The FDA Just Approved a New Covid Vaccine

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just green-lit a new Covid vaccine from Moderna, the company said in a press release Saturday. Now the vaccine will bump up against an administration that is loath to recommend it.

The vaccine, called mNEXSPIKE, was approved for adults 65 and older, and people between 12 and 64 years old with “one or more underlying risk factor” defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including conditions like cancer, asthma, and HIV. In a clinical trial of more than 11,000 participants, the vaccine showed higher efficacy than Moderna’s earlier vaccine.

According to Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, the shot offers an “important new tool to help protect people at high risk of severe disease.” Covid, as Bancel noted in the press release, “remains a serious public health threat, with more than 47,000 Americans dying from the virus last year alone.”

Moderna’s announcement comes just days after Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a video posted to X that the CDC would drop Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women, a decision made outside the agency’s formal expert review process. Previously, everyone 6 months and older was advised to get vaccinated.

“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said on X. “We’re now one step closer to realizing President Trump’s promise to make America healthy again.”

Many experts in the medical community expressed concern about the guidance and how it was delivered. “We were not consulted about this,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases, told ABC News. “My biggest concern is about the process. This really ignores a long-established, evidence-based process that has been used to make vaccine recommendations in the US.”

While children are at less risk from Covid generally, many, especially young children, can develop severe illness. Pregnant people, too, are at heightened risk of illness and complications.

On Thursday, the CDC updated its guidance, with a clarification to Kennedy’s plans: Healthy children can still get the vaccine, the CDC said, through “shared clinical decision-making” between their parent and doctor. In other words, rather than advising against the vaccine, the CDC recommended parents speak to their doctors about it. (The American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend children get the vaccine.) The agency’s Covid vaccine guidance for pregnant adults reads, “No Guidance/Not Applicable.”

All this is likely to thwart the impact of Moderna’s shot. Experts worry the changes in recommendations will mean insurers will be less willing to cover Covid vaccines or doctors less likely to stock them, making them harder to access. As former Moderna executive and George Washington University health care law lecturer Richard Hughes told NPR earlier this week, “Expect variability in coverage, prior authorization and out-of-pocket [costs], all of which will discourage uptake.”

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Donald Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Gut American Science

On Friday, the Trump administration released a detailed look at its proposed 2026 budget, including major cuts to federal science agencies that oversee research on everything from cancer to the cosmos.

While the broad strokes of Trump’s budget had been released in early May, the new proposal reveals more about what specific programs the president would like to see cut—and its impact on American science.

That includes a more than $30 billion cut to the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—agencies tasked withcritical work like overseeing food safety, controlling disease outbreaks (see: measles), and supporting vaccine research. The Department of Education, as the New York Times tallied, would have its budget cut by about $12 billion—a blow to funding mechanisms like Pell grants that help promising future scientists afford college. And NASA’s budget, as Space.com reported, would shrink by $6 billion, a nearly 25 percent cut to the agency that oversees space exploration.

At NIH, which has already come under repeated scrutiny by the administration, the president proposed a budget cut of about $18 billion, the Times reports**—**around a 40 percent decrease of its current funds. Within NIH, the National Cancer Institute, responsible for supporting research on understanding and treating cancer, would see its funding cut from $7 billion to a little over $4.5 billion.

These cuts, experts say, will be detrimental to the national research landscape—and Americans’ health. As Harvard researchers noted in an op-ed published in JAMA Health Forum this week, more than 99 percent of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 had roots in NIH funding. Every dollar of NIH funding, in fact, returns more than 2.5 dollars in economic activity, a coalition of academic and industry scientists estimated in a widely cited report this year. In all, the Harvard researchers estimate, cutting $20 billion to NIH over 25 years may save $500 billion on paper, but it’d end up costing $8.2 trillion in lost human health.

And that’s just NIH. The National Science Foundation, along with NIH, is another major funder of American research. It wouldsee more than half of its funding slashed under Trump’s budget, from nearly $9 billion in 2025 to $3.9 billion. This reduction, according to the administration, “reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.” As science journalist Dan Garisto pointed out on Bluesky, it would mean the number of staff, students, and researchers involved in NSF-supported science would drop from more than 330,000 to about 90,000—a whopping 73 percent cut.

And at NASA, Trump’s proposed budget would mean “the biggest single-year cut to NASA in history,” Space.com reports, and the cancellation of several programs, including a project to collect material from Mars and explore the depths of the solar system, projects that would reportedly take billions to replace. In a statement Friday, the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization advocating for space exploration and research, called the president’s proposed cuts, if passed by Congress**,** an “extinction-level event” for science. “It will damage the agency’s highly skilled workforce, abandon national priorities, and gut STEM education and outreach.”

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Team Trump is Poised to Kill a Critical Program It Likely Knows Nothing About

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nearly two decades ago, scientists made an alarming discovery in upstate New York: Bats, the world’s only flying mammal, were becoming infected with a new, deadly fungal disease that, in some cases, could wipe out an entire colony in a matter of months.

Since then, the disease—later called white-nose syndrome—has spread across much of the country, utterly decimating North American bats that hibernate in caves and killing over 90 percent of three bat species. According to some scientists, WNS has caused “the most precipitous wildlife decline in the past century in North America.”

These declines have clear consequences for human populations—for you, even if you don’t like bats or visit caves.

“We have 10 years of momentum, and so to cut it off now sort of wastes all that investment. That feels like a tremendous loss.”

Bats eat insect pests, such as moths and beetles. And as they decline, farmers need to spray more pesticides. Scientists have linked the loss of bats in the US to an increase in insecticide use on farmland and, remarkably, to a rise in infant deaths. Insecticide chemicals are known to harm the health of newborns.

The only reason we know any of this is because of a somewhat obscure government program in the US Geological Survey (USGS), an agency nested within the Interior Department. That program, known as the Ecosystems Mission Area, is the biological research division of Interior. Among other functions, it monitors environmental contaminants, the spread of invasive species, and the health of the nation’s wildlife, including bees, birds, and bats.

The Ecosystems Mission Area, which has around 1,200 employees, produces the premier science revealing how animals and ecosystems that Americans rely on are changing and what we can do to keep them intact—or risk our own health and economy.

A northern long-eared bat with white-nose syndrome.Steve Taylor/University of Illinois

This program is now at an imminent risk of disappearing.

The Trump administration has asked Congress to slash USGS funding by $564 million in its preliminary 2026 budget request. And while the proposal doesn’t specify cuts to Ecosystems Mission Area, an email obtained by Vox indicates that his administration had proposed eliminating funding for the program. (The email was originally reported by Science.) Such cuts are also in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy roadmap, which calls for the government to “abolish” Interior’s Biological Research Division, an outdated name for the Ecosystems Mission Area.

USGS has requested that the White House maintain at least some funding for the program, according to a current senior Interior Department employee with knowledge of the Ecosystems Mission Area. Whether or not Trump officials heed that request will be made clear when the White House releases a more detailed budget proposal in the coming days. The employee spoke to Vox on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the press.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also reportedly trying to fire government employees in the Ecosystems Mission Area, though a federal judge has so far blocked those efforts.

Eliminating biological research is not good. In fact, it’s very bad.

For a decade now, EMA’s North American Bat Monitoring Program, has been gathering and analyzing data on bats and the threats they face. NABat produces research using data from hundreds of partner organizations showing not only how white-nose syndrome is spreading—which scientists are using to develop and deploy vaccines—but also how bats are affected by wind turbines, another known threat.

Energy companies can and do use this research to develop safer technologies and avoid delays caused by wildlife regulations such as the Endangered Species Act.

The irony, another Interior Department employee told me, is that NABat makes wildlife management more efficient. It also helps reveal where declines are occurring before they become severe, potentially helping avoid the need to grant certain species federal protection—something the Trump administration would seem to want. The employee, who is familiar with Interior’s bat-monitoring efforts, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.

“If they want to create efficiencies in the government, they should ask us,” yet another Interior employee told Vox. “The damage that can be done by one administration takes decades to rebuild.”

A dead bat infected with white-nose syndrome under UV light.USGS

In response to a request for comment, an Interior Department spokesperson told Vox that “USGS remains committed to its congressional mandate as the science arm of the Department of the Interior.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In a Senate appropriations hearing last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum refused to commit to maintaining funding for EMA.

“There’s no question that they don’t know what EMA does,” said the senior Interior employee.

Ultimately, it’s not clear why the administration has targeted Interior’s biological research. EMA does, however, do climate science, such as studying how plants and animals are responding to rising temperatures. That’s apparently a no-go for the Trump administration. It also gathers information that sometimes indicates that certain species need federal protections, which come with regulations (also a no-go for President Donald Trump’s agenda).

What’s especially frustrating for environmental advocates is that NABat, now 10 years old, is starting to hit its stride.

“We should be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of this very successful program that started from scratch and built this robust, vibrant community of people all collecting data,” said Winifred Frick, the chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, an environmental group. “We have 10 years of momentum, and so to cut it off now sort of wastes all that investment. That feels like a tremendous loss.”

Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining the program is less than 1 percent of Interior’s overall budget.

The government’s wildlife monitoring programs are “jewels of the country,” said Hollis Woodard, an associate professor of entomology at University of California Riverside who works with USGS on bee monitoring. “These birds and bats perform services for us that are important for our day-to-day lives. Literally everything I value, including food, comes down to keeping an eye on these populations. The idea that we’re just going to wipe them out is just terrifying.”

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For Trans People on Medicaid, Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” Is Anything But

Last week, Max, a trans man in North Carolina in his twenties—and my childhood friend—got top surgery.

“I didn’t cry when I saw the results because it just looks like how I feel it should,” Max wrote in an email. He cried later, he said—when he realized he’d been able to “build a body I feel fully at home in.”

Three days after Max’s surgery, Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a massive package of GOP tax and spending legislation, passed the House with a last-minute amendment that would ban Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplace plans from covering transgender health care like Max’s surgery and hormone replacement therapy. Approximately 185,000 trans adults, or about one in twelve in the US, are on Medicaid, according to the University of California, Los Angeles’ Williams Institute.

Max could only afford his surgery because it was covered in part by Medicaid. Medicaid also provided his hormone replacement therapy—prohibitively expensive without insurance—and the rest of his health coverage for the last several years, while he’s juggled school with full-time work.

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” has yet to pass in the Senate, and Democratic senators are working to use the Byrd Rule, which limits “extraneous” provisions to the budget, to remove its amendment against gender-affirming care.

“I want more than anything for other trans people to have the options I did.”

If the bill passes with that amendment intact, said Jennifer C. Pizer, chief legal officer at LGBTQ civil rights nonprofit Lambda Legal, “There will be litigation, because the harms are quite serious and it legitimizes the range of other cruel and unjustifiable treatments of transgender people.”

The provision against gender-affirming care, Pizer pointed out, wouldn’t force all states to follow suit; she cited California’s use of state funds to cover domestic partners’ health insurance before federal law recognized same-sex relationships. States protective of transgender rights may take similar steps. But for those with a history of anti-LGBTQ legislation, there’s less hope: ten states already exclude coverage for such care in their Medicaid plans for all ages.

And the Trump administration, Pizer noted, has unlawfully pulled federal funding from programs it opposes—a “battering ram” it may use against states taking action to fund transgender healthcare.

That, together with the administration’s other attacks, has trans people on Medicaid fearful even in states with strong LGBTQ rights protections.

Ory and Caleb, both from Oregon, spoke positively about the state’s Medicaid program. Caleb described the care it provides as vastly improving their mental health; Ory called it “lifesaving.” But both have started to make backup plans to stock up on testosterone out of fear of losing access.

