https://www.bettycjung.net/Fedgovchanges.htm
2025 U.S. Federal Government Changes
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The content was originally added to my U.S. Federal Government & Other National Statistics Sites webpage, which included links to various federal government webpages with data that I thought would be useful for Public Health and other related-field professionals.
When resources started to be removed, I started posting these changes on LinkedIn and BlueSky, so people would know what was no longer available. And, then other changes started happening, and I decided to document these changes on the Govstats.htm page noted above.
Finally, today, with the NBC news item How Trump is reshaping government data. The Trump administration has influenced data used by researchers, economists and scientists - an effort that drew more attention after the president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics I thought it was time that the documentation of removed and altered content should have its own Webpage. So, here it is. If you think other content should be included, please contact me: 
Tracking the lawsuits against the Trump administration Last updated December 15, 2025
Trump Administration Litigation Tracker
Erasure in Action Save Our Signs
9/4/2025 - If there wasn't a felon in the White House, taxpayer money wouldn't be wasted on contesting all the laws he is breaking and all the illegal actions he has been taking, like denying people of their rights (due process). [https://bsky.app/profile/bettycjung.bsky.social/post/3lxz3rxvrls2z]
February 2025 - U.S. Federal Government Public Health Data Issues
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When Revision is Wrong
Historical Negationism: This involves denying the veracity of facts or manipulating data to promote a false narrative, often seen in the denial of genocides. Dishonesty and Distortion: Intentionally misrepresenting the historical record to fit a particular ideology or political agenda is a misuse of history. "Whitewashing": This occurs when negative aspects of history are minimized or ignored to make the past seem more palatable or to protect certain beliefs or groups, as noted in Quora. Lack of Integrity: When sources are misrepresented, evidence is ignored, or conclusions are predetermined to serve an agenda rather than the pursuit of truth, the historical process is corrupted. The Key Distinction
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ELIMINATING 10 REGULATIONS FOR EACH NEW REGULATION ISSUED: Today, President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to unleash prosperity through deregulation.
The Order requires that whenever an agency promulgates a new rule, regulation, or guidance, it must identify at least 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance documents to be repealed.
The Director of the Office of Management and Budget will ensure standardized measurement and estimation of regulatory costs.
It requires that for fiscal year 2025, the total incremental cost of all new regulations, including repealed regulations, be significantly less than zero.
This section archives my 2/7/2025. 2/14/2025, 2/21/2025, 2/28/2025, 3/7/2025 LinkedIn postings regarding issues arising from Trump's administration's changes to Public Health data and information on federal government web sites.
According to the New York Times, More than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down.
There are many more, see the KFF link below for full description. These resources may return, but there is no guarantee the data will be the same as before the pause as extensive revisions and editing are taking place to existing sources to comply with political changes that are not necessarily fact-based.
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina February 4, 2025 "Your Local Epidemiologist" newsletter:
Scientists remain in limbo - unsure of who they can talk to, what they can say, or who is in charge. This lack of clarity is dangerous, especially during emerging threats.
Sources:
February 7, 2025
Decimation of U.S. Public Health and federal government data during this current administration.
On February 2, 2025, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported the takedown of many public health data and informational sources:
No longer available on federal government Web sites:
After pushback, limited updates resumed:
According to my 2/7/2025 posting, I tried to give an overview of the federal government's information disarray that is impacting Public Health. While some HHS, CDC and FDA webpages have been reposted, per 2/11/2025 court order, the People's CDC Report newsletter notes:
The January 21 pause on public health communications has not yet been formally lifted. We can only expect that the administration is sanitizing and altering reports, censoring scientific consensus.
During the past couple of weeks I have been searching for other ways to access missing federal government webpages and uncovered other sources that may be useful for your work. Too much information for one posting, I have split the resources into two postings:
Part 1 posting (this week) includes alternative sources of federal government data and eliminated Webpages.
Part 2 posting (~next week): Specific public health program sources; new sources of health and public health data that you may find useful to support our data needs and analyses.
CDC datasets uploaded before January 28th, 2025
List of files you can download
Downloadable Torrent File
End of Term Web Archive (to the end of the Biden Administration)
All U.S. federal government websites are already archived by the End of Term Web Archive
Official website
Wikipedia-Explanation
Internet Archive blog post about the 2024 archive
GitHub
Links to archived versions of every CDC.gov page available pre-purge (15 parts)
Thanks to Dr. Angela Rasmussen @angie_rasmussen for posting links to the 15 parts on X that was saved by Charles Gaba @charles_gaba
CDC.gov archive index now available w/alphabetical drop-down menu
Dr. Angela Rasmussen's Threadreader's listing of the 15 parts
Dr. Angela Rasmussen's Threadreader's listing of the 15 parts PDF Format
Sources:
Note: 2/7, 2/14, 2/21 postings - permanent home on my U.S. Federal Government & Other National Statistics Sites webpage. Should be ready by 2/28/2025, at: https://www.bettycjung.net/Govstats.htm
Dr. Katelyn Jetelina: Data are back up on CDC website but with a banner
Doctors For America sued the administration after removing important health data and guidance from government health websites. The judge ruled in favor. Can we trust this data? I know columns were being rearranged and variables being renamed. It's possible data was messed up-either by accident or on purpose. Confirmation analysis needed to ensure the data integrity.
USAspending.gov USAspending is official open data source of federal spending: Contracts, grants, & loans.
AskJan Long Covid Accommodation and Compliance
Americans with Disabilities Act & Long Covid
County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) Summary data related to health, free & public.
2024 Measures
Health Data The annual data release provides a revealing snapshot of how health is influenced by where we live, learn, work, and play. The snapshots provide communities a starting point to investigate where to make change.
Data & Documentation Find national statistics, state-level data and technical documentation including changes to our measures, guidelines for comparing data across states, information about data years and sources and more.
Harvard Dataverse Academic free, online repository. Researchers can use site to share & upload data & access what other researchers shared
Internet Archive collection page https://archive.org/details/EndofTermWebCrawls - cut and paste the URL to access if the direct link doesn't work.
Library of Congress Blog - End of Term Archive Information
National Archives Blog - End of Term Archive Information
World Health Organization - U.S. data
U.S. state health departments data sources Dr. Caitlin Rivers @caitlinrivers Google spreadsheet with links to all state health departments, all in one place.
Sources:
CDC will stop processing transgender data
The CDC will no longer process transgender identity data to comply with Trump's executive orders. This will likely affect federal health surveillance systems: National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Among Transgender Women; Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. There is a major dearth of data on trans and nonbinary people in U.S.
USDA removed climate change data and online tools
A filed lawsuit regarding USDA Web site removal of climate change information. USDA's decision to purge climate change info from its websites harms organic farmers.
Trump repeatedly called climate change a "hoax" and abandoned US efforts to limit the greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels causing climate change. There is overwhelming scientific consensus pollution from fossil fuels raise global average temperatures and driving more extreme weather.
Two online tools are no longer available
"Climate Risk Viewer" used to show impacts of climate change on rivers and water sheds, and how that might affect future water supplies.
"Farmer Helpline" to access funding for "climate-smart farming," loan program that supports reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
USDA's removal of all these resources violate 3 federal laws: Information Act (FOIA) that gives public the right to access key records from any federal agency, the Paperwork Reduction Act stipulating adequate notice before changing access to information, and Administrative Procedure Act that governs the way federal agencies develop regulations.
This posting will be added to https://www.bettycjung.net/Govstats.htm which now includes the previous 3 postings about changes to public health and related data on federal government websites.
Sources:
Scoop: Some CDC probationary employees have been reinstated. "We apologize for any disruption that this may have caused." The news came the same day the Trump administration revised a memo that had led to mass terminations in February, but it's unclear if this development is related. Inside Medicine, March 4, 2025.
This will be my final weekly update about the changes to the availability of public health and health-related data of federal government websites, not because the changes have stopped, but because they will probably continue. So, I will, however, note changes at https://www.bettycjung.net/Govstats.htm
Sad to say, many sources have been compromised, and I am not sure how reliable the available data are. Email me at: bcjungmph@yahoo.com with suggested sources and data verification studies, and I will add them to the more permanent location on the govstats page. Thanks.
IRS's Internal Revenue Manual is missing pages
Internal Revenue Manual, which outlines its policies and procedures, which could prevent taxpayers from fully complying with their fine obligations.
Michael Kaercher, Deputy Director of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law notes that changes will not simply affect this tax season, but could have long-term effects on the work of the tax agency.
National Law Enforcement Accountability Database gone
The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), a centralized repository of official records documenting instances of misconduct and commendations for federal law enforcement officers, was established under Executive Order 14074 and was deactivated by President Trump on January 20, 2025.
The Trump administration decommissioned the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which documented law enforcement misconduct across the country, according to the Citizens for Ethics.org, violates federal recordkeeping law.
Read NY Times editorial: The MAGA war on speech
Officials in Washington have spent the past month stripping federal websites of any hint of undesirable words and thoughts, disciplining news organizations that refuse to parrot the president's language and threatening to punish those who have voiced criticism of investigations and prosecutions.
More than 8,000 federal websites, in fact, have been taken down or altered to remove concepts derided by the MAGA movement. These include thousands of pages about vaccine research and S.T.D. prevention guidelines, efforts to prevent hate crimes, prevention of racial discrimination in drug trials and disbursement of federal grants and details of environmental policies to slow climate change.
Sources:
As we have been following since the beginning of Trump's second term, websites across the entire federal government have been altered and taken offline under this administration's war on science, health, and diversity, equity, and inclusion. Critical information promoting vaccines, HIV care, reproductive health options including abortion, and trans and gender confirmation healthcare have been purged from the CDC's live website under Trump. Disease surveillance data about bird flu and other concerns have either been delayed or have stopped being updated entirely. Some deleted pages across the government have at least temporarily been restored thanks to a court order, but the Trump administration has added a note rejecting "gender ideology" to some of them.
Restored CDC isn't going to have continuous updates on this type of healthcare and disease guidance, but it has brought back all of the critical data that was purged in an easy to use, easy to navigate, and fast website. Other critical archiving projects, including the End of Term Archive, have saved government websites more broadly, but many website archives are slow to use and difficult to navigate because things like interactive elements and internal linking can sometimes be wonky. Some archives require users to download files to navigate them on their own computers, for example. Archives on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine are a great public service, but depending on the snapshot, they can be slow to load and some elements may be broken. Using RestoredCDC.org, meanwhile, is like using any other website, and the team hopes that the pages will be indexed by Google so they will be easily discoverable on search engines.
"Therefore, we will re-build the links between the pages, to create a site that can be navigated the same way as the pre-January 21, 2025 CDC site," they wrote. "The only changes we will make on these pages is to add a header that indicates that this site is not a CDC website. Because of the complex navigation between pages, we will also include a button to report problems in this header. Our goal is to provide a mirror site that provides the same information and user experience as the previous CDC website."
"Our goal is to provide a resource that includes the information and data previously available," the team wrote. "We are committed to providing the previously available webpages and data, from before the potential tampering occurred. Our approach is to be as transparent as possible about our process. We plan to gather archival data and then remove CDC logos and branding, using GitHub to host our code to create the site."
Graphic source: https://apnews.com/article/dei-purge-images-pentagon-diversity-women-black-8efcfaec909954f4a24bad0d49c78074
Graphic source: https://apnews.com/article/dei-purge-images-pentagon-diversity-women-black-8efcfaec909954f4a24bad0d49c78074
The purge could delete as many as 100,000 images or posts in total, when considering social media pages and other websites that are also being culled for DEI content.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had given the military until Wednesday to remove content that highlights diversity efforts in its ranks following President Donald Trump's executive order ending those programs across the federal government.
The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities, including notable milestones made in the military. And it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months - such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.
In some cases, photos seemed to be flagged for removal simply because their file included the word "gay," including service members with that last name and an image of the B-29 aircraft Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.
He noted that Hegseth has declared that "DEI is dead" and that efforts to put one group ahead of another through DEI programs erodes camaraderie and threatens mission execution.
The shred and burn initiative may violate federal law. The American Foreign Service Association, a union that represents diplomats, warned that the destruction of documents may violate the Federal Records Act, which requires agencies to abide by certain document retention requirements. Under the law, printed documents are required to be saved in a digital format before being destroyed-and it's not clear that there has been any effort to digitize the documents that are getting put through the shredder or into the burn bags.
USAID isn't alone in its apparent efforts to obfuscate access to documents. DOGE, which is responsible in large part for gutting USAID, has been trying to operate in secrecy as much as possible. Elon Musk has thrown hissy fits over members of his staff being named in public-a thing that would be standard for basically any other government agency. And for the entirety of its operation thus far, DOGE has ignored Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by claiming that it is immune from the process by arguing that it is a 'presidential records entity' that serves as a shield against public disclosure.
The DoD has purged 26,000 images from its public database as part of a "digital content refresh." The photo purge is the result of Donald Trump's executive order ordering the end of "radical and wasteful government DEI programs." After Trump signed the order, the Pentagon announced the purge of woke images from its databases and started removing stuff from the internet.
The goal, it said, was to take down all DEI-related imagery and articles on its various websites as part of a "digital content refresh" that more closely aligns with the Trump administration and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseht's views of the American military.The purge has been slipshod and imprecise. It's unclear why this picture of The Enola Gay was removed from an Air Force page, but I would guess it's because the URL ends in "deiatomic-exposure" and triggered an automatic system looking for the letters "DEI." As with so many other things in the Trump administration, the facts are slippery and seem to change moment to moment.
