I’ve been a pediatrician for 20 years. When I learned how to take a pediatric patient’s history, I was taught to ask parents: “Are your child’s immunizations up to date?” At the beginning of my career I’d already be writing down the answer “yes,” without hesitation or uncertainty. Now when I ask that question, I brace myself.
Right now, a measles outbreak is surging in my home state of South Carolina, where there are already more than 900 confirmed cases, most of them unvaccinated children, with hundreds in quarantine and more exposures being reported daily.
That’s hundreds of parents missing work. Kids missing weeks of school. Newborns, seniors and the immunocompromised being forced to gamble their health on their neighbors’ choices. Hospitals and health centers bracing for what comes next.
This was all preventable, and we need to be honest about how we got here.
We have an incredibly safe and effective vaccine for measles. One of the reasons scientists worked with urgency to develop the measles vaccine was because of how contagious the virus is, far more contagious than the flu or Covid-19. Every person with measles infects 20 other people, on average. Someone with measles can walk into a room, cough and leave, and the virus can still be alive in that room for hours. This is why measles doesn’t “fade out” on its own. It spreads like wildfire when community immunity drops.
So no, measles doesn’t spread like this just because a virus is good at its job. It spreads when the systems meant to protect families get replaced with noise, doubt, lies and deliberate confusion.
At the highest levels of our federal government, we have watched medical expertise get shoved aside while conspiracy theories get promoted. The message Americans keep getting is that expertise is suspect, that doubt is bravery and that your Facebook feed is just as good as your doctor’s advice. When the people at the top signal that science is subjective, confusion becomes contagious.
That message has consequences. It becomes the air people breathe. It shapes what a parent believes about vaccinations as they scroll their social media feed in the preschool pickup line. It erodes trust in medicine and threatens the fabric of our nation’s public health system.
The outbreak isn’t the fault of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alone, but we’re kidding ourselves if we pretend leadership doesn’t matter.
Kennedy has been a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement for decades, which has led communities across the country to slip below the herd immunity threshold for the prevention of outbreaks of infections like measles. Even if you replaced the name on the door at HHS tomorrow (which a responsible Congress would do), trust doesn’t snap back like a rubber band. It takes years to build and minutes to burn.
And the burn is not theoretical. Just this month, the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization, stepping away from the very kind of coordination that helps countries spot outbreaks early and stop them before they spread. Meanwhile, the world is looking back at us: a nation on the brink of losing elimination status for measles, a disease we fully eliminated in 2000.
We are flirting with the return of an old killer, not because the science changed, not because the virus itself changed, but because our politics did.
I didn’t set out to become a politician. I’m a pediatrician and mom of three, which means I understand deeply what it feels like to be responsible for a tiny human you’d do anything to protect. I know how heavy it is to make decisions in a world that feels more chaotic and less trustworthy by the day. And I understand that when politics is injected into public health, parents’ jobs get harder and children suffer. That is why I stepped up to fight on behalf of America’s children and the families who love them.
So here’s my plea, doctor to country, mother to community.
Stop letting politicians play games with public health. Put scientific expertise back where it belongs: in government, in policy and in the language we use when the stakes are life and death.
If you want to stop measles, you should get vaccinated.
If you want to stop the next iteration of this, you stop rewarding people who profit from confusion. You stop letting unserious leaders turn public health into a culture war. You put serious, qualified people back in the rooms where decisions are made.
Measles doesn’t care who you voted for. It cares whether we protect each other. And we still can.
“I will commit to not firing anybody who’s doing their job.”
“I support vaccines. I support the childhood schedule.”
“My approach to HHS, as I said before…, is radical transparency.”
“I’m pro-good science.”
Health experts say Kennedy has made sweeping reversals on these statements. His HHS tenure has seen the U.S. childhood vaccine program reduce the number of recommended shots to protect against 11 diseases instead of 17, thousands of public servants (many of them scientists) have been fired, standard-setting scientific practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health have been replaced with “gold-standard” dictates that scientists call dishonest, and judges have blocked funding cuts as illegal. Kennedy and HHS officials did not respond to requests for comment.…”
The secretary has spoken broadly about his goals this year to Congress and the public. In September, before a Senate panel, he described his “big-picture” mission as “enacting a once-in-a-generation shift from a sick care system to a true health care system that tackles the root causes of chronic disease.” His “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda, now wedded to President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement, puts Kennedy atop a new, unorthodox American political coalition. It unites a partisan distrust of science with a deep-rooted skepticism of medicine and the food industry. Roughly four in 10 parents are supporters of the MAHA movement, according to a KFF survey.
