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Heather Cox Richardson: GOP Budget Bill Is Packed with Deadly Cuts and Lies

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2025 //
8

Heather Cox Richardson warns about the Republicans’ “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” which cuts Medicaid and other vital services while increasing the deficit. Republicans cover up the cruel cuts to vital services by lying about them.

She writes:

The Republicans’ giant budget reconciliation bill has focused attention on the drastic cuts the Trump administration is making to the American government. On Friday, when a constituent at a town hall shouted that the Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, the federal healthcare program for low-income Americans, meant that “people will die,” Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) replied, “Well, we are all going to die.”

The next day, Ernst released a video purporting to be an apology. It made things worse. “I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this Earth. So, I apologize. And I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ,” she said.

Ernst blamed the “hysteria that’s out there coming from the left” for the outcry over her comments. Like other Republicans, she claims that the proposed cuts of more than $700 billion in Medicaid funding over the next ten years is designed only to get rid of the waste and fraud in the program. Thus, they say, they are actually strengthening Medicaid for those who need it.

But, as Linda Qiu noted in the New York Timestoday, most of the bill’s provisions have little to do with the “waste, fraud, and abuse” Republicans talk about. They target Medicaid expansion, cut the ability of states to finance Medicaid, force states to drop coverage, and limit access to care. And the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the cuts mean more than 10.3 million Americans will lose health care coverage.

House speaker Mike Johnson has claimed that those losing coverage will be 1.4 million unauthorized immigrants, but this is false. As Qiu notes, although 14 states use their own funds to provide health insurance for undocumented immigrant children, and seven of those states provide some coverage for undocumented pregnant women, in fact, “unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for federally funded Medicaid, except in emergency situations.” Instead, the bill pressures those fourteen states to drop undocumented coverage by reducing their federal Medicaid funding.

MAGA Republicans claim their “One Big, Beautiful Bill”—that’s its official name—dramatically reduces the deficit, but that, too, is a lie.

On Thursday, May 29, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed the measure would carry out “the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years with $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings.” She echoed forty years of Republican claims that the economic growth unleashed by the measure would lead to higher tax revenues, a claim that hasn’t been true since Ronald Reagan made it in the 1980s.

In fact, the CBO estimates that the tax cuts and additional spending in the measure mean “[a]n increase in the federal deficit of $3.8 trillion.” As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers notes, the CBO has been historically very reliable, but Leavitt and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried to discount its scoring by claiming, as Johnson said: “They are historically totally unreliable. It’s run by Democrats.”

The director of the CBO, economist Philip Swagel, worked as chief of staff and senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisors during the George W. Bush administration. He was appointed in 2019 with the support of Senate Budget Committee chair Michael Enzi (R-WY) and House Budget Committee chair John Yarmuth (D-KY). He was reappointed in 2023 with bipartisan support.

Republican cuts to government programs are a dramatic reworking of America’s traditional evidence-based government that works to improve the lives of a majority of Americans. They are replacing that government with an ideologically driven system that concentrates wealth and power in a few hands and denies that the government has a role to play in protecting Americans.

And yet, those who get their news by watching the Fox News Channel are likely unaware of the Republicans’ planned changes to Medicaid. As Aaron Rupar noted, on this morning’s Fox and Friends, the hosts mentioned Medicaid just once. They mentioned former president Joe Biden 39 times.

That change shows dramatically in cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA is an agency in the Commerce Department, established under Republican president Richard Nixon in 1970, that monitors weather conditions, storms, and ocean currents. The National Weather Service (NWS), which provides weather, wind, and ocean forecasts, is part of NOAA.

NWS forecasts annually provide the U.S. with an estimated $31.5 billion in benefits as they enable farmers, fishermen, businesspeople, schools, and individuals to plan around weather events.

As soon as he took office, Trump imposed an across-the-board hiring freeze, and billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” fired probationary employees and impounded funds Congress had appropriated. Now, as hurricane season begins, experts in storms and disasters are worried that the NOAA will be unable to function adequately.

Cuts to the NWS have already meant fewer weather balloons and thus less data, leaving gaps in information for a March ice storm in Northern Michigan and for storms and floods in Oklahoma in April. Oliver Milman of The Guardianreported today that 15 NWS offices on the Gulf of Mexico, a region vulnerable to hurricanes, are understaffed after losing more than 600 employees. Miami’s National Hurricane Center is short five specialists. Thirty of the 122 NWS stations no longer have a meteorologist in charge, and as of June 1, seven of those 122 stations will not have enough staff to operate around the clock.

On May 5, the five living former NWS leaders, who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, wrote a letter to the American people warning that the cuts threaten to bring “needless loss of life.” They urged Americans to “raise your voice” against the cuts.

Trump’s proposed 2026 budget calls for “terminating a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs” and cutting about 25% more out of NOAA’s funding.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has also suffered dramatic cuts as Trump has said he intends to push disaster recovery to the states. The lack of expertise is taking a toll there, too. Today staff members there said they were baffled after David Richardson, the head of the agency, said he did not know the United States has a hurricane season. (It does, and it stretches from June 1 to the end of November.) Richardson had no experience with disaster response before taking charge of FEMA.

Trump’s proposed cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are even more draconian. On Friday, in a more detailed budget than the administration published in early May, the administration called for cuts of 43% to the NIH, about $20 billion a year. That includes cuts of nearly 40% to the National Cancer Institute. At the same time, the administration is threatening to end virtually all biomedical research at universities.

On Friday, May 23, the White House issued an executive order called “Restoring Gold Standard Science.” The order cites the COVID-19 guidance about school reopenings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to claim that the federal government under President Joe Biden “used or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner.” (Schools closed in March 2020 under Trump.) The document orders that “[e]mployees shall not engage in scientific misconduct” and, scientists Colette Delawalla, Victor Ambros, Carl Bergstrom, Carol Greider, Michael Mann, and Brian Nosek explain in The Guardian, gives political appointees the power to silence any research they oppose “based on their own ‘judgment.’” They also have the power to punish those scientists whose work they find objectionable.

The Guardian authors note that science is “the most important long-term investment for humanity.” They recall the story of Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, who is a prime example of the terrible danger of replacing fact-based reality with ideology.

As Sam Kean of The Atlantic noted in 2017, Lysenko opposed science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century in favor of the pseudo-scientific idea that the environment alone shapes plants and animals. This idea reflected communist political thought, and Lysenko gained the favor of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Lysenko claimed that his own agricultural techniques, which included transforming one species into another, would dramatically increase crop yields. Government leaders declared that Lysenko’s ideas were the only correct ones, and anyone who disagreed with him was denounced. About 3,000 biologists whose work contradicted his were fired or sent to jail. Some were executed. Scientific research was effectively banned.

In the 1930s, Soviet leaders set out to “modernize” Soviet agriculture, and when their new state-run farming collectives failed, they turned to Lysenko to fix the problem with his new techniques. Almost everything planted according to his demands died or rotted. In the USSR and in China, which adopted his methods in the 1950s, at least 30 million people died of starvation.

