FAU Harbor Branch receives grant from Chef José Andrés’ Longer Tables Fund for queen conch lab aquaculture expansion

Philanthropic initiative recently launched to address urgent challenges across the globe through the power of food

Florida Atlantic University

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An adult queen conch (Aliger gigas) in The Bahamas. 

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Credit: Shane Gross

Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute was awarded a grant by the Longer Tables Fund to develop a community-based aquaculture facility for conservation and restoration of the queen conch on the island of Eleuthera in The Bahamas. Through a strategic partnership with The Island School’s Cape Eleuthera Institute (CEI), the Queen Conch Conservancy: A Community-Based Aquaculture Restoration Project will address the needs to ensure longevity of the species.

Launched by Chef José Andrés with support from the Bezos Courage and Civility Award, the Longer Tables Fund invests in innovative solutions that transform food systems, rebuild communities, and empower the next generation of food leaders. From supporting local initiatives to global coalitions, the Longer Tables Fund is committed to bringing people together through the power of food and creating a more resilient, inclusive future.

“I believe food has the incredible power to nourish communities, sustain livelihoods, and create a healthier planet,” said Andrés. “That’s why I am so excited for how this new partnership will restore healthy conch populations and improve sustainable fishing methods. The Queen Conch Lab is showing us what it looks like when science, community and food come together to build a better future – this is what it means to build longer tables.”

Harbor Branch’s Queen Conch Lab (QCL) is working to establish a community-based queen conch farm in every Caribbean country. Native to Florida and the Caribbean, the queen conch is an important grazer that keeps seagrass beds healthy. It is also deeply rooted in the culinary and economic culture of these communities as one of the most significant fisheries in the region.

Between 1980 and 2020, approximately 31,000 tons of conch were harvested annually, worth nearly $39 million per year. Overfishing and habitat degradation have led to a significant decline in queen conch populations, and the conch is now listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act. Predictions based on extensive surveys indicate that commercial fishing for queen conch in The Bahamas may become unsustainable within 10 to 15 years.

José Andrés’ Longer Tables Fund is the latest to join an impressive coalition of QLC supporters. Over the past six years, QCL has received nearly $6 million in philanthropic and other support from the Builders Vision; Moore Bahamas Foundation; Saltonstall-Kennedy NOAA Fisheries; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service; Jamaica Conch Restoration Project; Bahamas National Trust; Blue Carbon Plus (BC+); and McPike-Zima Foundation.

QCL has established community-based farms in 10 locations across the Caribbean; along with The Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Curaçao are a few of the others. This project will expand the program’s reach into The Bahamas and deepen its partnership with CEI, a world-renowned science and experiential learning campus which connects primary research to education and outreach, where students from pre-K to doctorate levels interact and learn from leading researchers. CEI has been studying the queen conch in this region for more than 20 years.

“We are thrilled to partner with José Andrés, the Longer Tables Fund, The Island School, and the community of Eleuthera to help grow and restore the queen conch, which is significant to the local ecosystem and a vital resource and cultural touchstone for the island,” said Megan Davis, Ph.D., director of the QCL, and a research professor of aquaculture and stock enhancement at FAU Harbor Branch. “This collaboration supports working together as a community to ensure the queen conch is there for generations to come, and there is much more work to be done.”

The QCL will establish and operate a Queen Conch Mobile Lab at the institute with the goal of growing up to 2,000 queen conch juveniles per year for conservation and restoration. In conjunction, the program will offer training and education to staff and the more than 1,000 students attending the school each year. Building upon longstanding relationships The Island School has developed in the local community, the collaboration will also offer outreach activities to the approximately 10,000 residents on Eleuthera, providing training in workforce skills and education on sustainable fishing practices.

“We are so pleased to be partnering with Harbor Branch’s Queen Conch Lab and Chef José Andrés’ Longer Tables Fund to address a critical concern in our local environment and the community – the conservation and restoration of the queen conch population,” said Chris Maxey, founder and head of school of The Island School. “The project fits squarely into our mission of conducting innovative, cutting-edge environmental research, and sharing and applying what we learn to sustainable solutions within our community.”

Bahamian fisherman with a queen conch. 

Credit

Megan Davis, Ph.D.

Megan Davis, Ph.D., during a demonstration at the Naguabo Aquaculture Center in Puerto Rico. 