But the Pentagon has still removed a lot of content, mostly related to Black and female servicemembers and various diversity and inclusion initiatives. A 15-year-old article on the Air Force website about an all-female crew of AF support staff is gone. A lecture from a Tuskegee Airman about integration is gone. Photos of a multicultural celebration at a Marine Corps base are gone. The disappeared content is overwhelmingly stuff that featured women and non-white service members.
Much of the world, including U.S. citizens, view the American military as a group of bullies and thugs. The Pentagon has worked hard to shift that perception. The images and videos it is scrubbing from the internet are part of a concerted campaign to show America and the world that it was more than just killers. Trump and Hegseth have decided that's all the Pentagon is and all it can ever be.
A website looking just like one run by the CDC, but featuring anti-vaccine propaganda, seemed to have been launched on Friday by a group formerly run by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The brazenness of the move was stunning, with the website using the CDC's official logo, as well as the same font, color scheme, and page layout as used by the agency's website. Anyone who stumbled across the faux page could have been forgiven for thinking the page was legitimate and left puzzled by the questions it raised about the safety of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, the chief target of vaccine opponents.
By Saturday evening, the site was dark. The New York Times reported that Kennedy had instructed the Children's Health Defense, which appeared to be responsible, to take it down. But questions remain about why the organization, which has not publicly claimed credit for the work, went to the effort involved in mounting the page, and why it appeared to think it could use the trademarks of a government agency. The Internet Archive captured images of the page on Friday and Saturday. - Helen Branswell
Imposter Uncovered
Graphic Source: https://infoepi.substack.com/p/cdc-clone-site-rife-with-false-vaccine
Here is the entire transcript of messages from the Signal group chat just released by Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic:
byu/nnhuyhuy inFauxmoi
Significantly, the December 2024 organic pet food rule assured pet owners that slaughter by-products (used in organic pet foods) were sourced from inspected and passed animals. Quoting USDA:
"The term organic slaughter by-products refers to the parts of organic animals that humans do not typically eat, such as offal, gristle, and bone. It does not refer to substandard animal products from diseased animals, uninspected animals, condemned animals, or animals deemed unfit for human consumption."
The USDA itself admitted that the rules approved in December 2024 resolved "problems by, first, establishing that organic pet food is regulated as a processed product rather than as livestock feed." But, if these regulations are cut - organic pet food will again be faced with problems. Organic pet food will return to being regulated as livestock feed. If these regulations are cut, there would be nothing in place to prevent an organic feed grade pet food from sourcing "substandard animal products from diseased animals, uninspected animals, condemned animals, or animals deemed unfit for human consumption."
Until the recent changes, VA hospitals' bylaws said that medical staff could not discriminate against patients "on the basis of race, age, color, sex, religion, national origin, politics, marital status or disability in any employment matter". Now, several of those items - including "national origin," "politics" and "marital status" - have been removed from that list.
Similarly, the bylaw on "decisions regarding medical staff membership" no longer forbids VA hospitals from discriminating against candidates for staff positions based on national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, membership in a labor organization or "lawful political party affiliation".
The CDC Data Project was developed by Fired But Fighting, a network of former CDC employees, to summarize publicly available federal agency and budget data to show the impact of the proposed FY26 budget on efforts to help Americans live safer, healthier and longer lives. Take a moment to review the site, educate yourself on the budget cuts proposed to public health and share this with your contacts. This is a great resource for advocacy to support public health. (APHA)
Graphic source: https://thesicktimes.org/2025/06/19/the-federal-government-is-restricting-covid-19-vaccine-access-heres-what-that-means-for-the-ongoing-pandemic-and-people-with-long-covid/
August 4, 2025
Graphic source: https://www.statista.com/chart/34931/difference-between-preliminary-and-final-data-for-additions-losses-to-nonfarm-payroll-employment/?lid=d8s00pudgiuo
August 4, 2025
Graphic source:https://www.statista.com/chart/34932/experts-on-the-quality-of-official-us-economic-statistics/?lid=mm9pbu20sngk&utm_source=braze
Tuesday, August 05, 2025
How Trump is reshaping government data
Meteorological data collected by some weather balloons has been halted. Statistics for HIV among transgender people were scrubbed from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's website. And basic public figures, like how many people work for the federal government, have been frozen or delayed for months.
Across the federal government, President Donald Trump has been wielding his influence over data used by researchers, economists and scientists, an effort that was playing out largely behind the scenes until he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Notation on top of webpage about data issues
Krassenstein - Before removal of Sections 9 and 10
Trump's L.A. deployment ruled illegal (New York Times, September 2, 2025)
A federal judge accused President Trump of effectively turning nearly 5,000 Marines and National Guard soldiers into a "national police force" in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Judge Charles R. Breyer ruled that Trump exceeded the limits of federal laws that generally prohibit the use of the military for domestic law enforcement. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton and is the brother of former Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court. Our legal expert says the decision could make it harder for Trump to send troops to other cities. But Trump said today that "we're going in" to Chicago, offering no details.
Climate Experts' Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report
A group of more than 85 scientists have issued a joint rebuttal to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report about climate change, finding it full of errors and misrepresenting climate science.
This comes weeks after the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Environmental Defense Fund filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration that alleges that Energy Secretary Chris Wright "quietly arranged for five hand-picked skeptics of the effects of climate change" to compile the government's climate report and violated the law by creating the report in secret with authors "of only one point of view."
Dessler argues that this DOE report, released in late July, is important to pay attention to, because of what he and other scientists identify as problems with the science, and because of how the report is being used by the Trump administration to roll back the endangerment finding. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has said the goal of the administration is "driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion."
Our review reveals that the DOE report's key assertions-including claims of no trends in extreme weather and the supposed broad benefits of carbon dioxide-are either misleading or fundamentally incorrect. The authors reached these flawed conclusions through selective filtering of evidence ('cherry picking'), overemphasis of uncertainties, misquoting peer-reviewed research, and a general dismissal of the vast majority of decades of peer-reviewed research.
A federal judge in Boston ordered the Trump administration on Wednesday to unfreeze nearly $2.2 billion in federal grants to Harvard.
"All freezes and terminations of funding to Harvard made pursuant to the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters on or after April 14, 2025 are vacated and set aside," U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs said in the order.
The 84-page order conceded that Harvard has been "plagued by antisemitism" in recent years and should "have done a better job of dealing with the issue," but it said that "there is, in reality, little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism."
She cited the April letter in which the Trump administration conditioned funding on agreeing to those 10 terms, "only one of which related to antisemitism," she said. She said the six other terms were "related to ideological and pedagogical concerns, including who may lead and teach at Harvard, who may be admitted, and what may be taught."
The Democratic governors of Washington state, Oregon and California announced Wednesday that they have created an alliance to establish their own recommendations for who should receive vaccines because they believe the Trump administration is putting Americans' health at risk by politicizing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The differing responses come as COVID-19 cases rise and as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has restructured and downsized the CDC and attempted to advance anti-vaccine policies that are contradicted by decades of scientific research. Concerns about staffing and budget cuts were heightened after the White House sought to oust the agency's director and some top CDC leaders resigned in protest.
"The CDC has become a political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science, ideology that will lead to severe health consequences," the governors said in a joint statement.
"The dismantling of public health and dismissal of experienced and respected health leaders and advisers, along with the lack of using science, data, and evidence to improve our nation's health are placing lives at risk," California State Health Officer Erica Pan said in the news release.
In the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, states formed regional alliances to gain buying power for respirators, gloves and other personal protective equipment for frontline workers and to coordinate reopening their largely shuttered economies.
Governors in the Northeast and West Coast - all but one of them Democrats - announced separate regional groups in 2020 hours after Trump said on social media that it would be his decision when to ''open up the states.''
AMA condemns 'unprecedented rollback' The American Medical Association (AMA) was quick to release a response, expressing its opposition to Ladapo's proposed end to mandates.
"The American Medical Association strongly opposes Florida's plan to end all vaccine mandates, including those required for school attendance. This unprecedented rollback would undermine decades of public health progress and place children and communities at increased risk for diseases such as measles, mumps, polio and chickenpox resulting in serious illness, disability and even death," Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, MD, trustee with the AMA, said in a statement. "While there is still time, we urge Florida to reconsider this change to help prevent a rise of infectious disease outbreaks that put health and lives at risk."
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 89% of all Florida students entering kindergarten receive routine immunizations, as do 92% of students nationwide.
Graphic source:
https://christinapagel.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-his-perceived-enemies
Graphic source:
https://christinapagel.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-his-perceived-enemies
Democrats have blocked nearly every single one of Trump's nominees, forcing majority Republicans to spend valuable floor time on procedural votes and leaving many positions in the executive branch unfilled.
GOP senators discussed one proposal in a private meeting on Wednesday that would enable them to confirm large tranches of nominees "en bloc," or several at once, if a majority of senators agree, according to multiple senators who attended the meeting.
Currently, the objection of a single senator forces multiple votes on most nominations. The rules change would likely only apply to executive branch nominations, not lifetime judicial appointments, and would exclude many of the most high-profile positions, such as Cabinet nominees, that require a longer debate time.
Schumer said in a Wednesday statement that Republicans' proposed plan "guts the Senate's constitutional role of advice and consent, weakens our checks and balances, and guarantees that historically bad nominees will only get worse with even less oversight."
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has agreed to restore webpages with pertinent health and science information that it deleted in order to comply with an executive order from President Donald Trump. Specifically, content deemed to have any link to "diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)" was removed from websites operated by the federal government.
The Washington State Medical Association (WSMA), which acted as the plaintiff alongside the state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, announced the settlement on Thursday-which is tantamount to a victory, as restoring the deleted information was the purpose of the lawsuit.
At the behest of Trump, HHS hastily purged all "DEI" public health information from agency websites, including facts on birth control, maternal health, opioid addiction, AIDS and more.
WSMA sued, arguing that physicians and patients rely on official government websites for accurate, timely health information. Public health would suffer as a result of such data being suddenly out of reach, the group maintained. The federal government began the deletion process in January, days after Trump took office.
"As the leading voice for physicians in Washington state, the WSMA engaged in this legal effort to resist interference into the physician-patient relationship and to show patients and communities that regardless of the whims of governments or politics, physicians are committed to providing accurate, evidence-based care to patients and we will fight any intrusion into our ability to do so," WSMA President John Bramhall, MD, PhD said in a statement.
Per the agreement, HHS will restore the deleted webpages, studies and other documents-more than 100 in total-over the next few weeks.
In response to the settlement, an HHS official said the agency "remains committed to its mission of removing radical gender and DEI ideology from federal programs, subject to applicable law, to ensure taxpayer dollars deliver meaningful results for the American people."
The WSMA said it was "thrilled" by the outcome of its lawsuit, adding that "critical resources are once again available to physicians, scientists, medical professionals and the American public." Another similar case, brought by Doctors of America, is still pending in federal court. While the two overlap, its outcome remains unknown and could result in even more public information being recovered.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Senate committee on Thursday that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention leaders who left the agency last week deserved to be fired. He criticized CDC recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic tied to lockdowns and masking policies, and claimed - wrongly - that they 'failed to do anything about the disease itself.'
"The people who at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving," Kennedy said. He later said they deserved to be fired for not doing enough to control chronic disease.
The Senate Finance Committee called Kennedy to a hearing about his plans to "Make America Healthy Again," but Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden said Kennedy was lying when he said he had the support of U.S. doctors. He said Kennedy had "stacked the deck" of a vaccines committee, replacing scientists with "skeptics and conspiracy theorists."
In May, Kennedy - a longtime leader in the anti-vaccine movement - announced COVID-19 vaccines would no longer be recommended for healthy children and pregnant women, a move opposed by medical and public health groups. In June, he abruptly a panel of experts that had been advising the government on vaccine policy. He replaced them with a handpicked group that included several vaccine skeptics, and then shut the door to several doctors groups that had long helped form the committee's recommendations.
A number of medical groups say Kennedy can't be counted on to make decisions based on robust medical evidence. In a statement Wednesday, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and 20 other medical and public health organizations issued a joint statement calling on Kennedy to resign. "Our country needs leadership that will promote open, honest dialogue, not disregard decades of lifesaving science, spread misinformation, reverse medical progress and decimate programs that keep us safe," the statement said.
Many of the nation's leading public health and medical societies, including the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have decried Kennedy's policies and warn they will drive up rates of vaccine-preventable diseases.
Brian Schwalb, the district's elected attorney general, said in a lawsuit that the deployment, which now involves more than 1,000 troops, is an illegal use of the military for domestic law enforcement.
"No American jurisdiction should be involuntarily subjected to military occupation," Schwalb wrote.
Graphic source: https://apnews.com/article/washington-dc-trump-federal-takeover-national-guard-lawsuit-f2f76ef685676ee0d3bbd81496c74f2e
September 4, 2025
Source: https://bsky.app/profile/luckytran.com/post/3ly27h7sni222
Acetaminophen - ASD-ADHD Products Liability Litigation 12/2023
Acetaminophen Use During Pregnancy and Children's Risk of Autism, ADHD, and Intellectual Disability 9/4/2024 JAMANetwork
President Donald Trump on Saturday amplified his promises to send National Guard troops and immigration agents to Chicago by posting a parody image from "Apocalypse Now" featuring a ball of flames as helicopters zoom over the nation's third-largest city. In response to the post, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat, called Trump a "wannabe dictator."
The Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Donald Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission despite a federal law that is intended to restrict the White House's power to control the agency.
Asian American and other immigrant organizations warned of grave consequences after Monday's Supreme Court ruling essentially greenlighting racial profiling. The court ruled that federal agents could stop people simply for looking a certain way or speaking a certain language.
