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Supreme Court by 5-4 Approves Cuts to NIH Research

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2025 //
9

The U.S. Supreme Court voted by 5-4 to approve the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research grants on health, due to their possible connection to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to “radical gender ideology.” Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the Court’s three liberal justices to stop the cuts to research funding.

The Associated Press reported:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Supreme Court decided Thursday.

The high court majority lifted a judge’s order blocking $783 million worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Republican President Donald Trump’s priorities. The high court did keep Trump administration guidance on future funding blocked, however.

The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was along those who would have kept the cuts blocked, along with the court’s three liberals.

The order marks the latest Supreme Court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict “incalculable losses in public health and human life.”

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination.”

The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12 billion of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer said judges shouldn’t be considering those cases under an earlier Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.

But the plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups, argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and couldn’t be sent to claims court. Halting studies midway can also ruin the data already collected and ultimately harm the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers, they argued.

U.S. District Judge William Young judge in Massachusetts agreed, finding the abrupt cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing in June. He later added: “Have we no shame.”

An appeals court left Young’s ruling in place.

Categories Extremism, Funding, Gender, Health, Research, Science, Trump

Michael Bloomberg: Will Trump Let RFK Jr. Destroy His Greatest Achievement?

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2025 //
3

During his first term in office, Trump had one major achievement: he responded to the pandemic by authorizing the rapid funding of a vaccine for COVID. His project was called operation Warp Speed. It was the domestic and peaceful equivalent of the Manhattan Project. It was a resounding success. Millions of lives were saved.

Unfortunately, Trump’s Health Secretary is opposed to vaccines. He has spent years encouraging people not to trust vaccines. He recently cancelled $500 million in vaccine research, cancelling research on exactly the kinds of mRNA vaccines that protected people from COVID.

Michael R. Bloomberg is a billionaire who has funded medical research at his Alma mater, John’s Hopkins University, and elsewhere. He is as devoted to promoting public health as RFK Jr. is to undermining it. Mr. Bloomberg was mayor of NYC for 12 years. In this post, he cleverly pits Trump’s ego against one of his worst Cabinet choices.

He writes:

For leaders in business, failing to learn the lessons of a crisis can be disastrous. For leaders in government, when millions of lives are at risk, such disasters can be catastrophic. Unfortunately, that’s where the US is heading, thanks to the disagreement that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has with his boss, President Donald Trump.

A little history: On Jan. 10, 2020, a Chinese scientist posted the genetic sequence of a “mystery virus” that had sickened dozens and caused at least one death. Forty-two days later, as Covid-19 spread across the globe, researchers near Boston sent the first shipment of an experimental vaccine to US regulators. Three months after that, Trump announced Operation Warp Speed, an $18 billion effort to accelerate the development, approval and distribution of vaccines.

Within a year, billions of vaccine doses had been administered worldwide — saving millions of lives, including those of many Americans. As Trump said: “Operation Warp Speed, whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, was one of the most incredible things ever done in this country.” He was absolutely correct — but his health secretary disagrees. The question is: Will Trump allow Kennedy to destroy his legacy?

Kennedy recently canceled $500 million in contracts for the research and development of so-called messenger RNA vaccines. His defense — that mRNA technology is ineffective against respiratory infections — is wrong. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, must know that, so he subsequently offered a different defense: There is insufficient public confidence in it.

Bhattacharya didn’t mention, of course, that Kennedy has fueled that public distrust. Regardless, the correct response to misperceptions about lifesaving medicine is not to throw up one’s hands, cancel funding for it and walk away. It’s to use the power of the bully pulpit to bring people together — community, faith, civic and other leaders — to spread facts and overcome hesitations. That’s leadership.

Not content to peddle misinformation and halt existing projects, Kennedy also effectively terminated additional federal funding for research on mRNA vaccines. The two edicts put countless American lives at risk.

To see the scale of the danger Kennedy is creating, it helps to understand how revolutionary mRNA vaccines are. For many decades, traditional vaccines have injected a small part of a dead or weakened virus into a healthy person. This stimulates the immune system to create antibodies, which protect people from serious infection when they encounter the real thing. In some cases, millions of chicken eggs are used to develop and produce these traditional vaccines, by incubating the viruses. In other cases, cell cultures are grown in bioreactors. Both processes are complex and time-consuming.

New mRNA vaccines are faster to develop. Messenger RNA is a strand of genetic code that gives cells instructions. For decades, scientists worked to design a synthetic form of mRNA, which would then tell the body to fight specific infections. Such a discovery, in theory, would also enable drugmakers to manufacture a vaccine without using a virus, cutting months off development. Yet despite significant advances, an mRNA vaccine had never been produced or tested at scale.