Credit

Shanna-Lee Thomas

- FAU -

About Florida Atlantic University:

Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, Florida Atlantic serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the Southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, Florida Atlantic embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. Florida Atlantic is designated as a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report, and holds the designation of “R1: Very High Research Spending and Doctorate Production” by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Florida Atlantic shares this status with less than 5% of the nearly 4,000 universities in the United States. For more information, visit www.fau.edu.

About Longer Tables Fund:

We need longer tables to bring people together—not higher walls that keep people apart. The Longer Tables Fund is Chef José Andrés’ philanthropic initiative to drive transformative global change, rooted in his belief that food has the power to solve the world’s most urgent and complex challenges.

Guided by a long-term vision but driven by immediate action, the Longer Tables Fund invests in solutions that strengthen food systems, rebuild crisis-affected communities, and empower the next generation of food leaders, from culinary arts and hospitality to food policy. With work spanning communities in the U.S. and beyond, José and the Longer Tables Fund are investing in local leadership, innovation, and scalable solutions to build a future where everyone has a seat at the table.

 

Poll: Amid multi-state measles outbreak, 79% of Americans support routine childhood vaccine requirements

Among the 21% who don’t support requirements, reasons focus on parental choice more than safety concerns

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

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Boston, MA—In the midst of a multi-state measles outbreak, a new poll by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the de Beaumont Foundation finds that most U.S. adults (79%) say parents should be required to have children vaccinated against preventable diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella to attend school. This includes a majority of adults across party lines—90% among Democrats and 68% among Republicans – as well as 66% of those who support the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement. It also includes 72% of all parents. Among all U.S. adults, about one in five (21%) do not support routine childhood vaccine requirements.

The poll was conducted from March 10 to March 31, 2025, among a probability-based, nationally representative sample of 2,509 U.S. adults age 18 and older. At the time the poll was conducted, the measles outbreak was in its third month and had spread to multiple states. The poll was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the de Beaumont Foundation.

“Childhood vaccine requirements are less controversial than many people may think,” said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation. “This poll shows that they’re widely supported across political groups—and it’s heartening to see that so many Americans understand the importance of vaccination, which remains a fundamental pillar of public health and disease prevention.”

The most common reason for opposing vaccine requirements is parental choice, not concern about safety.

• Among the 21% of adults who say they don’t support vaccine requirements, most (79%) say a major reason is that they think it should be the parents’ choice whether to vaccinate their child.

• Smaller majorities of those who don’t support requirements say they think government agencies who enforce vaccine requirements are influenced too much by politics and big companies (66%), worry that children might be required to get too many vaccines in the future (64%), and think vaccine requirements exist to make money for companies who develop vaccines (54%).
• Concern about vaccine safety is a less common reason, cited as a major reason by 40% of those who do not support routine childhood vaccine requirements.

Major reasons for supporting vaccine requirements include vaccine effectiveness, family responsibilities to keep schools healthy, and concern that diseases like measles could return without vaccine requirements.

• Among the 79% who support routine childhood vaccine requirements, the vast majority cite vaccine effectiveness (90%) and family responsibilities to keep schools safe (87%) as major reasons.
• Those who support requirements also commonly say that major reasons are that they think diseases like measles will come back if vaccines are no longer required (84%), vaccine requirements are important to protect children who cannot get vaccinated for medical reasons (81%), and routine vaccines have been proven safe because they are well-tested (80%) and have been around so long (76%).
• Fewer of those who support requirements say trust in government agencies that approve routine childhood vaccines is a major reason for their support (49%). 

“At this point, public opposition to childhood vaccine policies is often more about parental rights than vaccine safety,” said survey lead Gillian SteelFisher, director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program and principal research scientist at Harvard Chan School. “As the country leans on vaccine policies to help address its largest measles outbreak in decades, public health leaders need to be prepared to bring empathy to conversations that go beyond just trying to convince people vaccines are safe.”

The vast majority of parents and adults across political parties believe routine childhood vaccines are safe.

The poll found that 91% of the public believes that vaccines for childhood preventable diseases are safe for most children. This includes 63% who believe vaccines are very safe and 28% who believe they are somewhat safe. Only 5% and 4% believe they are not very safe or not at all safe, respectively.

Belief in vaccine safety is high among parents (88%) and across political affiliations:

• Democrats: 97%
• Republicans: 88%
• Supporters of the MAGA movement: 84%

That said, Republicans and MAGA supporters are less likely to believe vaccines are “very safe” (51% and 47%, respectively) than Democrats (80%).

Topline findings are available at https://hsph.harvard.edu/research/opinion-research/de-beaumont-foundation-harvard-polls/.