"This ruling is dangerous. It strips away fundamental protections and normalizes harassment of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike," said Aileen Louie, Interim CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California. "It tells our communities that the way you look, the language you speak, or the place you work can now make you a target. That is unconstitutional and unacceptable."
"This Supreme Court decision upends the U.S. Constitution's guarantee that all Americans will be free from arbitrary targeting by law enforcement," said Ben Johnson in a statement. "It threatens to transform America into a 'show me your papers' nation where Immigration and Customs Enforcement can target and stop people because of the way they look, sound, work, or even where they are standing in public. Every American should be gravely concerned."
Three high-ranking FBI officials were fired last month in a "campaign of retribution" carried out by a director who knew better but caved to political pressure from the Trump administration so he could keep his own position, according to a federal lawsuit filed Wednesday that seeks reinstatement of the agents.
The complaint asserts that Director Kash Patel indicated directly to one of the ousted agents, Brian Driscoll, that he knew the firings were "likely illegal" but was powerless to stop them because the White House and the Justice Department were determined to remove all agents who helped investigate President Donald Trump. It quotes Patel as having told Driscoll in a conversation last month "the FBI tried to put the president in jail and he hasn't forgotten it."
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Driscoll, Steve Jensen and Spencer Evans, three of five agents known to have been fired last month in a purge that current and former officials say has unnerved the workforce. Fired agents have leveled unflattering allegations of a law enforcement agency whose personnel moves are shaped by the White House and guided more by politics than by public safety. "Patel not only acted unlawfully but deliberately chose to prioritize politicizing the FBI over protecting the American people," the suit says. It adds that "his decision to do so degraded the country's national security by firing three of the FBI's most experienced operational leaders, each of them experts in preventing terrorism and reducing violent crime."
Kennedy, who has long promoted doubts about the safety and efficacy of a range of vaccines contrary to scientific evidence, also fired Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head Susan Monarez last month. All 17 expert members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices were fired by Kennedy in June.
Many Americans, particularly Democrats, worry the Trump administration could pull back federal support for vaccines more broadly. Asked if they were worried that in the future children wouldn't get the vaccines they need, 48% of respondents said they were concerned, compared to 38% who said they were not.
$10 Million in Contraceptives Have Been Destroyed on Orders From Trump Officials. The pills, intrauterine devices and hormonal implants, valued at about $9.7 million, had been purchased by U.S.A.I.D. for women in low-income countries.
Yesterday: Trump's emergency takeover of the D.C. police expired, returning the department to local control. But: While the federal government will no longer oversee the local police force, ICE and National Guard troops will remain in the city, with D.C. officials' cooperation.
As is so often the case with Mr. Trump, however, he has both identified a real problem and enacted a set of policies that will worsen that problem. With public health, the damage could be vast. His administration is rejecting basic medical knowledge and turning back the clock to an era when people were sicker and died sooner.
The administration's hostility to lifesaving vaccines, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has already contributed to a rise in measles. Mr. Trump's cuts to scientific research will forestall future treatments of cancer, heart disease and childhood illnesses. His cuts to Medicaid, which pay for tax breaks for the wealthy, will leave millions of Americans without health insurance and, by extension, health care. His rollback of environmental regulations has allowed corporations to pump more pollution into the air and water, which will contribute to lung diseases and other ailments.
The taming of infectious diseases, including polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, tetanus, influenza and, most recently, Covid-19, has been one of humankind's greatest achievements. These diseases have all been made far less deadly, and in some cases virtually nonexistent, thanks to vaccines. Mr. Trump himself recently said that vaccines work, "pure and simple."
Yet as his top health official he has appointed a conspiracist, Mr. Kennedy, who exaggerates or outright lies about the risks that come with these vaccines. Mr. Kennedy has filled an important federal panel, which shapes which vaccines are covered by insurers, with other conspiracists. Republican-led states are following the administration's lead; Florida is trying to repeal vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.
The FDA is basing its claim on an analysis of data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, a publicly available database maintained by the FDA and the CDC, according to three sources familiar with the plan.
But, two of the sources said, the agency is misusing the database which allows anyone - including doctors, patients and caregivers - to submit reports to VAERS about adverse events they believe are linked to vaccines. The reports are unverified, but the health agencies use the database as a guide for topics to investigate further.Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the Universit y of California Law, San Francisco, said the database reports can't prove a connection between vaccination and children's deaths.
"To identify causation to a vaccine you need to show that the cause of death was something the vaccine caused, and by itself, a VAERS report would not show that - you need larger studies comparing incidents of the harm with or without the vaccine," she said in an email.
"We've been looking into the VAERS database of self-reports that there have been children that have died from the Covid vaccine," Makary said. "We're going to release a report in the coming few weeks and we're going to let people know. We're doing an intense investigation."
The VAERS website warns that reports can contain inaccurate, incomplete or biased information. "As a result, there are limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind."
The Washington Post reported that Makary's special adviser Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, a sports medicine physician who criticized Covid shots for children during the pandemic, is expected to present the new findings at next week's vaccine committee meeting.
One former FDA official, who requested anonymity to speak freely, pushed back on the findings. "I can tell you on a stack of Bibles that we looked through all of the autopsy reports and that we didn't find anything," the official said in a text message. "Unless someone was hiding them from us I don't know what they're referring to."
Kennedy has already taken steps to limit access to this year's vaccine: Last month, he announced that the FDA had approved updated Covid shots for the fall for people 65 and up and those with underlying medical conditions. The limited approval has left some patients and pharmacies confused, and some patients report that they haven't been able to get the shots.
The decision to disband the CWG came as a hearing was held this week in a lawsuit that the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists had filed against the Trump administration. As NPR reported previously, the suit alleges that Energy Secretary Chris Wright "quietly arranged for five hand-picked skeptics of the effects of climate change" to compile the government's climate report and violated the law by creating the report in secret with authors "of only one point of view."
"The Climate Working Group was convened in secrecy, and it created a clandestine report - in brazen violation of federal law - that is being used to weaken protections against the climate pollution that makes life less safe and less affordable for all Americans," Erin Murphy, senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, wrote in a statement.
- U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday appointed five new members to the revamped advisory panel that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccine policy, review guidance on shots for hepatitis B, measles-mumps-rubella-varicella and COVID-19, in a closely watched session that could further reshape the federal vaccination policy.
Kennedy, a longtime vaccine critic, dismissed all 17 members of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices in June and installed a new, smaller panel, with members who have questioned aspects of mRNA and childhood vaccination. The committee will now have 12 members.
Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist who has examined cases of myocarditis related to COVID-19 vaccination. According to a news report from 2022, he backed the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin - both unproven treatments for COVID-19 - to treat the illness during the pandemic.
The former BLS commissioner warned of political meddling in economic data collection. Erika McEntarfer's ousting followed a jobs report showing 250,000 fewer jobs were added than expected. Economists fear that firing the BLS head harms US economic data integrity and public trust. Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, raised the alarm on political meddling in economic data collection. "Economic data must be free from partisan influence," McEntarfer said in her first public remarks since her sudden ousting by President Donald Trump last month.
"Markets have to trust the data are not manipulated," McEntarfer said. "Firing your chief statisticians for releasing data you do not like, it has serious economic consequences." Last month, Trump fired McEntarfer following a disappointing jobs report. Trump said that the report, which showed the US had added about 250,000 fewer jobs than expected, had been manipulated to hurt him politically. BLS often revises its jobs reports. Economists warned that Trump firing McEntarfer and raising doubts about BLS data could have poor consequences. "Firing the head of the BLS is five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system," (Jed Kolko).
William Beach, a Trump-appointed former BLS commissioner, also condemned McEntarfer's firing. He called his successor's firing "a dangerous precedent." Last month, Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, a conservative economist at the Heritage Foundation, to serve as the next BLS commissioner. Antoni, whose appointment requires Senate confirmation, has previously been critical of the BLS and its reports. Antoni has no government experience.
An Inside Medicine summary of possible CDC funding based on the President's Budget, the House markup, and the Senate markup. In the Trump column, a color scheme indicates programs Trump wants entirely slashed (red), programs where Trump requested substantial cuts (yellow), and programs where he sought flat or increased funding (blue). Image by Birna Gustafsson for Inside Medicine.
Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr suggested ABC's broadcast license was at risk from Kimmel's statements about Tyler Robinson, the accused killer of Kirk.
Jimmy Kimmel, during his opening monologue for Monday night's show, had suggested that Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing Kirk last week at a Utah university, was aligned with President Donald Trump's MAGA - Make America Great Again - movement.
"The MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it," Kimmel said.
What to know: A provision of the National Defense Authorization Act passed by the House would prevent three bases once named after Confederates from being renamed again.
Context: Nine bases originally named in honor of Confederate leaders were renamed after other military figures following a 2020 initiative.
Then: Trump sought to restore the base names, but with a twist: the bases were named in honor of military figures who bore the same last name as the original namesake.
What happened: Signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks will be taken down to comply with a Trump order to remove "corrosive ideology" from parks.
More: National Park Service officials are taking a broad interpretation of the order and have asked employees to report any information that may violate it.
Today: Former CDC director Susan Monarez told senators that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pressured her to align with his anti-vaccine views.
More: Monarez said Kennedy told her to fire vaccine scientists and required a political review of every major CDC policy decision.
President Donald Trump has used threats, lawsuits and government pressure as he remakes the American media landscape, unleashing his long-standing grievances against an industry that has mocked, criticized and scorned him for years.
Why this matters: He's extracted multimillion-dollar settlements, forced companies into costly litigation and prompted changes to programming that he found objectionable. Now Trump is escalating his campaign of censure and retaliation, invigorated by successful efforts to push ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel off the air for his commentary on conservative activist Charlie Kirk's assassination.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One while returning from Great Britain on Thursday, Trump said federal regulators should consider revoking broadcast licenses for networks that "give me only bad publicity." "All they do is hit Trump," he said.
Brendan Carr, Trump's handpicked head of the Federal Communications Commission, issued a similar warning the previous day while criticizing Kimmel's remarks. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way," Carr said. "These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead." ABC suspended Kimmel hours later.
U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday ruled that Trump's 85-page lawsuit was overly long and full of "tedious and burdensome" language that had no bearing on the legal case.
"A complaint is not a megaphone for public relations or a podium for a passionate oration at a political rally," Merryday wrote in a four-page order. "This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner."
The Times had said it was meritless and an attempt to discourage independent reporting. "We welcome the judge's quick ruling, which recognized that the complaint was a political document rather than a serious legal filing," spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said Friday.
The potential for harm is even clearer when it comes to delaying the hepatitis B vaccine. As CDC experts emphasized in their presentation to the panel, up to 85 percent of infants born to infected mothers contract the virus, and about 90 percent of those children go on to develop chronic hepatitis B, a lifelong condition that can lead to cirrhosis, liver cancer and premature death.
Second, these vaccines have no record of serious safety issues. Hepatitis B vaccines have been in use since the 1980s, with at least 20 studies confirming their safety. None suggest that a birth dose is unsafe or that waiting a month provides any benefit. The MMRV vaccine does have a slightly elevated risk of high fevers resulting in seizures compared to the two separate shots, but the danger of families forgoing the additional immunization could outweigh that risk.
In other words, the anti-vaccine fringe is now setting CDC's agenda. If someone somewhere has a "concern," no matter how unfounded, that's apparently reason enough to question decades of settled science.
A pattern of getting rid of statistics has emerged that echoes the president's first term, when he suggested ifthe nation stopped testing for Covid, it would have few cases.
When the Trump administration said last week that it would stop requiring thousands of industrial facilities to report their planet-warming pollution, the move fit a growing pattern: If data points to a problem, stop collecting the data.
At the E.P.A., Trump officials said on Friday that they would end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the country's most comprehensive way to track the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the planet. Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, said in a statement that the program was "nothing more than bureaucratic red tape."
For the past 15 years, the program has collected data from roughly 8,000 industrial facilities nationwide,including coal-burning power plants, oil refineries and steel mills. The publication of this data has resulted in many companies reducing their emissions, most likely because the firms tried to become greener than their competitors, according to 2023 research.
In the United States, the Trump administration's efforts to end emissions measurements extend even to space, where officials want to decommission and possibly destroy two NASA satellites that monitor greenhouse gases and cost more than $800 million to launch. These satellites have provided highly precise measurements of carbon dioxide, one of the most prevalent greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere. At the same time, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund recently lost contact with another satellite that had monitored methane emissions from oil and gas sites worldwide. Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas that is roughly 80 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the short term.
In the mid-1970s, America's five-year cancer-survival rate sat at 49 percent; today, it is 68 percent. You can also correlate America's sustained investment in cancer research directly with these returns: According to a recent study in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, every $326 that our government spends researching cancer extends a human life by one year. Now an extraordinarily successful scientific research system - one that took decades to build, has saved millions of lives and generated billions of dollars in profits for American companies and investors - is being dismantled before our eyes.
In a matter of months, the Trump administration has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in cancer-related research grants and contracts, arguing that they were part of politically driven D.E.I. initiatives, and suspended or delayed payments for hundreds of millions more. It is trying to sharply reduce the percentage of expenses that the government will cover for federally funded cancer-research labs. It has terminated hundreds of government employees who helped lead the country's cancer-research system and ensured that new discoveries reached clinicians, cancer patients and the American public. And the president's proposed budget for the next fiscal year calls for a more-than-37-percent cut to the National Cancer Institute - the N.I.H. agency that leads most of the nation's cancer research - reducing it to $4.5 billion from $7.2 billion. Adjusting for inflation, you have to go back more than 30 years to find a comparably sized federal cancer-research budget.