Operation Warp Speed helped overcome the obstacles and produce vaccines in record time. The speed of this breakthrough led to fantastical theories, including that the shots change one’s DNA, insert microchips into the body and cause infertility. It was all nonsense — the ultimate fake news. But it spread nonetheless, amplified by skeptics like Kennedy. Countless studies proved the vaccines safe, and the two scientists behind their development won the Nobel Prize.

The misinformation couldn’t be contained, but Kennedy can be. All that’s needed is a call from the White House directing him to reverse his recent decisions. Otherwise, when the next pandemic strikes, other countries — including China — will be equipped to distribute a shot within weeks, while scientists in the US will be left to fiddle with outdated technology as Americans wait in line.

Senator Bill Cassidy, whose vote was critical for Kennedy’s confirmation, lamented last week that the secretary has “conceded to China an important technology” and is imperiling the administration’s goals. He’s right — yet Cassidy and his colleagues in Congress have stood aside while Kennedy puts American lives at risk.

Without government leadership, the private sector is unlikely to fill the funding gap. Research on treatments for a hypothetical pandemic is financially risky, so public funding is essential to saving lives.

Kennedy’s actions will also have a chilling effect on other potential mRNA developments, including work on Type 1 diabetes, HIV, genetic diseases and myriad other illnesses, especially cancer. That bears repeating: mRNA research could lead to a cure for cancer. How many Americans who have family members suffering from cancer are ready to sacrifice them to Kennedy’s dunderheaded paranoias?

The White House should remember and celebrate its extraordinary first-term success — and build on it by reining in Kennedy. If it does that, the president who sped the development of the Covid vaccine might go down in history as doing the same for a cure for cancer and other diseases.

Categories Extremism, Funding, Health, Trump

Becky Pringle: Hungry Children Can’t Learn

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
6

Trump and his compliant allies in Congress took pride in the One Big Ugly Bill that they passed in early July. But it offers reasons for shame, not pride. The Trump bill finances tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting food for schoolchildren and Medicaid for millions of children.

The Republican budget bill locks in benefits for the rich and hunger for children of the poor.

Imagine laughing, applauding, and feeling proud of this heartless bill! I

President Trump Signs His "Big, Beautiful Bill" Into Law And Celebrates Independence Day At The White House

President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cut federal spending on SNAP by around $186 billion over the next decade. Samuel Corum—Getty Images

Becky Pringle, President of the NEA, writes in TIME magazine about the shamefulness of this legislation.

She writes:

Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.

School meals are more than a budget line item. They are lifelines that help millions of students learn and grow. But as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals.

President Donald Trump’s newly-signed tax bill, which Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass, slashes food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an estimated $186 billion over the next decade—thelargest cut in American history. These devastating reductions will result in an estimated 18 million children losing access to free school meals.

The cuts shift the cost of school lunches to the states, costing them more than they can afford when they are already grappling with tighter budgets and substantial Republican-led Medicaid cuts.Twenty-three governors warned these cuts will lead to millions of Americans losing vital food assistance.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never faced hunger, but millions of American children do not have access to enough food each day. In a recent survey of 1,000 teachers nationwide, three out of every four reported that their students are already coming to school hungry. 

Our children can’t learn if they are hungry. As a middle-school science teacher for more than 30 years, I have seen the pain that hunger creates. It’s the student who skips breakfast so she can give it to her little brother. It’s the student who misbehaves because his stomach is rumbling. It’s the students who struggle in class after a weekend where they didn’t have a single full meal. Educators see this pain everyday, and that’s why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students. 

Free school meals represent commonsense and cost-effective public policy. They don’t just prevent hunger, they help kids succeed. Decades of research reviewed by the Food Research & Action Center shows that when students participate in school breakfast programs, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement go up and tardiness goes down. When I stand in a room of bright and curious children, it breaks my heart that some of them are going without the food they need to learn and thrive—not because America can’t afford to feed them, but because adults in Washington decided they’d rather spend the money on tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

The cuts from the Republican tax bill will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many. In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced lunch during the 2022-2023 school year.

These are not abstract numbers. These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America’s kids deserve better. 

The National School Lunch Act of 1946 laid the foundation that public schools are places where children can receive a free breakfast and lunch each day. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded school lunch programs, operating under the shared understanding that no child should go hungry at school in the richest country in the world.