An Oregon law prohibits insurance carriers from denying medically necessary gender-affirming treatment, putting it in direct conflict with the new federal provision should it pass. It’s not clear how such tensions between federal and state authority will be resolved, Pizer said.

Alex joined Medicaid after the death of her partner compelled her to move close to where she grew up in Illinois. She started HRT on the day of Trump’s election. “I did not really plan it that way,” she said. “Let me tell you, that was not fun.”

Still, Alex has loved HRT: “It no longer felt like my body was fighting itself,” she said. “It feels internally aligned in a way I did not know it could previously.”

Alex called her senators for the first time to urge them to vote against the budget bill. Its authors “can pry my estrogen from my cold, dead hands,” she said, “and I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Fuck those motherfuckers.”

Max, in North Carolina, was hit viscerally by the latest attempt to slash the care he was relying on. “It was a rollercoaster of emotions,” he said, from euphoria and recovery following his surgery to grief following the news.

“They can pry my estrogen from my cold, dead hands.”

The bill’s last-minute modifications to strip trans health coverage were made in a “cowardly way,” Max said—at night, with no cameras present—in “a pathetic attempt to avoid backlash, basically admitting that this is a terrible idea.”

“Trans people are vulnerable, but we are not weak,” said Alex. “We will always stick up for one another. We have always existed, and we always will exist, and there’s nothing that anybody could do to stop that, no matter how hard they try.”

Still recovering from surgery, Max writes, “I’m living the dreams of the little boy I used to be.” His wish? “I want more than anything for other trans people to have the options I did.”

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The Supreme Court’s Latest Decision Will to Make It Easier to Build Stuff, Good and Bad

This story was originally published by Vox.com, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Supreme Court handed down an opinion on Thursday that reads like it was written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of an influential book arguing that excessive regulation of land use and development has made it too difficult to build housing and infrastructure in the United States. (Ezra is also a co-founder of Vox.)

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado concerns a proposed railroad line that would run through 88 miles of Utah, connecting the state’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the broader national rail network. The line is expected to make it easier to transport crude oil extracted in this region to refineries elsewhere in the country. The court’s opinion in Seven County places strict new limits on a federal law that a lower court relied upon to prevent this line from being constructed—limits that should make it easier for developers to build large-scale projects.

Before this rail project can move forward, it must be approved by the Surface Transportation Board. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), moreover, this board is required to produce an environmental impact statement, which identifies any significant environmental effects from the rail project as well as ways to mitigate those effects.

The court’s concurring opinions mirror a growing bipartisan consensus that NEPA has become too much of a burden to development.

Significantly, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explains in the Court’s Seven County opinion, “NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions” on the board or on any other federal agency. It requires agencies to identify potential environmental harms that could arise out of development projects that they approve, but once those harms are identified in an environmental impact statement, the agency is free to decide that the benefits of the project outweigh those harms.

Nevertheless, NEPA is often a significant hindrance to land development because litigants who oppose a particular project—be they environmental groups or just private citizens looking to shut development down—can often sue, claiming that the federal agency that must approve the project did not prepare an adequate environmental impact statement. As a result, Kavanaugh writes in his Seven County opinion, “litigation-averse agencies…take ever more time…to prepare ever longer EISs for future projects.”

Indeed, the Seven County case itself is a poster child for just how burdensome NEPA can be. The Surface Transportation Board produced an environmental impact statement that is more than 3,600 pages, and it goes into great detail about the rail line’s potential impact on topics ranging from water quality to vulnerable species, such as the greater sage-grouse.

Nevertheless, a federal appeals court blocked the project because it determined that this 3,600-page report did not adequately discuss the environmental impacts of making it easier to extract oil from the Uinta Basin. The appeals court reasoned that the agency needed to consider not just the direct environmental impacts of the rail line itself but also the impact of increased drilling and oil refining after the project is complete.

All eight of the justices that heard the Seven County case (Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused) agreed that this appeals court decision was wrong, although Kavanaugh’s majority opinion for himself and his Republican colleagues is broader than a separate opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The justices’ agreement in Seven County, moreover, mirrors a growing bipartisan consensus that NEPA has become too much of a burden to development. As Kavanaugh notes in his opinion, President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2023 that limits environmental impact statements to 150 pages and requires them to be completed in two years or less.

Still, Kavanaugh’s opinion goes even further, repeatedly instructing courts to be deferential to an agency’s decision to greenlight a project after producing an environmental impact statement.

One striking thing about Kavanaugh’s opinion is how closely it mirrors the rhetoric of liberal proponents of an “abundance” agenda, which seeks to raise American standards of living by promoting large infrastructure projects.

These proponents often claim that well-meaning laws intended to advance liberal values can have the opposite effect when they impose too many burdens on developers. As Kavanaugh argues, NEPA has “transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool” that even stymies clean energy projects ranging “from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, from solar farms to geothermal wells.”

Broadly speaking, Kavanaugh’s opinion imposes two limits on future NEPA lawsuits. The first is simply a blunt statement that courts should be highly reluctant to second-guess an agency’s decision that it has conducted an adequate environmental review. As Kavanaugh writes, “the bedrock principle of judicial review in NEPA cases can be stated in a word: Deference.”

Kavanaugh also criticizes the appeals court for blocking one project—the Utah rail line—because of the environmental impacts of “geographically separate projects that may be built” as a result of that rail line, such as an oil refinery elsewhere in the country.

As Kavanaugh writes, “the effects from a separate project may be factually foreseeable, but that does not mean that those effects are relevant to the agency’s decisionmaking process or that it is reasonable to hold the agency responsible for those effects.”

Both Kavanaugh and the separate opinion by Sotomayor also point to the fact that “the Board here possesses no regulatory authority over those separate projects.” That is, while the transportation board is tasked with approving rail lines, other agencies are in charge of regulating projects, such as oil wells or refineries.

As Sotomayor writes, an agency is not required to consider environmental harms that it has “no authority to prevent.”

So Seven County is a fairly significant victory for land developers as well as for traditional libertarians and for liberal proponents of an abundance agenda. It significantly weakens a statute that has long been a bête noire of developers.

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Elon Musk Says Goodbye With a Black Eye

During an official Oval Office event marking the end of his time working at the federal government, Elon Musk on Friday emerged with apparent facial swelling and bruising around his right eye.

“I wasn’t anywhere near France,” Musk replied when asked about the black eye, an apparent joke about Emmanuel Macron’s marital shove.

“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead and punch me in the face,’ and he did,” he continued. “It turns out even a 5-year-old punching you in the face actually…”

“That was X that did that?” Trump interrupted.

“Yeah,” Musk said while giggling.

The black eye encapsulated another fresh round of intense chaos for Musk this week after the announcement that he was leaving the Trump administration. (The departure itself follows months of tumult for Musk as the head of DOGE.) Mere hours before the Oval Office appearance, the New York Times alleged rampant drug use by Musk—frequent ketamine, mushrooms, and ecstasy. It came amid speculation of dramatic feuding between Musk and Stephen Miller, whose wife, Katie Miller, is reportedly leaving the administration to work full-time with Musk.

Elsewhere in the Oval Office on Friday, Musk appeared distracted, at times bobbing his head or staring at the ceiling.

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The Trump Trick: Pardon Black Celebs, Make It Easier to Imprison Black People

Trump has been on a spree this week: He’s pardoned or commuted the sentences of a host of people this week, tax fraudsters and TV personalities among them.

So, how do you get one of these pardons?

In my new video, I point out that if you’re Black, you should probably know Trump’s “Pardon Czar,” Alice Marie Johnson. Trump just pardoned rapper NBA YoungBoy, who spent time in prison for gun charges, and Larry Hoover, founder of the Gangster Disciples gang. Johnson’s fingerprints appear to be all over the pardons. NBA YoungBoy even thanked her in a statement after his release.

Johnson herself was actually pardoned by Trump back in 2020. When she was released from prison in 2018, she’d served more than 20 years of a life sentence for her involvement in a multi-national cocaine operation in Memphis, TN, which had connections to a Columbian drug cartel. Her story was championed by the ACLU, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and others. Now, her Instagram is full of pictures with Black rappers and entertainers, appearing to help turn pardons into loyalty to Trump from some Black entertainers, drawing more Black voters into his orbit.

Meanwhile, Trump is firing entire civil rights departments, militarizing the police, and ending corruption investigations into police departments known for targeting Black people.

It’s a bizarre sleight of hand. “Hey, look over here, I pardoned a Black person!”—while making it easier and easier to imprison Black people.

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“BS”: Former HHS Secretary Blasts White House Defense of False Citations in MAHA Report

The former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra said the Trump administration’s explanations of how fake studies wound up cited in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Health Again (MAHA)” report is “BS.”

“We have an obligation to protect the health of the American people, and to be silent is to acquiesce.”

“This ‘formatting’ BS doesn’t sell,” Becerra said, referring to claims White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and an HHS spokesperson made when dismissing errors found by the news site NOTUSas only issues arising from document formatting. “You’re supposed to do that checking before you publish, at least if you’re a rigorous publisher.”

“We caught this one,” Becerra added, “which ones didn’t we catch?”

Becerra, who announced last month he has entered California’s gubernatorial race, made the comments in response to a question from Mother Jones at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference in Los Angeles on Friday.

NOTUS first reported on Thursday that at least seven of the more than 500 studies cited in the MAHA report, focused on improving children’s health, did not actually exist; later on Thursday, the New York Times reported that at least two additional citations featured in the report were also fake. Both news outlets also said that the MAHA report misrepresented the findings of cited studies that do exist. Experts said that the errors indicated artificial intelligence may have been used in the writing of the report.

Both Leavitt and an HHS spokesperson downplayed the errors as formatting issues and emphasized that the “substance” of the report—which argues that factors like over-processed food, environmental chemicals, social media, and prescription drugs are harming kids’ health—remained accurate. By the end of the day Thursday, the White House, which previously hailed the report as a “milestone” in a post on X, had updated the report to remove the seven fake citations, NOTUS reported.

This is far from the first time the Trump administration has relied on shoddy research or baseless claims to justify its policy positions. Just this week, for example, RFK Jr. announced he was changing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines so as not to recommend the COVID vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women, calling it “common sense and good science” without citing any specific data that had led him to make that decision. Leading public health advocates condemned the move, noting that evidence has shown that the COVID vaccine does not lead to adverse birth outcomes and, instead, offers crucial protections against the virus for babies, pregnant people, and kids.

Becerra said Friday that he had avoided publicly critiquing the administration thus far to give them “a chance to settle in,” but that by now, “they got their chance.”

“I’m going to start talking,” he added, “because to say that we should not recommend that pregnant women and children receive the COVID vaccine; to say that in Texas, it’s okay that there are measles spreading after we had essentially eradicated measles in America—we have an obligation to protect the health of the American people, and to be silent is to acquiesce. There are too many people acquiescing to what’s going on right now.”

“Two young children died in Texas this year from measles,” Becerra said later. “They should be alive today.”

As of last month, Kennedy claimed to endorse the measles vaccine, but has also boosted baseless treatments, as my colleague Kiera Butler and I have reported.

The former secretary also blasted “all these folks that are underneath Secretary Kennedy at HHS, who are allowing this to happen, who know better, who are watching some of their most experienced colleagues who have been involved in saving lives and making the right decisions based on the science, who are being shuttered.”

As my colleagues and I have reported, Kennedy’s HHS laid off 10,000 workers, in addition to another 10,000 who reportedly took buyout offers; those laid off have included people who were working to make IVF more accessible and monitor pregnancy outcomes, and others working on preventing and tracking opioid addictions, gun injuries, and intimate partner violence, just to name a few examples Mother Jones covered. Becerra also noted the administration abolished the CDC’s Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, which he helped establish under the Biden administration.