But a very different attitude toward American science now prevails on the right wing of American politics. The Covid epidemic is largely responsible. Caught between a deadly pandemic and the government's oppressive countermeasures, many Americans sought someone to blame. A variety of vaccine skeptics, antigovernment MAGA types and wellness influencers and a discrete cohort of doctors and medical experts offered them acandidate: the scientific establishment. Their collective disaffection soon congealed into a powerful political force of its own, and a fringe movement to undermine the credibility of America's scientists went mainstream.
This force has become institutionalized in Trump's second administration. Defending the government's ongoing cuts to scientific research last May, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent vaccine skeptic who now leads the Department of Health and Human Services, told Congress that the N.I.H. was plagued by "corruption." Trump's N.I.H. director, Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a scientific treatise assailing America's Covid policies, made his name attacking the agency that he is now running.
In the absence of any such plan, it's hard not to see the ongoing dismantling of the cancer research system as collateral damage in a larger, partisan war against both the predominantly Democratic scientific establishment and the predominantly Democratic academic institutions where much of the country's biomedical research takes place.
It's perhaps no surprise that the Trump administration's attack on America's biomedical research system has been embraced by the disruption-addicted tech right. A government-run research system of sustained investment, collaboration and incremental progress no doubt looks anachronistic to a culture of individual visions, competitive silos and overnight growth - and all the more so with the leaders of various generative-A.I. companies making far-fetched promises to cure cancer in a matter of years.
It's too early to predict what the ongoing dismantling of America's cancer-research system is going to cost us- what lifesaving, life-extending or life-improving treatments will be slower to develop, if they develop at all.The White House's proposed budget, with its 37-percent cut to the N.C.I., is still awaiting congressional debate, and various court battles are still playing out. In June, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston, William G. Young, reversed some of the Trump administration's grant terminations in a stinging decision, writing that in his 40 years on the bench, he had "never seen government racial discrimination like this." But the administration appealed, and in late August, a 5-to-4 majority of Supreme Court justices upheld the cancellations, while leaving the door open for individual grantees to bring their own challenges.
The cancer-research system may be big and sprawling, but its wholesale dependence on government funding also makes it almost uniquely precarious. It doesn't take much to disrupt its normal functioning, and in the realm of science, any sort of disruption can be devastating. "Running a lab isnot like running a clothing store, where if your sales are down you can bounce back," Harold Varmus, a former N.I.H. director and Nobel Prize-winning cancer researcher, told me. "You are dealing with highly trained people and projects which, when stopped for a short time, are ruined."
The Supreme Court allowed President Trump to fire one of the leaders of the Federal Trade Commission for now, and said it would consider in December the broader question whether to overturn a 90-year-old precedent that has prevented presidents from removing independent regulators solely over policy disagreements. (NY Times, September 22, 2025).
Breaking: President Donald Trump unveiled medical recommendations today that call for women to not take Tylenol while pregnant and to space out child vaccines.
Why: Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have suggested childhood vaccines and Tylenol during pregnancy could cause autism.
Controversy: Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the relationship between Tylenol and autism is "worthy of further study," but that there is no current evidence of a connection.
"Don't take Tylenol," Trump instructed pregnant women around a dozen times during the White House news conference. He also urged mothers not to give their infants the drug, known by the generic name acetaminophen in the U.S. or paracetamol in most other countries.
Medical experts said Trump's remarks were irresponsible. New York University bioethicist Art Caplan said it was "the saddest display of a lack of evidence, rumors, recycling old myths, lousy advice, outright lies, and dangerous advice I have ever witnessed by anyone in authority."
Autism is not a disease but a complex developmental condition that affects different people in different ways. The disorder affects 1 in 31 U.S. children today, a sharp rise from just a few years ago, according to the CDC. Experts say the increase is mainly due to a new definition for the disorder that now includes mild cases on a "spectrum" and better diagnoses. They say there is no single cause to the disorder and say the rhetoric appears to ignore and undermine decades of science into the genetic and environmental factors that can play a role.
Holding the Line, Today's Toons, September 25, 2025
Graphic source: Credit: Adam Zyglis / CTNewsJunkie via Cagle Cartoons / ALL RIGHTS RESERVED https://ctnewsjunkie.com/2025/09/25/todays-toons-65/
The Trump administration's cuts to the food benefits program SNAP have critics worried that more people are going hungry. Now the Department of Agriculture is also canceling the annual food insecurity survey that tracks how many Americans are struggling to put enough food on the table, calling the 30-year program "redundant, costly, politicized and extraneous."
Research shows food insecurity is linked with a number of chronic diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. The timing of the survey's cancellation means that the government won't have a way to assess the impact of eliminating food benefits for an estimated 2.4 million Americans, or of other policies.
The most recent data, from 2023, shows that food insecurity is rising, affecting 13.8% of people in the U.S. compared to 12.8% the previous year. The food insecurity survey has been lauded for using language that helps researchers identify experiences of deprivation even when people might not self-identify as hungry - for example, asking whether they'd skipped meals or eaten fewer foods because of money concerns.
It added up to an extraordinary diatribe that ignored the human suffering exacted by the heat waves, wildfires and deadly floods that are aggravated by the burning of fossil fuels and, at the same time, stood at odds with the rapid expansion of renewable energy all over the world.
He chose his two targets, demonizing immigrants and green energy, and called them a "double-tailed monster" that he claimed, without evidence, are "destroying" Europe. Both subjects play well to his base in the Republican Party. But it was remarkable that he said all this to a global audience.
"Trump continues to embarrass the U.S. on the global stage and undermine the interests of Americans at home," Gina McCarthy, who served as the United States climate policy director in the Biden administration, said in a statement. "He's rejecting our government's responsibility to protect Americans from the increasingly intense and frequent disasters linked to climate change that unleash havoc on our country."
But there is also another reason for Trump's wish, analysts say, as his "public jockeying for the prize reflects his focus on accolades, praise and acceptance - and a burning desire to best his predecessors," said The New York Times. Former President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize nine months into his first term, and Obama himself "noted that his 'accomplishments are slight' compared with those of other winners." Trump has "repeatedly invoked Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, complaining that he did not deserve the award."
What happened: Yesterday, Hegseth announced soldiers who won the Medal of Honor for their role in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre will be allowed to keep their honor.
Background: Under President Joe Biden, a review of 20 medals given to soldiers in the massacre of Native Americans was launched. Hegseth accused Biden officials of being "politically correct."
The history: The U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry killed an estimated 350 Lakota people in South Dakota in the massacre.
The state of Oregon and the city of Portland have sued the Trump administration to stop it from deploying National Guard troops to Portland. The suit names President Donald Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Defense Department, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security as defendants. It asks a federal court in Portland to stop the Trump administration from deploying troops and declare the deployment unlawful.
"When the president and I spoke yesterday, I told him in plain language that there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland or any other city in our state," Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek said in a news release Sunday. "Despite this - and all evidence to the contrary - he has chosen to disregard Oregonians' safety and ability to govern ourselves. This is not necessary. And it is unlawful. And it will make Oregonians less safe."
The plaintiffs claim that the administration's move to federalize the guard violated the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, saying police power lies with the states. A federal judge in California ruled earlier this month that the administration illegally deployed the guard and the Marines to Los Angeles in June. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said the administration violated a 19th century law called the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using the armed forces for domestic law enforcement.
An organization called Save Our Signs stated on its website that it had confirmed the signage was removed. Save Our Signs was created in response to Trump's Executive Order 14253, which seeks to erase "negative" stories from public view by doing things like removing signage.
Despite the utility of these data in answering important questions related to autism, there are at least 4 major reasons why Kennedy's announcement of the formation of this registry created such distress. First, the language Kennedy has used to describe autistic people suggests that they have no societal value. He described autism as an individual tragedy and stated that autism destroys families and that autistic people "will never pay taxes, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem, they'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted." This language is consistent with the eugenics language of the early and mid-20th century, ignores the range of abilities that comprise the spectrum, and raises concerns about the motivation for identifying autistic individuals. Past registries of people with disabilities have led to discrimination, institutionalization, and eugenic practices. Some forms of discrimination that seem quite possible in today's climate include employers and insurers using the data to make hiring and health care coverage decisions.
Second, Kennedy has stated strongly his belief that postnatal exposure to environmental toxins causes autism. Despite the huge bolus of evidence to the contrary, he has continued to espouse debunked theories that, for example, vaccines and fluoride cause autism. Scientists and advocates have expressed concern that this registry would be used in misleading ways to find supposed environmental risk factors, which could lead to contraindicated health practices and a diversion of resources from where they are needed most.
Finally, families have significant concerns about privacy and data security. The current administration has acted in ways that reduce confidence in their ability to handle sensitive information. There have been several published instances of data breaches and ongoing related lawsuits against the Department of Government Efficiency. If autism registry data were leaked or stolen, they could be used for fraud or to discriminate against autistic people and their families. The lack of detail regarding what data will be used, how they will be stored, and who will have access, combined with the speed with which registry-related activities are moving forward, does not inspire confidence in data safety.
New evidence since 2021 suggests that COVID-19 vaccination for children is both effective and safe. Numerous studies, including in children, showed the benefits of COVID-19 vaccination for preventing hospitalization and severe disease and documented the burdens of COVID-19 disease, especially in very young children, including those without underlying health conditions. Data show that infants and children aged 0 to 4 years are the group hospitalized for COVID-19 at the highest rates after adults older than 65 years. There is also increased understanding of long COVID, that it can impact those who do not have other risk factors for COVID-19 complications, and that vaccines are effective in its prevention.
Administering approved versions of COVID-19 vaccines to children off-label is not without risks. If physicians and primary care clinics cannot obtain the FDA-approved pediatric formulation indicated for young children at high risk of severe COVID-19, risks related to accurate administration of pediatric doses from vaccines manufactured for adults may persist. There is also the possibility that previously approved COVID-19 vaccines may not match current or future viral strains, lessening the anticipated benefits of the vaccine. These are drawbacks that patients and their trusted pediatricians will need to evaluate along with the risks of COVID-19.
There are also costs associated with off-label vaccination. While reliance on health insurers to cover vaccination removed the CDC's prohibition on off-label vaccination, it created new financial barriers to access. Off-label treatments are not always covered by health insurance. However, if COVID-19 vaccines are no longer recommended as part of the CDC vaccine schedule, they may not be covered by Medicaid and insurers will not be obligated to pay for them, also exacerbating problems for vaccine equity and access. Other equity concerns raised by off-label use in 2021 no longer pertain to 2025. Demand for COVID-19 vaccines is relatively low across all age groups, such that off-label vaccination would not likely take away a dose from someone using it on-label.
Public health-promoting alternatives to off-label vaccination may be burdensome or inaccessible. The US now favors individual risk mitigation through personal choices to mask or be vaccinated instead of evidence-based preventive measures like improved ventilation in schools or testing and quarantine protocols to curb COVID-19. Enrolling in future clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines may not be geographically or practically accessible, and it may result in receiving a placebo instead of a vaccine. Moreover, trials for pediatric COVID-19 vaccines may not continue if manufacturers cannot anticipate regulatory approval that would justify the investment in such research.
Off-label vaccination is not a widespread public health strategy. Structural responses are also necessary, like the American Academy of Pediatrics publishing its own vaccine schedule and filing a lawsuit against HHS challenging the legality of the Secretary's decision to remove healthy children and pregnant people from the CDC immunization schedules.
A storm is brewing and when it hits, the U.S. health care system will be ill prepared given the recent evisceration of public health infrastructure and reduced veracity of data at multiple levels, compounded by withdrawal of the United States from the World Health Organization. Although viruses have always been part of the human condition, we have developed protections to combat the consequences with lifesaving vaccines. Erosion of the data-reporting process from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) impairs early warning systems that indicate the emergence of an influenza and other pandemics and threats from other omnipresent potential spillover pathogens. This scenario, compounded by lowered confidence in vaccines due to conflicting information and misinformation, continuing diminution of health care capacity and staffing in U.S. health care facilities, and the serial evisceration of the public health infrastructure, signals that disaster is looming.
In late 2022, the WHO announced that it would phase out the disease name "monkeypox," replacing it with "mpox" - something it has the authority to do under the International Classification of Diseases, which STAT's Helen Branswell has called "the global bible of diseases." The name was seen by scientists across the globe as discriminatory and stigmatizing. But now, if you look at the CDC's website, it appears that the Trump administration is in the midst of transitioning back to the old name.
"Monkeypox is the name of the viral disease caused by the monkeypox virus," an HHS spokesperson said over email. The rep did not answer follow-up questions why the agency made the switch or how else the website text may be changing. It's the same statement the agency provided to NPR earlier this month. "This is a simple provocation," physician and infectious disease professor Joseph Cherabie said to NPR. "It just falls in line with the playbook of this administration to go back to controversial terms."
Yesterday: District Judge David G. Campbell ruled that Trump's pick for U.S. attorney in Nevada has unlawfully served past the 120 days allowed for an interim U.S. attorney.
Breaking: Most of the advisory council for the National Endowment for the Humanities was abruptly fired today, leaving only four Trump appointees to guide the group.
Related: Earlier this year, Trump fired the entire Kennedy Center board, replacing them with loyalists who then elected him chairman of the board.
Threats of federal shutdowns have become routine in the past decade, but this closure could be different: US President Donald Trump's administration has encouraged mass firings of federal workers - a group that includes tens of thousands of scientists — during the lapse in funding.
If the shutdown lasts more than a few days, it will directly affect non-government researchers: both the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would stop awarding new grants.