“[W]hen the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end,” Kean said of Lysenko. He concludes: “It never did.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, Lies, Republicans, Science, Trump

The Insane Killing of Medical Research by Trump

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2025 //
5

It’s hard to say what is the very worst thing Trump has done in the first few months of his second term.

Here’s my candidate: the cancellation of vast numbers of grants for medical research. There is simply no rationale for the way he has laid waste to scientific research–to those seeking the causes and cures for deadly diseases that afflict the lives of millions of people.

The New York Times provided a public service by creating a database of the medical research that has been terminated.

This link is a gift article, so you should be able to open it.

It contains interactive features that I cannot duplicate.

Thousands of grants have been canceled or put in indefinite hold. They include research about effective vaccines. The search for cures for different types of cancer.

In his first months in office, President Trump has slashed funding for medical research, threatening a longstanding alliance between the federal government and universities that helped make the United States the world leader in medical science.

Some changes have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye, a New York Times analysis found. To understand the cuts, The Times trawled through detailed grant data from the National Institutes of Health, interviewed dozens of affected researchers and spoke to agency insiders who said that their government jobs have become unrecognizable.

In all, the N.I.H., the world’s premier public funder of medical research, has ended 1,389 awards and delayed sending funding to more than 1,000 additional projects, The Times found. From the day Mr. Trump was inaugurated through April, the agency awarded $1.6 billion less compared with the same period last year, a reduction of one-fifth. (N.I.H. records for May are not yet comparable.)

The impacts extend far beyond studies on politically disfavored topics and Ivy League universities like Columbia or Harvard. The disruptions are affecting research on Alzheimer’s, cancer and substance use, to name just a few, and studies at public institutions across the country, including in red states that backed Mr. Trump.

Why? What is the rationale? Whose interest does this serve?

Did the voters give Trump a mandate to destroy medical research?

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Economy, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Georgia: Brain-Dead Woman Kept on Life Support Because She Was 9 Weeks Pregnant

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2025 //
4

Several days ago, I posted this horrible story about a young woman in Georgia who is on life support. She is brain dead. Because she was nine weeks pregnant when her brain died, Georgia law requires that she be kept in a vegetative state until the fetus can be delivered at 36 weeks.

The political cartoonist Ann Telnaes posted this visual commentary on her Substack blog:

“The decision should have been left to us- not the state”, says her family

Telnaes quit her job at The Washington Post when her editor refused to publish a cartoon showing the tech billionaires bowing to Trump. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the newspaper, was one of them. Telnaes won a Pulitzer Prize for that cartoon.

Categories Cruelty, Education Reform, Gender, Georgia, Health

Trump Regime Inflicts Chaos on Prestigious Science Agencies

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2025 //
11

Jocelyn Kaiser wrote in Science magazine about the chaos inflicted on the National Institutes of Health by Trump appointees and Elon Musk’s DOGS (not a misspelling) wrecking crew. Large numbers of scientists were fired, some were rehired, then fired again. What was the goal? Was it to sow demoralization and fear? If so, it succeeded.

Since World War II, the U.S. has led the world in science, medicine, and technology, which are important components of our economy. It’s by no means clear why Trump selected people who were determined to disrupt and destabilize the core of the federal science program. Kaiser interviewed many insiders to compile this overview of a machine of destruction, unleashed for unknown reasons on some of our most important science agencies.

Kaiser wrote

On a cool, sunny, mid-April day, the cheerful redbuds and other flowering trees amid the sprawling labs on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) main campus belied the pervasive gloom. Nearly 3 months into President Donald Trump’s administration, NIH in-house scientists and other workers were reeling from mass layoffs of colleagues; the removal of leaders; and limits on travel, communication, and purchasing that have shut the agency off from the outside world, hamstrung experiments, and crushed the community’s spirits.

On that spring day in Bethesda, Maryland, one senior scientist lamented that two star colleagues in his institute were heading back to their native China from NIH, abandoning a destination that had always drawn talent from around the world. “I want to cry,” he said. Another pointed to the abrupt retirement the previous day of a noted NIH nutrition scientist who said the agency had censored his publications and interactions with the media.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), billionaire Elon Musk’s quasi-official White House enforcer, “pops in and out” of online meetings of senior leaders, the scientists said. Another researcher, who is not a U.S. citizen, mentioned that he has prepared a “deportation plan,” including a company lined up to ship belongings back to his native country, in case he’s fired and loses his work visa.

The atmosphere is one of “chaos and fear and frustration and anger,” said a senior scientist with NIH’s intramural research program who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to protect themselves and others from retribution. This scientist added: “It’s this feeling of utter powerlessness and repeated insults.”

A former top NIH official who was forced out believes that’s the intent. “I think the plan is to sow as much chaos as possible. … I think they want a dispirited workforce at NIH so people will just say ‘to hell with it’ and leave.”

It’s working. Hundreds of NIH employees took voluntary buyouts offered by the Trump administration. And at least 25 of the roughly 320 physician-researchers who lead trials of drugs, cell therapies, and vaccines at NIH’s massive Clinical Center are leaving, as are consulting physicians, a researcher there told Science.

In NIH entryways, recently installed portraits of Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and new NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya have become a forum for silent protests. A photo of tanks rolling through Tiananmen Square during China’s 1989 student uprising was briefly plastered below one set of visages. On a different wall on another day, flyers appeared for a nationwide protest of Trump’s science cuts along with a Post-it note with the word “Shame.” A staff memo sent out the day a Science reporter visited warned of penalties for “damage or destruction of federal property” including “defacement of portraits.”

A researcher who has spent more than 2 decades with NIH’s intramural research program believes the world’s largest biomedical agency will never be the same. “However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.”

Along with firing about 2500 of the agency’s 20,000-strong federal workforce and pushing others to retire, Trump officials have used what some call “bureaucratic sabotage” in ways that likely explain why NIH has disbursed at least $1.8 billion less in funding to outside researchers in this administration’s first 3 months than it did in the same time period in 2024. They have canceled more than 800 grants on topics such as HIV research, transgender health, and vaccine hesitancy. NIH, at HHS’s behest, also tried to impose a crippling cut in the overhead payments made to universities that carry out grant-funded research.

More disruption looms, including HHS-demanded cuts to billions of dollars in contracts that fund key support staff and research centers and a White House proposal due any day now that will likely aim to slash up to 44% from NIH’s $47.4 billion budget and overhaul its structure. An agency that once had strong bipartisan support and was seen as the crown jewel of U.S. science, and the envy of the world, now faces a diminished, uncertain future.

I think the plan is to sow as much chaos as possible. … I think they want a dispirited workforce at NIH so people will just say ‘to hell with it’ and leave.

Some on the NIH campus that April day held out hope for Bhattacharya, who has said he wants to “undo some of the disruptions” and get NIH research back on track. Bhattacharya told Science this week, “It’s been a tough period” at NIH, but “I think things have turned around significantly.”