“Who can argue with the foundational goal of ‘Making America Healthier Again’? We want parents to want healthier lives for their children,” says Washington University in St. Louis School of Public Health dean Sandro Galea, author of the book Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time. Many of the goals of the MAHA movement—including increasing stalled U.S. life expectancies, bettering childhood health and addressing overmedicalization—are shared by public health experts.
“It would be great to see MAHA be a force for good,” Galea says. “But some of its ideas, frankly, will end up hurting people.” Notably, Kennedy’s decisions on vaccines will inevitably lead to outbreaks, Galea says, and the return of preventable infectious diseases such as measles. “We really haven’t seen an HHS tenure like this in our lifetimes.”
HHS is largely the national social insurance arm of the U.S., with a sideline in medical research and public health. It oversees the massive Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs, as well as the FDA, CDC and NIH. In many ways, the colossal agency today continues to function as normal: Social Security checks, Supplemental Security Income or both still lands in nearly 75 million mailboxes every month, one in five Americans receives Medicaid coverage, and the Affordable Care Act that the department administers still covers more than 24 million people nationwide despite Trump administration cuts to health insurance and food assistance. On February 2 Kennedy announced a $100 million pilot program to fund outreach, medical treatment and other support for homeless people and those with substance use disorders in eight cities—in the kind of bipartisan response to the overdose crisis long sought in the public health world.
This kind of tumult is now standard fare at HHS. In his first year, Kennedy fired his own handpicked CDC chief, linked Tylenol to autism with little evidence and urged farmers to let bird flu “run through” their flocks (an idea that could blow chicken prices skyward and spur spread of the virus, experts say). All told, the agency lost more than 17,000 civil servants through firings and resignations in 2025—including many scientific leaders at the FDA, CDC and NIH. An HHS spokesperson defended Kennedy’s cuts to “bloated bureaucracies that were long overdue” to ProPublica in August.
In the September Senate hearing, Kennedy accused one critical lawmaker of “crazy talk” and took out his phone and began scrolling through it while another spoke. “We’re denying people vaccine,” said senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, the physician chair of the Senate health committee. “You’re wrong,” Kennedy replied to Cassidy, who provided a crucial Republican vote last February for Kennedy’s confirmation.
Kennedy “comes across as a privileged rich guy with an air of entitlement,” says American Public Health Association executive director Georges Benjamin, whose organization called for Kennedy to resign in April after the mass layoffs at the CDC, FDA and other health agencies. “He’s completely in over his head at this job, has no experience, no training in areas of health he’s affecting and is causing a lot of harm.”
VACCINES
Kennedy has a long history of vaccine opposition. He joined the board of the antivaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense in 2015, when it was known as the World Mercury Project (and resigned from his position as chairman in 2024); the organization led numerous lawsuits against vaccine makers. The move from environmental lawyer to antivaccine activist turned out to be well timed for postpandemic politics; attacking COVID vaccines wooed Republican voters. At his confirmation hearing, Kennedy refused to disavow links between vaccines and autism, a favorite theory of outfits spurring vaccine hesitancyamong parents, though numerous studies have found no connection. “News reports have claimed that I am antivaccine or anti-industry,” Kennedy said at his confirmation hearing. “I am neither; I am pro-safety.” What Kennedy meant then by safety has since become clear, Benjamin says: his own judgment.
The FDA’s top vaccine official, Peter Marks, resigned in March, writing of Kennedy, “truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” During the pandemic, Marks had famously withstood political pressure to approve COVID shots without safety testing. Now he is out. An HHS official told NPR that Marks “has no place at FDA” because of his opposition to the secretary “restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency” at the agency.
Kennedy later claimed Monarez had told him she wasn’t “trustworthy”; in Senate testimony, she denied doing so. “The question before us is whether we will keep faith with our children and grandchildren—ensuring they remain safe from the diseases we fought so hard to defeat: polio, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough and many others,” Monarez said at the September 17 Senate hearing. “Undoing that progress would not only be reckless—it would betray every family that trusts us to protect their health.”
In December Kennedy’s reconstituted vaccine panel voted to stop recommending that all newborns be vaccinated for hepatitis B, a disease that contributed to the deaths of 1.1 million people worldwide in 2022. HHS next reduced the number of U.S. childhood vaccine shots so that they protected against 11 diseases instead of 17, basing the decision on the rules of Denmark, a country with a relatively small and homogenous population and publicly funded health care for all. Most recently, the chair of the vaccine panel, a cardiologist, told POLITICO that its focus this year will be on examining vaccine side effects rather than on its longstanding mission of gauging vaccine effectiveness.