It's unclear how long the shutdown could last. The first Trump administration (2017-21) featured a 35-day closure, the longest in US history, that cost roughly US$5 billion and led to disruptions across most US science agencies. There is no set date for the parties to meet for negotiations.
According to plans disseminated before the government closed, the NSF intended to furlough roughly 75% of its staff. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was expecting to furlough 54% of its personnel, halting "most research activities". At NASA, in which 83% of staffers were furloughed, a skeleton crew will keep active satellites operational.At the EPA, 86% of the staff are to be furloughed, but ongoing experiments will be preserved. A contingency plan for the NIH specified a furlough of 78% of workers, preserving only crucial functions such as care for existing patients. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will furlough 64% of its staff.
Despite the optimism, Lord and others say they are worried that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) might prevent the funded scientists from publishing certain findings or use the work to assert a narrative about autism that is not supported by data. They say their concerns stem from the program's atypical funding mechanism and review process and from previous actions and comments by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"This administration has done things that we just couldn't believe anyone would do. And so that does make me nervous," Lord says. In particular, she says she worries that the HHS will pick out a single factor correlated with receiving an autism diagnosis and do a "media blast about it" to scare people-like what has happened with acetaminophen. "You can do almost anything with data. If you don’t control for other factors, you can find anything you want. And so it's not at all that I mistrust the PIs," Lord says, but rather that other parties could make "weird interpretations."
The program also sidestepped the NIH's standard study section review process, in which subject-matter experts individually score applications and then meet as a group to discuss the lot of them. The membership of study sections is publicly available; applicants do not know specifically who scores their grant, but they know the pool of potential reviewers. Instead, the ADSI application review involved "both internal and external subject-matter experts," according to the funding announcement. The names of those experts were never shared publicly.
The review process was "very unusual," says an autism researcher who signed up to serve as a reviewer but then backed out because of their concerns. The researcher spoke anonymously out of fear of retaliation. Reviewers applied via a publicly available webform rather than the standard NIH review portal, which was a "red flag," the researcher says. Potential reviewers selected their relevant expertise from a checklist of options, one of which was "lived experience."
"I think the question now is, what happens in the future? What happens when these grantees start coming to conclusions?" Amaral says. "I hope that, just like any other grantee from the NIH, they're going to be able to freely publish their results, regardless of what they show. The Coalition of Autism Scientists will be watching and listening to ensure that we can report if there's any sign that data is being misrepresented that is coming out of this initiative."
BlueSky Post (https://bsky.app/profile/moreperfectunion.bsky.social/post/3m2a6jrpbvc2n) October 2, 2025
The Trump administration is tapping National Guard and Army Reserve lawyers to be temporary immigration judges after firing dozens of existing judges, the latest step in a broader plan that experts warn could harm immigration courts and the military justice system.
Why this matters: Training for the first group of Army lawyers begins Monday and training for the second group is expected to start in the spring, several former and current military reserve lawyers said they were told.
Some immigration and military law experts are concerned the reservists will be put in the job without enough training or experience after more than 100 immigration judges were fired or left. Of particular concern, the administration is not requiring experience as an administrative law judge or in immigration law as in the past, said Margaret Stock, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and immigration lawyer.
CDC priorities statement CDC is now unrecognizable
Exclusive: The Trump administration is looking into eliminating age as a factor considered in disability claims, which could limit disability benefits for Americans over 50.
Currently: At present, older age is considered a limitation to adapt to a new job, making older applicants, typically those over 50, more likely to receive benefits.
New: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced today that Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano will also serve as the IRS "chief executive officer," a new role within the agency.
Why it matters: The IRS is run by a commissioner, which is a Senate-confirmed position. As an entirely new role, being IRS "CEO" could allow Bisignano to lead the agency while avoiding Senate confirmation.
More: The IRS oversight board would need to approve any changes to senior IRS leadership, but the board has lacked a quorum for years and is thus inactive.
The Associated Press is objecting to Donald Trump's false claims about its ongoing legal dispute over access after the president incorrectly characterized the case in a public forum - a situation that goes back to the news service's decision last winter not to follow the president's executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico.
Trump, speaking Sunday on an aircraft carrier while marking the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Navy, said that "we got sued by The Associated Press and they lost." The president said the "liberal" AP "got thrown out of court" and that "they're almost not allowed to cover me anymore."
In fact, the AP won its case against Trump, but the president successfully earned a delay in getting the ruling enforced before the U.S. Court of Appeals considers the issue. Arguments on the president's appeal are scheduled for November.
"The court ruled in AP's favor - in a strong opinion in support of free speech - and the government is appealing," AP spokesman Patrick Maks said. "As we've said throughout, the press and the public have a fundamental right to speak freely without government retaliation." The AP sued, arguing that the government was unlawfully punishing the organization for its point of view. U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, a Trump appointee, agreed that the White House — once it had decided to invite reporters - could not "shut those doors" on those reporters because of what they've said or written.
The president has applied pressure against news organizations on several fronts, with ABC News and CBS News settling lawsuits related to their coverage. Trump has also filed lawsuits against The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. The president has also moved to choke off funding for government-run services like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Over the weekend, Trump sent National Guard troops from Texas to Chicago, against the wishes of the Illinois governor, a Democrat. The president also ordered hundreds of out-of-state National Guard troops into Portland, Ore., setting off a showdown with a federal judge who blocked the administration's moves on Sunday night. Judge Karin Immergut (who was appointed by Trump) wrote in her ruling:
This historical tradition boils down to a simple proposition: This is a nation of constitutional law, not martial law. Defendants have made a range of arguments that, if accepted, risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power - to the detriment of this nation.
Trump says there are national security reasons for these deployments - they protect federal buildings or immigration agents from protesters who would hurt them. As he put it to the sailors on Sunday: "We send in whatever is necessary. People don't care. They don't want crime in their cities." He has also sent troops to Memphis and Los Angeles. But judges so far have said police can handle the problems. Trump said yesterday that he might use the Insurrection Act - an 1807 law that gives the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil - to bypass rulings that block him.
His national security rationale can be at odds with the nakedly political way he sometimes explains his decisions. He slams elected Democratic officials in the cities where he has deployed the National Guard. "The ones that are run by the radical left Democrats," he said last week, are "very unsafe places, and we're going to straighten them out one by one." In this way, the troops end up looking to some like a cudgel for his political agenda.
When President Trump warned that pregnant women and children should avoid taking Tylenol, the vast majority of medical experts said there's insufficient evidence to support any claims linking the drug to autism. But that didn't stop the wellness industry from pouncing on the pronouncement as a business opportunity.
"Wellness influencers are well-practiced" at capitalizing on fear, "even if that's fear they helped manufacture," wellness debunker Mallory DeMille noted on Instagram. Medical experts worry about the prospect of kids taking homeopathic products that are neither regulated nor well-researched, and about how the companies and influencers making money off parents' concerns may further erode trust in science-based medicine.
Since January, President Trump's administration has terminated nearly four dozen committees that provide advice to various agencies within HHS. These groups worked on hospital infection control, made recommendations for long Covid research, assessed which genetic conditions newborns should be screened for, and more. More than half of the terminated panels are groups of outside experts assembled by the NIH to review grant applications for specialized topics unique to individual institutes.
"It's really more about people that measure up to the qualifications by their obedience to a political orthodoxy, rather than based upon science and evidence," said Lawrence Gostin, who was dismissed from a position on an advisory board to the Fogarty International Center. Just weeks before being let go, he met with Bhattacharya at a dinner for the center and tried to make a case for continued funding.
Today the six surgeons general appointed since George H. W. Bush was president penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post calling for the removal of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
"We are compelled to speak with one voice to say that the actions of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are endangering the health of the nation," they wrote. "Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this. But the profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy's policies and positions pose to the nation's health cannot be ignored."
The op-ed by Jerome Adams, MD, Richard Carmona, MD, MPH, Joycelyn Elders, MD, Vivek Murthy, MD, Antonia Novello, MD, MPH, and David Satcher, MD, PhD, said Kennedy has created a crisis in the nation's public health system and health agencies, which is resulting in mass resignations, short staffing, a resurgence of infectious diseases, and worsening chronic illnesses.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy has a $2 trillion budget and helms Medicare, Medicaid, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies that each American uses, the doctors wrote.
The opinion piece warns that under Kennedy more childhood vaccines will be in jeopardy, including newborn hepatitis B, which was the subject of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) September meeting.
Moreover, they said the three measles deaths the country experienced this year as part of a wider outbreak were preventable. They also said Kennedy has repeated conspiracy theories that contributed to the targeting of the very staff he is charged with protecting in the wake of the attack on the CDC in August.
"Secretary Kennedy is entitled to his views. But he is not entitled to put people's health at risk. He has rejected science, misled the public and compromised the health of Americans," the opinion piece said.
Two leading psychiatric organizations also called for the removal of Kennedy today, noting cuts to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the federal agency responsible for supporting states and localities with overdose prevention. The Southern California Psychiatric Society (SCPS) and the Committee to Protect Public Mental Health each issued statements saying Kennedy spouts dangerous ideas, including the idea of putting homeless people on "wellness farms" and saying common antidepressants are more addictive than heroin.
The SCPS in its statement said Kennedy misrepresented psychotropic medications in the Make America Health Again report. "The report uses these inaccurate statements as a basis for taking action to restrict access to critical services that ease suffering, restore functioning, and prevent suicide," the statement said. "Without these critical services, criminalization and expanded use of civil commitment will curtail the ability of individuals with mental illness to lead productive lives."
O'Neill calls for monovalent measles, mumps, rubella vaccines. Late yesterday afternoon, Acting Director of the CDC Jim O'Neill announced on X that he is calling for the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine to be separated into three monovalent (single-strain) vaccines after President Donald Trump made the suggestion last month.
"I call on vaccine manufacturers to develop safe monovalent vaccines to replace the combined MMR and "break up the MMR shot into three totally separate shots," O'Neill's post said. The idea to separate the vaccine may be tied to ideas common among anti-vaccine proponents who believe vaccines overwhelm a child's immune system. There is no evidence that monovalent vaccines are more safe or efficacious than the MMR, which has been in use in the United States since 1971.
Titled "Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education," the nine-page document details the demands of the White House and an outlined version asks universities to focus on American students first, limiting international undergrad enrollment to 15% as well as sharing "all known information" about international students to the Department of Homeland Security, according to NBC.
Additionally, the memo demanded universities disregard race or sex in hiring and admissions, freeze tuition for five years, require that applicants take a standardized test and transform or abolish "institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas."
The American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and the American Association of University Professors President Todd Wolfson released a joint statement, condemning the letter.
"The Trump administration's offer to give preferential treatment to colleges and universities that court government favor stinks of favoritism, patronage, and bribery in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda," the statement wrote. "It is entirely corrupt."
Of the universities, USC hosts the most international students, making up about 26% of the student body. Both Brown and Dartmouth follow with 14%, MIT has 12%, UPenn has 11%, Vanderbilt has 10%, University of Virginia with 8%, University of Arizona has 3.3% and University of Texas is last with only 2.8%. California Governor Gavin Newsom responded to the news with a post on X, writing that universities in the state would lose funding if they conceded to the terms.
Jim O'Neill, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), calling for vaccine manufacturers to develop separate measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines to replace the combined MMR shot. His statement linked to President Trump's similar message but provided no scientific rationale for the proposed change, as Reuters reported. No monovalent (single-strain) vaccines for measles, mumps, or rubella are currently licensed in the United States.
The head of the federal agency responsible for disease control is advocating for dismantling a vaccination program his own agency credits with eliminating rubella and reducing mumps incidence by 99%. Just this January, the CDC's website celebrated the 20th anniversary of rubella elimination as "one of our greatest public health success stories."
O'Neill's proposal faces immediate practical obstacles. Merck discontinued its monovalent vaccines in 2009. Creating them would require pharmaceutical companies to conduct new clinical trials, reconfigure production facilities, and secure FDA approval for three separate products. This process would take years, not months.
Beyond logistics, the medical evidence strongly favors combination vaccines. A 2017 study found that 69% of children who received combination vaccines completed their full vaccination series, compared to 50% of those whose parents chose single vaccines. This completion gap translates directly to disease vulnerability. Separating vaccines would triple the number of medical visits required for full protection, creating barriers particularly for families with limited resources who struggle with transportation, work absence, and healthcare access.
The CDC explicitly states that giving multiple vaccines simultaneously does not weaken immune responses. The immune system routinely processes thousands of antigens-substances that trigger an immune response-daily through environmental exposures; three weakened viruses present no meaningful challenge. The separation idea originates from Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper suggesting the MMR vaccine caused autism, even though it was based on a study of only 12 children. The paper was retracted for fraud, and Wakefield lost his medical license. A 2019 Danish study of 657,461 children found no association between MMR vaccination and autism, even among children at higher risk due to family history.
O'Neill's statement creates immediate risk. Parents hearing the CDC director question vaccine safety may delay or skip vaccination while waiting for alternatives that do not exist and will not exist for years. Historical precedent demonstrates this danger. O'Neill offers no evidence for his proposal, because none exists. No immunologic principle supports separation. No safety data justify abandoning a program that has protected millions of children for more than 50 years. What we have instead is the acting CDC director resurrecting a fraud's discredited theory while measles spreads through American communities at rates not seen in decades.