But others see him as firmly aligned with the Trump administration. In recent remarks to the research community, Bhattacharya said he wants to pivot NIH toward Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda, which focuses on chronic diseases, a shift that could come at the expense of the basic research and infectious disease studies that the agency now funds. “His presentation was distressing on multiple fronts,” says longtime NIH observer Keith Yamamoto, a cell biologist at the University of California (UC) San Francisco. 

Others outside the agency share a pessimistic assessment of NIH. “I don’t think there’s any way to sugarcoat the last 100 days. The state of the enterprise is chaotic and it’s in jeopardy,” says Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, a biomedical research advocacy group. “I am terribly worried,” says molecular biologist Shirley Tilghman, former president of Princeton University. “It will take years to undo the damage that is being inflicted right now.”

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S interference with NIH began the day after he took office, when HHS political appointees imposed a “pause” on communications from its 27 institutes and centers. Past administrations had sometimes briefly halted press releases and other communications, but this time, NIH extended the pause to public meeting attendance by scientists who handle grant programs and reviews. That meant meetings were abruptly halted, sometimes minutes before the start time or even midway through. In-house scientists and grants staff were also told to freeze hiring, purchasing, and travel. Days later, on 27 January, the White House froze grant payments from all federal agencies.

That first week, Trump appointed an acting director to replace Monica Bertagnolli, who had stepped down as NIH director days before the presidential transition. But instead of veteran Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak, who had previously held the acting role, he chose Matthew Memoli, a longtime influenza researcher with NIH’s intramural program. Memoli had questioned the need for widespread COVID-19 vaccinations during the pandemic. That put him at odds with Anthony Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a frequent target of conservatives, and may have elevated Memoli in the administration’s eyes.

On Friday of the second week, the director’s office, known as Building 1, received an order to post a notice imposing an immediate 15% cap on indirect costs, the overhead payments the agency includes with each grant, to save $4 billion. Former NIH officials say they were alarmed by the sudden memo, which had multiple errors and directly conflicted with congressional restrictions on the agency’s indirect costs rates. By Monday, universities had won a court order halting the cap, arguing it was illegal.

That same week, the first signs of a widely expected purge of NIH leadership emerged. Tabak was called to a meeting at HHS headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., and told he was reassigned to a job there and would lose his NIH lab. The 25-year NIH veteran announced his retirement later that day. Deputy Director for Extramural Research Michael Lauer, who oversaw NIH grant policies, abruptly retired later that week amid rumors he, too, would be reassigned. Before he left, Lauer ordered staff to lift the NIH grant freeze after a court ruled it was illegal.

Next came what many dubbed the “Valentine’s Day massacre”—the dismissal of nearly 1200 NIH employees who, along with thousands of other federal workers, had a “probationary” status because they were new to the agency or, in many cases, were veterans but had recently changed positions. Among them were crucial Clinical Center staff along with more than a dozen tenure-track investigators. Illustrating the haphazard nature of the firings, the clinical staff and animal care workers were quickly rehired when it became clear they were essential, and the firings of the tenure-track scientists were also eventually reversed. HHS also abruptly halted routine renewals of the many intramural scientists on term-limited appointments—a policy reversed after an appeal from Memoli but that NIH researchers say has recently resurfaced.

AS FEBRUARY ROLLED into March, a new threat crystallized for the university scientists and other extramural researchers who receive the bulk of NIH funds: HHS ordered NIH to cancel hundreds of grants that allegedly violated Trump executive orders barring funding for topics that touched on diversity, equity, and inclusion and LGBTQ health. The cuts included HIV trials in South Africa, training grants, health equity and environmental studies, as well as work on vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19.

“It was soul sucking every time to see those lists of grants that were vulnerable,” says Emily Erbelding, an NIAID division director who was put on leave this month. NIH letters terminating the grants stated that the work “no longer effectuates agency priorities”—language meant to satisfy recently revised grant policy requirements.

The cuts have made a huge dent in some research fields, such as transgender health, which has lost at least $157 million in unspent NIH funding. Although researchers can appeal terminations, and a few cancellations have been reversedwithout explanation, some scientists have already shut down their programs. After losing $5 million in research and training grants studying ways to improve health care for Alzheimer’s disease in sexual and gender minorities, social scientist Jason Flatt of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas laid off his two full-time staff and is scrambling to find other support for five graduate students. “This has been my life’s work,” says Flatt, who now expects to pivot to less politically fraught Alzheimer’s studies.

It will take years to undo the damage that is being inflicted right now.

At some top research universities all NIH funding, regardless of its focus, has become leverage as the Trump administration pressures the institutions on matters unrelated to science. First the White House killed NIH grants, and other federal funds, to Columbia University in March saying it had not properly combated antisemitism in the wake of campus protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza. Columbia has been negotiating policy changes, so far without winning back its funding, more of which was frozen. At dozens of other universities NIH funding is threatened. Harvard University, facing the loss of at least $2.2 billion in multiyear grants from NIH and other agencies, has called the demands an attack on academic freedom and on 21 April, filed a lawsuit challenging the cancellations. Bhattacharya told Science he supports the freezes because “these institutions ought to obey the civil rights laws.” 

Much of the money flowing from NIH to universities supports early-career researchers. Other changes at the agency also threaten the U.S. pipeline for scientists. Virtually all NIH-funded training programs aimed at attracting underrepresented groups to science are now gone. “I’m concerned that these events are very likely to affect who decides to stay in science and we will lose important and necessary scientific talent,” says cell biologist Needhi Bhalla of UC Santa Cruz, who has mentored several trainees supported by these awards.

THE FIRST DAY OF APRIL, Bhattacharya’s start date, brought another wave of about 1300 job cuts at NIH as part of Kennedy’s plans to downsize and centralize operations at all HHS agencies. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) faced similarly huge reductions in force. That same week, four institute directors and one acting director at NIAID and other NIH institutes were told they had been put on leaveand in most cases offered reassignments to sites with the Indian Health Service far from their current homes. (None has publicly resigned or accepted the reassignment so far.) Other NIH leaders, including the chief of the agency’s well-regarded international center and some close to Fauci, were removed as well.

The HHS-imposed staff cuts, which ignored a plan developed by NIH leadership and submitted by Memoli, wiped out many communications, acquisitions, human resources, and policy offices. They swept up intramural scientists who many thought would be protected, including 10 tenured neuroscientists who Kennedy later said were fired by mistake—one of many acknowledged errors at NIH, CDC, and FDA. (As this story went to press, these scientists were back in the lab but had still not been officially reinstated.)

Even NIH’s biggest supporters acknowledge that some parts of the massive agency could be improved or made more efficient through centralization of necessities such as information technology. But as one senior scientist put it, “There was no planning.” Institute leaders are now scrambling to get functions handled by the disbanded offices operating again.

However bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse. They’re dismantling and destroying everything.

Some of the internal restrictions have recently been eased. Peer-review meetings to consider grant proposals have resumed, as well as institute council meetings, which do the second level of funding review. Bhattacharya quickly lifted the freeze on travel and purchasing.