“As dangerous as the guy in the Oval Office is,” Becerra added, “I think the big danger is those who enable him to do this, because that’s how you end up with tyranny and dictatorship—when others follow and let it happen.”

This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also said he may prevent researchers from publishing in medical journals, arguing that they are “corrupt” and that HHS will likely create its own publications instead. Seemingly responding to that news, Becerra said it was “dangerous” for officials “to say that you’re going to muzzle researchers if their data doesn’t conform to their White House’s view of life.”

Becerra also predicted that the GOP-backed Medicaid cuts proposed in the reconciliation bill could lead Trump voters to see how Republicans’ policies are directly harming them: “Medicaid is as important in red states, in red congressional districts, as it is in blue—in fact, maybe even more. Because when you live in rural America, if you don’t have access to a doctor who uses Medicaid services, you may not have access at all.” More than half of Democrats and more than 40 percent of Republicans say they or someone they know has been covered by Medicaid, according to a KFF poll, which also found large majorities in all political parties view it favorably.

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard repeated prior claims characterizing the fake citations as “minor” and “formatting errors,” adding: “Under President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, our federal government is no longer ignoring [chronic disease affecting children], and it’s time for the media to also focus on what matters.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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“Well, We’re All Going to Die,” Says GOP Senator in Defense of Medicaid Cuts

The largest Medicaid cuts in US history, which, if signed into law, would sever healthcare for the poorest Americans in order to offset massive tax cuts for the wealthy, have a curious new defense: “Well, we all are going to die.”

During a town hall meeting, when discussing Medicaid benefits, Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) responds to someone: "Well, we all are going to die." pic.twitter.com/HDj0w27vHJ

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 30, 2025

The line emerged on Friday as Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) attempted to defend the cuts before angry constituents during a contentious town hall. It was delivered with a smirk, and then, apparent impatience. “For heaven’s sakes, folks,” she said as the audience gasped.

It is true: Every one of us will indeed perish. But implicit in Ernst’s cavalier response on Friday is that the inevitability of death neutralizes how death comes for us. Jeopardizing health care for the most vulnerable? Why the hell not. Speeding up death for the oldest Americans by making them sicker? Well, we all are going to die.

Of course, the reality is that so much of the death that American society tolerates—our gun epidemic, a lack of universal health care, etc.—is a choice enshrined in our shitty politics. Just take a look at the staggering rise in babies born HIV positive right now, thanks to a similar casual cruelty of Elon Musk.

Ernst’s point is an accidental bedrock of GOP politics. Death does not matter, for certain people, if it means a supposed economic boost to the few.

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The Worrying Backstory of Trump’s Proposed “Office of Remigration”

On Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the Trump administration had taken new steps towards “building an America First State Department” by notifying Congress of a “reorganization plan.” The massive overhaul, first proposed in April, will reportedly downsize or eliminate hundreds of bureaus and offices; cut thousands of domestic civil service and foreign service jobs; and redirect the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to focus on “Democracy and Western Values.”

A small but noteworthy part of this shake-up at the State Department should raise particular alarm: a plan to create an “Office of Remigration.”

As Mother Jones reported previously, the term “remigration” is rooted in the debunked Great Replacement theory and favored by the European far-right and White nationalist extremists. It calls for the forcible repatriation or mass expulsion of non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of immigration status or citizenship, and an end to multiculturalism. In 2019, the Associated Press described remigration as the “chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.”

The proposed establishment of an “Office of Remigration” is the latest push by the Trump administration to curb most, if not all, immigration to the United States (with the notable exception of South Africa’s white Afrikaners and investors willing to buy a $5 million gold card). This includes ideologically purging students and lawful residents, on top of trying to rid the country of all undocumented immigrants and summoning wartime powers to expel hundreds of noncitizens to a foreign prison without due process.

The anti-immigrant buzzword “remigration” was made popular by Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner. It has since become a policy platform embraced by Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party and far-right politicians across Europe. Earlier this month, a “remigration” summit in Italy reportedly gathered hundreds of lawmakers and activists—including a former Trump-endorsed candidate for the Michigan House of Representatives—in support of repatriating “non-assimilated” immigrants and European-born citizens alike. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism called it an “ethnic cleansing summit.”

Trump’s “Office of Remigration” would fall under the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, one State Department official told Axios. “The Office of Remigration will serve as the [Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]’s hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking,” according to a copy of the 136-page plan shared with six Congressional committees to be approved before July 1 and reviewed by Wired. “It will provide a policy platform for interagency coordination with DHS and other agencies on removals/repatriations, and for intra-agency policy work to advance the President’s immigration agenda.”

The move would effectively undercut the bureau’s original stated mission to “provide protection, ease suffering, and resolve the plight of persecuted and uprooted people around the world.” Instead, according to the document submitted to Congress, the bureau’s functions will be consolidated into three offices under the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Migration Matters and “substantially reorganized” to deliver on the administration’s policy priorities.

One of such offices, the “Office of Remigration,” would “actively facilitate the voluntary return of migrants to their country of origin or legal status.” Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would offer a stipend and financial travel assistance to immigrants who decided to use the CBP Home mobile app to self-deport. Recently, immigration lawyers have also seen “notices to self-deport” posted in immigration courts, warning that they’re misleading and intended to scare people.

In a recent post on an apparent State Department Substack, Samuel Samson, a senior adviser for the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor singled out “mass migration” and the replacement of “spiritual and cultural roots” as threats to “democratic self-governance.” He further called for a partnership focused on the United States and Europe’s “shared Western civilizational heritage.”

Last September, in the lead up to the presidential elections, Donald Trump invoked “remigration” in a Truth Social post stating his plans to “return Kamala [Harris]’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).” At the time, Trump’s nod to the European far right’s policy caught Sellner’s attention and was celebrated as another step towards taking remigration global and mainstream. Now, it might be policy. When asked by Wired about the incursion of remigration in the United States, Sellner said Trump “ticks many of the boxes. The “common line” between America and Europe, he added, is “preserving the cultural continuity by stopping replacement migration.”

Sellner, who was barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and had his US travel authorization canceled in 2019 because of his suspected links to the Christchurch shooter, told Wired he might try to get a new visa, saying “I hope I will touch American soil again soon.” One of the organizers and speakers at this month’s remigration summit in Italy, Sellner reportedly advertised the event by lauding the United States as an example, saying “Remigration is on everyone’s lips.”

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Forget Dobbs—The Personhood Movement Wants Much More

To hear people in the anti-abortion movement tell it, the idea that human personhood begins at fertilization is as old as the Bible.But as abortion historian Mary Ziegler writes in her latest book, Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, the legal movement for fetal personhood only dates from the 1960s, when anti-abortion activists were losing state battles to reform abortion laws and needed a legal theory to justify strict bans. So they turned to the Constitution and found a strategy contained in the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses are persons, they argued, and thus should have the same legal rights and protections as anyone else.

The US Supreme Court rejected this radical notion 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, and in the process established the constitutional right to abortion. But when the court reversed Roe in 2022,inDobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the personhood issue was suddenly back on the table—and abortion opponents were thrilled. They see personhood as the surest path to a total national abortion ban, one that could circumvent lawmakers, ballot initiatives, and state constitutions. “Overturning Roe wasn’t the end—it was the beginning,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the increasingly influential Students for Life, wrote on the platform X when Ziegler was on MSNBC earlier this month. “The fight was never just about state laws. It’s about recognizing the human rights of every preborn child. Personhood is the goal. Always has been.”

But even as personhood supporters strategize about how to get the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority to take up the issue, at the state level, fetal personhood has already become deeply entrenched in politics and law. Take Georgia, for example, where, over her family’s objections, a brain-dead woman named Adriana Smith has been on life support for three months (and counting), because she is pregnant. Not only does the state’s LIFE Act, passed in 2019 but blocked until Dobbs, confer personhood on any embryo or fetus starting around six weeks, but residents can claim fetuses as dependents for tax purposes, state officials must include fetuses in population counts, and pregnant people can demand child support before giving birth.

Like Georgia, more than half of states have laws invalidating advance directives for end-of-life care if the patient is pregnant. (A new lawsuit is challenging one such law in Kansas.) Seventeen states have established fetal rights by law or judicial decision, Pregnancy Justice reports, and more than two-thirds have feticide laws that make it a form of homicide to cause a pregnancy loss, such as a miscarriage or stillbirth. The most frequent targets of personhood laws are women who use drugs during pregnancy, but since Dobbs, prosecutions of women for miscarriages and stillbirths have also surged.

Yet when Americans understand the full implications of fetal personhood, they overwhelmingly oppose it. Consider the backlash that followed last year’s declaration by the Alabama Supreme Court that IVF embryos are “extrauterine children”—a ruling that threw the fertility industry into chaos. Even Donald Trump criticized it, vowing to protect IVF and calling himself the “fertility president.” Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California-Davis and author of six other books about abortion, sees this widespread opposition as a hopeful sign for reproductive and women’s rights. “It’s really hard for me to imagine our politics changing to a point where Americans will be OK with a version of fetal personhood that leads to IVF being effectively eliminated,” she says, “or women routinely being thrown into jail for having abortions.”

But personhood opponents will have to fight hard, Ziegler says—not just for abortion, but for democracy. And she urges them to take an important lesson from the very movement they are fighting: “This is a long game.” I spoke with Ziegler from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Reading your new book, maybe the most surprising thing to me is how closely the idea of personhood is entangled with ideas about equality and discrimination.

That’s one of the reasons I think personhood resonates with a lot of conservatives, because it’s not just a claim about when life begins, or when rights begin, or how you enforce rights. It’s also about who’s a victim of discrimination in America. What does discrimination look like? What does equality look like?

But personhood inherently subordinates women to their fertilized eggs. It turns women into second- or third-class citizens. How do people who believe in personhood square that with “equality”?

Let’s say that you really do see a fertilized egg as a human being like any other, fundamentally no different from a 12-year-old child or an adult. People who are opposed to abortion compare that fertilized egg to other people they think are being discriminated against, or who the government or the Constitution has said are discriminated against. And, they see abortion, or the destruction of embryos through other means like IVF, as being the most violent kind of discrimination, one that doesn’t recognize the fetus’s or embryo’s basic humanity. They see an analogy to slavery because slaves were also deemed to be less than human.

It’s so interesting that this idea of fetal personhood was starting to take hold among abortion opponents in the 1960s and ‘70s, at the same time when so many other movements for equality were also happening: civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights.

The short, crude history is that personhood began as a sort of strategic necessity in the 1960s, when abortion opponents were starting to lose struggles in the states about abortion reform. Anti-abortion leaders were desperately trying to find a better way to talk about abortion and they landed on the idea that it’s unconstitutional to reform abortion laws because fetuses are persons and should be treated that way under the 14th Amendment.

“During earlier anti-abortion movements, it would have been really weird to talk about fetal personhood or rights—I mean, in the 19th century, people were just starting to make arguments about personhood and rights for enslaved people.”

During earlier anti-abortion movements, it would have been really weird to talk about fetal personhood or rights—I mean, in the 19th century, people were just starting to make arguments about personhood and rights for enslaved people. But in the 1960s, “equality” and “rights” were very much part of the zeitgeist. To some degree, anti-abortion leaders were doing what a lot of other social movements were doing in that era when everybody was claiming to be the next civil rights movement.

But in asserting that the fetus is a victim of discrimination, anti-abortion people were forced to talk about discrimination differently from how other people were talking about it at the time. Instead of thinking about discrimination as a legacy of historical oppression—which was becoming the main paradigm in the US—what abortion opponents landed on was the idea that the real victims of discrimination are people with disabilities, the elderly, and unborn children, because they are physically unable to protect themselves. That changed as conservatives rethought equality in other contexts. Over time, the anti-abortion movement gravitated more and more to the idea that the primary victim of discrimination in America was the victim of a crime.

