Hi, hope you’ve had a great week. Today’s newsletter heads to Texas, where we’ll meet immigrant janitors who have seen their workloads increase as coworkers lose temporary protected status. We’ll also check on the cost of Thanksgiving dinner, ponder the cost of killing the penny and learn what to watch for during open enrollment. But first: Let’s look at the state of the eclectic car. — Tony Wagner, newsletter editor

The market for electric vehicles in this country is at a turning point.

EVs just had their best quarter of sales on record, as Americans rushed to buy them before federal tax credits expired at the end of September. There are now more EVs on the road than ever before: over 6.5 million.

Now that the Trump administration and Congress have stripped away both the federal tax credits and most of the regulations that incentivized building more electric cars, carmakers are scaling back EV production in the U.S. and concentrating on vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Still, the American market for EVs likely won’t go away, according to experts who watch the industry, thanks in part to the thousands of new EV owners.

Chris Bendel of Colchester, Vermont, is one of them. He just bought a new 2025 Chevy Equinox EV. Like a lot of brand-new cars, it comes with plenty of features: He can start it up remotely, there’s an array of screens on the dashboard, and it’s got seat warmers with three different temperature levels.

“You can kind of just do whatever feels comfortable,” Bendel said, sitting inside the Chevy in his driveway.

It’s a big upgrade from his last car, a 2014 Mazda CX-5, which he brought to his mechanic in late September. It turned out to be one of those visits to the repair shop.

“The guy was like, ‘You got a lot of rust ... I would say, sell it now, trade it in, make it someone else's problem,’” Bendel said.

This happened just a few days before the $7,500 federal tax credit for new EVs expired. Bendel had been planning to make his next car an EV, so he decided to jump. After the tax credit and a bundle of other discounts, he said he paid about $20,000 for the Equinox. He figures he’ll save money in the long run.

On the first day of open enrollment, Rebecca Wilson woke up, grabbed her computer, and went straight to Oregon’s Affordable Care Act marketplace site to see what her health insurance was going to cost next year.

“I put in all of our information, and I just started sobbing,” she said

The plan she and her husband have now is going from $355 a month to $1,400 a month.

“This is insane. This is insane,” Wilson said. “It's just a couple of hundred dollars less than my mortgage.”

Wilson and her husband are two of the 24 million people who buy health insurance through the ACA marketplace.

With about a month left in the open enrollment period, there’s still a lot of uncertainty swirling over what’s going to happen with the enhanced subsidies or tax credits that have made insurance more affordable for millions of people for the last few years. At this point, Congress will likely let them expire in December.

On top of that, health insurance companies that sell ACA plans are raising rates by about 25%, which means buying insurance is about to get a lot more expensive — twice as expensive, on average, for people who are losing the enhanced premium tax credits.

Wilson said she’s not signing up yet, just in case Congress does extend the subsidies or tax credits. She doesn’t really believe that’ll happen.

Cynthia Cox at the health policy nonprofit KFF said she gets it.

“But I would go ahead and plan as though the enhanced tax credits are expiring. Maybe you'll be pleasantly surprised if something happens, but in the meantime, I think, start planning as if they're going away,” she said.

The question Wilson has is what happens if she does sign up for a plan now — maybe a worse but cheaper one — and then Congress votes to extend the subsidies after all?

“I want to know if I do lock in, will I be able to have a chance to go back and redo it?” she said.

Maria has been cleaning the same high rise office building on the west side of Houston for nearly 30 years — not long after she first came to Texas from El Salvador. She’s 70 years old now and comes into work when most people are headed home, during the evening rush hour.

(Marketplace isn’t using any of the cleaners’ real names, because they are afraid of being targeted by the Trump administration.)

Maria goes cubicle by cubicle, cleaning up trash. She earns about $13 an hour at her cleaning job. “I like the work. I like it in part because I get to exercise,” she said in Spanish.

But she does come home tired. And she’s been working extra lately, because roughly a third of her coworkers have had to quit since President Donald Trump’s administration started rolling back work permits.

“It’s a shame that they’ve taken away [permits] from so many colleagues,” she said. “It’s us, Hispanic immigrants, that are doing this [work]. Without us, there isn’t anybody else.”

And some have left more than just the office.

“Some say that they’re better off heading back to their home country. Many have already left,” she said.

But Maria is still here and able to work for now.

She has Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian protection that includes permission to work. The Trump administration has removed TPS from individuals from several countries — but Salvadorans are still protected.

For now, she and her colleagues with work authorization keep showing up to the office.

“We’re still there, but we’re afraid,” she said. And even though she has kids and grandkids living in Houston, she’s prepared for the worst.

“When they say, ‘There’s no more TPS,’ I’m going back to El Salvador,” she said.

While the Trump administration’s immigration raids have generated a lot of fear and media coverage, Dallas Federal Reserve economist Pia Orrenius said other policy changes are playing a larger role when it comes to the workforce.

“Hundreds of thousands, in some cases, maybe even millions, of work permits are being canceled. And so that's really what's affecting employers most directly,” she said.

The Philly Mint produced America’s last penny about a week ago, so what happens to the billions of dollars worth of 1-cent coins still in circulation?

Well, “circulation” is kind of a strong word. Most pennies are discarded or sitting in forgotten corners of our homes, Caity Weaver reported in the New York Times Magazine last year. They’ve given as change and never spent. Worse, the government has no real plan to deal with all these coins, Weaver reported in The Atlantic this week. (Those are both paywall-free links, by the way, the stories are very entertaining reads.) 

Pennies are still legal tender, but their remaining usefulness is bound to evaporate. They can’t really be recycled. Absent government guidance, businesses are left scrambling to make a plan for rounding transactions.