Yet the staff shortages are still taking a toll. One intramural scientist had to cancel a talk at a local university because his slides, submitted 30 days earlier, had not yet been approved. The few senior scientists who have rare agency credit cards are swamped with requests to buy lab supplies. “The backlogs are crazy,” a postdoc says—6 months for mice or a microscope part that would normally take 2 weeks. Researchers are getting by with workarounds such as sharing antibodies.

With continuing losses of key technicians, physicians, and administrative staff, the Clinical Center now lags in lab testing and faces difficulty bringing in patients from outside the United States, who are needed for studies of rare diseases. Its patient population has dropped by at least 30% since Trump took over, to below 70 in April compared with more than 100 during the same month in past years, a senior clinical investigator there tells Science. The Clinical Center’s Steven Rosenberg, a pioneer in using a person’s own immune cells to fight their advanced cancer, says the staff cuts and purchasing delays mean up to 2-month delays in treatment for his seriously ill patients and fewer treated overall. “We’re working at a much slower pace,” he says.

WHETHER THINGS WILL get better at NIH now that it has a permanent director is anyone’s guess. Although he has said he backs research on health disparities, which his own work has examined, Bhattacharya supports the Trump administration cuts to diversity programs, which he calls “a political ideology.” And he has brushed off killing HIV grants in South Africa as part of a shift of resources to support Kennedy’s focus on Americans’ health. “I’m concerned that he has little autonomy,” Yamamoto says.

Rosenberg, who has met with the new director, is more optimistic: “He seemed very reasonable and eager to improve things,” he says.

More reshaping of NIH could be coming. Career staffers in Building 1 have been replaced with political appointees with no experience with research agencies. DOGE and HHS are expected to approve new grant solicitations, and the agency this week began to absorb an HHS-mandated $2.6 billion cut in contracts that fund vaccine scientists, equipment maintenance, long-running heart disease studies, and much more.

Kennedy’s influence is a particular worry. The HHS director ordered NIH to launch a study of the causes of autism, which Kennedy has falsely blamed on vaccines, although he says other “environmental” causes could have a role. Another study the White House and Kennedy have told NIH to instigate will explore “regret” among transgender people who undergo hormone treatments. “The conclusions seem predetermined,” says biochemist Jeremy Berg of the University of Pittsburgh, former director of NIH’s basic science institute and former editor-in-chief of Science. “It undermines the credibility of NIH particularly because it seems designed to drive a particular political agenda.”

The Republicans in control of Congress so far have taken no action to protect NIH, although Senator Susan Collins (R–ME) said today at a hearing on the state of the biomedical research enterprise that the cuts to NIH scientists and grants “must be reversed.” Collins chairs the committee that oversees NIH’s budget and held the hearing in partnership with the panel’s senior Democrat, Senator Patty Murray (WA). Murray has protested the many NIH cuts, most recently to NIH’s landmark Women’s Health Initiative, which HHS said it had reversed after an outcry. Congress will also decide whether to go along with Trump’s proposed, radically smaller NIH budget and reorganization plan. Indirect cost payments will almost certainly be revisited and trimmed. “We are undoubtedly at an extremely challenging time for the biomedical research community,” says Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

For now, the biomedical research community and NIH staff are hoping the resumption of council meetings will allow grants to flow out again—although staff shortages will be an impediment. Disbursing NIH’s full budget before the end of the fiscal year on 30 September “is going to be a near impossible feat for the number of people left,” says a former cancer institute official. If so, hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally approved funding meant to identify new medical treatments and test them in patients across the U.S. and world will go back to the Department of the Treasury.

Like those on the NIH campus who spoke with Science, many of the agency’s former leaders are also not optimistic about the next 100 days, or the rest of Trump’s term. Geneticist Francis Collins, NIH director from 2009 to 2021 who abruptly retired in late February and closed his NIH lab, is one. “Reckless decisions will disrupt a noble institution with a stunningly positive track record, drive young scientists to leave the country, and damage the future health of the nation.”

With reporting by Sara Reardon.

Update, 2 May, 11:55 a.m.: Additional comments from NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, from an interview after this story was posted, have been added.

Categories Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Thomas Edsall: What Scholars Say About Trump’s Reign of Error and Chaos

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2025 //
12

Thomas Edsall writes a regular feature for The New York Times. In this stunning article, he recounts the views of numerous scholars about what Trump has done since his Inauguration.

This is a gift article, meaning you can open the link and finish reading the article, which is usually behind a paywall.

Edsall writes:

One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency.

The targets of President Trump’s assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America’s foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more.

J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there had never

been a U.S. president who I consider even to have been destructive, let alone a president who has intentionally and deliberately set out to destroy literally every institution in America, up to and including American democracy and the rule of law. I even believe he is destroying the American presidency, though I would not say that is intentional and deliberate.

Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress.

Let’s look at just one target of the administration’s vendetta, medical research. Trump’s attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation.

“This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,” Jennifer Zeitzer, the deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science magazine. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will “totally destroy the nation’s public health infrastructure.”

I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump’s wreckage. “The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, “is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.”

I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique in terms of his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied:

There is no precedent, not even close, unless you consider Jefferson Davis an American president. Even to raise the question, with all due respect, is to minimize the crisis we’re in and the scope of Trump et al.’s. intentions.

Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump’s election the opportunity to pursue their goals?

Wilentz’s reply:

Trump’s closest allies intended chaos wrought by destruction which helps advance the elite reactionary programs. Chaos allows Trump to expand his governing by emergency powers, which could well include the imposition of martial law, if he so chose.

I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. “Not to be flip,” Rudalevige replied by email, “but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts, the answer is already distressingly permanent.”

From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote:

The damage caused to governmental expertise and simple competence could be long lasting. Firing probationary workers en masse may reduce the government employment head count, slightly, but it also purged those most likely to bring the freshest view and most up-to-date skills to government service, while souring them on that service. And norms of nonpoliticization in government service have taken a huge hit.

I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige’s:

The comp that comes to mind is Andrew Johnson. It’s hardly guaranteed that Reconstruction after the Civil War would have succeeded even under Lincoln’s leadership. But Johnson took action after action designed to prevent racial reconciliation and economic opportunity, from vetoing key legislation to refusing to prevent mob violence against Blacks to pardoning former members of the Confederacy hierarchy. He affirmatively made government work worse and to prevent it from treating its citizens equally.

Another question: How much is Trump’s second-term agenda the invention of conservative elites, and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump’s MAGA supporters?

“Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,” Rudalevige wrote, “but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.”

In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025

was not just a campaign manifesto but a bulwark against the inconsistency and individualism its authors thought had undermined the effectiveness of Trump’s first term. It was an insurance policy to secure the administrative state for conservative thought and yoke it to a cause beyond Trump or even Trumpism.

The alliance with Trump was a marriage of convenience — and the Trump legacy when it comes to staffing the White House and executive branch is a somewhat ironic one, as an unwitting vehicle for an agenda that goes far beyond the personalization of the presidency.