 

Methodology

Results are based on survey research conducted by the Harvard Opinion Research Program (HORP) based at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in partnership with the de Beaumont Foundation. The research was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and the de Beaumont Foundation. Representatives from these organizations developed the survey questionnaire, while analyses were conducted by researchers from Harvard Chan School and the fielding team at SSRS of Glen Mills, Pennsylvania. 

The HORP project team included Gillian SteelFisher, director of HORP and principal research scientist at Harvard Chan School, and Mary Findling, managing director of HORP.

The de Beaumont Foundation project team included Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, Emma Prus, senior program and research associate, Mark Miller, vice president of communications, and Nalini Padmanabhan, communications director.

The poll was conducted among a probability-based, nationally representative sample of 2,509 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. At the time the poll was conducted, the measles outbreak was in its third month and had spread to multiple states. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish online and by telephone. Respondents were reached online and by phone through the SSRS Opinion Panel, a nationally representative, probability-based panel. Panelists were randomly recruited via an Address Based Sampling frame and from random-digit dial samples on SSRS surveys. Most panelists completed the survey online with a small subset who do not access the internet completing by phone. The interview period was March 10 to 31, 2025.

Findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the de Beaumont Foundation, RWJF, or Harvard Chan School. When interpreting findings, one should recognize that all surveys are subject to sampling error. Results may differ from what would be obtained if the whole U.S. adult population had been interviewed. The margins of error at the 95% confidence interval are +/-2.3 percentage points for the total sample (n=2509), +/-3.6 for Republicans, including adults who lean Republican (n=1016), +/-3.4 for Democrats, including adults who lean Democrat (n=1132), +/-4.2 for MAGA supporters (n=778), and +/-3.9 for parents or guardians of children under 18 years old (n=1020).

Possible sources of non-sampling error include non-response bias, as well as question wording and ordering effects. Non-response in web and telephone surveys produces some known biases in survey-derived estimates because participation tends to vary for different subgroups of the population. To compensate for these known biases and for variations in the probability of selection within and across households, sample data are weighted in a multi-step process by probability of selection and recruitment, response rates by survey type, and demographic variables (gender, age, education, race/ethnicity, region, the frequency of internet use, civic engagement, population density, registered voter, party ID, religious affiliation, number of adults in household, and home tenure) to reflect the true population of adults in the U.S. Other techniques, including random sampling, multiple contact attempts, replicate subsamples, and systematic respondent selection within households, are used to ensure that the sample is representative.

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Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is a community of innovative scientists, practitioners, educators, and students dedicated to improving health and advancing equity so all people can thrive. We research the many factors influencing health and collaborate widely to translate those insights into policies, programs, and practices that prevent disease and promote well-being for people around the world. We also educate thousands of public health leaders a year through our degree programs, postdoctoral training, fellowships, and continuing education courses. Founded in 1913 as America’s first professional training program in public health, the School continues to have an extraordinary impact in fields ranging from infectious disease to environmental justice to health systems and beyond.

The de Beaumont Foundation creates and invests in bold solutions that improve the health of communities across the country. Its mission is to advance policy, build partnerships, and strengthen public health to create communities where everyone can achieve their best possible health. For more information, visit www.debeaumont.org.

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Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Poll: Amid multi-state measles outbreak, 79% of Americans support routine childhood vaccine requirements

Article Publication Date

26-Jun-2025

 

Researchers show AI art protection tools still leave creators at risk

The team of international researchers cite a need for stronger, more adaptive defenses within the rapidly growing landscape of AI and digital creativity

University of Texas at San Antonio

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The use of AI image generation models has not only gained popularity but raised concerns surrounding potential misuse when it comes to training data, including copyright-protected material.

Text-to-image models have gained significant popularity due to their ability to generate diverse, realistic-looking images from just a short prompt. As these models are trained on vast datasets from various sources, there is growing concern that artists’ works, including photographs, paintings and other creative pieces, may be used in training without their consent.

To protect their work from being exploited by emerging technologies, artists have turned to two prominent tools known as Glaze and NightShade.

The tools work by adding subtle, invisible distortions (known as poisoning perturbations) to digital images. These are designed to confuse AI models during training. Glaze takes a passive approach, hindering the AI model’s ability to extract key stylistic features. NightShade goes further, actively corrupting the learning process by causing the AI model to associate an artist’s style with unrelated concepts.

But a team of international researchers discovered these tools have critical weaknesses that cannot reliably stop AI models from training on artists’ work.