In the beginning, some supporters took a surprisingly benign approach to how fetal personhood ideas should play out in policy.

Early on, there was an argument that honoring personhood would require things like better health care during pregnancy, and better services for new parents. There was an acknowledgment that if you’re going to care about a fetal person, you also have to address the reasons that women might seek abortion.

But by the 1980s and ’90s, personhood was associated with a very pro-punishment ethos. What happened?

By that time, the anti-abortion movement had pretty much aligned with the Republican Party, which was very much in the middle of engineering changes that would lead to mass incarceration. It was not going to be productive to talk about fetal rights in terms of expanding the social safety net. The movement itself also was changing—the dominant strain was now conservative Protestantism, and the new leadership more often shared that kind of pro-punishment perspective. Those ideas about helping pregnant patients never entirely went away, but they were pushed to the margins.

At first, the movement put its hopes on getting a personhood amendment into the US Constitution. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t work. So by the 1980s and ’90s, anti-abortion groups were looking for other ways to seed the idea of fetal personhood into the law. Most often, they did it in ways that appealed to Republicans—for example, making it a homicide to kill a fetus during the commission of another crime, allowing parents to sue for a fetus’s wrongful death, and criminalizing drug use during pregnancy.

“By the ’80s, the anti-abortion movement had pretty much aligned with the GOP, which was in the middle of engineering changes that would lead to mass incarceration. “

But then anti-abortion leaders also worried that the movement was starting to look anti-woman, particularly as clinic violence and murders of abortion providers spiked in the 1990s. That led to them saying, “Well, the reason you don’t punish women for having an abortion is because they don’t know what they’re doing.” And you began to see them writing up their ideas about fetal rights and personhood into informed consent laws, then punishing the providers who don’t give women this information.

Why do we sometimes think of the anti-abortion and personhood fights as different movements?

What happened was that some anti-abortion advocates were becoming really frustrated with the pace of change. Starting in Colorado in 2008 and then spreading elsewhere, they began promoting state constitutional amendments enshrining fetal rights. The media narrative was: there’s this thing called the personhood movement that is so fringy, mainstream anti-abortion groups don’t support it, it’s even losing in Mississippi. But if you dig into what they were fighting about, the mainstream groups said, “This is the wrong time.” They were afraid that the US Supreme Court would strike down these ballot measures and maybe even strengthen abortion rights in the process. So this was not a disagreement about substance, it was a disagreement about strategy. And I think that’s still where we are at.

Flash forward to 2025, and the fetal personhood movement has been grinding along for 60 years, making vast inroads in the law. What has been the reaction among mainstream reproductive rights groups?

On the abortion rights side, a few people and organizations, like Pregnancy Justice, have been talking about personhood for some time. And, of course, abortion groups opposed the personhood ballot measures. But most people were fixated on saving Roe. In some ways that made strategic sense, because with Roe in place, anti-abortion groups couldn’t execute their broader plans for personhood. But there wasn’t enough of a conversation about why personhood might be dangerous. Obviously, since Dobbs was handed down, the sense of what’s realistic has changed accordingly. But for a long time, it was pretty unimaginable for a lot of people that the Supreme Court would undo Roe, much less continue to go further.

And when repro folks did talk about issues like personhood and pregnancy, it was often in ways that seemed overly intellectualized and a little clueless. You know, “It’s not a baby, it’s a clump of cells.” “It’s not a heartbeat, it’s cardiac activity.”

A lot of Americans who are not particularly progressive or particularly invested in this debate don’t experience pregnancy that way—even a very early pregnancy. On the repro side, I think there was a certain amount of dismissing some of the ways that pregnancy is really complicated for people, emotionally and intellectually. Reproductive justice advocates sometimes did a good job of capturing this nuance, but it didn’t always come across in broader political conversations.

“It’s incumbent on people who support reproductive rights both to explain why they’re opposed to personhood laws , and to say, ‘And here’s how we’re going to care about pregnancy, here’s how we show that we value fetal life, too.’”

Since Dobbs , the rhetoric around personhood has become much more extreme—for example, so-called abortion abolitionists arguing that women should be arrested and prosecuted for having abortions. If anti-abortion people all agree that personhood is important, what don’t they agree on?

They’re disagreeing either about how you get to personhood or what personhood means when you get there.

The abolition movement is part of the personhood movement. But they very much believe the 1990s idea that “we don’t punish women who get abortions because women don’t know what they’re doing” was a grave mistake, because most women do know what they’re doing. In their view, if the anti-abortion movement is serious about the idea that a fetus is a person just like any other, then we can’t avoid punishing women, because we punish women for any other homicide.

And other anti-abortion groups are saying, hold on. Punishing women is so disastrously unpopular that even a movement that’s willing to do things that are already pretty unpopular thinks it’s a bridge too far.

What do personhood advocates want? Do they want Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale ? This is a serious question. I keep wondering about the endpoint.

It’s fair to say that people in the abolitionist wing have very traditional views on gender and parenting. Many of them have, even by the standards of religious conservatives, exceptionally large families and very traditional ideas about masculinity. So their answer about what they want would probably reflect those extremes.

As for the rest of the personhood movement, I don’t know if they’ve worked it all out. That’s not unusual for social movements. For example, progressives will say, we want universal public health care, or access to abortion without limits, or universal basic public income, or a complete end to climate change. And everyone agrees: “Yeah, that’d be great.” And then, in the next breath, “But that’s totally not going to happen.”

To some degree, this is the dog that caught the car—not in the sense that the anti-abortion movement doesn’t want personhood, but the fall of Roe happened so fast. Before Dobbs, personhood just could be the rallying cry. It didn’t have to be practical. Now, it does, and you’re starting to hear people saying, “Well, that’s not what personhood means. That’s not what I’m fighting for.”

Your book makes a sobering case for the long-term strength of the personhood movement. Is it possible to reverse this trend? As a legal concept, it feels very advanced.

It’s true that personhood already has a lot of anchoring in law. But it has very little popular support. That said, what happens next with fetal personhood largely depends on what kind of democracy we have. Are voters the ones who get to decide, or will it be the judiciary or someone else? To the extent it’s the judiciary, what will the federal courts look like? It’s true that we have to be ready with good legal arguments against personhood when the moment comes. But it’s also important to make sure this is a question that regular people have the power to decide and not just something that’s directed to parts of our government that don’t have to be responsive to what the people want.

In addition to protecting our broader democratic rights, what else should people on the repro side be doing to prevent fetal personhood from making further inroads into our laws and politics?

I think it’s incumbent on people who support reproductive rights both to explain why they’re opposed to personhood laws and strategies, and to say, “And here’s how we’re going to care about pregnancy—not just the pregnant person, but the fetal life, too.” It would be helpful for reproductive rights groups to think about a way to talk to those Americans who want to think of themselves as valuing fetal life, who also don’t feel comfortable with some of what that’s leading to. It’s not enough to say, “Fetal personhood erases the personhood of the mother” and leave it at that.

Let’s take the example of legislation requiring the payment of child support for the fetus during pregnancy. That’s an idea a lot of people might instinctively feel attracted to. It’s also part of a strategy to recognize a version of fetal personhood that’s very carceral in ways I don’t like. But if you just say, “This is going to lead to the bad thing,” without an alternative, that risks sounding either callous or unplugged from the way many people view the emotional complexity of pregnancy and pregnancy loss.

More basically, I think it might be helpful for people on our side, not just to say that personhood is a silly thing to talk about but to talk about what it means to them. Like, what does personhood from the perspective of a pregnant person look like? At the most fundamental level, we should be making it easier for people to talk about the full experience of pregnancy, in all its complexity. The repro side shouldn’t be letting the other side set the terms of the debate.

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The Trump Administration Is Already Ignoring the Supreme Court

On May 16, the Supreme Court handed down a significant order in one of the many swirling cases over the Trump administration’s efforts to seize immigrants and deport them to foreign prisons. In an unsigned opinion, seven of the court’s nine justices reaffirmed that immigrants needed a reasonable amount of time to challenge their deportations. Reading between the lines was an alarming recognition by the seven justices: The Trump administration was already violating their orders.

Trump officials’ refusal to follow high court orders has not caused an uprising.

The opinion was the first time the justices—all but two—acknowledged that when it comes to the Trump administration, the courts are not dealing with a compliant litigant. The United States government is generally given deference at the Supreme Court, a longstanding principle called the “presumption of regularity” by which judges extend government officials the benefit of the doubt that they are acting lawfully, until proven otherwise. But the Trump administration’s actions have served as that proof, and the Supreme Court seems to have grasped this new reality of a government gone rogue.

It can be hard to spot this defiance, because the administration typically acts as if it will follow court orders. In hearings and briefs, even when it is stretching the truth or misrepresenting the law, Justice Department lawyers behave as if everything is normal. Their defiance of the lower courts, and even the Supreme Court, does not have totake the form of a bold pronouncement against the judiciary. But among the trappings of legal proceedings, it is there, making a thousand small cuts into the rule of law.

The case, AARP v. Trump, arrived at the Supreme Court as an emergency appeal. On April 17, ACLU lawyers learned that their clients at ICE’s Bluebonnet Detention Facility in northern Texas were about to be sent to El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a wartime law President Donald Trump has (illegally) invoked. They sought relief in district court, then at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, and finally at the Supreme Court. Minutes before midnight Central Time on April 18, the Supreme Court halted the deportations. The justices didn’t know it then, but the government had already loaded the detainees onto buses and taken them to an airport to be sent to El Salvador. The buses were turned around and the immigrants returned to Bluebonnet only because the courts had been alerted. In the end, the government complied—but only once it had been caught.

Notably, however, the government’s actions had violated a Supreme Court order from April 7 that required the administration to give reasonable time for immigrants to exercise their due process rights before being deported under the AEA. In AARP v. Trump, the seven justices reiterated the court’s unanimous holding from less than two weeks prior: “this Court explained—with all nine Justices agreeing—that ‘AEA detainees must receive notice… within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief… before removal,” the majority wrote. “In order to ‘actually seek habeas relief,’ a detainee must have sufficient time and information to reasonably be able to contact counsel, file a petition, and pursue appropriate relief.” As Justice Sonia Sotomayor had warned on April 7: “To the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief, it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court.” Just 11 days later, the government attempted to do exactly that with the migrants confined in Bluebonnet.

The justices‘ May 16 ruling also highlighted how the administration’s refusal to follow court orders—including those from Supreme Court—forced them to side with the detainees in this matter.

In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to CECOT in error, the Supreme Court had affirmed on April 10 that the administration must “facilitate” his return. Further, the justices told the administration that “the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.” For all intents and purposes, the government has bucked both of these holdings. It has done incredibly little to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, and it has resisted sharing any information with the district court overseeing the case by deploying specious legal arguments. This week, it asked the district court to dismiss the case, alleging that because Abrego Garcia is no longer on US soil, the court has no jurisdiction—despite the Supreme Court and the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals seemingly affirming that jurisdiction when both sent the case back to the district court. Further, Trump himself has said that all it would take to get Abrego Garcia back is phoning Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, yet he has refused to facilitate his return by placing the call.

“The administration is hoping to wear down the courts through sheer force of will.”

The administration’s intransigence in the Abrego Garcia case, including its refusal to follow lower court orders that the Supreme Court has itself upheld, informed the seven justices’ decision on May 16. “The Government has represented elsewhere that it is unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador, where it is alleged that detainees face indefinite detention,” the court wrote. “Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster.” In other words, the court might be inclined to give the administration more leash if it trusted that the administration would correct any unlawful removals.