In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued,

it has been in response to crisis: the Civil War, World War I, the Depression and World War II, 9/11. But no similar objective crisis faced us. So one had to be declared — via proclamations of “invasion” and the like — or even created. In the ensuing crisis more power may be delegated by Congress. But the analogue is something like an arsonist who rushes to put out the fire he started.

One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged America’s relations with traditional allies everywhere.

Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, wrote in an email:

The most lasting impact of this term will be felt in the damage done to the reputation of the United States as a safe harbor where the rule of law is king and where the Constitution is as sacred a national document as any country has developed.

Through his utter disregard for the law, Trump has shown both how precious and how fragile are the rules that undergird our institutions, our economic and national security and the foundation for our democracy.

To finish this excellent article, please open the link.

Categories Democracy, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, Justice, Science, Technology, Trump

Trump Threatens to Transfer Harvard’s Billions for Scientific Research to Trade Schools, Demands Names of Foreign Students

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2025 //
13

Trump is a petty man who is filled with rage, grievance, and a passion for retribution. His current target is Harvard University because the nation’s most prestigious university told him no. Harvard’s President Alan Garber said it would not allow the federal government to control its curriculum, its admissions, and its hiring policies. No.

Every Cabinet department has pulled research grants to Harvard. Now he warns he might turn the billions that were going to medical and scientific research and hand it over to trade schools.

He would rather stop researchers who are trying to find cures for cancer, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases than back down on his efforts to stifle academic freedom and his vendetta against Harvard.

I don’t know about you, but I would rather see the federal government fund the search for a cure for MS than withdraw the funding. If he wants to fund trade schools, why should he do so at the expense of crucial research?

He wrote on Truth Social yesterday:

“I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” Trump said in a post on social media. “What a great investment that would be for the USA, and so badly needed!!!”

Meanwhile, Trump dreamed up another way to harass Harvard during the hours when he couldn’t get to sleep. He demanded that Harvard give him a list containing the names and countries of origin of all its foreign students. Harvard has nearly 7,000 foreign students. Why? What will he do with those names? Will he say they are spies and try again to expel them? Funny thing is he already has all their names and countries. They were registered when they applied for a visa. It’s all a campaign of endless vengeance by a petty, bitter man.

Categories Academic Freedom, Economy, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Higher Education, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

What Can the Federal Government Do to Promote Learning?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2025 //
12

On May 10, Dana Goldstein wrote a long article in The New York Times about how education disappeared as a national or federal issue. Why, she wondered, did the two major parties ignore education in the 2024 campaign? Kamala Harris supported public schools and welcomed the support of the two big teachers’ unions, but she did not offer a flashy new program to raise test scores. Trump campaigned on a promise to privatize public funding, promote vouchers, charter schools, religious schools, home schooling–anything but public schools, which he regularly attacked as dens of iniquity, indoctrination, and DEI.

Goldstein is the best education writer at The Times, and her reflections are worth considering.

She started:

What happened to learning as a national priority?

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats strove to be seen as champions of student achievement. Politicians believed pushing for stronger reading and math skills wasn’t just a responsibility, it was potentially a winning electoral strategy.

At the moment, though, it seems as though neither party, nor even a single major political figure, is vying to claim that mantle.

President Trump has been fixated in his second term on imposing ideological obedience on schools.

On the campaign trail, he vowed to “liberate our children from the Marxist lunatics and perverts who have infested our educational system.”Since taking office, he has pursued this goal with startling energy — assaulting higher education while adopting a strategy of neglect toward the federal government’s traditional role in primary and secondary schools. He has canceled federal exams that measure student progress, and ended efforts to share knowledge with schools about which teaching strategies lead to the best results. A spokeswoman for the administration said that low test scores justify cuts in federal spending. “What we are doing right now with education is clearly not working,” she said.

Mr. Trump has begun a bevy of investigations into how schools handle race and transgender issues, and has demanded that the curriculum be “patriotic” — a priority he does not have the power to enact, since curriculum is set by states and school districts.

Actually, federal law explicitly forbids any federal official from attempting to influence the curriculum or textbooks in schools.

Education lawyer Dan Gordon wrote about the multiple laws that prevent any federal official from trying to dictate, supervise, control or interfere with curriculum. There is no sterner prohibition in federal law than the one that keeps federal officials from trying to dictate what schools teach.

Of course, Trump never worries about the limits imposed by laws. He does what he wants and leaves the courts to decide whether he went too far.

Goldstein continued:

Democrats, for their part, often find themselves standing up for a status quo that seems to satisfy no one. Governors and congressional leaders are defending the Department of Education as Mr. Trump has threatened to abolish it. Liberal groups are suing to block funding cuts. When Kamala Harris was running for president last year, she spoke about student loan forgiveness and resisting right-wing book bans. But none of that amounts to an agenda on learning, either.

All of this is true despite the fact that reading scores are the lowest they have been in decades, after a pandemic that devastated children by shuttering their schools and sending them deeper and deeper into the realm of screens and social media. And it is no wonder Americans are increasingly cynical about higher education. Forty percent of students who start college do not graduate, often leaving with debt and few concrete skills.

“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after running Chicago’s public school system. “There are no metrics to measure goals, there are no strategies to achieve those goals and there is no public transparency.”

I have been writing about federal education policy for almost fifty years. There are things we have learned since Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965. That law was part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s agenda. Its purpose was to send federal funds to the schools enrolling the poorest students. Its purpose was not to raise test scores but to provide greater equity of resources.

Over time, the federal government took on an assertive role in defending the rights of students to an education: students with disabilities; students who did not speak English; and students attending illegally segregated schools.

In 1983, a commission appointed by President Reagan’s Secretary of Education Terrell Bell declared that American schools were in crisis because of low academic standards. Many states began implementing state tests and raising standards for promotion and graduation.

President George H.W. Bush convened a meeting of the nation’s governors, and they endorsed an ambitious set of “national goals” for the year 2000. E.g., the U.S. will be first in the world by the year 2000; all children will start school ready to learn by 2000. None of the goals–other than the rise of the high school graduation rate to 90%–was met.

The Clinton administration endorsed the national goals and passed legislation (“Goals 2000”) to encourages states to create their own standards and tests. President Clinton made clear, however, that he hoped for national standards and tests.

President George W. Bush came to office with a far-reaching, unprecedented plan called “No Child Left Behind” to reform education by a heavy emphasis on annual testing of reading and math. He claimed that because of his test-based policy, there had been a “Texas Miracle,” which could be replicated on a national scale. NCLB set unreachable goals, saying that every school would have 100% of their students reach proficiency by the year 2014. And if they were not on track to meet that impossible goals, the schools would face increasingly harsh punishments.

In no nation in the world have 100% of all students ever reached proficiency.

Scores rose, as did test-prep. Many untested subjects lost time in the curriculum or disappeared. Reading and math were tested every year from grades 3-8, as the law prescribed. What didn’t matter were science, history, civics, the arts, even recess.