WELLNESS
“I walk through the airports today…, and I see these kids that are just overburdened with mitochondrial challenges,” Kennedy said in August at a Texas “Make America Healthy Again” state-law-signing ceremony. Ashish Jha, formerly the Biden administration’s pandemic response czar, called this airport diagnosis “wacky, flat-earth voodoo stuff” on X (formerly Twitter).
“I think what we’re seeing is a mutual partnership between RFK, Jr., and what he says he values and the existing MAHA values and ideals,” says Mariah L Wellman of Michigan State University, a wellness industry scholar. Kennedy’s rhetoric reflects a common ground with influencers like Means, she adds. “I absolutely think there are deep ties between how the wellness industry exists [and] is talked about on social media right now and RFK, Jr.’s beliefs.”
In May, at a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Kennedy called for an end to genetic research on the causes of autism, instead suggesting that “environmental toxins” were the source. Kennedy often claims there that there is an autism “epidemic,” but improved diagnosis largely explains the recent rise in cases.
A MAHA commission report released by HHS in September reflected the movement’s signature mixture of concern over real problems, such as rising childhood obesity and illness, with Kennedy’s “pet peeves and half-baked science that doesn’t really get at the root causes of poor health in children,” says Peter Lurie of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Alongside calls for research on cell-phone-signaleffects on health and vaccine injuries, the report went light on investigating pesticides and the food industry, disappointing some environmental figures.
In September Kennedy joined Trump in suggesting that Tylenol use during pregnancy causes autism—another belief taken up by the wellness industry—based on weak evidence. Scientists, however, say that if the medicine is linked with autism—a connection that’s not yet clear—it could be the fevers and infections the Tylenol was meant to address, and not the pills themselves, that drives increased autism risk. Nevertheless, HHS started the process for an FDA warning to be added to the pain reliever’s label.
The recommendations fit a pattern of Kennedy’s, Benjamin says. “I see him as a sort of environmental purist of sorts,” he says, rejecting medicine just as he once opposed pollution as an environmental lawyer. Fatty “real” foods, even if they are linked to heart disease, look less threatening to a worldview shaped by fears of something “artificial” causing harm, even if (unnatural) prescription drugs such as statins actually reduce the risk of heart disease. “He is an advocate, and he sees the world as a place for advocacy, not [for] the balanced perspective of a scientist or physician,” Benjamin says.
Antidepressants and heart disease medications are now in MAHA’s sights. Kennedy has claimed that medications such as these are overprescribed as a result of what he says is corruption that has affected medical studies—a charge that echoes his environmental movement rhetoric.
POLITICS
“Don’t you want a president that is going to make America healthy again?” Kennedy said at an August 23, 2024, campaign rally in Glendale, Ariz., in which he endorsed Trump. At the event, as Trump was introducing Kennedy to his supporters, he announced his intention to release the assassination files of Kennedy’s uncle John F. Kennedy…
“RFK, Jr., certainly has his own goals and ideology that overlap with Trump’s and are also distinct,” says Pamela Herd of the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. “But at the end of the day, it is the Trump administration, and he will be limited to what it is, or isn’t, comfortable with.”
At a December campaign rally-style briefing from the first-floor stage of HHS’s headquarters at the Hubert H. Humphrey Building in Washington, D.C., Kennedy announced sweeping plans to restrict gender-affirming care for U.S. minors. Kennedy recognized political activists and conservative politicians in his opening remarks. Gender-affirming care has not been a historical preoccupation of Kennedy or the wellness industry but rather one “where the [Republican] party sees an advantage,” POLITICO observed.
“I think the MAHA and MAGA [movements] are intersecting circles in a Venn Diagram,” says political scientist David Lewis of Vanderbilt University. Right now, the two movements form a political coalition held together by Trump, he says.
Overall, the most significant effect of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS, Herd says, is his firing of scientific leaders and replacing expertise with political activism, most notably in upending the childhood vaccine schedule. The politicization genie won’t easily go back in the bottle, she says. “I think this this is a much more kind of radical change and one that’s difficult to pull back.”