Historians sometimes say that when societies are descending into fascism, it can be hard for the people to notice it in real time. Well, historians of the future, I'm here to tell you: We are noticing. Millions of us are noticing. And we are horrified and enraged. We are well aware: We once lived in a country that, for all its frequent imperfections, was a place where the rule of law was a broadly shared value and where leaders acted with democratic restraint. We now live in a country where there is no rule of law; where leaders, especially the president but also others who support him, spit on the idea not only of democratic restraint but of democracy itself; and where the timorous first reflex of nearly every member of one of our two political parties is, at virtually all times, to do precisely what the leader wants.
That's fascism. It may be-for now-a comparatively mild form of fascism. Political opponents aren't being jailed or shot, opposition media outlets aren't being shuttered, and books aren't being burned. But a lot of things are happening that are terrifying. Shooting an unarmed and peacefully protesting pastor is by definition an act of state-sponsored mayhem. State-sponsored mayhem starts at the top, with the president's thuggish, lawless threat to imprison the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago.
Administration officials pile lie upon lie upon lie. With respect to Portland, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refers preposterously to "the radical left's reign of terror" there. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declares antifa to be "just as dangerous" as ISIS, which was killing perceived apostates by the thousands at its peak and raping little girls. Stephen Miller, Trump's deputy chief of staff, rants nightly about armed confrontations that either don’t exist or exist solely because the administration creates them so it can have the footage that will air over and over on its propaganda network, Fox News. It's all toward the purpose of erasing dissent, erasing democracy.
"The president is taking steps to criminalize being anti-Trump in America."
When a president and his aides are doing that, it's no longer America. When masked government thugs take potshots at a priest, it's no longer America.
When a handpicked hack prosecutor with no prosecutorial experience indicts two honorable American citizens within a month of the president ordering their prosecutions, and when two real prosecutors quit rather than pursue these obscenely political prosecutions, it's no longer America.
When the third-ranking official in the country, the speaker of the House of Representatives, delays the swearing-in of a duly elected member of that body because he knows she will vote to release files that potentially may shed light on unsavory behavior by the president, it's no longer America.
When the presidential administration announces that it’s going after nonprofit charitable groups that have operated unmolested in this country for decades under Democratic and Republican administrations because they donate to causes the president disfavors, it's no longer America.
When naturalized citizens are canceling overseas trips because they can't be certain they'll be welcomed back to their own country upon return, it's no longer America.
When the Department of Education is bullying universities into agreeing to a "compact" under which they’ll promise not to "belittle" conservative ideas, it's no longer America. When the Supreme Court of the United States has sold its soul to all this barbarity, it's no longer America.
When the president and his family have used his office to enrich themselves to the tune of $3.5 billion in nine months, and when the Congress, controlled by the president's party, refuses to do a thing about this rancid, dictator-level corruption, it's no longer America.
And when this thuggish dictator-wannabe is also a buffoonish man-child who sits there in his breathtakingly tacky Oval Office with his fake face and fake hair next to another head of state (the president of Finland) as he boasts yet again about passing a simple dementia test that a 10-year-old could ace, and we realize that this man-child is the sitting president, it's no longer America, at least for anyone who cares about how we look to the rest of the world.
Historians of the future: Rest assured, millions of us know all this in real time. We are horrified, shocked, enraged, and ashamed. We are acting, in a thousand ways, to oppose it. This cannot, and will not, be how the United States ends.
In October 2025, a rumor spread that Stephen Miller, the White House's deputy chief of staff, said live on television that President Donald Trump has "plenary authority," a phrase that refers to one branch of government having full or limitless power over an area of governance.
Miller was standing in front of the White House during the interview, while Sanchez was in a CNN studio. Miller cited Title 10 of the U.S. Code, a law that codifies the role of the military, when he claimed Trump has "plenary authority." After he made the comment, he fell silent, mid-sentence, and appeared to have lost the audio connection to Sanchez.
This is the comprehensive dismantling of America's national public health agency. One of my friends texted me last night: "They are eviscerating us. It's surreal."
These RIFs spanned the US government and were the work of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought. President Donald Trump and the Republicans forced a government shutdown as a further means of centralizing power within the Executive Branch and cementing Trump's authoritarian rule. Trump is shamelessly spreading propaganda like this "Government Shutdown Clock" on .gov websites blaming the Democrats for the shutdown he and his party engineered. The Democrats aren't capitulating yet, but they aren't really doing much else of note. So Vought is using the ongoing government shutdown as a pretext to continue his premeditated murder spree of the federal workforce.
More than 4,000 public servants lost their jobs across the government last night. More than 1100 people of those were from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and from what my colleagues in multiple HHS agencies tell me, that was overwhelmingly concentrated at CDC.
To be very clear, these RIFs are illegal. There is nothing in the US Constitution that gives the President the power to begin culling civil servants because the government is shut down. The entire point of the division of power in American democracy is that the President doesn't have unlimited power over the whole of government, nor is he authorized to just fire entire organizational units of federal employees for political reasons. Trump and Vought are, as usual, trying to see what they can get away with.
However, if they get away with these lawless RIFs at CDC, the consequences will include a death toll. The people who got RIF notices work on some of our most critical public health functions. Without them, CDC will not be able to provide these services. And without these services, Americans-and people around the world-will die.
CDC had already been brutalized by the Trump administration. Besides suffering massive cuts on the Valentine's Day and April Fool's Massacres, Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. have defunded critical programs, scaled back essential surveillance, dissolved expert committees, overridden standard evidence-based practices, descheduled critical childhood vaccines, ignored the domestic terror attack in August, purged CDC of its leadership, and installed incompetent, unqualified, ideologically monstrous political appointees like Acting CDC Director Jim O'Neill.
The White House's mass firing of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff has decimated offices related to injury prevention, respiratory disease surveillance, and chronic disease, according to four people familiar with the cuts.
Almost the entire staff behind the CDC's flagship publication, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, has been fired. The report is typically one of the first places where information about U.S. disease outbreaks is disseminated before appearing in other journals and publishes information on a wide variety of critical public health issues.
Take the time to read the signs
Of more than 1,300 CDC employees who received reduction-in-force notices Friday, about 700 later received emails revoking their terminations, the union said. The AFGE Local 2883 called the action a "politically-motivated stunt" to illegally fire agency workers.
Among those targeted for dismissal and then reinstated were the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, the "disease detectives" who are deployed to respond to outbreaks that threaten public health, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the CDC, who said she was in touch with EIS officers in that situation. "These are people who go into really scary places," Schuchat said. "Usually you think it's nature that's going to be giving you a hard time, the viruses, not the government."
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s tenure atop HHS has been marked by increasing tension between career scientists and political leaders at health agencies. That tension is nearing a breaking point at the FDA, according to interviews with more than 20 current and former agency officials, as well as legal experts.
That breaking point arrived after agency scientists received an unusual inquiry in August from the leader of the center that regulates prescription medicines to learn more about leucovorin as part of Kennedy's bid to identify autism's root cause by September.
Experts say the push to approve leucovorin, a generic drug that's mainly used to alleviate side effects of cancer treatment, as an autism treatment is a sign that the U.S. is headed toward a new era of drug regulation: one where political decisions lead, and evidence follows.
Summary: Lack of US data a concern abroad as well as in US; Shutdown seen as symptomatic of larger issues; World Bank, IMF cite loss of institutional trust as a downside risk. What happens in America, in other words, doesn't stay in America, and global officials say being left data-blind by the shutdown over time could complicate their own policymaking and boost the risk of a mistake at a moment when countries are already adjusting to the Trump administration's efforts to remake global trade.
At least 30 news organizations declined to sign a new Pentagon access policy for journalists, warning of the potential for less comprehensive coverage of the world's most powerful military ahead of a Tuesday deadline to accept new restrictions.The policy requires journalists to acknowledge new rules on press access, including that they could be branded security risks and have their Pentagon press badges revoked if they ask department employees to disclose classified and some types of unclassified information.
Reuters is among the outlets that have refused to sign, citing the threat posed to press freedoms. Others that have announced their refusal to accept the new press access rules in statements or their own news stories are: the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, Axios, Politico, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Hill, Newsmax, Breaking Defense and Task & Purpose.News organizations have not disputed restrictions on reporters' access to sensitive areas in the Pentagon. Credentialed reporters have historically been limited to unclassified spaces, according to the Pentagon Press Association.
All five major broadcast networks issued a joint statement on Tuesday, saying: "Today, we join virtually every other news organization in declining to agree to the Pentagon's new requirements, which would restrict journalists' ability to keep the nation and the world informed of important national security issues. The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections. We will continue to cover the U.S. military as each of our organizations has done for many decades, upholding the principles of a free and independent press."
The Pentagon revised its proposed policy following negotiations between the department and news organizations that came after they widely condemned requirements that barred credentialed reporters from seeking out sensitive information that was not approved for release.
The revised policy notes that receiving or publishing sensitive information
"is generally protected by the First Amendment "but states that soliciting the disclosure of such information "may weigh in the consideration of whether you pose a security or safety risk." The policy adds: "The press's rights are not absolute and do not override the government's compelling interest in maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive information."
Dozens of reporters turned in access badges and exited the Pentagon on Wednesday rather than agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, pushing journalists who cover the American military further from the seat of its power. The nation's leadership called the new rules "common sense" to help regulate a "very disruptive" press.
News outlets were nearly unanimous in rejecting new rules imposed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that would leave journalists vulnerable to expulsion if they sought to report on information - classified or otherwise - that had not been approved by Hegseth for release.
Even before issuing his new press policy, Hegseth, a former Fox News Channel host, has systematically choked off the flow of information. He's held only two formal press briefings, banned reporters from accessing many parts of the sprawling Pentagon without an escort and launched investigations into leaks to the media.
Between January 20th to September 30th of this year, there have been 506 attacks on science. (We broadly define attacks on science as actions, statements, or decisions that undermine, co-opt, or ignore science in the federal government.)
Despite Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s claims that he wanted to investigate diet-related and chronic illnesses, the Department of Health and Human Services neglected to publish a federal study showing the harmful effects of drinking alcohol (like its connections to developing cancer).
The Department of Agriculture canceled an annual survey it falsely claims had become “politicized” that provided regular data on food insecurity across the country (and put the scientists who conducted it on administrative leave). This marks the first time in 30 years—following two years of rising food insecurity and amid recent funding cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—that the U.S. will be in the dark on food security data collection and analysis.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, recently on the receiving end of the President's vitriol for releasing an inconvenient jobs report, indefinitely delayed the release of an annual report on income and employment.
The Department of Homeland Security canceled its regularly updated Global Trends report that highlighted, based on intelligence analysis, predicted threats to national security for the next four years. In the most recent edition, published four years ago? The global threats of COVID-19 and climate change.
The EPA ordered some of its scientists to stop publishing their research. Moving forward, research that comes out of the Office of Water at EPA will be subject to additional review by political officials. In practice, what this means is that EPA scientists in this office are no longer allowed to submit their scientific studies to peer-reviewed scientific journals without having a political appointee review them first.
First, enforcing an additional review process of scientific research that EPA scientists would otherwise publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals is, in itself, a problematic development and threatens to undercut the scientific merit and expertise of those who work in the Office of Water.
For context: reputable scientific journals, on their own, employ a stringent peer-review and editorial process to ensure the methodology, analysis, and reasoning behind submitted studies are sound enough to contribute to the collective scientific knowledge on a topic. I should also add that these scientific studies are being developed, finalized, and reviewed by experts in their respective fields of study. In other words, these studies already go through multiple rounds of scientific review before being published in a journal.
The additional level of oversight, though, risks putting loyalty to President Trump and the administration’s priorities over any scientific considerations. To reiterate, this administration has created a list of terms that are banned or require additional scrutiny (like “sustainability,” “diversity,” “pollution,” and “transgender”), and targeted topics inconvenient to its agenda (like the well-established association between fossil fuels and climate change). Political leaders have attempted to gut studies, programs, and funding that have any perceived association to these topics. Appointing political officials to this oversight role is so alarming because the Trump administration has consistently committed anti-science actions and has made policy decisions that wildly conflict with the best available science.
Take, for example, the attacks on PFAS regulation in waterways. Within the Office of Water’s jurisdiction is any scientific inquiry, testing, and monitoring of harmful substances in water, including “forever chemicals,” or PFAS. PFAS are a group of synthetic chemicals that are very difficult to break down, both in human/animal bodies and in the environment. They have been shown to have a variety of serious health impacts.
The Trump administration is actively suppressing scientific information and changing policy that regulates PFAS in drinking water. For example, in recent months, EPA has delayed the release of a finalized assessment that summarizes the harmful effects of a certain type of PFAS (PFNA), like liver and reproductive health damage. It also recently requested a federal court to effectively weaken regulations on PFAS, which, if approved, would mean that fewer of these chemicals would be removed from drinking water moving forward.
Placing political officials in charge of reviewing scientific studies before the public and scientific community can see them risks independent science being buried, altered, or otherwise politicized. And when we’re talking about things like the harmful effects of PFAS or other chemicals in waterways, there’s a real chance that this change will hurt people, animals, and our planet.
President Trump is asking the Justice Department to pay him about $230 million in compensation for past investigations into him. The situation, which was revealed today by our Washington reporters Devlin Barrett and Tyler Pager, has no parallel in American history. It is also perhaps the starkest example yet of the president's potential ethical conflicts: His close allies, including one of his former defense lawyers, could be in charge of approving any such payout.
When asked about the potential conflict of interest, the Justice Department said it would follow the guidance of career ethics officials. However, the department's top ethics adviser was fired three months ago.
But this time, he outdid himself. On the heels of the second No Kings protest, he released an AI video of himself sitting in a fighter jet, wearing a crown, and dumping shit bombs onto protestors. He imagined himself gleefully defecating on the American people without shame.