The holding itself, reminding the government that the high court had already required sufficient time for due process in AEA cases, was a major setback for the Trump administration. But in what Georgetown Law professor Steven Vladeck called “the quiet bombshell in the ruling,” the court recognized that the rights of detainees likely could not be vindicated if each had to sue individually for due process. That seemed to be shift from back on April 7, when the Supreme Court nixed an effort to secure nationwide class action relief for all similarly situated detainees and instead ordered them to challenge AEA removals through habeas corpus petitions where they are confined, ruling out the possibility of universal injunctions. By May 16, it was clear those habeas petitions would not happen, because the government wasn’t providing the due process that would make such challenges possible. By giving a nod of approval to proposed classes, the court again recognized that the administration cannot be trusted to provide meaningful due process despite the court having now, twice, ordered it.

But the May 16 ruling is only a setback if the administration follows this gentle reminder—and if the Supreme Court stands by it. In the meantime,the government continues to assert that 24 hours (or less) is enough notice to deport peopleunder laws besides the AEA. The Supreme Court is already being asked to weigh in.

Three days after the Supreme Court’s decision in AARP that 24 hours is insufficient for due process, the government told at least two detainees they were being sent to South Sudan, one of the world’s most dangerous countries. Like El Salvador, South Sudan has agreed to accept deportees who are not from there. Less than 16 hours later—most of which was overnight and none during business hours—the government put eight immigrant prisoners on a plane and flew them to Africa. When lawyers for the immigrants figured out what was happening, they rushed to district court in Massachusetts, where Judge Brian Murphy had already issued an order, citing the Supreme Court’s April 7 opinion, requiring the government provide immigrants it seeks to send to a country that is not their own a “meaningful opportunity” to object over fears they may be tortured there.The flight was a blatant violation of Murphy’s order. And while this case concerned due process under the Immigration and Nationality Act, not the AEA, the principle of adequate notice and the ability to challenge that removal that the Supreme Court had just articulated days earlier logically applies.

Judge Murphy issued a new orderhalting the prisoners’ transfer to South Sudan until meaningful process can be administered. The administration has appealed to the Supreme Court, giving the justices a chance to stand by its guarantee of due process—or to back down.

The prospect of Trump and his administration disobeying the Supreme Court has been held up as a Rubicon-crossing moment from democracy to lawlessness. “If Trump doesn’t obey the Supreme Court,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in March, “and the rule of law goes by the wayside, I believe that there will be an immediate and strong reaction from one end of the country to the other in ways we have never seen.” He added: “Our democracy will be at stake then… we’ll all have to stand up and fight back in every way.”

There is ample evidence the administration has no intention of following court orders.

But the administration’s refusal to follow the Supreme Court’s orders in these immigration cases has not caused an uprising. In fact, its disregard has too often been treated as merely exhausting its legal options or part of the general course of litigation. The justices themselves, while clearly gesturing at the administration’s defiance, haven’t yet said the quiet part out loud.

Leah Litman and Daniel Deacon, both University of Michigan Law professors, have described how the administration has hidden its refusal to obey judges behind a veil of legal argumentation. “The administration uses the language of the law as cover to claim that it is complying with court orders when in fact it is not,” they write in the Atlantic, summarizing a forthcoming paper on the phenomenon. “We call this ‘legalistic noncompliance,’ a term intended to capture how the administration has deployed an array of specious legal arguments to conceal what is actually pervasive defiance of judicial oversight. It is a powerful strategy, as it obscures the substance of what the administration is doing with the soothing language of the law.”

Legalistic noncompliance explains how the administration has ignored the courts without triggering the public backlash that Schumer predicted. Instead, the government defies the courts, again and again, slowly habituating the public to a government that doesn’t actually do what the courts tell it. Meanwhile, Litman and Deacon warn, judges clearly see the noncompliance. In response, they can either escalate the confrontation by calling it out, and risk triggering overt noncompliance. Or, fearful of a confrontation, they could backdown and ultimately give the government’s noncompliance a pass. “By advancing outlandish arguments in such a wide range of cases, and to a judiciary controlled by a conservative Supreme Court, the administration is hoping to wear down the courts through sheer force of will,” they write.

The Supreme Court faces this exact conundrum now. As the case of the detainees en route to South Sudan sits on its docket, the justices must determine whether to insist on meaningful due process before possiblysentencing detainees to a lifetime of confinement in a gruesome foreign country, or whether, worn down by the the administration’s refusal to provide due process, it will find a way to let the whole thing quietly go away.

Whatever the justices decide, there is now ample evidence, in these cases and others, that the administration has no intention of following court orders, including those of the Supreme Court. The question is whether the courts, and Americans, will ultimately do anything about it.

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Study Finds High Levels of Roundup-Type Weedkiller in Tampons in the UK

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Toxic pesticide levels have been found in tampons at levels 40 times higher than the legal limit for drinking water.

Traces of glyphosate, a pesticide linked to cancer, has been found at very high levels in menstrual products, according to a report by the Pesticide Action Network UK (Pan UK), the Women’s Environmental Network, and the Pesticide Collaboration.

This is concerning, according to the authors, because chemicals absorbed through the vagina directly enter the bloodstream, bypassing the body’s detoxification systems. This means even small traces of chemicals in direct contact with the vagina could cause health risks.

The researchers tested 15 boxes of tampons from UK retailers across a range of different popular brands. Glyphosate was found in tampons in one of the boxes, at 0.004 mg/kg. The UK and EU maximum residue level for drinking water is 0.0001 mg/kg, making this 40 times higher than permitted levels of glyphosate in drinking water.

“We were genuinely shocked to find glyphosate in tampons sitting on UK shelves.”

Glyphosate is the world’s most widely used herbicide, but a review by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, classified the weedkiller as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” It has also been linked to the development of Parkinson’s, and emerging research is raising concerns about links to other serious health conditions.

Amy Heley, from the Pesticide Collaboration, said: “If this level of glyphosate is deemed to be unsafe in the water we drink, why is it allowed to appear in our period products? Our investigation reveals that women, girls, and those who menstruate may not be protected from exposure to harmful chemicals. And yet, most people remain completely unaware that this is even an issue.”

It is thought this pesticide could have ended up in the tampons because weedkillers are used to grow cotton, a key ingredient. The researchers detected aminomethylphosphonic acid on the tampons, a breakdown of glyphosate. The plant is one of the most chemical-dependent crops in the world, and up to 300 pesticides can be used in its global production.

The UK government has no plans to tackle chemicals in period products, even though previous studies have found heavy metals such as lead and arsenic in tampons.

Josie Cohen, the interim director at Pan UK, said: “We were genuinely shocked to find glyphosate in tampons sitting on UK shelves. This harmful chemical is already impossible to avoid since it’s sprayed by councils in streets and parks and contaminates much of our food and water due to its overuse in farming.

“We urgently need to reduce our overall toxic load and shouldn’t have to worry about glyphosate and other highly hazardous pesticides in our period products. This is a blatant gap in health and safety regulation that the government urgently needs to address.”

The report’s authors have suggested a regulation scheme with a testing process in place to ensure period products are pesticide-free.

In the UK, glyphosate is used to prepare fields for sowing crops by clearing all vegetation from the land. It kills weeds by inhibiting EPSP synthase, an enzyme involved in plant growth, while not damaging crops that have been genetically modified to be glyphosate-tolerant. Farmers argue that it is an important herbicide because it has “high efficacy on non-resistant weeds and is a cost-effective weed control solution for farmers.”

But beyond concerns about human health, red flags have also been raised over the weedkiller’s impact on biodiversity: Recent research has shown that it damages wild bee colonies, and this product also has adverse effects on aquatic organisms.

There are calls to ban it from urban areas: At present many local councils continue to use it to kill weeds. However, 70 to 80 UK councils have turned to chemical-free options or now simply allow plants to grow, from Bath & North East Somerset council to Highland council in Scotland.

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Trump Is Weaponizing the Justice Department to Advance His Voter Suppression Plans

Donald Trump has made false claims about voter fraud central to his political identity and issued a sweeping anti-voting executive order in March. Now he’s weaponizing the Justice Department to advance his voter suppression agenda.

On Tuesday, in its first major voting-related lawsuit, the Trump Justice Department sued the state of North Carolina over its voter rolls, reviving arguments that Republican judicial candidate Jefferson Griffin used to try to throw out tens of thousands of ballots in an effort to overturn the victory of Democratic North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs.

“It’s no accident they’ve chosen a case in which the Republican candidate lost and they’re echoing his exact claims,” says Chiraag Bains, who served as deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Joe Biden and as a senior counsel in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division from 2010 to 2017.

The Justice Department claims that North Carolina violated the Help America Vote Act of 2002 by failing to collect voters’ driver’s license or Social Security numbers when they registered. Griffin challenged the eligibility of more than 60,000 voters who he claimed fell into that category, even though all of those voters showed identification when they cast a ballot and his legal team never presented a single instance of a someone voting improperly.

Nonetheless, the Trump Justice Department has now resurrected Griffin’s allegations, less than a month after a federal court shut down the GOP plot to steal the supreme court election and ordered the state board of elections to certify Riggs’ victory.

The DOJ lawsuit claims that the elections board “only took limited actions to prevent future violations from reoccurring” and should create a plan, within 30 days of a court order, “to remedy the demonstrated violations.”

That has led to fears among voting rights advocates that the elections board, which is now under Republican control after the GOP-controlled legislature stripped the state’s Democratic governor of the power to appoint a majority of members, will erroneously remove eligible voters from the rolls if they do not provide the information demanded by DOJ.

“There’s a risk of widespread disenfranchisement depending on what steps the Republican majority on the board of elections seeks to take,” Bains says.

“We are concerned that this indicates that the Trump administration is interfering in North Carolina’s process of managing its voter rolls,” adds Ann Webb, policy director for Common Cause North Carolina.

The North Carolina lawsuit is likely just the beginning of the Trump DOJ’s efforts to make it harder to vote. “I expect we’ll see all of the section’s energy go into cases intending to remove voters from the rolls and tighten access to voter registration and voting,” Bains predicts.

“It’s no accident they’ve chosen a case in which the Republican candidate lost and they’re echoing his exact claims.”

Trump has radically transformed the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which oversees the voting section and has historically been known as its “crown jewel.”

He appointed Harmeet Dhillon, a Trump ally with a long history of attacking voting rights, as head of the division. She has subsequently dismantled the division’s staff and completely changed its priorities from past administrations.

More than 250 lawyers, 70 percent of its total, have left the civil rights division during Trump’s second term, and the department’s voting section, which enforces the Voting Rights Act and other voting rights laws, has shrunk from 30 lawyers to just three. As the Guardian reported, political appointees removed all the senior managers in the voting section and ordered them to dismiss every major active case, including litigation challenging restrictive voting laws and gerrymandered maps in states such as Arizona, Georgia, and Texas.

At the time same, Dhillon removed the longtime mandate of stopping racial discrimination in voting from the section’s mission statement and instead pledged to address Trump-inspired priorities that include enforcing the president’s executive order and “preventing illegal voting, fraud, and other forms of malfeasance and error.”

“Fighting racial discrimination doesn’t exist anymore—that is the founding rationale for the Civil Rights Division and the voting section,” says Bains. “That is very radical.”

That shift is a major departure from even Trump’s first term, when the department pulled back from voting rights enforcement but largely left the structure of the civil rights division and voting section intact.

However, prominent election deniers urged Trump to gut the division in his second term. Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer who helped lead Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, called on the president to fire every lawyer in the voting section, labeling them “leftwing activists.” It appears Trump and his acolytes are largely following those orders.

The civil rights division has played an integral role in protecting voting rights and enforcing the Voting Rights Act over decades. Now, under Trump, it’s become a chief impediment to protecting voting rights.

