It’s payday for college athletes

In the world of sports, it's a big day for paychecks (and not just because it's Bobby Bonilla Day). Today the NCAA settlement that allows colleges to directly pay their athletes goes into effect. Bloomberg sports business reporter Ira Boudway has some thoughts on how the deal might work out. Plus: Who gets hurt by cuts to food stamps, and what the world can learn from Singapore's wastewater testing.

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Today, somewhere in America, a college athlete is holding a check from their school. As of July 1, under the House v. NCAA settlement agreement, schools are allowed to pay players directly. The deal, first agreed to more than a year ago and approved by a federal judge last month, ushers in a new era of professionalism in college sports. In addition to paying out $2.8 billion in damages to former athletes over the next 10 years, the NCAA and its biggest athletic conferences have agreed to a revenue-sharing plan that allows schools to distribute up to 22% of the average athletic department's income to their players. That comes to about $21 million for next season.

There's a lot to say about how we got here, but essentially the powers-that-be in college sports have decided to give up some money in return for a measure of control. For the past four years, the marketplace for college athletes has operated almost entirely unrestrained through NIL (name, image and likeness) contracts between players and third-party groups known as collectives. Federal courts and state lawmakers had forced the NCAA to let go of the reins, leading to a free-for-all of spiraling costs and widespread roster instability.

Under the House settlement—named after lead plaintiff Grant House, a former Arizona State University swimmer—players can now get paid by their schools, but their outside NIL deals are strictly limited. A clearinghouse for third-party payments called NIL Go, administered by Deloitte and overseen by a new governing body called the College Sports Commission, restricts deals between players and outside groups to fair market value for services rendered. And those services don't include touchdowns or rebounds. You can take money for appearing in an Applebee's commercial, in other words, but not for switching schools.

More than a trophy is at stake for players now. Photographer: Matthew Pearce/Icon Sportswire/AP Images

Now we wait to see if the College Sports Commission can enforce its own rules. I am on record as skeptical about that, but we're about to find out. Last month, when I spoke with Blake Lawrence, co-founder of the NIL marketplace Opendorse, he said the new system needs a stress test and fast. "In order for this industry to take compliance seriously, there needs to be a significant investigation and report and punishment that occurs within weeks of July 1st," he told me.

We also wait for the inevitable legal challenges. Some people would classify the 22% cap on pay as a case of open collusion to suppress wages and the NIL Go clearinghouse as an illegal restraint on trade. I am also on record as skeptical about whether a class-action settlement can work as a substitute for collective bargaining. We're about to find out.

In the meantime, here's a fun question for athletic directors: What exactly are they paying players for? For their NIL? Or for their labor? Or both? The NCAA spent decades tying itself in linguistic knots to avoid acknowledging that a quarterback is a highly skilled worker performing labor for a boss he calls coach. It's still not ready to call athletes employees.

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In Brief

President Donald Trump's $3.3 trillion tax and spending cut bill passed the Senate after a furious push by Republican leaders.
Zohran Mamdani clinched the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, extending his lead to 12 points in the primary over Andrew Cuomo.
Trump threatened to withdraw government subsidies from Elon Musk's companies and examine the billionaire's immigration status. Meanwhile, Musk has assumed oversight of Tesla sales in Europe and the US after the exit of a high-profile executive.

Republicans Rely on Food Aid Too

Photographer: Rui Pu; Photos: Getty (2), Shutterstock (8)

President Donald Trump's allies love to talk about the food we're eating here in the US: too sugary, too processed, too artificially dyed. What they're not talking about, though, is how many Americans don't have enough of it, whether it's healthy or not. If the Republicans get their way, the number of them will only go up.

Exactly how the right-leaning majorities in the House and Senate will cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as SNAP, is being negotiated. But their intentions are clear: Shrink its reach, reduce the benefits of the people still on it, and leave it to the states to take the blame

Versions of the plan laid out in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act include all variety of cuts, such as increasing work requirements, scrapping a major nutrition education program, eliminating eligibility for legally admitted immigrants and, perhaps most alarmingly, shifting a percentage of the costs, now entirely shouldered by the federal government, to the already strapped states. House Speaker Mike Johnson maintains that the changes being considered are an effort to reduce fraud and waste, not a cut to SNAP. It's hard to see how he can say that with a straight face. They are proposing cutting it—and cutting it deep.

Using data from the US Census Bureau American Community Survey analyzed by the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), an anti-hunger nonprofit, Bloomberg Businessweek's Deena Shanker looks at the distribution of food benefits: SNAP Cuts in Big Tax Bill Will Hit a Lot of Trump Voters Too

Watching for New Pandemics

Illustration: Seba Cestaro for Bloomberg Businessweek

Several times a year, a dozen or so health professionals from across Southeast Asia spend a week in Singapore examining human excrement. They scoop sewage out of manholes and bring it back to a bright, sterile lab at the city-state's environmental agency, where they concentrate the wastewater, dribble it into test tubes and evaluate it for pathogens. At these training sessions, organized by Duke-NUS Medical School—a leader in infectious disease research—they learn how to extract genetic materials that might indicate the presence of viruses.

The aim of the workshops is to train scientists from the region to identify disease outbreaks and stop them before they can spread. At the end of the weeklong program, the participants head home, where they'll pass their newfound knowledge on to colleagues. "The training helps equip countries with a skilled workforce to prepare for future pandemics," says Vincent Pang, an epidemiologist at the Duke-NUS Centre for Outbreak Preparedness.

One of Covid-19's lasting lessons is the need for early detection of pathogens, robust testing capabilities, efficient information sharing and a swift, coordinated response to outbreaks. Yet just two years out of the Covid health emergency, such programs look increasingly quaint. European countries are scaling back foreign aid. And with the virtual shutdown of the US Agency for International Development, President Donald Trump's administration has effectively cut off funding for thousands of health projects around the world, including many that support disease monitoring and surveillance. "Twenty to 50 billion US dollars of global health investment is going to disappear, and nobody can fill that gap," says Manisha Bhinge, vice president for health at the Rockefeller Foundation, a major supporter of global disease-tracking initiatives.

Singapore is one of the few countries still routinely monitoring wastewater for diseases. Karoline Kan writes about efforts share its know-how: Singapore Disease Testing Helps Fill the Gap Left by US Funding Cuts

How to Pay Tariffs

1.83 million

That's how many American Express Rewards points the CEO of a guitar-pedal manufacturer used to pay an $11,000 tariff bill, highlighting the struggles of small businesses due to volatile trade policies.

All That Glitters

"For a long time, the West was seen as a symbol of progress and sophistication. Now we realize the price of Western luxury brands was often too high."

Chen Tianmin

A 42-year-old psychotherapist in China's Guangdong province

Sales at Laopu Gold Co. have more than doubled in each of the past two years as Chinese consumers turn to homegrown brands. Chen spent 90,000 yuan ($12,500) on four pieces from Laopu in May.