Some schools were sanctioned or even closed for falling behind. Schools were dominated by the all-important reading and math tests. Some districts cheated. Some superintendents were jailed.

In 2001, there were scholars who warned that the “Texas Miracle” was a hoax. Congress didn’t listen. In time the nation learned that there was no Texas Miracle, never had been. But Congress clung to NCLB because they had no other ideas.

When Obama took office in 2009, educators hoped for relief from the annual testing mandates but they were soon disappointed. Obama chose Arne Duncan, who had led the Chicago schools but had never been a teacher. Duncan worked with consultants from the Gates and Broad Foundations and created a national competition for the states called Race to the Top. Duncan had a pot of $5 billion that Congress had given him for education reform.

Race to the Top offered big rewards to states that applied and won. To be eligible, states had to authorize the creation of charter schools (almost every state did); they had to agree to adopt common national standards (that meant the Common Core standards, funded wholly by the Gates Foundation and not yet completed); sign up for one of two federally funded standardized tests (PARCC or Smarter Balanced) ; and agree to evaluate their teachers by the test scores of their students. Eighteen states won huge rewards. There were other conditions but these were the most consequential.

Tennessee won $500 million. It is hard to see what, if anything, is better in Tennessee because of that audacious prize. The state put $100 million into an “Achievement School District,” which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools into a new district and turned them into charters. Chris Barbic, leader of the YES Prep charter chain in Houston was hired to run it. He pledged that within five years, the lowest-performing schools in the state would rank among the top 20% in the state. None of them did. The ASD was ultimately closed down.

Duncan had a great fondness for charter schools because they were the latest thing in Chicago; while superintendent, he had launched a program he called Renaissance 2010, in which he pledged to close 80 public schools and open 100 charter schools. Duncan viewed charters as miraculous. Ultimately Chicago’s charter sector produced numerous scandals but no miracles.

I have written a lot about Race to the Top over the years. It was layered on top of Bush’s NCLB, but it was even more punitive. It targeted teachers and blamed them if students got low scores. Its requirement that states evaluate teachers by student test scores was a dismal failure. The American Statistical Association warned against it from the outset, pointing out that students’ home life affected test scores more than their teachers.

Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 failed. It destroyed communities. Its strategy of closing neighborhood schools and dispersing students encountered growing resistance. The first schools that Duncan launched as his exemplars were eventually closed. In 2021, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously to end its largest “school turnaround” program, managed by a private group, and return its 31 campuses to district control. Duncan’s fervent belief in “turnaround” schools was derided as a historical relic.

Race to the Top failed. The proliferation of charter schools, aided by a hefty federal subsidy, drained students and resources from public schools. Charter schools close their doors at a rapid pace: 26% are gone in their first five years; 39% in their first ten years. In addition, due to lax accountability, charters have demonstrated egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse.

The Common Core was supposed to lift test scores and reduce achievement gaps, but it did neither. Conservative commentator Mike Petrilli referred to 2007-2017 as “the lost decade.” Scores stagnated and achievement gaps barely budged.

So what have we learned?

This is what I have learned: politicians are not good at telling educators how to teach. The Department of Education (which barely exists as of now) is not made up of educators. It was not in a position to lead school reform. Nor is the Secretary of Education. Nor is the President. Would you want the State legislature or Congress telling surgeons how to do their job?

The most important thing that the national government can do is to ensure that schools have the funding they need to pay their staff, reduce class sizes, and update their facilities.

The federal government should have a robust program of data collection, so we have accurate information about students, teachers, and schools.

The federal government should not replicate its past failures.

What Congress can do very effectively is to ensure that the nation’s schools have the resources they need; that children have access to nutrition and medical care; and that pregnant women get prenatal care so that their babies are born healthy.

Categories Civil Rights, Closing schools, Curriculum, Democrats, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Graduation rates, Health, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans, Segregation, Special Education, Standardized Testing, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: RFK Jr. is a Danger to Public Health

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2025 //
1

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for The Los Angeles Times, explains why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is himself a danger to public health. Why did Trump pick him? RFK Jr. is neither a medical nor a scientific researcher. He has made his mark in public as a conspiracy theorist and a publicist for the idea that vaccines cause autism and other illnesses.

Hiltzik writes:

Americans have become woefully familiar with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the purveyor of flagrant misinformation about medical treatments. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the minimizer of health crises such as the spreading measles outbreak. And with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the antivaccine crusader.

Now let’s meet Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the promoter of a costly, time-consuming and distinctly unethical order for testing vaccines. “All new vaccines will undergo safety testing in placebo-controlled trials prior to licensure — a radical departure from past practices,” HHS announced in a May 1 statement. What it didn’t say was that the “departure” is “radical” because it’s shunned by medical authorities as a bad thing.

Just this week, Kennedy’s agency doubled down on this order with the appointment of Vinay Prasad, an oncologist at UC San Francisco, as head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, the division at the Food and Drug Administration that oversees vaccine testing.

Prasad was a strident critic of the Biden administration’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic, including the COVID vaccines. In a blog post in late April, he called for clinical testing of COVID boosters, along the lines of Kennedy’s order. Prasad succeeds Peter Marks, a widely respected expert who resigned from the FDA in March after clashing with Kennedy.

“I was willing to work to address [Kennedy’s] concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency,” Marks wrote in his resignation letter. “However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”

The HHS announcement about Kennedy’s demand for placebo-controlled trials was unclear about how it defined “new vaccines.” But his previous claims about vaccine safety have made clear that he’s referring not only to first-generation vaccines for diseases, but also boosters and expanded formulations. That’s an important point, as I’ll cover in a moment.

The antivaccine camp, of which Kennedy has long been a leader, has pushed the claim that most childhood vaccines haven’t been adequately tested for safety because they haven’t been subjected to placebo-controlled trials — and therefore may be unsafe.

“Except for the COVID vaccine, none of the vaccines on the CDC’s childhood recommended schedule was tested against an inert placebo, meaning we know very little about the actual risk profiles of these products,” Kennedy’s spokesman at HHS, Andrew Nixon, asserted in connection with the order.

Both components of that claim are misrepresentations.

Let’s take a closer look, starting with some rudimentary points.

The testing that Kennedy and Prasad advocate are randomized control trials. They’re correct in asserting that so-called RCTs are the gold standard in clinical testing of drugs and vaccines.

RCTs typically involve at least two groups of subjects: One receives the medicine in question and another — a control group — receives something else, such as a placebo, a concoction that’s designed to resemble the medicine but is essentially inert, with no evident effect on the disease. The placebo may be an injectable saline solution, or water, or a sugar pill.

Kennedy, like other antivaxxers, is deceptive in saying that the safety of vaccines should be questioned if it hasn’t been tested against an “inert placebo.”

That brings us to the ethics of clinical testing, and why Kennedy’s policy is so dangerous.