“Trump is waging an overarching war on the idea that the federal government should be in the business of preventing historic and present-day race discrimination,” says Bains. And the Justice Department is now at the front lines of that battle.

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Trump Can’t Escape the Original Sin of His Presidency: His Bond with Putin

Donald Trump set off another social media eruption on Tuesday when he posted on his money-losing Truth Social site, “What Valdimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!” Here apparently was evidence from the horse’s mouth that Trump has long been playing nice with and protecting the tyrannical Russian leader and war criminal. There were, of course, no details.

Trump was reacting to Russia’s recent escalation of deadly drone and missile attacks on Ukraine—the largest bombardment of the war targeting Ukrainian cities. These assaults marked the first time since Putin invaded Ukraine over three years ago that Moscow has drawn opprobrium from Trump. Two days earlier, he had expressed a similar sentiment, stating, “I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia.” But in this post he groused that Putin “has gone absolutely CRAZY!” and was “needlessly killing a lot of people…for no reason whatsoever.” He declared that if Putin wants “ALL of Ukraine” that “will lead to the downfall of Russia!”

Did these messages signal some sort of pivot for Trump? Who knows with him? Trump could just as easily in the middle of the night zap out a post inviting Putin to his big, beautiful upcoming military parade in Washington, DC. But these posts have returned to the spotlight the curious relationship between Trump and Putin, and any such assessment has to include a fundamental fact that has been memory-holed and generally absent from the national political conversation: Trump initially won the presidency partly because Putin covertly attacked the 2016 election.

Since he returned to the Oval Office, Trump has generally acted in sync with his longstanding affinity for Putin. He badgered and threatened Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, blaming him for the Russia-Ukraine war that was launched by Putin, and repeatedly expressed sympathy and support for Putin, even as Russian forces bombed civilian targets and continued kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children. It seemed rather obvious that Trump wanted the war to end not because he was outraged by Putin’s vicious and vile assault on democracy and decency but so he would be free to work with the Russian autocrat for whom he has expressed admiration for over a decade.

In 2013, when Trump announced he would be staging his Miss Universe contest in Moscow—a venture that would earn him several million dollars thanks to the event being underwritten by a Putin-friendly oligarch—he asked, via a tweet, if Putin, who at that point was ratcheting up his repressive ways, would “become my new best friend?” When he was in Moscow for the pageant, Trump, who had long chased deals in Russia (and who had attracted Russian money for his various business projects), was obsessed with meeting with Putin. No tete-a-tete transpired. In subsequent years, he often hailed the Russian (“strong,” “smart”), and he periodically sought to develop a Trump tower in Moscow—a project he secretly pursued while running for president in 2016. (His personal attorney, Michael Cohen, even sought assistance from Putin’s office for the deal, which eventually fizzled.)

Trump has for years been yearning for an out-in-the-open bromance with Putin—perhaps like the profitable relationships he has forged with the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other nations. But this desire has been impeded by the Ukraine war and also complicated by an inconvenient fact: Trump would not likely have reached the White House without Putin’s assistance.

For nine years, Trump has done a masterful job of suppressing what was perhaps the most important story of the 2016 race: Moscow attacked the US election to assist Trump, and Trump and his crew aided and abetted that assault by denying it was happening. With his relentless ranting about “Russia, Russia, Russia,” the “Russia hoax,” and the “witch hunt”—propaganda enthusiastically embraced and loudly amplified by right-wing media and GOP leaders—Trump has essentially erased from public discourse Putin’s successful subversion of an US election and Trump’s own traitorous complicity.

There have been multiple official reports and much media reporting on this matter. But one only need turn to a bipartisan 966-page report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, when it was chaired by none other than Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), now Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, to get a clear picture of what had happened four years earlier:

The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

There is nothing ambiguous there. Nor was there any uncertainty in the report that Trump and his campaign took advantage of Putin’s clandestine operation and, worse, helped it by claiming it didn’t exist—that is, echoing Putin’s denials and abetting Moscow’s coverup:

While [Russian intelligence] and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.

Whether there was any collusion—and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report did reveal that Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair, secretly met during the race with a Russian intelligence officer who might have been involved in the operation targeting the US election—Trump, at the least, was assisting a foreign adversary as it schemed to sabotage a US election.

The Russian assault in 2016 included several components, including flooding social media with messages meant to exacerbate political discord and boost Trump. What likely had the most impact on the race was the hack-and-release operation, in which Russian cyber-warriors pilfered politically sensitive and occasionally embarrassing emails and documents from John Podesta, chair of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and slipped them to WikiLeaks, which then released them during the final weeks of the campaign—creating a steady stream of bad press that weighed down the Clinton effort in the home stretch.

Given how close the vote was in 2016, a number of events could be considered decisive—such as then-FBI Director Jim Comey’s last-minute revival of the investigation of Clinton’s handling of official email when she was secretary of state. But that list includes the Russian attack. Without it, Trump might not have narrowly won. The country will never know for sure, but Putin got what he wanted: Trump in power

Ever since, Trump has loudly and repeatedly bleated there was no Russian operation that helped grease his way into the White House—and he has avoided accountability for his own act of betrayal. He has gone so far as to say he believes Putin’s phony claims of innocence and to reject the findings of the US intelligence community, which concluded Moscow mounted this assault on American democracy to improve Trump’s chances.

Moreover, Trump has whined that both he and Putin have been victimized by the assorted Trump-Russia investigations. During his infamous meeting in the Oval Office with Zelenskyy on February 28, Trump evinced sympathy for Putin, suggesting the Russian leader had been unfairly tainted by these probes: “Let me tell you: Putin went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and ‘Russia. Russia, Russia, Russia.’ You ever hear of that deal?”

Trump was revealing to the public that he felt a powerful bond with Putin, insisting both he and the Russian dictator had been falsely maligned. It was an absurd moment. The facts have long been established: Putin subverted a US election and assisted Trump, and Trump endorsed and advanced Putin’s fake denials. Was Trump now saying this—expressing fellowship with this despotic warmonger—out of a sense of loyalty to him or gratitude? Does Putin have any leverage over him? Or has he deluded himself into believing that Putin did not intervene in the election so he can regard his victory as unstained? Or was he just playing the part of a useful idiot? Whatever the case might be, Trump was voicing heartfelt solidarity with an authoritarian who has committed war crimes. No surprise, he was showing us that what most mattered to him about Putin was not his ruthless war in Ukraine or his totalitarian governance of Russia but their shared plight due to “Russia, Russia, Russia.”

This statement indicated something uniquely bizarre about Trump’s relationship with Putin remains. There’s no telling how that will influence how Trump handles the latest developments in Ukraine and how he responds to Putin’s intransigence and horrific violence. As of this writing, Trump has griped about Putin’s recent bombing. But he has yet taken no steps to further punish Russia. On Wednesday, he downplayed the possibility of slapping Moscow with no sanctions, saying. “If I think I’m close to getting a deal, I don’t want to screw it up by doing that.”

As Trump seeks to implement autocratic and corrupt rule in the United States, his dealings with Putin are likely to be complex and, perhaps, erratic. He hates Zelenskyy. He admires Putin. He wants the war to go away. He foolishly promised he could make that happen in 24 hours. He doesn’t know what to do, and Putin, still aiming to crush a democratic Ukraine, is not helping. The known history between the two—and there could be important aspects that are unknown—is complicated and still puzzling. But as pundits, politicians, and voters assess how Trump is faring with all this, they ought to keep foremost in mind that he’s sitting in the White House partly because of Putin’s skullduggery. That’s the original sin of the Trump presidencies, and many in Ukraine and America are bearing its consequences.

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Elon Musk Made Your Life Worse

Elon Musk’s announcement on Wednesday that his “scheduled time” working for President Donald Trump is ending was instantly met with a mix of celebration and schadenfreude. And for once, the delight is likely to include both critics of the president and Trump-world.

This is not surprising. Musk’s personality, by all accounts deeply unlikeable, had been pissing off Trump aides from the very start; reports of infighting and West Wing screaming matches have been commonplace; Musk’s recent public criticism of Trump’s big, beautiful bill seemed to solidify his inevitable departure.

But as much as there is to relish about the world’s richest man getting unceremoniously offboarded by the very government he spent a quarter of a billion dollars to install, the joy quickly fades upon examining the damage. A quick accounting: As the head of DOGE, Musk lead the dismantling of the federal government with outlandish threats and actions; wreaked havoc at USAID; disrupted critical HIV programs around the world; stayed up late to harass federal employees with insulting emails; spread vicious conspiracy theories about US agencies that work to administer foreign aid; fired entire departments that work to prevent bird flu and safeguard our nuclear arsenal; paralyzed national parks.

To put it simply, Elon Musk’s brief time in Washington made American life worse, with actions that will continue to reveal the true extent of their immense damage for years to come. But for me, the thing that I’ll remember the most is Musk’s cruel disdain for the federal worker. Countless lives have been unraveled because of this man; their mental health in tatters as they still struggle to find employment after being callously fired by DOGE’s rabid desires to gut the federal government. I think about this Washington Post story often. May Musk’s legacy always be centered in the trauma that he and others so gleefully imparted.

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The World’s Largest Emitter Just Delivered Some Good Climate News—for Now

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

China is the world’s largest single greenhouse gas emitter, spewing more than double the amount of heat-trapping chemicals as the next biggest climate polluter, the United States.

For decades, China’s emissions soared ever higher as its economy grew, burning extraordinary volumes of coal, oil, and natural gas to light up cities, power factories, and fuel cars. The trend seemed unstoppable: At one point, China was approving two new coal power plants per week.

It was an alarming prospect for the whole world. “Eighty-five percent of emissions for the remainder of the century are projected to occur outside the EU and the US,” said Michael Greenstone, an economist at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “If we’re going to make real progress on climate change, that will require reductions from that 85 percent.” And since China is the single largest emitter, there’s no feasible way to meet international climate change targets without them on board.

To make China’s emissions reductions durable, there needs to be more stringent policies and enforcement.

But now, for the first time, there’s been a shift: China’s greenhouse gas emissions have actually fallen even as energy demand went up.

According to a new report at Carbon Brief by Lauri Myllyvirta, an analyst at Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, China’s overall greenhouse gas emissions have dropped for the first time, thanks largely to the country’s aggressive build-out of clean energy. Looking at official statistics and commercial data, the analysis shows greenhouse gas output fell 1 percent over the past year, even as China’s overall energy use and economic activity increased.

It’s not a massive shift, but the fact that the curve has bent at all is a major development for the global effort against climate change.

The growth rate of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has begun to level off, but it has yet to decline. In order to eventually halt human-caused warming, that rate has to effectively reach zero, and in order to meet the goals of the Paris climate agreement, that has to happen roughly within the next three decades.

The decline of emissions in China is a big step toward this international goal, and the timing puts it on course for its own climate targets, too. China had previously committed to peaking its greenhouse gas emissions before 2030.

“This is a little ahead of schedule,” Greenstone said. “The planet is happy about that.”

In large part, the decline in emissions came from clean electricity production. China deployed vastly more wind, solar, and nuclear power—sources that don’t emit carbon dioxide—at a pace faster than its electricity demand growth. Meanwhile, its coal and gas electricity production dropped. China’s emissions have dipped before due to economic slowdowns, so the fact that its economy grew while emissions declined is a significant turning point, putting China in a league with more than 30 countries, including the US, that have already done the same.

China has established itself as the world’s largest producer of solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, and batteries, driving down prices for the global market. It’s deploying these technologies within its own borders, as well as exporting them en masse, and some of its biggest customers are developing countries. That means China’s investments in clean energy redound to the rest of the world. Renewables accounted for 90 percent of new power capacity installed worldwide last year.

