provide some customer information. The company said it shut down the activity within 24 hours of discovering it.

The company’s investigation into the incident is ongoing. T-Mobile warned that it could incur significant costs tied to the incident, though it said it doesn’t currently expect a material effect on the company’s operations. The company is set to report fourth-quarter results on Feb. 1.

T-Mobile acknowledged a security lapse in 2021 after personal information regarding more than 50 million of its current, former and prospective customers was found for sale online. T-Mobile later raised its estimate and said about 76.6 million U.S. residents had some sort of records exposed.

A 21-year-old American living in Turkey claimed credit for the 2021 intrusion and said the company’s security practices cleared an easy path for the theft of the data, which included Social Security numbers, birth dates and phone-specific identifiers. T-Mobile’s chief executive later apologized for the failure and said the company would improve its data safeguards.

T-Mobile proposed paying $350 million to settle a class-action lawsuit tied to the 2021 hack. As part of the settlement, the company also pledged to spend $150 million for security technology in 2022 and this year.

Write to Will Feuer at Will.Feuer@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
T-Mobile US Inc. acknowledged a security lapse in 2021. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was last year. (Corrected on Jan. 19)

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