But the extreme right wing of today’s Republican Party has walked away from that moral consensus—ripping away these programs to give another tax break to billionaires.

The Trump Administration’s authoritarian blueprint outlined in Project 2025 takes the anti-public education attacks even further by attempting to gut the Department of Education and to send tax dollars to private schools, and promoting ideologically-driven book bans and classroom censorship.

And now, as the Trump Administration and its allies work to destroy public education, they also have attempted tointimidate the National Education Association and our 3 million educators. They know we are powerful and vocal advocates for students and a formidable opponent to their attacks on public education. Last month, the relentless efforts of organized educators and our allies got the Trump Administration to release $7 billion in education funds it had tried to withhold.

Together, we will fight forward: for our vision where every student attends a safe, inclusive, supportive, and well-resourced public school, which includes nutritious meals for all students regardless of race or place. 

We are educators. We don’t quit. We will continue to engage with school boards, town halls, state legislatures, and Congress to fight for students. Public education does not belong to politicians trying to dismantle it. It is for every student, parent, and educator who understands it has the power to transform lives.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Poverty, Trump

John Thompson: Trump’s “One Big Ugly Bill” Will Kill Millions of People And Won’t Save Money

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2025 //
4

Trump (or more likely, his puppetmaster Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Budget and Management [OMB]) pulled the wool over the eyes of the Republicans who control Congress.

Trump insisted that he would rein in the budget; he brought in Elon Musk and his Kiddie Corps, to shut down vital functions of the federal government and pare the federal workforce. But Trump’s newly enacted budget adds at least 3 trillions to the deficit.

But first a word about Russell Vought. He was the primary author and editor of Project 2025, which is a blueprint for Trump’s second term. He worked at the far-right Heritage Foundation before the election. Now as director of OMB, he holds the most consequential job in the federal government. OMB decides which programs are priorities and which are not, which need more funding and which do not.

To understand the Trump administration’s policies and goals, read Project 2025. During the campaign, Trump pretended to know nothing about Project 2025. He lied.

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the real human costs of this evil plan.

He writes:

Even though my primary focus is on public education, I have been concentrating on President Trump’s so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which is estimated to increase the federal deficit by $3.3 trillion, or more. 

My biggest concerns, however, were budget cuts that will likely result in the world-wide loss of untold millions of lives. For instance, even before Trump dramatically increased the subsidies for fossil fuel production, and undercut non-fossil fuel production, it was estimated that by 2049 global warming would cost the global economy $38 trillion per year, and that over 2 billion years of healthy lives would be lost by 2050.

Moreover, Robert F. Kennedy’s attacks on medical science and vaccines could result in pandemics that cost millions of lives. In fact, Kennedy’s attacks on Gavi vaccines would undermine a public health process which would likely save an estimated 8 million lives across the world by 2030.     

And it is estimated that the USAID programs Trump cut “have saved over 90 million lives over the past two decades.” It is now estimated that by 2030 those cuts could cost the lives of 14 million people.

Since the Trump plan passed through Congress, I’ve been catching up on the interconnected ways that it undermines education.

As Chalkbeat reported, this bill:

Slashes spending on Medicaid, which provides health insurance to some 37 million children and is a critical revenue source for schools. It also limits eligibility for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which provides food assistance to over 13 million children and makes kids automatically eligible for free meals at school.

Its revised tax credit will hurt an additional two million children. 

Moreover, the cuts will hurt the funding of hospitals and other medical service providers.

And anti-immigration raids will increase chronic absenteeism rates, and “have significant effects on children’s physical and mental health, as well as on broader school climate.”

And that brings me back to the damage done to Oklahoma students. As the Oklahoma Voice reports:

The Trump administration is indefinitely withholding more than $70 million in federal education programs meant for Oklahoma students and educators, including money for teacher development, English learners, after-care programs and migrant children.

Every day I hear about the results caused by threats to the $15.68 million that were authorized, but not delivered for before- and after-school programs, and the “$6.43 million dedicated for the 13% of Oklahoma students learning English as their non-native language.” 

In the Oklahoma City Public Schools, for instance, “47% of students are learning English as their second language. The district expected $1.1 million in federal revenue from Title III, which supports English learners.”

Finally, I recently attended the OK Justice Circle’s Breaking Bread with the Hispanic Community where educators and service providers described the cruelty that Hispanic students were facing. For instance, as a panelist was leaving for the conference, a student told her that she is studying the Holocaust. The student was worried about the tragedies that immigrants like her were experiencing, and how awful they could become.