Later this year, countries will gather in Brazil for the COP30 climate conference, where world leaders will hash out how to bring new, stronger commitments to cut their contributions to climate change by 2035. China’s President Xi Jinping pledged that his country will come to the table with a comprehensive plan to further reduce its emissions across its economy, while the US may not show up at all. One his first day of his second term, President Donald Trump began the process of pulling the country out of the Paris climate agreement altogether. Again.

However, in the Carbon Brief report, Myllyvirta noted that China’s small drop in emissions could easily go back up. If its economy grows even faster, demand for fossil fuels could rise again. Whether that happens depends, in part, on how the dust settles on the tariff fight between the US and China. High trade barriers would slow China’s economy. Losing the US as a customer could push China to try to compensate by installing more clean energy domestically.

China also emits greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. In particular, China is releasing high levels of HFC-23, a byproduct of making nonstick coatings and a pollutant that is thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere. China committed to halting HFC-23 pollution entirely when it signed the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol in 2021.

To make China’s emissions reductions durable, there needs to be more stringent policies and enforcement to curb climate pollution within the country. Otherwise, current clean energy technologies would need to get cheaper, and new ones would have to be invented. “Given the tepid appetite for aggressive carbon policy around the world, I think the most important thing the world could do is invest in early stage R&D on new energy technologies,” Greenstone said.

Meanwhile, US emissions are also seeing a slight downward trend. But the Trump administration’s push to extract more fossil fuels, cut incentives for clean energy, and roll back efforts to curb greenhouse gases mean that the US could become a larger climate polluter. That could offset some of the progress in China and slow the overall global endeavor to limit climate change.

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How Trump Twisted the Law to Protect White Men From Discrimination

In March, the Trump administration’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) sent concerned letters to 20 of the nation’s top law firms. The problem? Big Law diversity and equity programs were likely illegal, said the administration, because DEI discriminated against male and white candidates. At first, such an attack could seem silly—the policy memo equivalent of a trolling tweet.

But something more insidious was afoot. I used to work at WilmerHale, one of the law firms that received a letter. I was stunned by the rationale. The ostensible legal basis for the administration’s assertion is that these policies violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits an employer from making decisions on the basis of characteristics such as race, sex, and national origin—traits that are often referred to as “protected classes.”

Treating the race and sex of white men as protected classes is a startling move for the EEOC, an entity established by that same seminal 1964 law as part of an express attempt to combat discrimination against Black people. Even a cursory glance at its significant court decisions makes it apparent that the agency has been almost exclusively devoted to protecting marginalized groups. (The EEOC website still features a picture of Martin Luther King Jr.)

Trump has converted the casual right-wing rhetoric of “reverse racism” into a legal standard without much thought.

So how exactly can the EEOC jettison that 60-year history and transform overnight into an entity also devoted to protecting white men? By stretching the legal boundaries of what constitutes a “protected class” past the breaking point—with profound consequences for modern anti-discrimination law. When the Supreme Court held in 1954 that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, it did so in a 9–0 decision. The newly minted Chief Justice Earl Warren famously coordinated this unanimity in an effort to forestall backlash. But there was a cost: namely, the absence of anything in the opinion guiding how desegregation would take place. The Supreme Court directed the lower courts to coordinate the desegregation of public schools “with all deliberate speed,” but this ambiguous instruction did not result in uniform enforcement. The decade after Brown saw a massive wave of retrenchment by ­pro-segregation state lawmakers.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to remedy this not only by establishing the EEOC, but by barring “discrimination on account of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” in places of public accommodation, like hotels or restaurants. The concept of “protected classes” was born. “Racial desegregation in private employment,” as one scholar explained, “came only after Congress empowered” the EEOC.

Despite this history, the agency never had a mandate to protect only historically marginalized groups; “race” is the protected class, not “Black people.” This has allowed conservative advocates over the last 50 years to slowly refashion “protected class” for their use. Barely a decade after the Civil Rights Act was passed, in some of the first major anti–affirmative action cases to arrive in the Supreme Court, white plaintiffs argued such policies in schools were illegal because they “discriminated against white applicants on the basis of race.” A bedrock of universities’ fight against racism, the conservatives argued, was racist itself.

These initial efforts were unsuccessful. But through a series of cases, conservatives—particularly legal strategist Edward Blum—continued to push the Supreme Court to consider civil rights legislation to be reverse racism. Five decades of such work culminated in 2023’s Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which effectively killed affirmative action in higher education on the basis that it violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent criticized the decision as “cement[ing] a superficial rule of colorblindness” and “subvert[ing] the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality.” The majority’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, she wrote, was “contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history,” and it belied the painfully obvious truth that “ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal.” Former ­Columbia University President Lee Bollinger summed up the sentiment of many higher education leaders: “It feels tragic.”

The fact that the Supreme Court has now provided cover for white men to claim the status of “protected class” on the basis of race and sex does not give the EEOC carte blanche to do whatever it wants to shield them. The agency has a well-defined process: a formal complaint, evaluation, and then an investigation. But the recent letters to law firms from the EEOC elided these checkpoints. They stated simply that the inquiry “is exclusively based on publicly available information regarding your firm.” That’s such an egregious break from procedure that it prompted seven former EEOC officials to write to the current chair that “these letters appear to exceed your authority” under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A separate letter by eight prominent advocacy groups, including the ACLU, similarly stated: “An EEOC Commissioner, even the Chair, has no unilateral authority to demand the requested information and certainly does not have the power to change or reinterpret federal anti-discrimination law based on political whims.”

The obvious is true here: The agency’s moves are a scare tactic. The letters pay only lip service to the EEOC’s actual legal authority. They convert the casual right-wing rhetoric of “reverse racism” into a legal standard without much thought. And they stretch “protected class” until it begins to lose all coherence—which is perhaps part of the point.

The EEOC appears to be trying to weaken the system of discrimination law in general. That’s particularly obvious when seen in the context of the EEOC’s other postelection moves—such as removing safeguards against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity as it did in late January, in seeming defiance of the Supreme Court’s holding in Bostock v. Clayton County that both are protected by Title VII. In total, the gestures undermine the entire legal basis for having discrimination protections. Because when even a government entity can pluck a legal phrase so completely out of its context and use it however it wants, who’s to say that a protected class—or the law, for that matter—should mean anything at all?

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Missouri Supreme Court Defies Voters, Halts Abortions in the State

One might have thought that last November, when Missourians voted to enshrine “reproductive freedom,” including abortion, in the state constitution, that would be the end of the conversation. In overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, the US Supreme Court professed that the question of whether abortion should be legal was now up to states. And the people of Missouri made it very clear: They wanted abortion rights (at least until fetal viability).

Alas, the Missouri Supreme Court doesn’t seem to be inclined to listen.

Thanks to the passage of Amendment 3, Missouri’s criminal abortion ban is gone. But local Planned Parenthood affiliates are still fighting in court to overturn the web of restrictions, known as TRAP laws, that made providing abortions virtually impossible in the state even when Roe was the law of the land. These include a 72-hour waiting period, hallway width requirements for abortion clinics, and a rule that providers must have admitting privileges at a hospital 15 minutes away, to name just a few. In a pair of decisions in [December][4] and [February][5], Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang agreed to temporarily suspend enough of those old laws to allow abortions to resume in Missouri while the court case heads to a January 2026 trial.

But on Tuesday, the state supreme court overturned Zhang’s rulings, ordering her to reconsider the temporary block on the TRAP laws using a different legal standard. As a result, abortion providers have once again been forced to halt their work, rendering the constitutional right to abortion effectively moot, for now. For the second time since 2022, abortion clinics had to call pregnant people this week to let them know their scheduled abortions had been canceled, the Associated Press [reported][6].

“This decision puts our state back under a de facto abortion ban and is devastating for Missourians and the providers they trust with their personal health care decisions,” Emily Wales and Margot Riphagen, leaders of the two Planned Parenthood affiliates that operate in Missouri, said [in a joint statement][7]. “We will continue to fight for their freedom to the constitutionally protected health care they voted for.”

Planned Parenthood lawyers have already filed a brief asking Zhang to re-issue her preliminary injunction under the new standard and block the TRAP laws again. But even if Zhang agrees, and abortions do resume again in Missouri in a few weeks—or after a January 2026 trial—abortion rights in the state will remain far from settled.

That’s because,[ two weeks ago][8], Missouri lawmakers voted to put yet another constitutional amendment on the ballot—this one repealing the reproductive freedom amendment and banning virtually all abortions. Voters will see that question on their November 2026 ballots—or sooner, if Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe decides to call a special election.

[4]: http://Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang [5]: https://www.stlpr.org/health-science-environment/2025-02-14/abortions-resume-missouri-judge-halts-licensing-requirements [6]: https://apnews.com/article/abortion-ruling-missouri-supreme-court-0030d333e95de0ed2aebcf114b25aeba [7]: https://www.stlpr.org/health-science-environment/2025-05-27/missouri-supreme-court-overturn-abortion-amendment-3 [8]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/missouri-referendum-repeal-abortion-rights-amendment/

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Donald Trump’s Decades-Long Obsession With Eugenics

Many people were shockedto read allegations last year byDonald Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump III, about his uncle: Fred, whose son William has intellectual and developmental disabilities, reported that the elder Trump said during his first presidential term that people like William should “just die.”

That is shocking—but it’s not surprising. The comment falls into a pattern of eugenicist and ableist views that Trump has espoused all the way back to the 1980s, when he spoke openly about the importance of having “the right genes” in an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

The opposition’s failure to address and confront Trump’s eugenicist views, the American studies scholar Susan Currell wrote in a 2019 article, “shows that a wide-ranging eugenic ideology is embedded in the broader American body politic.” The lack of emphasis on Trump’s comments and record around disability and genetics bears that out. Trump makes a lot of outrageous statements—but there’s a pattern to his comments about intelligence (or lack thereof), his intense hostility towards disabled people (including reputed public use of the r-word stretching back decades), and his preoccupation with “good” genes: it’s inseparable from his constant promotion of Afrikaner and Northern European immigration, sympathy to claims of “white genocide,” and promotion of close advisors like Stephen Miller and Elon Musk.

Taken together, that track record illustrates the sitting president’s eugenicist mindset—one that comes into sharp focus in the timeline below.

1980

A former vice president in charge of construction at the Trump Organization alleged in an opinion piece that Trump shouted, “Get rid of the [expletive] braille. No blind people are going to live in Trump Tower,” when an architect showed Trump the planned interior of a new elevator.

Donald Trump at age 33, holding a model of the Fifth Avenue Trump Tower.Bettmann/Getty

1988

While promoting his Art of the Deal, Donald Trump told Oprah Winfrey that “you have to be lucky in the sense to be born with the right genes” in order to be successful.

1999

Trump’s great-nephew William is born with complex disabilities. Despite Trump’s physical proximity, he never bothered to meet William in person—and still hasn’t to this day, Fred Trump III told Mother Jones.

Fred, his son William, and a golden retriever.Courtesy Fred Trump III

2004

Trump has been casually using the R-word publicly for at least two decades, including towards an unnamed golfer in this appearance on the Howard Stern Show—while saying that even that guy said Trump should be paid more on The Apprentice.

TRUMP to HOWARD STERN in September 2004:

"I have a golf pro who's mentally retard ― I mean he's like really not a smart guy." pic.twitter.com/qBQOq2rCQq

— JM Rieger (@RiegerReport) September 5, 2018

2011

Deaf actress and Academy Award winner Marlee Matlin placed second on Celebrity Apprentice. The Daily Beast reported that Trump had made an ableist comment about her deafness to her face, in footage that did not air, and called her “r-tarded” behind her back.