Testing a vaccine against a true placebo is ethical and proper when it’s the first treatment for a disease for which no other safe and effective treatment exists. That’s not the case, however, when a known treatment does exist — say after a vaccine has been shown to be safe and effective and has become the standard of care.

As vaccine specialist Paul Offit of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has explained, subjecting new versions of those vaccines to placebo-controlled testing — giving some subjects the new vaccine and the control subjects no treatment, would be unethical, because it would require depriving the placebo group access to a known treatment. That was the conclusion of an expert panel assembled by the World Health Organization in 2014.

Offit, in a 2023 rejoinder to Kennedy’s appearance on a Joe Rogan podcast, in which he claimed that drug companies “never do placebo-controlled trials,” pointed to what may be the most famous vaccine trial to illustrate this point.
That was the nationwide trial of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine. In 1954, 420,000 first- and second-graders were given the Salk shot, and 200,000 got a shot of salt water. Salk objected to the trial’s design. Smaller trials had established the safety and efficacy of his vaccine, so the plan meant depriving 200,000 children of immunity to a disease that was paralyzing 50,000 children a year and killing 1,500.


As Offit noted, in the full trial 16 children died from polio; all were in the placebo group. So were 34 of the 36 children paralyzed in the course of the trial. “These are the gentle heroes we leave behind,” Offit wrote.


Now let’s examine Kennedy’s order as it applies to modern vaccines. As the veteran pseudoscience debunker David Gorski has pointed out, contrary to the assertion by Kennedy’s spokesman, almost none of the vaccines on the current childhood vaccination list is a first-generation vaccine warranting placebo testing. (An exception is Gardasil, which safeguards against human papilloma virus.)

They’re upgraded preparations of vaccines that themselves underwent placebo-controlled trials, or formulations aimed at new variants of the targeted disease, or shots that inoculate against several diseases all at once.

To demand that every new formulation be tested against an inert placebo would mean turning back the clock to reproduce trials that may have taken place decades ago, but resulted in the licensing of the original vaccine after safety and efficacy were established.

That means it would have been unethical to test the new version against a saline control, because the control group would be deprived of any effective treatment. “The bottom line,” Gorski writes, “is that, if you trace back the history of the vaccines developed for a disease like, say, measles, you will eventually find the RCT testing the first effective vaccine against it and that vaccine will have had a placebo control.”
He’s right. In a tweet thread, vaccinologist Peter Hotez traced back the history of several vaccines to their initial RCTs.

What makes Kennedy’s order especially cynical is that designing and implementing a clinical trial is an extraordinarily complex, costly and time-consuming process. As a team of Canadian researchers observed in a 2018 Nature article, a full-scale Phase 3 clinical trial — the level at which drugs and vaccines are studied for safety, efficacy and dosing — requires as many as 3,000 participants and can take as long as four years.

In an online posting last month, Prasad ridiculed “the mainstream media” for being upset about the idea that COVID boosters should in effect receive full randomized clinical trials before approval. He took particular issue with an article by Helen Braswell of STAT asserting that such a requirement might well delay approval of a vaccine targeting a new COVID variant until it was too late to protect users from that variant. Prasad called the argument false because “the virus spreads year round.”

Is that so? At the height of the pandemic, new COVID variants sometimes appeared within months of one another. The virulent Delta variant, for example, appeared in the spring of 2021 and was overtaken by the Omicron variant, which also caused severe disease, that November.

Delays in rolling out vaccines to combat newly emergent disease strains and variants could cost millions of lives. Under existing vaccine approval protocols, the COVID vaccines prevented as many as 20 million deaths globally within a year after they were introduced early in 2021.

Prasad’s new job will put him in charge of developing vaccine testing policies and overseeing the design and approval of clinical trials. I asked him via email what policies he would pursue, whether he was in alignment with Kennedy’s approach, and how he expected vaccine developers to reconcile the costs and time constraints of undertaking clinical trials on the scale he advocates with the imperatives of public health. I didn’t receive a reply.

So far, the Kennedy regime at HHS has lived down to the worst expectations of his critics. His devotion to unnecessary testing of vaccines that have already shown their safety and efficacy is only one aspect of a comprehensive assault on public confidence in science-based medicine.

In a recent appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, Kennedy dismissed the severity of the current measles outbreak and denigrated the effectiveness of the measles vaccine. The current outbreak of 935 cases is by far the worst in the U.S. since 2019, when 1,274 cases were recorded; at the current rate, we are on the path to nearly 3,000 this year.

Kennedy has promoted almost useless nostrums against measles, such as vitamin A, while describing vaccination as a personal choice. That’s devastatingly wrongheaded. Kennedy confuses “medicine” and “public health.” The former concerns itself with the individual; the latter with the community. Vaccine policy belongs in the latter category because vaccines are most effective when the effort is communitywide.

Measles is among the most contagious diseases known to humankind, which means that communal vaccination is crucial. Professionals have concluded that a 95% vaccination rate is the minimum required to protect the most vulnerable, such as infants, from infection; as of 2024, the U.S. vaccination rate among kindergartners had fallen from 95.2% in 2019-20 to 92.7%.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which falls within Kennedy’s jurisdiction, says the decline in measles vaccinations leaves 280,000 kindergartners at risk. Two children in the U.S. already have died from a disease that was thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. in 2020; Kennedy doesn’t seem concerned that the toll on his watch is poised to get much worse.

Categories Health, Safety, Science, Trump

PBS: What You Need to Know About Medicaid

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2025 //
16

Republicans are struggling to get the votes they need to pass Trump’s budget bill. They have a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, and they need almost every Republican vote to put the bill through. Much of the debate focuses on the fate of Medicaid.

Medicaid and Medicare are often confused. Medicare is health insurance for senior citizens, funded by their lifetime deductions from their income. Medicaid is health insurance for low-income persons.

Trump and most of the party want to cut Medicaid to pay for the Trump tax cuts, which are focused on high-income individuals and corporations. Even with deep cuts to Medicaid, the tax cuts will increase the deficits.

Lisa Desjardins of PBS assembled a fact sheet about Medicaid.

LET’S TALK ABOUT MEDICAID

By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent
 
Hello from just outside the chambers of House Speaker Mike Johnson.
 
I am waiting with a handful of other reporters as a small group of House Republicans try to work out a compromise over the party’s “One, Big, Beautiful Bill.” (I am looking for a shorthand for the bill, perhaps OB3?) 
 
Republicans do not have the votes for this — yet. But they could agree at any point in the next day or two. If not, they face a weekend standoff or the possibility of leaving for Memorial Day recess without the progress Johnson has promised.
 
There is much at stake here. We’d like to pull off one major piece and break down some highlights. Let’s talk about Medicaid.
 
The basics

  • Medicaid is the federal health care program for low-income Americans. 
  • Close to 71.3 million Americans get their health care this way. 
  • CHIP is the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which, along with states, provides health care for kids whose families can’t afford health care but earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. 
  • Nearly 7.3 million American kids are enrolled in CHIP.
  • Income thresholds: As this chart by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows, it varies by state and can vary on whether you have children or are pregnant. 
  • Medicaid expansion is a program in which the federal government pays 90 percent of the cost for any state that expands Medicaid to include those making up to 138 percent of poverty. In 2025, that is $21,597 a year for individuals or $44,367 for families of four. 
  • 40 states (plus Washington, D.C.)have Medicaid expansion.