MAHA and MAGA are now inextricably linked. In February Kennedy spoke at the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s event “One Year of Making America Healthy Again,” attended by political activists and Senator Tommy Tuberville. There Tony Lyons, president of the political group MAHA Action, described the group’s commitment to backing Republican candidates endorsed by Trump, a sign that the political coalition forged in the 2024 election will hold into the midterms. “It’s a joy to work for [Trump],” Kennedy said onstage. “He lets me do stuff that I don’t think anybody else would ever let me do.”
DAN VERGANO is senior editor, Washington, D.C., at Scientific American. He has previously written for Grid News, BuzzFeed News, National Geographic and USA Today. He ischair of the New Horizons committee for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a journalism award judge for both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
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In the year 2000, health officials declared that measles had been eliminated in the United States, thanks to a successful program to vaccinate all children against the disease.
But, thanks to Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is now Secretary of Health and Human Services, measles is back.
RFK Jr. is often described as a “vaccine skeptic.” He would be more accurately described as a fierce opponent of vaccines.
South Carolina reported nearly 800 cases last Tuesday, and the number is likely to grow.
With 789 cases reported as of Tuesday, the South Carolina outbreak surpassed a massive outbreak in Texas, which reached 762 cases before it ended in August last year. Two children died during the outbreak in Texas…
“It breaks my heart to see that my state is the number one outbreak currently in the United States since the 1990s,” Dr. Anna Kathryn Rye Burch, a pediatric infectious diseases physician with Prisma Health in South Carolina, told CNN Wednesday. “We have this amazing vaccine that would help protect us all from getting the measles, and we are just seeing that people aren’t as excited about getting that vaccine anymore. This is why we’re seeing measles come back into the United States…”
Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, meaning there has not been continuous transmission for more than a year at a time.
Before 2025, there were an average of about 180 measles cases reported each year since elimination, according to US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. The US reported more than 2,200 confirmed measles cases in 2025 — significantly more than there have been in any year since 2000.
Every year, Science magazine highlights the most innovative development of the year. While the United States retreats from efforts to protect the environment, China surges ahead with the use of American technology.
Solar panels armor a hillside in China’s Anhui province, parting only for an access road. Distant ridges host wind turbines, another fast-growing component of an energy revolution that has helped ease air pollution and slow the growth of China’s carbon emissions. GEORGE STEINMETZ
This year—for the first time—the world produced more energy via renewable sources than with coal. The meteoric rise of these greener energy technologies, particularly in China, has brought us tantalizingly close to the turning point where annual global carbon emissions plateau and even decline. “To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable,” wrote Science News Editor Tim Appenzeller—“a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.”
While renewable technologies were pioneered in the U.S., it was China’s industrious production of them that changed the game. The country now makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries. Increased production led to lower prices and increased demand, which in turn fueled even more production and even lower prices. As a result, “wind and solar became the cheapest energy in much of the world,” Appenzeller noted. Instead of investing in renewables because they are environmentally friendly, countries—and individuals—started buying them up because they were more affordable. “That change in motivation may be the most important breakthrough of all, ensuring that this year’s inflection points are just the beginning,” he concluded.
But there is one notable exception: the United States. “The U.S. is now squandering an opportunity to reap the benefits of its own technology, ceding the income and the geopolitical power to a nation that repeatedly puts technological prowess above politics,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp in an accompanying editorial. While much of the world continues to increase its renewable energy capacity, “the U.S. marches boldly backward toward the past,” Thorp wrote.
The Trump administration is engaged in a war against science and medicine. It has eliminated funding in many crucial areas of research conducted by universities and by the National Institutes of Health. Incalculable damage has been done to set back the search for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory diseases, and pediatric cancer. People will die because of the ignorance of those who close down ongoing, vital research.
Trump has consistently claimed that “climate change” is a hoax. He has said that the term “climate change” refers to the weather. He hates wind farms and has cut federal funding for them. He has hated wind farms since wind turbines were built near his Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. He sued to block them but repeatedly lost.
Now he is closing down a major hub of climate research.
The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.
The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.
But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.
Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”
Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere.
The center’s research has often proved useful in unexpected places, such as when its studies of downdrafts in the lower atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s led to development of wind shear detection systems around airports that helped address the cause of hundreds of aviation accidents during that era.
Before he was named Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was best known for his extremist views about vaccines. He has said repeatedly that vaccines are unsafe, that the vaccines cause the disease they are supposed to prevent; and that vaccines cause autism.
His views are so extreme that he was asked at his confirmation hearings by Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who is a doctor, whether he would change the vaccine policies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy insisted that he would not.
Today, it became clear that he is trashing the vaccine policies that he said under oath he would not change.
RFK Jr..’s fired every member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and replaced them with his allies.