In other words, the country's political and media ecosystem treated a sitting president's fantasy of defecating on citizens as if it were entertainment. The laughter and dismissal were enabling. Every smirk and shrug helped normalize a nasty display that was anything but funny. But we must refuse to see Trump's behavior as "political theater."
When a powerful, wealthy white man imagines himself shitting on people, it isn't comedy, it's a confession. It's humiliation as arousal and degradation as dominance. It's kink: a degradation fantasy, a control fetish, a way to make pleasure out of someone else's shame. Usually this plays out in private rooms with safe words. But here it's public with the leader of a nation acting out the same psychosexual script men with money and power have used for centuries: reduce the powerless to filth, then call it a joke.
Trump's fantasy isn't new. It's the fantasy of the plantation owner, the pimp, the colonizer, the man who can pay to make someone else kneel and swallow the mess. The act of shitting on someone isn't just about bodily waste, it's about power and control. It's saying, my disgust is worth more than your dignity. It's the most primal, carnal declaration of supremacy there is.
When rich white men defecate on others, literally or symbolically, it's about reminding the world that they own the terms of what's clean and what's dirty. They get to desecrate, and you get to smile through it. They get to say it's "satire," and you get called triggered or a snowflake for noticing it's abuse. That's the kink. That's the power rush. Trump is not hiding behind the jet and the crown, he's getting off on them. The crown is the fantasy. The jet is the erection. The waste is the proof that he can do it and still be adored by his base.
And that's why the video is so disturbing. It's not just crude, it's eroticized punishment. He doesn't dream of governing; he dreams of disciplining. The protestors below him aren't citizens, they're objects, props in his sadistic little fantasy of control. The act of dropping shit is foreplay for conquest. It's the same energy that drives him to demean women, mock the disabled, and sexualize his own daughter. It's pleasure born from power.
But this is the grammar of white male power through control, degradation, and the pleasure of seeing others dirtied by your hand. Trump's spectacle exposes what American culture has always worshipped: the white man who gets off on control, the patriarch who turns domination into performance and calls it strength. Naming that isn't indecent, it's the only honest thing left to do.
The video of Trump crowning himself and defecating on protestors is also the mirror image of the leaked GOP chats where party operatives fantasized about gassing Jews, burning Black people, and torturing LGBTQ folks. What those men whisper and masturbate to in private, Trump performs from the cockpit. Both acts announce the same creed: I can terrorize you, shit on you, degrade you, discard you and it's a show. Side by side, the AI video and the leaked chats expose a single pathology: sexualized violence, racialized contempt, class superiority, and the thrill of domination disguised as leadership.
None of this is political satire. It's porn for fascists. It's a humiliation fantasy where whiteness, wealth, racism, and waste collapse into one ecstatic gesture of control. And maybe Speaker Mike Johnson was right after all when he said Trump uses "satire" to make a point. Because he did make one: that he can shit on the American people, turn cruelty into orgasm, and still have men like Johnson wipe his ass for him and call it leadership.
The president said today that a donor had given the government $130 million to help pay troops during the government shutdown. He declined to name the donor, but described him as a "patriot" and a personal friend.
If evenly distributed, the money would pay only about $100 to each service member. But is not yet clear how the money will be used, or whether the donation violates a law prohibiting federal agencies from accepting money in excess of congressional appropriations.
Trump announced late last night that he was cutting off tariff negotiations with Canada - injecting new uncertainty into the U.S.'s relationship with its second-biggest trading partner - because of an advertisement featuring Ronald Reagan.
Trump declared that the ad, which was paid for by the province of Ontario and shows Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs, was "fraudulent." But while the clips in the ad were edited, they did not alter the substance: Reagan was, in fact, highly critical of tariffs. Ontario said it had paid about $53.5 million to broadcast the ad, which began airing last week in the U.S. during a Blue Jays game against the Seattle Mariners.
Watch original Reagan broadcast at heart of Trump free trade spat | REUTERS via @YouTube
The Bureau of Labor Statistics repeated earlier statements that apart from the recall of some staff to generate the Consumer Price Index for September, which was released earlier on Friday, all data collection and publishing activities have ceased for as long as the shutdown lasts.
During the December 2018-January 2019 government shutdown, the longest on record, the BLS remained functional, allowing many key reports to still be generated. Some economic data from other agencies, such as the Commerce Department, was delayed. Analysts and former policymakers have become increasingly worried that the wider nature of the current shutdown will result in a bigger impact on surveillance of the economy.
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Graphic source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-countries-with-the-best-reputations-in-2025/
CBS Cuts Trump's Corruption Tantrum From '60 Minutes' Edit The Daily Beast, Updated November 4, 2025
However, the full tense exchange over crypto corruption with interviewer Norah O'Donnell, which can be seen in the transcript on the 60 Minutes Overtime site, did not appear in either the TV or the extended online video version.
CBS also took Trump's suggestion to cut a section of the interview in which the president boasted about the payout their parent company paid him earlier this year. "And actually 60 Minutes paid me a lotta money. And you don't have to put this on, because I don't wanna embarrass you," he said. The comment did not appear in either of the videos.
Authoritarianism Playbook Rules:
1. Fire the government's referees.
2. Pack your government with loyalists.
3. Grab the power over the funding of programs-the power of the purse-that the Founders assigned to Congress.
4. Go after centers of power.
5. Exercise influence over the press.
6. Disregard due process-the guardian of our freedom that keeps any one of us from being locked up by a strongman.
7. Attack and diminish dissent by weaponizing the Department of Justice.
8. Use the military to suppress domestic dissent.
9. Use the power of the government to spread propaganda.
10. -The most dangerous rule of all- Rig future elections.
Experts on how democracies die observe that there are actions that can stop the entrenchment of an authoritarian takeover. One action is strong citizen resistance in the first year. People need to know and show that what is happening is breaking the norms, the laws, and the Constitution, and that it is not acceptable. That's why I'm so heartened by the No Kings protest.
Another is to have a strong pushback against the president's takeover in the next election, before the elections can be thoroughly rigged. That is the test that awaits us in November 2026. And it is a test we must not fail if we want to stop authoritarian rule.
Is it really necessary, as a taxpayer, to have to read this propaganda on a USDA webpage? It is unethical to politicize a federal government information source like this.
Shame on those who thought this was a right thing to do. IT'S NOT.
https://bsky.app/profile/bettycjung.bsky.social/post/3m4w7c6ihms24
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP USDA SNAP November 8, 2025
Posting of such messages is a violation of the Hatch Act (Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+Hatch+Act%3F&rlz=1C1RXQR_enUS1105US1105&oq=what+is+the+Hatch+Act%3F&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDU0NjNqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)
Democrats to Troops: Don't Follow Unlawful Orders
Susan Kressly, MD, FAAP, American Academy of Pediatrics (Lead Plaintiff):
" Right now, our children need strong government leadership. They deserve thoughtful, deliberative guidance grounded in medical evidence. They deserve access to immunizations for their children without confusion and chaos. And their pediatricians will do all we can-from the clinic to the courthouse-to keep children healthy, to speak up for them and to fight for them."
Richard Hughes IV, Epstein Becker Green, Attorney for Plaintiffs:
"Under federal law, ACIP must operate independently and base its decisions on evidence. The integrity of its process is fundamental to public health-not a technicality. The government's motion to dismiss seeks to avoid scrutiny of actions that have far-reaching implications for our clients and millions of families. The court should deny its motion and allow this case to proceed to the merits."
Ronald G. Nahass, MD, MHCM, FIDSA, President, Infectious Diseases Society of America: "The confusion and chaos created by Secretary Kennedy's misinformation about vaccines is hurting patients and destroying trust in medicine. It forces physicians to spend valuable time countering false and misleading narratives instead of focusing fully on the care people rely on. We filed this lawsuit for one reason: to stand up for those we serve. Patients deserve access to care and information grounded in the best available scientific evidence, not harmful claims that put their health at risk and undermine trust."
Carlene Pavlos, Executive Director, Massachusetts Public Health Alliance:
"At stake is the integrity of the process that shapes vaccine recommendations, decisions that affect millions of families in Massachusetts and across the country. When the advisory committee developing this recommendations fails to operate independently, transparently, and with regard to the best available, peer-reviewed science, it destroys public trust and is a retreat from decades of progress we've made in preventing infectious disease.
This litigation is about accountability: public health decisions must be evidence-based and free from undue influence. We are hopeful this case proceeds so we can ensure that the voices of families, providers, and public health advocates are heard, and that future ACIP recommendations truly reflect - not politics - but what is best for our communities."
Georges C. Benjamin, MD, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association: "This case must move forward expediently to protect the public's health. It is about ensuring we return to an evidence- and science-based approach to decisionmaking. It is also about transparency and the engagement of experts to ensure the public's trust. Secretary Kennedy's actions, including the remaking of the ACIP and publicly embracing the anti-vaccine movement, have worked to undermine the functioning of the decisionmaking aspects of the ACIP and damage the credibility of the advice and scientific independence of the process. His actions have already harmed the public's health.
Several epidemics of vaccine-preventable disease are getting worse and the ACIP's guidance, as proposed, will only make current and future epidemics worse. Now, they propose to undermine the safety of newborns and return the nation to epidemic of hepatitis B and its consequences of serious liver disease and cancer as they age. We need an ACIP grounded in science and data, providing clear, credible and consistent guidance to protect our health. Mr. Kennedy's decisions on the ACIP must be reversed."
Jason M. Goldman, MD, MACP, President, ACP: "The American College of Physicians is highly concerned about the administration's actions regarding ACIP and the negative impact it will have on our patients and our physician practices. Destabilizing a trusted source and its evidence-based process for helping guide decision-making for vaccines to protect the public health in our country erodes public confidence in our government's ability to ensure the health of the American public and contributes to confusion and uncertainty. As physicians, we require reliable, science-based guidance that is based on the best available evidence, developed through an independent, evidence-based, and transparent process, free from politicization and misinformation, to ensure the safety, welfare, and lives of our patients."
Sindhu K. Srinivas, MD, MSCE, President, Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine:"SMFM members-and the patients they serve-deserve vaccine recommendations grounded in rigorous, transparent, evidence-based review. We are deeply concerned that the Advisory Council on Immunization Practices is no longer meeting the standards of scientific rigor and independence that clinicians need to rely on for trustworthy guidance. SMFM remains committed to providing evidence-based recommendations so patients can make informed decisions that protect their health."
The plaque underneath claims Biden took office in January 2021 "as a result of the most corrupt election ever seen in the US". BBC Verify has looked at previous claims of fraud by Trump and his supporters but there has been no evidence to support allegations of widespread voter fraud or corruption. We investigated claims of "unexplained" surges in Democrat votes, voting machines that flipped votes from Trump to Biden, and even that thousands of "dead" people had voted in Michigan - none were true.
Trump also appointed as a special envoy to Greenland Jeff Landry, the governor of Louisiana, who said the "volunteer position" was to "make Greenland a part of the U.S."
The union representing foreign service officers at the State Department said a number of ambassadors appointed during the Biden administration have been ordered to leave their posts by mid-January, 2026.
Since the 2024 election, Trump and his allies have raised nearly $2 billion for his favored political causes and passion projects. The identities of the donors have not been publicly disclosed, and are not required to be.
A Times investigation sheds light on them. Reporters traced half a billion dollars’ worth of the haul to 346 people who each gave at least $250,000. More than half have benefited from, or are in industries that have benefited from, actions taken by the president and his administration, including regulatory changes, pardons and dropped legal cases.
Two hours before airtime Sunday, CBS announced that the story where correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi spoke to deportees who had been sent to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, would not be a part of the show. Weiss, the Free Press founder named CBS News editor-in-chief in October, said it was her decision.
The dispute puts one of journalism's most respected brands - and a frequent target of President Donald Trump - back in the spotlight and amplifies questions about whether Weiss' appointment was a signal that CBS News was headed in a more Trump-friendly direction.
Alfonsi, in an email sent to fellow "60 Minutes" correspondents said the story was factually correct and had been cleared by CBS lawyers and its standards division. But the Trump administration had refused to comment for the story, and Weiss wanted a greater effort made to get their point of view.
"In my view, pulling it now after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one," Alfonsi wrote in the email. "Government silence is a statement, not a VETO," Alfonsi wrote. "Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story. If the administration's refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a 'kill switch' for any reporting they find inconvenient."
Speaking Monday at the daily CBS News internal editorial call, Weiss was clearly angered by Alfonsi's memo. A transcript of Weiss’ message was provided by CBS News. "The only newsroom I’m interested in running is one in which we are able to have contentious disagreements about the thorniest editorial matters with respect and, crucially, where we assume the best intent of our colleagues," Weiss said. "Anything else is completely unacceptable."
Trump has been sharply critical of "60 Minutes." He refused to grant the show an interview prior to last fall’s election, then sued the network over how it handled an interview with election opponent Kamala Harris. CBS' parent Paramount Global agreed to settle the lawsuit by paying Trump $16 million this past summer. More recently, Trump angrily reacted to correspondent Lesley Stahl's interview with Trump former ally turned critic Marjorie Taylor Greene.
"60 Minutes" was notably tough on Trump during the first months of his second term, particularly in stories done by correspondent Scott Pelley. In accepting an award from USC Annenberg earlier this month for his journalism, Pelley noted that the stories were aired last spring "with an absolute minimum of interference."
Pelley said that people at "60 Minutes" were concerned about what new ownership installed at Paramount this summer would mean for the broadcast. "It's early yet, but what I can tell you is we are doing the same kinds of stories with the same kind of rigor, and we have experienced no corporate interference of any kind," Pelley said then, according to deadline.com.