The educator further explained that a big majority of her students are Hispanic. Due in large part to the current deportation campaign, at times, absenteeism has surged to 30% to 40%. And many students come to school every day with their birth certificates in the backpack in case they have to face raids by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The panelists explained how deportations of family members have produced a surge in the wide, interconnected, and painful crises that undermine student learning.

One of the services that schools can provide is referring students and families to nonprofit and public institutions. In an especially revealing set of discussions, educators described their “do-s and don’t-s” when sharing immigration information with patrons. 

But those statements are based on trust in the law and procedures that ICE agents are required to follow.  Today, it was agreed, it is hard to trust the immigration process.

As I struggled to reach the best possible emotional balance when evaluating the brutality imposed on children, families, and people across the world, I received a message from the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. It’s Executive Director, Colleen McCarty, expressed the frustration that I continually hear:

Congress passed the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—a piece of legislation wrapped in soundbites and flag pins—that will strip thousands of Oklahomans of life-saving healthcare. It will supercharge Immigration and Customs Enforcement, giving new power and resources to deport millions of people, tear families apart, and criminalize human existence based on borders and skin color. 

But she is committed to “stand in one courtroom fighting for freedom,” even though she leaves “to find the government systematically dismantling it on the largest scale imaginable.” 

We also must continue to fight both legal and political battles in defense of our democracy.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Cruelty, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, Health, Science, Trump

Headstart Leaders Speak Out Against Kennedy’s Order to Ban Children of Non-Citizens

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2025 //
7

The first iteration of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill included the elimination of Headstart. This program was birthed in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It provides food, medical screening, education, and socialization skills for low-income children ages 3-4. It also provides jobs for some of the children’s mothers.

But there must have been enough negative feedback from Republicans to cause Headstart to survive.

However, the Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared that children of undocumented immigrants would not be allowed to participate in Headstart. How will the programs know which children to exclude? The announcement outraged Headstart providers, those brave enough to speak out.

The blog Wonkette reported on the negative reactions:

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. added further shame to his family’s legacy Thursday, announcing that effective immediately, undocumented immigrant children will be banned from the Head Start preschool program, which not only provides child care and preparation for kindergarten to low-income preschoolers, but also provides school meals and health screenings. The point is to finally crack down on undocumented three- to five-year-olds to send the message that they must not come to the US without proper legal authorization. 

In addition to kicking an unknown number of children out of Head Start, the change in HHS policy also bars everyone in the country without legal status from multiple HHS programs including access to public clinics, family planning, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and the federal low-income energy assistance program. Sure, some people will probably get sick and die, but that’s the point. The Trump war on immigrants must ratchet up cruelty at every opportunity, just as the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws systematically excluded German Jews from every aspect of public life. 

People living in the US without authorization are already prohibited from most public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP, but a 1998 rule enacted by the Clinton administration allowed them to use some public health programs, including Head Start, under the logic that a healthy public, including children attending preschool, is actually better than sickness and ignorance. Kennedy reversed that interpretation, redefining Head Start and a bunch of other HHS programs as “federal public benefits’’ that are only available to citizens and to permanent legal residents. You know, at least until Stephen Miller figures out how to invalidate all green cards, too. The MAGA faithful can never be satisfied in their demands for eradication of ILLEGALS.

Kennedy said in a press release that even the most basic health and education measures “incentivize illegal immigration,” which of course is some bullshit, so we won’t quote any of his other lies. 

Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, issued a statement pointing out that in its 60 years of existence, Head Start “has never required documentation of immigration status as a condition for enrollment,” and that nothing in the Head Start Act justifies the new restrictions. Vinci added that “Attempts to impose such a requirement threaten to create fear and confusion among all families who are focused on raising healthy children, ready to succeed in school and life,” which of course is the point. She also noted that Kennedy’s action

“undermines the fundamental commitment that the country has made to children and disregards decades of evidence that Head Start is essential to our collective future. Head Start programs strive to make every child feel welcome, safe, and supported, and reject the characterization of any child as ‘illegal.’”

We will just assume that her comments were met with angry complaints from MAGA that it’s dishonest to call someone a “child” when in fact they’re an ILLEGAL ALIEN, which automatically wins every argument. 

As for wisely using taxpayer money, HHS claimed that banning undocumented kids from Head Start would save $374 million a year, at the low, low cost of only $21 million annually to document eligibility. Not included in the estimate was any guess at how many US citizen children would be thrown out of Head Start because their parents fear submitting paperwork to the government, or how many kids of US citizens would lose access to the program because of paperwork snafus. 