Today, that hand-picked panel voted to stop recommending that all newborns receive a vaccine against Hepatitis B.
Senator Cassidy posted this reaction on Twitter:
As a liver doctor who has treated patients with hepatitis B for decades, this change to the vaccine schedule is a mistake. The hepatitis B vaccine is safe and effective. The birth dose is a recommendation, NOT a mandate.
Before the birth dose was recommended, 20,000 newborns a year were infected with hepatitis B. Now, it’s fewer than 20. Ending the recommendation for newborns makes it more likely the number of cases will begin to increase again. This makes America sicker.
Acting CDC Director O’Neill should not sign these new recommendations and instead retain the current, evidence-based approach.
Senator Kennedy’s outrage was echoed by numerous medical leaders and organizations. Children will die because of this decision.
For many public health experts, the vote also marked the end of trust in the C.D.C. and its vaccine advisers.
“Today is a defining moment for our country,” Michael Osterholm, a public health expert at the University of Minnesota, said. “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines.”
In a statement, Dr. Richard Besser, president and chief executive of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting director of the agency, said “policymakers, physicians, and families must turn to reputable medical and public health groups for guidance, and health insurers should do the same for informing what vaccines they will cover.”
The votes on hepatitis B were originally scheduled for the September meeting but deferred twice because some members said there was insufficient data to make a decision. The committee attempted the vote again on Thursday, but postponed it after some panelists questioned whether a change was warranted.
Some panelists noted that the practice had helped to nearly eliminate cases among newborns in the United States, and that there was no evidence of harm from the shots at any age.
“We know it’s safe, and we know it’s very effective,” Dr. Cody Meissner, a professor of pediatrics at Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine, said on Friday, and he warned that if the vote passed, “we will see more children and adolescents and adults infected with hepatitis B….”
RFK Jr. has used his power over the vast agency to fire or force out many well-respected scientists, who were replaced by people who share Kennedy’s extremist hatred of vaccines.
Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the chief medical and scientific officer at the US Food and Drug Administration, is strongly anti-vaxx, despite his sterling credentials. He recently stated that “at least” 10 children had died after taking the COVID vaccine shot, but he provided no evidence showing the causes of their deaths or how they were related to the vaccine.
Dr. Prasad said that the number of deaths might be more than 10.
Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham is both a doctor and veterinarian. He served in Congress. In 2024, he was appointed Surgeon General of Louisiana. During the pandemic, he advocated hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin as cures for COVID, echoing Trump. Mainstream scientists found both to be ineffective. He opposed mass vaccinations.
Another blow against intelligence, science, medical knowledge and good health. Another strike against the nation’s premier public health institution. Look elsewhere for sound advice on medical issues.
The New York Times reported that the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has changed to reflect the extremist views of The Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The takeover of the nation’s premier public health agency will encourage some parents to avoid life-saving vaccines. Children will die.
The story says:
A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website that previously said that vaccines do not cause autism walked back that statement, contradicting the agency’s previous efforts to fight misinformation about a connection between the two.
The agency’s webpage on vaccines and autism, updated on Wednesday, now repeats the skepticism that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has voiced about the safety of vaccines, though dozens of scientific studies have failed to find evidence of a link.
A previous version of the webpage said that studies had shown “no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism spectrum disorder.” It cited a 2012 National Academy of Medicine review of scientific papers and a C.D.C. study from 2013.
On Thursday, the live version of the page stated: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.”
Federal Judge Rita F. Lin ruled that the federal government cannot withhold $1.2 billion in funding for medical and scientific research as punishment for alleged anti-Senitism. This is an important victory for free speech, academic freedom, and the First Amendment. The Trump administration’s efforts to impose its views on the nation’s institutions of higher education—and U.S. research funding as leverage is unprecedented in American history.
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Trump administration from imposing a $1.2-billion fine on UCLA along with stipulations for deep campus changes in exchange for being eligible for federal grants.
The decision is a major win for universities that have struggled to resist President Trump’s attempt to discipline “very bad” universities that he claims have mistreated Jewish students, forcing them to pay exorbitant fines and agree to adhere to conservative standards.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The preliminary injunction, issued by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California, rendered moot — for now — nearly every aspect of a more than 7,000-word settlement offer the federal government sent to the University of California in August after suspending $584 million in medical, science and energy research grants to the Los Angeles campus.
The government said it froze the funds after finding UCLA broke the law by using race as a factor in admissions, recognizing transgender people’s gender identities, and not taking antisemitism complaints seriously during pro-Palestinian protests in 2024 — claims that UC has denied.