This is Frontline's coverage of CECOT. The 60 Minutes segment with Alfonsi is no longer available on Youtube or anywhere else. I did view it when it was available for a short time. It is the kind of investigative reporting that is expected of 60 minutes.
Trump officials, to put it lightly, took some drastic steps this year to change how core federal health insurance programs exist. They gutted federal health policy research; created uncertainty across the agency that oversees Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act marketplaces; and fired the inspector general who was rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse in health care.
The biggest impacts to federal programs are yet to be felt. The poorest among us may have a more difficult time getting free coverage they are entitled to, and both Trump and congressional Republicans have refused to extend the enhanced subsidies for ACA health plans, which will double premiums for more than 20 million people. Republicans' tax bill also is set to lead to 12 million people losing their health coverage, primarily through Medicaid funding cuts and new mandated paperwork requirements that verify work status.
On December 22, 2025, through spokesman Angel Ureña, Clinton publicly called for the Department of Justice to release every federal record bearing his name related to Epstein without redaction beyond what law strictly requires for victim protection. No court ordered this transparency, and no subpoena compelled this disclosure. He chose openness over institutional protection, and that choice just created a legal and political trap every other person named in those files cannot escape.
Clinton just dragged it back into daylight by demonstrating that institutional delay cannot survive when the very subjects of those records seek their release. If Trump makes the same request, DOJ loses every excuse for continued delay. The Attorney General cannot claim privacy concerns when the person named in the files is demanding disclosure. The statute already prohibits redactions for embarrassment or reputational harm. If Trump, Dershowitz, and Prince Andrew all made Clinton’s demand, DOJ would be legally compelled to process and release those files immediately or face contempt charges from Congress for violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act. If Trump refuses, his refusal becomes the story and transforms inaction into active choice to suppress evidence. Clinton removed his own name as justification for keeping files sealed, which means Trump now faces a binary choice with no safe option: accept transparency and whatever those records reveal or maintain opacity and confirm he benefits from their continued suppression.
Clinton exposed the pressure point: one public directive forces release of the Epstein files in full, without redactions. Trump'silence reflects neither caution nor process but deliberate control. He employed the same maneuver with his tax returns, promising transparency while withholding disclosure long enough to dull accountability, and he now applies it to records that could clarify his relationship to Epstein' criminal network. The issue no longer resides in sealed archives. It resides in the refusal to demand complete, unfiltered disclosure, and that refusal warrants sustained scrutiny until it collapses.
The attorneys general oppose rollbacks to PFAS reporting requirements mandated by Congress in 2019 under the Toxic Substances Control Act and promulgated by EPA in October 2023. Under the reporting requirements, manufacturers and importers of PFAS are asked to report whatever information they already know about the PFAS in their products, during a one-time reporting requirement currently scheduled to begin in April 2026. This would include information such as the identities and amounts of PFAS chemicals manufactured, any known effects on human health or the environment, and how many workers are exposed to these chemicals.
"PFAS forever chemicals are a toxic menace to human health and our environment," Tong said. "Trump's latest effort to gut PFAS regulation is an insult to the families, workers, and especially the firefighters who have been disproportionately exposed to these dangerous chemicals. We urge the EPA to abandon this proposal."
If adopted, the Trump Administration proposal would shield from reporting over 98 percent of entities that are expected to have relevant, vital information about PFAS under six new carveouts that had been previously considered and rejected by EPA. The proposed new exemptions include: an exemption for articles with PFAS concentrations below 0.1%; an imported articles exemption; an exemption for PFAS manufactured as byproducts; an exemption for PFAS manufactured as impurities; an exemption for PFAS manufactured as non-isolated intermediates; and a research and development exemption.
Today, nearly all humans have PFAS in their blood. PFAS chemicals are toxic and can persist in the environment indefinitely. PFAS chemicals can travel through the environment, including into drinking water sources, and accumulate in human blood. Even modest releases of PFAS can cause widespread pollution and damage.
The EPA itself has concluded that many PFAS are known to cause severe adverse human health effects, including increased risk of kidney, breast, pancreas, prostate, and testicular cancers, liver damage, decreased birth weight and birth defects, decreased vaccine response, high cholesterol, and infertility, according to the EPA website.
"From a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year," he said. "Tyranny is booming over here." Trump celebrated the suspension of the veteran late-night comic and his frequent critic, calling it "great news for America." He also called for other late night hosts to be fired.The incident, one of Trump's many disputes and legal battles waged with the media, drew widespread concerns about freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Hundreds of leading Hollywood stars and others in the entertainment industry urged Americans to "fight to defend and preserve our constitutionally protected rights." The show returned to the air less than a week later. "We won, the president lost, and now I'm back on the air every night giving the most powerful politician on earth a right and richly deserved bollocking," he said.
"Here in the United States right now, we are both figuratively and literally tearing down the structures of our democracy from the free press to science to medicine to judicial independence to the actual White House itself," Kimmel said, in reference to demolition of the building's East Wing. "We are a right mess, and we know this is also affecting you, and I just wanted to say sorry."
Denmark recommends routinely vaccinating all children against just 10 diseases. In the U.S., the immunization schedule calls for routine universal vaccination against 16 diseases. It was 17 diseases until last week, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially dropped the recommendation to vaccinate all newborns against hepatitis B.
For starters, Denmark's population is about 6 million people - roughly that of Wisconsin - compared to more than 343 million people in the U.S. Denmark also lacks the racial and ethnic diversity and wide income disparities that are prevalent in the U.S. Denmark also has a highly unified health system, with a national health registry that basically tracks everyone from birth to death, Michaud says.
"We have fragmented insurance, we've got millions uninsured, we don't have a national health registry and we've got enormous gaps in the continuity of care," Scott says. "And we use broader vaccine recommendations because our system can't reliably identify and follow up with every person at risk." The U.S. also has higher rates of childhood obesity and asthma than Denmark, Scott notes, which puts those kids at higher risk of some diseases.
"The reason why countries, particularly in Europe, have different vaccination schedules is not because they consider the vaccines not to be safe or that the vaccines don't work," Moss says. And I think it's very important that people understand that." Scaling back America's vaccine schedule to model Denmark's in this very different context puts America's children at real risk, O'Leary says. "It's like, what diseases do they want to bring back to the U.S.? Which diseases do they want kids to be hospitalized for that they're not protected from? I simply don't get it."
But when you look at the 30 countries that are part of the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, the U.S. is very much in line with them, says Michaud of KFF. "In fact, it is Denmark that seems to be the outlier here in terms of recommending very few vaccines," he says. "In the case of Germany, France and Italy, we might be talking about 15 or more vaccines." Even compared to other Nordic countries with similar health systems, Denmark is "unusually minimalist,: says Scott of Stanford. "Sweden, Norway, Finland - they all cover more diseases."
Experts say it's legally murky whether the health secretary could overhaul vaccine policy by simply announcing it in a press conference, without going through the usual process for deliberating such changes. Kennedy technically has broad authority in setting vaccine policy, says Dorit Reiss, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco whose research focuses on legal and policy issues related to vaccines. But simply announcing such a major change via press conference - rather than going through the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices - could open up the Trump administration to legal challenges, she says."The process makes them very vulnerable to legal challenges," Reiss says.
The move is the latest in the Trump administration's war on climate science, which has included proposing cuts to research funding and scrubbing data from government websites.
Americans for the Arts Action Fund
Trump's executive order calling for the "termination" of all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the federal government will become a source of tension-and another way for him to assert his will on the arts. In recent budgets under Biden, House appropriators praised the endowments for "addressing equity through the arts" and "diversity at the national endowment." "The [Appropriations] Committee directs the NEA to continue prioritizing diversity in its work," read a section of the budget for fiscal year 2023.
Ed Department spokesperson Madison Biedermann responded: "Reaching out to individuals about a work matter at their private address is not journalism - it is borderline intimidation. In today's political climate it is particularly unacceptable.
We received your inquiries (via email, phone calls, text messages, both on work and personal email address) and made a conscious decision not to respond, as we have every right to do. You are not entitled to a response from us, or anyone, ever," Biedermann wrote.
President Donald Trump has labeled his administration the most transparent in history, but at the same time, agencies in the executive branch have taken down datasets and pulled down public information. Trump has called the press "fake news" and called individual reporters derogatory terms. In this environment, our journalists have found that their efforts to get the real story and be fair were vilified rather than appreciated. Condemned, not commended.
While the group did not provide details behind the decision, Billy Hart, the Cookers' drummer, told The New York Times that the center's name change “evidently” played a role in the cancelation, noting concerns about the potential for retaliation.
New York City-based dance company Doug Varone and Dancers also announced on Monday that they're canceling their performances set for April, because "with the latest act of Donald J. Trump renaming the center after himself, we can no longer permit ourselves nor ask our audiences to step inside this once great institution."
Kristy Lee, a folk singer-songwriter who was slated to perform on January 14, also canceled her show due to the name change. "When American history starts getting treated like something you can ban, erase, rename, or rebrand for somebody else's ego, I can't stand on that stage and sleep right at night," she said last week in a social media post.
While the group did not provide details behind the decision, Billy Hart, the Cookers' drummer, told The New York Times that the center's name change "evidently" played a role in the cancelation, noting concerns about the potential for retaliation.
Before the renaming, Trump's aggressive push to reshape the Kennedy Center had already prompted some artists to back away from the venue. After Trump's handpicked board elected him chair in February, artists including Issa Rae, Renee Fleming, Shonda Rhimes and Ben Folds resigned from their leadership roles or canceled events at the space. And Jeffrey Seller, producer of the hit musical "Hamilton," canceled the show's planned run earlier this year.
The change has raised legal concerns as to whether the board has the authority to rename the arts institution, which Congress designated in 1964 as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy following his assassination.
Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and an ex-officio trustee of the board, sued the president in federal court to challenge the name change. She said that she was muted on Zoom during the board meeting when she tried to speak up in objection to the vote, and argued in the lawsuit that the vote and the addition of Trump's name to the physical building the day after were "scenes more reminiscent of authoritarian regimes than the American republic." The addition of Trump's name has also been met with fierce backlash from the Kennedy family.
It makes me really happy to hear that my efforts to inform empowered people by putting science into the context of their own experiences and priorities. If I can contribute expertise or skills where needed during a crisis, then I do it, especially if it improves people's lives.
Scientists in general-across all sectors-have done a bad job of explaining our work or its importance to the public. Bad actors can lie about scientists and our research, because we have not made enough of an effort to equip the public with the knowledge that they are lying. We have not done enough to put our work into the context of our current moment. Too many of our institutions and societies have failed to lead in this regard, choosing instead to cower silently behind the delusion that science and public health should be apolitical.
I have half a million followers on the hellsite and I still post there, but virologists-and everyone-are facing a different kind of crisis than we did with COVID. In 2020, I was a virologist facing a pandemic caused by a type of virus that I studied. In 2025, I am a virologist facing the complete destruction of virology, and all science, and our entire public health system, and American democracy.
On January 20th, I watched as the President began to lay waste to the entire federal government, creating terrifying new vulnerabilities for our health, liberty, and security. I am still in disbelief that the American democratic values I was raised to believe were our greatest strength are no match for the most idiotic, puerile buffoons in the history of authoritarianism. I am enduring the indignity of my profession being dismantled by the comically inept, unquenchably thirsty bootlickers in senior positions throughout the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), most of whom I have been beefing with online since 2020. I am both horrified by what is happening and uniquely positioned to comment on it. It is simultaneously the worst and weirdest time in my life.
Although the hellsite is always reliable for antagonizing the upjumped contrarian clout chasers running things at CDC, FDA, and NIH and going back and forth about teen sperm counts with HHS Secretary Robert F. "I Am a River" Kennedy, Jr., it is no longer very useful for communicating effectively with an audience that is receptive to reading long threads about influenza subtypes, pathogenesis, pandemics, or evidence-based frameworks for making vaccination policy, at least not without finding yourself at the top of a mountain of MAHA and/or Nazi replies.
I am very glad that my newsletter is resonating with people. It turns out it’s also pretty corrosive to my mental health and overall well-being to have a head full of thoughts about all the ways Kennedy and the Trump administration are going to raze my profession and cause mass preventable death, so purging them here is actually quite therapeutic. Overall, I think Rasmussen Retorts has been a pretty successful experiment!
I think now is the time for me to share my thoughts. People deserve to understand what is happening to science and public health, how this is being used to subvert democracy, who is doing it and why, and what the consequences will be. This needs to be documented clearly and transparently, because the results are going to be so severe. Dead children. Millions of dead children. This is not reasonable skepticism or a much-needed shaking up of the medical or academic status quo; it is enabling completely preventable mass death, economic ruin, and the end of American democracy in service of an authoritarian traitor.
I want to express my deepest gratitude to the more than 5,000 readers who have subscribed. I am humbled that so many of you find my newsletter to be sufficiently engaging that you are willing to tolerate additional emails in your inbox (I have more than 65,000 unread emails and it's like the digital equivalent of the Augean stables; every addition is more shit on the pile).
I also assume it means some of you agree with me, and are working towards stopping the catastrophe that awaits us all if we don't do something about it. This keeps me going. 2025 completely sucked and 2026 is probably going to be worse. But the growing community of people who are doing something about this gives me a lot of hope for the future.
So thank you so much for giving me that opportunity. And if you don't already subscribe, I would be so grateful if you did. You don't need to, and I won't be putting paywalls up anytime soon, but subscriptions are one way that I can assess the impact of this work. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. Here's to better years ahead! XO Angie You can subscribe: Rasmussen Retorts
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