The number of children affected by the decision is difficult to assess, since according to experts, most of the young children of parents here without papers were born here in the US. Julie Sugarman, who directs K-12 research for the Migration Policy Institute, told the Washington Post, “The actual number of children this would affect is probably very, very small.” Of course, the ban is also so vaguely defined that the administration may intend for it to exclude any children of undocumented parents regardless of the child’s own citizenship status. 

We’ll add that ripping away education and health services from any children at all as a means of punishing their parents is cruel on the face of it. And of course Donald Trump is still itching to end birthright citizenship so babies can be deported more easily. 

For that matter, the Right has long despised Head Start and sought to wipe it out altogether because preschool is communist, and allows poor families to have some childcare they don’t deserve. It’s a bit of a wonder that the administration’s draft budget plan to zero out Head Start, leaked in April, didn’t ultimately make it into the Big Shitty F**k Poor People Twenty Ways From Sunday Bill. But then, there’s little reason to think Trump won’t decide at some point to simply eliminate Head Start by decree, since he considers funding passed by Congress only a suggestion anyway.

In the longer term, red states and groups like the Heritage Foundation keep pushing their efforts to pass laws to ban undocumented children from public schools altogether. The 1982 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe ruled that states can’t deny access to public education based on immigration status, but that’s yet another thing that gets rightwingers spittin’ mad. Bills that would have required schools to collect information on families’ immigration status failed this year in Indiana, New Jersey, Texas, and Tennessee, but eventually one is nearly certain to pass and make its way to the Supreme Court.

Pushback to the latest assault on Head Start and undocumented children came very quickly. The Illinois Head Start Association on Friday instructed its hundreds of members not to make any changes to who they serve, pointing out that the government hasn’t provided any directions on how providers are supposed to put the ban in place and screen out undocumented children. (Or parents? Nobody knows!) 

“We have never asked for [the] status of our children that we’re serving, and to do so creates fear and anxiety among our community,” said Lauri Morrison-Frichtl, head of the Illinois Head Start Association, which supports about 600 centers statewide serving the 28,000 students in Head Start in the state. “So we’re really worried that families will stop bringing their children, they won’t be able to go to work [and] children will be in unsafe places.”

The Illinois Head Start Association is also one of several educational organizations and parent groups who filed a federal lawsuit in April aimed at stopping Trump’s threatened cuts to Head Start. The ACLU, which is representing the plaintiffs, immediately announced that the plaintiffs will amend their complaint in the case to fight the administration’s latest attack on Head Start.

Now that Trump’s polling on immigration policy is deep underwater with Americans, who support deporting dangerous criminals but are horrified by Trump’s fascist stormtrooper shit, this new cruelty aimed at little kids is only going to make people more disgusted with the administration. Americans freaking love education. We hate seeing kids harmed. Let Republicans know you aren’t going to stand for this crap.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Health, Injustice

Measles Returns, 25 Years After It Was Eradicated

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
2

Measles is back! This is bad news. Our nation officially eradicated measles in 2000, yet measles is having a banner resurgence.

Why? We all know by now. The COVID pandemic launched an anti-vaccine movement, joined by large numbers of parents who distrusted science and wanted to protect their children: not by immunizing them but by refusing to immunize them.

Now that an anti-vaxxer–Robert F. Kennedy Jr.– is in charge of the nation’s public health system, we can anticipate an active effort to discourage parents from vaccinating their children. This is sad. In fact, it is tragic because children who are unvaccinated stand a high risk of death.

The New York Times reported:

There have now been more measles cases in 2025 than in any other year since the contagious virus was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, according to new data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The grim milestone represents an alarming setback for the country’s public health and heightens concerns that if childhood vaccination rates do not improve, deadly outbreaks of measles — once considered a disease of the past — will become the new normal.

Experts fear that with no clear end to the spread in sight, the country is barreling toward another turning point: losing elimination status, a designation given to countries that have not had continuous spread of measles for more than a year.

“It’s a huge red flag for the direction in which we’re going,” said Dr. William Moss, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied measles for more than 25 years.

Most of the cases this year have been tied to the Southwest outbreak — the largest single outbreak since 2000 — which began in January in a Mennonite community in West Texas and has since jumped to New Mexico and Oklahoma.

But cases have also popped up in 38 states, which experts say represents a concerning vulnerability to diseases of the past. Because of the contagiousness of the virus, researchers often think of measles as the proverbial canary in a coal mine. It is often the first sign that other vaccine-preventable diseases, like pertussis and Hib meningitis, might soon become more common.

In total, 1,288 people have had a confirmed case of measles this year, 92 percent of whom were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown….