The settlement proposal outlined extensive changes to push UCLA — and by extension all of UC — ideologically rightward by calling for an end to diversity-related scholarships, restrictions on foreign student enrollment, a declaration that transgender people do not exist, an end to gender-affirming healthcare for minors, the imposition of free speech limits and more.
“The administration and its executive agencies are engaged in a concerted campaign to purge ‘woke,’ ‘left,’ and ‘socialist’ viewpoints from our country’s leading universities,” Lin wrote in her opinion. “Agency officials, as well as the president and vice president, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.
Universities are then presented with agreements to restore federal funding under which they must change what they teach, restrict student anonymity in protests, and endorse the administration’s view of gender, among other things. Defendants submit nothing to refute this….”
Universities including Columbia, Brown and Cornell agreed to pay the government hundreds of millions to atone for alleged violations similar to the ones facing UCLA. The University of Pennsylvania and University of Virginia also reached agreements with the Trump administration that were focused, respectively, on ending recognition of transgender people and halting diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Friday’s decision, for the time being, spares the UC from having to proceed with negotiations that it reluctantly entered with the federal government to avoid further grant cuts and restrictions across the system, which receives $17.5 billion in federal funding each year. UC President James B. Milliken has said that the $1.2-billion fine would “completely devastate” UC and that the system, under fire from the Trump administration, faces “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history.”
This is not the first time a judge rebuked Trump for his higher education campaign.
Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in September ordered the government to reverse billions in cuts to Harvard. But that case did not wade directly into settlement negotiations.
Those talks have proceeded slowly. In a court hearing last week, a Department of Justice lawyer said “there’s no evidence that any type of deal with the United States is going to be happening in the immediate future.” The lawyer argued that the settlement offer was only an idea that had not received UC approval. Because of that, he said, a lawsuit was inappropriate. Lin disagreed.
“Plaintiffs’ harm is already very real. With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratcheting up defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how defendants’ actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system.”
The case was brought by more a dozen faculty and staff unions and associations from across UC’s 10 campuses, who said the federal government was violating their 1st Amendment rights and constitutional right to due process.
UC, which has avoided directly challenging the government in court, was not party to the suit. “This is not only a historic lawsuit — brought by every labor union and faculty union in the UC — but also an incredible win,” said Veena Dubal, a UC Irvine law professor and general counsel for one of the plaintiffs, the American Assn. of University Professors, which has members across UC campuses.
Dubal called the decision “a turning point in the fight to save free speech and research in the finest public school system in the world.” Asked about Friday’s outcome, a spokesperson said UC “remains focused on our vital work to drive innovation, advance medical breakthroughs and strengthen the nation’s long-term competitiveness. UC remains committed to protecting the mission, governance, and academic freedom of the university.”
This documentary is fascinating. It shows young Bobby’s idyllic childhood at the family’s sprawling, luxurious compound in Virginia. He grew up in a world of joy, fun, and privilege.
You can see how deeply he was scarred by the murder of his father, with whom he was very close. This was an experience no child should endure.
He is sent away to a boarding school, where he is soon kicked out. Then another, then Harvard, which was a given, in light of his name. At Harvard, he becomes addicted to drugs and a drug dealer. Pot, cocaine, heroin.
He goes to law school, flunks the bar exam, but eventually passes. He marries an eligible young woman, has children, divorces her. Still a drug addict. Meets a beautiful Catholic girl, marries her, has four children. He begins to find his niche as an environmental lawyer. Life is looking up. But he’s a sex addict and he keeps a record of his conquests–at least 37. His wife finds the record and hangs herself.
He believes he is destined for greatness. He is a Kennedy so he keeps looking for the vehicle that will catapult him to fame. He discovers angry mothers who are looking for the cause of their children’s autism. He latches on to the issue and becomes their champion. He also becomes a prominent anti-Vaxxer and conspiracy theorist.
He briefly runs for president in 2024 but soon realizes that his prospects are nil. Trump offers a big job if he joins his campaign. Bobby accepts his offer, to the dismay of his family.
Bobby speaks to large, adoring crowds. He loves it.
Trump appoints him to lead the government’s public health agency–Health and Human Services. His family is appalled. They know he is unqualified. They know he has no respect for science. He promises the Senate committee that he won’t stop vaccines, despite his long history as a critic of them. He wins approval.
He begins to fire prominent scientists and thousands of experienced employees. He throws the agency into turmoil.
Diane Ravitch's blog 