Murtuza Jadliwala, UTSA associate professor in computer science and core member of the MATRIX UTSA AI Consortium for Human Well-Being, worked alongside Hanna Foerster from University of Cambridge and Sasha Behrouzi, Phillip Rieger and Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from the Technical University of Darmstadt to show the insufficiency of existing copyright protection tools and the need for more robust approach.

The team developed LightShed, a powerful new method capable of bypassing these protections. LightShed can detect, reverse-engineer and remove the distortions, effectively stripping away the protections and rendering the images usable again for generative AI model training.

LightShed works through a three-step process. It first identifies whether an image has been altered with known poisoning techniques. In the second step, reverse engineering takes place as it learns the characteristics of the perturbations using publicly available poisoned examples. Finally, it eliminates the “poison” to restore the image to its original, unprotected form. 

In experimental evaluations, LightShed successfully detected NightShade-protected images with 99.98% accuracy and effectively removed the embedded protections from those images. 

“This shows that even when using tools like NightShade, artists are still at risk of their work being used for training AI models without their consent,” Foerster said.

Although LightShed reveals serious vulnerabilities in art protection tools, the researchers stress that it was developed not as an attack on them — but rather an urgent call to action to produce better ones. 

“We see this as a chance to co-evolve defenses,” Sadeghi explained. “Our goal is to collaborate with other scientists in this field and support the artistic community in developing tools that can withstand advanced adversaries.” 

The team cites a need for stronger, more adaptive defenses within the rapidly growing landscape of AI and digital creativity.

In March, OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT image model that could produce artwork in a style reminiscent of Studio Ghibli, the renowned Japanese animation studio. This sparked a wide range of viral memes — and equally wide discussions about image copyright, in which legal analysts noted that Studio Ghibli would be limited in how it could respond to this since copyright law protects specific expression, not a specific artistic “style.”

Following these discussions, OpenAI subsequently announced prompt safeguards to block some user requests to generate images in the styles of living artists. But issues over generative AI and copyright are still going on, as highlighted by the copyright and trademark infringement case currently being heard in London’s high court. Global photography agency Getty Images is alleging that London-based AI company Stability AI trained its image generation model on the agency’s huge archive of copyrighted pictures. Stability AI is fighting Getty’s claim and arguing that the case represents an “overt threat” to the generative AI industry.

“The increasing number of lawsuits filed by media corporations against generative AI service providers underscores the seriousness of the unauthorized use of copyrighted content for training AI models. By demonstrating how current protective measures for artists and their copyrighted works can be circumvented, our aim is to establish a strong foundation for the development of more robust and effective defense mechanisms to address this growing concern,” Jadliwala said.

The team’s study has been accepted for publication at the USENIX Security Symposium 2025, a premier cybersecurity and privacy conference.

 

Vegan diet improves dietary acid load, a key risk factor for diabetes, new study finds

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

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WASHINGTON, D.C.— Compared with a Mediterranean diet, dietary acid load decreased significantly on a low-fat vegan diet and was associated with weight loss, according to a randomized cross-over trial conducted by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and published in Frontiers in Nutrition.

 

“Eating acid-producing foods like meat, eggs, and dairy can increase the dietary acid load, or the amount of acids consumed, causing inflammation linked to weight gain,” says Hana Kahleova, MD, PhD, director of clinical research at the Physicians Committee and lead author of the study. “But replacing animal products with plant-based foods like leafy greens, berries, and legumes can help promote weight loss and create a healthy gut microbiome.”

 

This new research included 62 overweight adults who were randomized to a Mediterranean or a low-fat vegan diet for 16 weeks, separated by a four-week cleansing period, followed by an additional 16 weeks on the alternate diet.

 

Participants’ dietary records were used to calculate dietary acid load, which is commonly estimated by two scores: Potential Renal Acid Load (PRAL) and Net Endogenous Acid Production (NEAP). A higher score indicates a higher dietary acid load.

 

Animal products including meat, fish, eggs, and cheese cause the body to produce more acid, increasing dietary acid load, which is linked to chronic inflammation that disrupts metabolism and can lead to increased body weight. Plant-based diets, which are more alkaline, are associated with weight loss, improved insulin sensitivity, and lower blood pressure.

 

In the new analysis, both PRAL and NEAP scores decreased significantly on the vegan diet, with no significant change on the Mediterranean diet. The reduction in dietary acid load was associated with weight loss, and this association remained significant even after adjustment for changes in energy intake. Body weight was reduced by 13.2 pounds on the vegan diet, compared with no change on the Mediterranean diet.