While measles symptoms typically resolve in a few weeks, the virus can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients, especially children, to get oxygen into their lungs. It may also lead to brain swelling, which can cause lasting damage, including blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities.

For every 1,000 children who get measles, one or two will die, according to the C.D.C. Two unvaccinated children and one adult have died this year, the first such deaths in the country in a decade.

The outbreak’s full effect on public health may not be apparent for years.

The virus causes “immune amnesia,” making the body unable to defend itself against other illnesses it has already been exposed to and leaving patients more susceptible to future infections. And very rarely, the virus can cause a degenerative and almost always deadly neurological condition that may appear a decade after the original infection.

Until now, 2019 held the record for the highest number of measles cases since the virus was eliminated. (Before that, large outbreaks sickened tens of thousands of people in some years.) Most of the 1,274 cases that year were connected to a large outbreak that spread through Orthodox Jewish communities in New York State for nearly 12 months.

To see graphics that show where outbreaks of measles have occurred, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Health, Science

Trump Budget Guts Scientific Research

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
3

William J. Broad, science writer for The New York Times, reports on the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to scientific research. As the U.S. cuts back on investments in basic research, China is increasing its spending.

I invite anyone who reads this to try to explain why this administration is reducing spending on scientific research.

Broad writes:

President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.

The group says it would fall by more than one-third.

The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.

For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.

The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.

His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”

Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”

Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.

In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.

Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.

The Gutting of America’s Medical Research: Here Is Every Canceled or Delayed N.I.H. Grant. Some cuts have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye.

Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”

The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century…

In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.

The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.

In April, the science group published figuresshowing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.

Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.

Categories Budget Cuts, Economy, Extremism, Funding, Health, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

RFK Jr. Endorses a Packaged Meal Loaded with Additives

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
9

Amanda Seitz and Jonel Alecia of the Associated press reported that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary of Health and Human Services, endorsed a product that violates the standards of his “Make America Healthy Again” campaign.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Monday praised a company that makes $7-a-pop meals that are delivered directly to the homes of Medicaid and Medicare enrollees. 

He even thanked Mom’s Meals for sending taxpayer-funded meals “without additives” to the homes of sick or elderly Americans. The spreads include chicken bacon ranch pasta for dinner and French toast sticks with fruit or ham patties.

“This is really one of the solutions for making our country healthy again,” Kennedy said in the video, posted to his official health secretary account, after he toured the company’s Oklahoma facility last week. 

But an Associated Press review of Mom’s Meals menu, including the ingredients and nutrition labels, shows that the company’s offerings are the type of heat-and-eat, ultraprocessed foods that Kennedy routinely criticizes for making people sick. 

The meals contain chemical additives that would render them impossible to recreate at home in your kitchen, said Marion Nestle, a nutritionist at New York University and food policy expert, who reviewed the menu for The AP. Many menu items are high in sodium, and some are high in sugar or saturated fats, she said.

Categories Ethics, Fake, Health, Hypocrisy, Science

Dan Rather: Robert Kennedy Jr. Is a Public Menace

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
4

Dan Rather and his team at Steady writes fearlessly about the dangers posed by Trump and his unqualified Cabinet.

In this post, he discusses the scandal of appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has no medical or scientific qualifications. He is a lawyer whose head is filled with conspiracy theories. Worse, he has used his position to cancel major scientific studies and fire scientists.

Rather writes:

The last person this country needed to address the many public health issues we face was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man Donald Trump chose to helm the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy is an alarmist, a conspiracy theorist, and a disinformation disseminator who is putting American lives at risk. His convenient amnesia and lack of a medical or science background — he is a lawyer by training — has led to confusion, fear, and poorer health outcomes. He has been HHS secretary for only five months.

And this guy’s HHS leads a country that now has the lowest life expectancy and the highest maternal and infant mortality rates among Western countries while offering absurd options to help us. It’s about to get worse.

The budget reconciliation bill that Donald Trump gleefully signed into law on July 4 will drastically and dramatically impact Americans’ health. An estimated 17 million will lose health insurance. Millions more will see their premiums balloon. Hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes will close. The legislation will cause the largest reduction in food assistance ever, disproportionately impacting children. This will result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths a year.

Look no further than Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda as one of the main causes of the hard-right shift. MAHA has emphasized real health issues facing Americans, such as chronic disease, obesity, and poor nutrition, but has offered wrong-headed solutions.