 
The funding

We are about to get really nerdy. 
 
The federal government and states share the costs of Medicaid. But the rate of federal sharing varies by state, based on a formula.
 
Something called FMAP, the Federal Matching Assistance Program, helps determine how much each state gets, based on the state’s average income level. These range from a 50 to 77 percent match in the states. 
 
But that match rate is just one half of the formula. The other is how much states spend. Medicaid is often the largest single expenditure for any state. The largest portion of money comes from the state’s general fund or general budget. 
 
But states also use something called a “provider tax,” which is a fee charged on health care providers. Think nursing homes or hospitals.
 
Here is the thing about the provider tax. It is a system whereby states can actually profit.  
 
Think about it this way. States charge hospitals and nursing homes a fee. They spend that fee on Medicaid, upping the amount the federal government must match. (More state spending triggers more federal match.) And then those federal dollars go back to the state and to the providers, as people get care. So states and providers don’t lose money, in theory.
 
But they trigger more federal matching.
 
Why it matters
 
Fiscal conservative holdouts who oppose the current “One Big Beautiful Bill” want action on these provider taxes and potentially on the FMAP level.
 
But the latest draft instead reforms Medicaid primarily by setting up new work requirements for “able-bodied” people, or those without disabilities, in the program. That requirement is currently set to phase in over the next two years.
 
Per the Congressional Budget Office, this Republican Medicaid plan would lead to 8.6 million Americans losing their health insurance over the next decade.  
 
(Changes to the Affordable Care Act would lead to millions more losing coverage, per CBO.)
 
Republicans argue that these are programs the United States cannot afford. 
 
And all of it revolves around precisely how Medicaid works, and how states pay for it.

Categories Health, Poverty, Republicans, Trump

Now Will They Leave Joe Biden Alone?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2025 //
24

As I was scrolling through Twitter on Sunday, I read a bunch of anti-Biden tweets, so I added my two cents.

I tweeted:

Maybe it’s just me, but I would rather have Joe Biden (surrounded by highly competent people) asleep than Donald Trump at his best (surrounded by Fascists, haters, and law-breakers) on his best day. @jaketapper @AlexThomp

I once wrote on this blog that I would never criticize Joe Biden because he was running against a man who was totally unfit for the job. Several Trumpers has since written to complain about that statement, saying that it demonstrated my bias, but time has confirmed my view.

Regardless of his mental state, Biden would never have appointed a crackpot to run the National Institutes of Health. He would never have defunded USAID, NPR, PBS, FEMA, the Voice of America, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the U.S. Department of Education. Nor would he have let loose Elon Musk’s DOGS to ransack federal agencies, fire thousands of expert career officers, mess with the Social Security Administration, and hoover up all our personal data, for whatever nefarious purposes he chooses. Unlike Trump, Biden would not have terrorized institutions of higher education and threatened academic freedom and freedom of speech. Unlike Trump, Biden respected the independence of the Justice Department and the FBI and did not put political lackeys in charge of them or treat them as his personal attack dogs.

Frankly, I can’t keep track of the many federal programs and agencies that Trump has recklessly destroyed. If anyone knows of such a compilation, please share it. Trump and Musk have vandalized our government, and despite the thousands of injudicious, capricious firings, have not saved any money at all.

Then I came across this post by Julie Roginsky, which appeared shortly after the nation learned that former President Biden has prostate cancer, which has metasticized to his bones. She is writing about the new book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that aims to prove that President Biden was experiencing severe mental and physical decline while he was in office and that his family and staff collaborated to conceal that decline from the public.

She wrote:

Maybe now they’ll leave Joe Biden alone — or, better yet, spend some time assessing his actual presidency, both in isolation and in comparison with what has followed.

Stick it to legacy media, which has consistently beaten up on a decent man.

Was Biden operating at half-capacity throughout his term? Was he operating at 10%? Here are some facts, regardless of the opinions rendered by amateur neurologists all over media these days.

“Biden inherited an economy that was flat on its back because of the pandemic, and he’s bequeathing an economy that’s flying high,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s, which just lowered the credit rating of the United States for the first time in history under Donald Trump. 

Biden’s economic tenure was marred by the inflation that was a hangover of the Covid pandemic. But the numbers don’t lie about the rest of it. On his watch, the Dow Jones rose by over 40%, while the Nasdaq rose by almost 50%. The economy expanded by 11% during his four years in office (compared with under 9% during Donald Trump’s first term). Despite inflation, retail sales grew by more than 20%. Household net worth was 28% higher when Biden left office than when he took over from Trump. Unemployment was 2% lower at the end of Biden’s tenure than when he entered the White House. 

Most importantly, no one was predicting the demise of our 250 year American experiment while Biden was in charge.

Now, Biden is diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, which has spread to his bones. You don’t need to be an oncologist to know that the prognosis is not great.

So maybe now is a good time to reflect not just on Biden’s tenure but on what this obsession with his mental health means for the future of this country. Reporters who have spent the past several weeks on the fainting couch about “the cover up” of his mental condition in the Oval Office have consistently failed to acknowledge the successes of his tenure. They have failed to compare that tenure, both in economic and in governance terms, to what has followed. They have never stopped beating up a man who is no longer in the White House to take stock of the mental health of the current occupant of the White House.

Trump’s mental decline (which is apparent to anyone who has lived in the New York media market for the past four decades) is not happening, you see — because he does not stutter, because he shouts with vigor, because he “truths” at all hours of the night, unlike a septuagenarian who might require more rest. 

In short, all this is just “Trump being Trump.” It cannot be that he is stark raving mad. 

And Trump’s economic record, the one that is driving inflation ever higher, the one that is destroying consumer sentiment, the one that has driven both the stock and bond markets crazy? Never mind all that. Have you listened to Biden’s conversation with Robert Hur? Now that’s a scandal. 

Look, I really don’t care if Biden was confined to a gurney for four years. The facts speak for themselves. The country was more prosperous, the democracy was more stable, the nation was more respected, the people were less terrified, when he was in charge. 

Yes, Biden’s staff may have covered up his medical condition while he was in the Oval Office. But the real scandal is the cover up happening now. The media so obsessed with kicking Biden now that’s gone that it is ignoring the very real danger that his successor poses to us all. 

I am not a religious person but I hope that whatever higher power exists will look out for Joe Biden. He is a good man, who did well on behalf of the people who entrusted him with the presidency. That is a hell of a lot more than could be said about his successor.

I repeat:

Maybe it’s just me, but I would rather have Joe Biden (surrounded by highly competent people) asleep than Donald Trump at his best (surrounded by Fascists, haters, and law-breakers) on his best day. @jaketapper @AlexThomp

Categories Biden, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Trump
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