 

The authors say that a vegan diet’s alkalizing effect, which increases the body’s pH level to make it less acidic, may also help promote weight loss. Top alkalizing foods include vegetables, particularly leafy greens, broccoli, beets, asparagus, garlic, carrots, and cabbage; fruits, such as berries, apples, cherries, apricots, or cantaloupe; legumes, for example lentils, chickpeas, peas, beans or soy; and grains, such as quinoa or millet.

 

Founded in 1985, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is a nonprofit organization that promotes preventive medicine, conducts clinical research, and encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in education and research.

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Journal

Frontiers in Nutrition

DOI

10.3389/fnut.2025.1634215 

Method of Research

Randomized controlled/clinical trial

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Dietary acid load on the Mediterranean and a vegan diet; a secondary analysis of a randomized, cross-over trial

Article Publication Date

25-Jun-2025

 

Chicago’s rodents are evolving to handle city living

Chipmunk and vole skulls from over 125 years reflect changes in diet and noise exposure

Field Museum

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 Skull and skin from a vole, collected in 1898 in Chicago.

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Credit: © Field Museum.

In general, evolution is a long, slow process of tiny changes passed down over generations, resulting in new adaptations and even new species over thousands or millions of years. But when living things are faced with dramatic shifts in the world around them, they sometimes rapidly adapt to better survive. Scientists recently found an example of evolution in real time, tucked away in the collection drawers of the Field Museum in Chicago. By comparing the skulls of chipmunks and voles from the Chicagoland area collected over the past 125 years, the researchers found evidence that these rodents have been adapting to life in an increasingly urban environment.

“Museum collections allow you to time travel,” says Stephanie Smith, a mammalogist, XCT laboratory manager at the Field Museum, and co-author of a new paper in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology detailing the discovery. “Instead of being limited to studying specimens collected over the course of one project, or one person’s lifetime, natural history collections allow you to look at things over a more evolutionarily relevant time scale.”

The Field Museum’s mammal collections are made up of more than 245,000 specimens from all over the world, but there’s especially good representation of animals from Chicago, where the museum is located. What’s more, these collections represent different moments in time throughout the past century.

“We’ve got things that are over 100 years old, and they're in just as good of shape as things that were collected literally this year,” says Smith. “We thought, this is a great resource to exploit.”

The researchers picked two rodents commonly found in Chicago: eastern chipmunks and eastern meadow voles. “We chose these two species because they have different biology, and we thought they might be responding differently to the stresses of urbanization,” says Anderson Feijó, assistant curator of mammals at the Field Museum and co-author of the study. Chipmunks are in the same family as squirrels, and spend most of their time aboveground, where they eat a wide variety of foods, including nuts, seeds, fruits, insects, and even frogs. Voles are more closely related to hamsters. They mostly eat plants, and they spend a lot of time in underground burrows.

Two of the study’s co-authors, Field Museum Women in Science interns Alyssa Stringer and Luna Bian, measured the skulls of 132 chipmunks and 193 voles. The team focused on skulls because skulls contain information about the animals’ sensory systems and diet, and they tend to be correlated with overall body size. “From the skulls, we can tell a little bit about how animals are changing in a lot of different, evolutionary relevant ways—how they're dealing with their environment and how they're taking in information,” says Smith.

Stringer and Bian took measurements of different parts of the skulls, noting things like the overall skull length and the length of the rows of teeth. They also created 3D scans of the skulls of 82 of the chipmunks and 54 of the voles. This part of the analysis, called geometric morphometrics, entailed digitally stacking the skull scans on top of each other and comparing the distances between different points on them.

These analyses revealed small but significant changes in the rodents’ skulls over the past century. The chipmunks’ skulls became larger over time, but the row of teeth along the sides of their mouths became shorter. Bony bumps in the voles’ skulls that house the inner ear shrank over time. But it wasn’t clear why they were changing.

To find an explanation for these changes, the scientists turned to historical records of temperature and levels of urbanization. “We tried very hard to come up with a way to quantify the spread of urbanization,” says Feijó. “We took advantage of satellite images showing the amount of area covered by buildings, dating back to 1940.” (Specimens older than 1940 were either from areas that were still wild in 1940, and thus could safely be assumed to be wild before that, or from highly urbanized areas like downtown Chicago.)

The researchers found that the changes in climate didn’t explain the changes in the rodents’ skulls, but the degree of urbanization did. The different ways the animals’ skulls changed may be related to the different ways that an increasingly urban habitat affected them.