Rather than looking for common sense or legislative options, Kennedy has weaponized his fear-based wellness campaign, preying on people’s rightful concerns about their health. He blames corruption in the food industry and gets people to focus on things like removing food dye or the “dangers” of canola oil (it’s safe), rather than address the real culprits: income inequality, lack of access to health care, environmental pollutants, and now the “big, ugly bill” and its anti-health agenda.

Beyond the bill, there are pressing public health crises affecting Americans. The surging measles outbreak that started in Texas could and should have been contained back in January. Yesterday, the CDC confirmed 1,277 cases in 38 states, a 33-year high. Many believe those numbers are low because of underreporting. Remember that in 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles eradicated in the U.S. Now our country is on track to lose that status.

Kennedy initially downplayed the outbreak, saying, “We have measles outbreaks every year.” The U.S. does have measles cases every year, usually fewer than 200, and they are typically attributed to unvaccinated people contracting the disease abroad.

The best defense against this highly contagious and preventable disease is vaccination, according to the American Medical Association (AMA). The MMR vaccine is one of the safest and most beneficial on the market. It is 97% effective and usually lasts a lifetime. Prior to 1963, when the measles vaccine was introduced, the U.S. saw 3 to 4 million cases a year.

Kennedy, a vocal vaccine skeptic, has been lukewarm at best at encouraging people to vaccinate against measles.

At a congressional hearing in May, Kennedy was asked if he would vaccinate his own children against measles. He replied “probably.” Then added, “My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant. I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” We agree.

His skepticism about vaccines in general, and the MMR vaccine specifically, has led to a drop in immunizations and a prolonging of the current outbreak.

But it’s much more than measles. Last month, in an unprecedented move, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the nonpartisan Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Formed in 1987, the committee is made up of doctors and public health professionals who help the CDC determine best practices for vaccine usage.

Kennedy quickly replaced eight of the members with unvetted candidates. Several are avowed anti-vaccine advocates. One new member has been on the committee before. During his first tenure, he made 12 conflict-of-interest disclosures, which is curious since Kennedy said he fired the original members because they were “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.” A review of the committee’s disclosures found few conflicts, and all were communicated.

Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines has international implications. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) is recognized as one of the most successful public-private health alliances ever. GAVI was founded in 2000 by the United States, Great Britain, and the Gates Foundation with the goal of increasing vaccine access around the world. It has been credited with significantly reducing infant and child mortality globally. GAVI delivered 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Kennedy has halted America’s financial contribution to GAVI, which accounts for 12% of its funding, because of (his) concerns about vaccine safety and what he calls a “disregard for scientific evidence.” That is rich coming from a non-scientist who disregards anything that does not align with his narrow and unfounded beliefs.

Though a Democrat for most of his life, Kennedy has fully embraced the MAGA strategy of lying with impunity. The list of his lies is long. Here are some highlights:

  • HHS released a long-awaited MAHA Report in mid-May. The report called for an aggressive assault on chronic disease. But there were two problems. One, several studies cited by the report do not exist; they were simply made up. And others were misrepresented. Oh, and the Trump administration had pulled funding for any of Kennedy’s initiatives.
  • During an appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” Kennedy mentioned a 1999 CDC study on the correlation (not causation) between the hepatitis B vaccine and autism risk, citing a “1,135% elevated risk of autism” among vaccinated children. The “1,135%” figure has been bouncing around the anti-vax community for years, but it was never actually published in a study. It also ignores the years of research debunking any connection between vaccines and autism. No wonder parents are scared and confused.
  • Kennedy has claimed that half the population of China has diabetes. Again, a seemingly crazy notion made up out of whole cloth. And it was. According to The Lancet, the actual prevalence is just over 12%.
  • Kennedy said COVID-19 was a bioweapon developed by China.

While the reckless whims of Donald Trump represent a clear and present danger to every American’s mental health, the dangerous actions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. risk their physical health. It is a sad day when the person in charge of this nation’s health could also be described as a public menace.

Categories Extremism, Fake, Health, Ignorance, Science, Trump

David Dayen: What Else Is Included in the Big Ugly Budget Bill?

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2025 //
5

Since this is a mostly education blog, I have covered the budget debate by focusing on what the GOP is doing to maim public schools and enrich private (especially religious schools). In the past, Republicans were strong supporters of public schools. But the billionaires came along and brought their checkbooks with them.

The rest of the Ugly bill is devastating to people who struggle to get by. Deep cuts to Medicaid, which will force the closure of many rural hospitals. Cuts to anything that protects the environment or helps phase out our reliance on fossil fuels. Well, at least Senator Schumer managed to change the name of the bill, new name not yet determined.

One Republican vote could have sunk the bill. But Senator Murkowski got a mess of pottage.

David Dayen writes in The American Prospect:

Welcome to “Trump’s Beautiful Disaster,” a pop-up newsletter about the Republican tax and spending bill, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation in a generation. Sign up for the newsletter to get it in your in-box.

By the thinnest of margins, the U.S. Senate completed work on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on Tuesday morning, after Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) decided that she could live with a bill that takes food and medicine from vulnerable people to fund tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, as long as it didn’t take quite as much food away from Alaskans.

The new text, now 887 pages, was released at 11:20 a.m. ET. The finishing touches of it, which included handwritten additions to the text, played out live on C-SPAN, with scenes of the parliamentarian and a host of staff members from both parties huddled together.

At the very end, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer knocked out the name “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” with a parliamentary maneuver, on the grounds that it was ridiculous (which is hard to argue). It’s unclear what this bill is even called now, but that hardly matters. The final bill passed 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance breaking the tie.

Murkowski was able to secure a waiver from cost-sharing provisions that would for the first time force states to pay for part of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). In order to get that past the Senate parliamentarian, ten states with the highest payment error rates had to be eligible for the five-year waiver, including big states like New York and Florida, and several blue states as well. 

The expanded SNAP waivers mean that in the short-term only certain states with average or even below-average payment error rates will have to pay into their SNAP program; already, the language provided that states with the lowest error rates wouldn’t have to pay. “The Republicans have rewarded states that have the highest error rates in the country… just to help Alaska, which has the highest error rate,” thundered Sen. Amy Klobuchar (R-MN), offering an amendment to “strike this fiscal insanity” from the bill. The amendment failed along party lines.

The new provision weakens the government savings for the bill at a time when the House Freedom Caucus is calling the Senate version a betrayal of a promise to link spending cuts to tax cuts. But those House hardliners will ultimately have to decide whether to defy Donald Trump and reject the hard-fought Senate package, which only managed 50 votes, or to cave to their president.

In addition, Murkowski got a tax break for Alaskan fishing villages and whaling captains inserted into the bill. Medicaid provisions that would have boosted the federal share of the program for Alaska didn’t get through the parliamentarian; even a handwritten attempt to help out Alaska on Medicaid was thrown out at the last minute. But Murkowski still made off with a decent haul, which was obviously enough for her to vote yes.

All Republicans except for Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and Susan Collins (R-ME) voted for the bill. Tillis and Collins are in the two most threatened seats among Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections; Tillis decided to retire rather than face voters while passing this bill. Paul, a libertarian, rejected the price tag and the increase in the nation’s debt limit that is folded into the bill.

Other deficit hawks in the Senate caved without even getting a vote to deepen the Medicaid cuts. That could be the trajectory in the House with Freedom Caucus holdouts. But the House also has problems with their handful of moderates concerned about the spending slashes in the bill.

The bill was clinched with a “wraparound” amendment that made several changes, including the elimination of a proposed tax on solar and wind energy production that would have made it impossible to build new renewable energy projects. The new changes now also grandfather in tax credits to solar and wind projects that start construction less than a year after enactment of the bill. Even those projects would have to be placed in service by 2027. The “foreign entities of concern” provision was also tweaked to make it easier for projects that use a modicum of components from China to qualify for tax credits.

The bill still phases out solar and wind tax credits rather quickly, and will damage energy production that is needed to keep up with soaring demand. But it’s dialed down from apocalyptic to, well, nearly apocalyptic. And this is going to be another source of anger to the Freedom Caucus, which wanted a much quicker phase-out of the energy tax credits.

The wraparound amendment also doubled the size of the rural hospital fund to $50 billion. The Senate leadership’s initial offer on this fund was $15 billion. Overnight the Senate rejected an amendment from Collins that would have raised the rural hospital fund to $50 billion. Even at that size—which will be parceled out for $10 billion a year for five years—it hardly makes up for nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts, which are permanent. The hospital system is expected to buckle as a result of this legislation, if it passes.

Some taxes, including a tax on third-party “litigation finance,” were removed in the final bill. But an expanded tax break for real estate investment trusts, which was in the House version, snuck into the Senate bill at the last minute.

The state AI regulation ban was left out of the final text after a 99-1 rejection of it in an amendment overnight.

The action now shifts to the House, where in addition to Freedom Caucus members concerned about cost, several moderates, including Reps. David Valadao (R-CA) and Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), have balked at the deep spending cuts to Medicaid and other programs.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Injustice, Privatization, Religion, Trump
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