“Over the last century, chipmunks in Chicago have been getting bigger, but their teeth are getting smaller,” says Feijó. “We believe this is probably associated with the kind of food they're eating. They're probably eating more human-related food, which makes them bigger, but not necessarily healthier. Meanwhile, their teeth are smaller— we think it's because they're eating less hard food, like the nuts and seeds they would normally eat.”

Voles, on the other hand, had smaller auditory bullae, bone structures associated with hearing. “We think this may relate to the city being loud— having these bones be smaller might help dampen excess environmental noise,” says Smith.

While these rodents have been able to evolve little changes to make it easier to live among humans, the take-home lesson isn’t that animals will just adapt to whatever we throw at them. Rather, these voles with smaller ear bones and chipmunks with smaller teeth are proof of how profoundly humans affect our environment and our capacity to make the world harder for our fellow animals to live in. This is a wake-up call.

“These findings clearly show that interfering with the environment has a detectable effect on wildlife,” says Feijó.

“Change is probably happening under your nose, and you don't see it happening unless you use resources like museum collections,” says Smith.

Authors Stephanie Smith and Anderson Feijó examining chipmunk specimens in the Field Museum’s collections.

Chipmunk skulls collected near Chicago in 1906.




Chipmunk specimens in the Field Museum's collections

Credit

(c) Field Museum

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Journal

Integrative and Comparative Biology

Article Title

Limited cranial shifts in city-dwelling rodents after a century of urbanization

Article Publication Date

26-Jun-2025

US Steel buyout gives Trump a new power: What about future presidents?

Copyright AP/David Dermer

By AP with Eleanor Butler
Published on 26/06/2025 

President Trump holds a veto power on specific matters and has the right to appoint an independent director as part of the Nippon Steel takeover.

President Donald Trump will control the so-called “golden share” that's part of the national security agreement under which he allowed Japan-based Nippon Steel to buy out American steelmaker US Steel. That's according to disclosures filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The provision gives the president the power to appoint a board member and have a say in company decisions that affect domestic steel production and competition with overseas producers.

Under the provision, Trump — or someone he designates — controls that decision-making power while he is president. However, control over those powers reverts to the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department when anyone else is president, according to the filings.

The White House responded in a statement that the share is “not granted to Trump specifically, but to whoever the president is". Officials were asked why Trump will directly control the decision-making and why it goes to the Treasury and Commerce departments under future presidents.

Still, the wording of the provision is specific to Trump.

It lists what decisions cannot be made without “the written consent of Donald J. Trump or President Trump’s Designee” at “any time when Donald J. Trump is serving as President of the United States of America” or “at any other time, the written consent of the CMAs”, a contractual term for the Treasury and Commerce departments.

Nippon Steel's nearly $15 billion buyout of Pittsburgh-based US Steel became final last week, making US Steel a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Trump has sought to characterise the acquisition as a "partnership" between the two companies after he at first vowed to block the deal — as former President Joe Biden did on his way out of the White House — before changing his mind after he became president.

Related

• Nippon Steel finalises US Steel takeover after state opposition
• President Trump orders review into Nippon Steel’s bid for US Steel

The national security agreement became effective 13 June and is between Nippon Steel, as well as its American subsidiary, and the federal government, represented by the departments of Commerce and Treasury, according to the disclosures.

The complete national security agreement hasn't been published publicly, although aspects of it have been outlined in statements and securities filings made by the companies, US Steel said Wednesday.

The pursuit by Nippon Steel dragged on for a year and a half, weighed down by national security concerns, opposition by the United Steelworkers, and presidential politics in the premier battleground state of Pennsylvania, where US Steel is headquartered.

The combined company will become the world’s fourth-largest steelmaker in an industry dominated by Chinese companies, and bring what analysts say is Nippon Steel’s top-notch technology to US Steel’s antiquated steelmaking processes. That’s on top of a commitment to invest $11bn to upgrade US Steel facilities.

The potential that the deal could be permanently blocked forced Nippon Steel to sweeten the deal.

That included upping its capital commitments in US Steel facilities and adding the golden share provision, giving Trump a veto power on specific matters and the right to appoint an independent director.

Those matters include reductions in Nippon Steel’s capital commitments in the national security agreement; changing US Steel’s name and headquarters; closing or idling US Steel’s plants; transferring production or jobs outside of the US; buying competing businesses in the US; and certain decisions on trade, labour and sourcing outside the US.