(L-R) Star Jones, Marlee Matlin, Donald Trump, Meat Loaf and John Rich attend a Celebrity Apprentice event at Florence Gould Hall on April 26, 2011 in New York City.Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic/Zuma

In his book Time to Get Tough: Make America #1 Again, Trump wrote that Social Security disability claims—specifically, that “one out of every twenty people in America now claims disability”—stood in the way of making America great. (That figure is actually quite low, considering around that one in four American adults has a disability.)

2015

In an incident some observers thought would cost him the election, Trump did a cruel, mocking impression of New York Times reporter Serge F. Kovaleski’s disability on the campaign trail. Trump later claimed not to have done so, despite clear video evidence.

2016

Asked who he’d consult with on foreign policy, Trump said himself—as he has “a very good brain.”

2017

Trump claimed that his Cabinet members, yet to be confirmed, had “by far the highest IQ of any Cabinet ever assembled.”

President Donald J. Trump holds a cabinet meeting.Kevin Dietsch/CNP/Zuma

Axios reported that Trump physically mocked both Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has long-term health issues related to polio, and the late Sen. John McCain, who has disabilities related to the torture he experienced as a prisoner of war.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and John McCain at a statue unveiling ceremony for former Sen. Barry Goldwater in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall, February 11, 2015. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

2018

During a trip to Singapore, Trump lauded his uncle, late MIT physicist John Trump, as someone with “good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart.”

John G. Trump, the president’s uncle, sits next to a medical apparatus he helped to develop.MIT Museum/Wikimedia

After the GOP’s failure to repeal part of the Affordable Care Act, Trump approved a Justice Department commitment not to pursue health insurers for failing to cover appropriate care for people with pre-exisiting conditions, which includes all disabled people.

2019

Trump appointed his former physician, Ronny Jackson, to be his chief medical advisor after Jackson said that Trump had “good genes.”

Rear Adm. Ronny JacksonTom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom/Zuma

Trump branded journalists “degenerate Trump haters”—language that, as my colleague Mark Follman wrote in 2019, “historically has connotations of eugenics and Nazi propaganda.”

People turn to make their feelings known toward the media covering President Donald Trump during a ‘Evangelicals for Trump’ campaign event held at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami, Florida.Joe Raedle/Getty

2020

Following a May 2020 White House meeting with disability advocates, Trump said to his nephew Fred Trump III that people with complex disabilities “should just die.”

The same month, at a campaign event in Michigan, Trump complimented the “great bloodlines” of Henry Ford, himself a noted eugenicist and virulent bigot who received an award from the Nazi German regime in 1938.

Trump said that his supporters at a Minnesota rally, who appeared to be mostly white and able-bodied, “have good genes”: “A lot of it is about the genes,” he continued, referring to it as the “racehorse theory” and repeating “You have good genes in Minnesota.”

"You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we're so different? You have good genes in Minnesota." — Trump pic.twitter.com/OiF63qZaKx

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2020

In the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Trump dismissed the deaths of people with underlying health issues, saying Covid alone “affects virtually nobody”—now a mainstay right-wing talking point.

2023

Kicking off his return to campaigning for the presidency, Trump said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

2024

Instead of criticizing then-President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech for its content, Trump chooses to mock Biden’s stutter.

Trump also referred to both then-President Biden and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris as “mentally impaired.”

Trump: Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country. pic.twitter.com/v6Yo6uINp5

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 28, 2024

Trump reportedly called Harris the R-word at a Trump Tower penthouse dinner with billionaire donors, according to the New York Times.

In an October radio interview covered by my colleague Isabela Dias, Trump said that migrants coming into the country had “bad genes.”

2025

After January’s fatal plane crash near Reagan Airport in Washington, Trump seemed to blame disabled FAA workers for the collision, rattling off a list of the disabilities he claimed the agency had allowed air traffic controllers to have in a speech that centered on a fixation with “naturally talented geniuses.”

Wreckage of an American Airlines plane is lifted from the Potomac River during recovery efforts near Reagan National Airport, February 3, 2025.Carol Guzy/Zuma

In his first day in office, Trump rolled back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs established under Biden to seek to hire more disabled people, people of color, and LGBTQ people—all of whom face discrimination in hiring processes—into federal positions.

On March 20, Trump signed an executive order—that a judge later blocked—to hollow out the Department of Education, in what he hopes will be a prelude to its complete dismantling. Programs for disabled students have been set to be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, itself contending with massive, sweeping cuts under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has promoted disinformation about vaccines and autism, among other disabilities.

Trump poses with Secretary of Education Linda McMahon after signing an executive order aimed at shuttering the Department of Education.Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty

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Can Bacteria Serve as ‘Microscopic Miners’ of the Metals We Need?

“This story was originally published on the author’s substack, Field Notes with Alexander C Kaufman, to which you can subscribe here.”

Five years after President Donald Trump signaled his support for extracting metals from the moon, his new administration is seeking to satisfy the United States’ hunger for critical minerals by encouraging mining under the polar ice caps, amid warzones, and at the bottom of the ocean.

A breakthrough by a startup backed by two of the world’s biggest mining companies points to a different path to obtaining the metals needed for manufacturing next-generation energy and defense technologies: Microbes.

Last week, the Denver-based company Endolith announced the completion of tests on whether its mix of genetically modified microbes could extract significant amounts of copper from the type of low-grade, hard-to-process ores left over in mining waste that make up 70 percent of the world’s known reserves of the metal.

The results “outperformed conventional approaches to low-grade heap leaching and revealed new value in mineralized waste previously considered uneconomic to process.”

In other words, the company said it proved its “microscopic miners” are “remarkably good at extracting metals that conventional chemistry leaves behind,” Endolith CEO Liz Dennett told me, noting that her company was prepared to deploy its microbes at scale.

“We don’t need to mine the moon or venture 20,000 leagues under the sea to solve our copper shortage,” she told me over email. “The microbes have been doing this work for billions of years, we’re just finally paying attention.”

The US federal government is just starting to pump money into researching the use of microbes for mining. The Australian mining behemoth BHP provided Endolith with funding for testing and site-matched ore samples through its in-house innovation program. The London-based metals giant Rio Tinto, meanwhile, backed the Founders Factory startup accelerator that helped Endolith get started. Still, neither company has made a formal investment in Endolith.

Here’s how Endolith’s process works: First, the company analyzes the ore and the native microbes—which include both bacteria and archaea, the tinier single-celled organisms—at each site to understand the baseline conditions. Then, using a microbial library and genomic techniques, its researchers select and adapt strains that are best suited to the specific mineralogy and conditions of the site.

Once that’s established, Endolith grows the optimized microbes in portable bioreactors, ensuring that the microbes are fresh and consistent with the location. Finally, the company adds the microbes via liquid sprinkled or dripped onto heaps of wasted dirt at the mine and continuously monitors the activity to make real-time adjustments to maximize how much copper the microbes are recovering.

“We’re creating a new industrial paradigm at the intersection of biology and mining.”

“We’re creating a new industrial paradigm at the intersection of biology and mining,” said Dennett, who earned a Ph.D in geosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and went on to work at NASA’s astrobiology program and run data architecture for Amazon Web Services before founding Endolith. “Our goal is simple: reshape supply chains for the most important technology transitions of our lifetime.”

Extracting metals with microbes is nothing new. The process of using microbes to convert copper ions in liquid into metal through calcification dates back more than 2,000 years. While the actual biological function wasn’t yet understood, Han dynasty prince Liu An described using water to concentrate copper as far back as 120 BCE, a method Chinese scientists later put into practice in 1086 under the Northern Song dynasty.

It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that miners found convincing evidence showing “that microbes were active participants in leaching copper and some other metals from ores,” according to a 2003 paper from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In recent years, scientists have ratcheted up research into different kinds of bacteria that could be used to produce rare earth metals. But there’s been little commercial activity outside laboratories.

Endolith’s test results are a “significant and potentially meaningful step forward in the field,” said Patricio Martínez Bellange, the director of biomining at Universidad Andrés Bello’s Center for Sustainable Biotechnology in Chile.

“While further validation is necessary, Endolith’s reported results represent a promising advancement in unlocking significant copper resources from low-grade ores in a potentially more sustainable manner,” he told me in a LinkedIn message after reviewing the company’s announcement. “This could indeed be a meaningful milestone in the quest for a more secure and environmentally responsible supply of critical minerals.”

Still, he cautioned that different ore types, “the long-term stability of the microbial cultures under industrial conditions, and the overall economics at scale will need to be thoroughly evaluated.”

Competition with the naturally-occurring microbes at mines represents “the next challenge” to “fully scaling up this process in the field,” said Buz Barstow, an associate professor of biological engineering at Cornell University.

If Endolith’s real-time monitoring “can solve this problem,” then they will truly be onto something,” said Barstow, who reviewed the company’s announcement for this newsletter.

But one solution can beget another problem. “If they do solve this problem,” he said, “then it creates the new problem of containment of these genetically engineered microbes.”

These are still the early days of researching biomining, Barstow said. National funding for researching metal-mining microbes has been scarce.

That was starting to turn around. In 2023, the National Science Foundation opened the door to financing research into the nascent field. Barstow said he and colleagues proposed a project called the Microbe-Mineral Atlas, consisting of 22 principal investigators at 11 universities in four countries—the US, Britain, Japan, and Canada—that would discover new knowledge about how microbes interact with minerals and metals and how they could be engineered for biomining.

The British, Japanese, and Canadian funders rejected the project as “too ambitious,” he said. But the Biden administration’s National Science Foundation “took a risk on the US part of the team, and gave us a small down payment on the funding we asked for.”

Since January, Barstow said, his team has been working on sampling microbes from “geologically unusual environments, trying to figure out new genes that control mineral and metal interactions.”

But his hopes are dimming now with the Trump administration slashing all kinds of federal grants.

“With funding cuts from the government,” Barstow said, “this type of work is in danger of never getting off the ground.”

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Rage and Resentment Are Killing the Great American Road Trip

A record 45 million Americans were expected to travel this Memorial Day weekend, long considered the unofficial kickoff to summer. And most of them were hitting the road. Sarah Kendzior is no stranger to the family road trip. Her family, in fact, has visited 38 states—and counting. These trips were born out of a love and curiosity for America and a desire to explore small towns, vast National Parks, and the unexpected oddities along the way. And when money was tight, the best way for her family to see the country was simply to jump in the car and go.

In her new book, The Last American Road Trip: A Memoir, Sarah chronicles those family trips while grappling with a country she believes is failing to uphold its own ideals. Sarah says she feels an urgency to share the country she loves with her children but often wonders if these travels—and the version of America she knows—might be coming to an end. “Every trip I describe in that book,” Sarah says, “I set off wondering: Is this the last time the four of us will get to be together exploring America with the freedom that we have now?”

On this week’s More To The Story, Sarah chats with host Al Letson about trying to show her children the America she adores while holding a light to its flaws, her concerns for the nation’s future, and why hitting the road is often the best way to understand yourself—and your country.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Trump Has Nothing to Do Today. So, of Course, He Posted.

Nothing is listed on President Donald Trump’s public schedule today. In theory, that could mean it will be a relatively calm day from our commander-in-chief.

But, no. On Tuesday, Trump awoke and grabbed hold of his Truth Social account for a special string of posts. First, he went after a “transitioned Male athlete” in California, threatening to pull federal funding “maybe permanently” if the state did not adhere to his executive order banning trans women from women’s sports. Then, perhaps most alarmingly, Trump continued by ordering local law enforcement officials to block the trans athlete, whom he did not identify, from participating in the state finals. (As CNBC reports, a trans high school student has been the source of media attention in recent weeks; state finals for track and field are slated for next weekend.)

As with most things related to instructions abruptly cast from the Oval Office, it wasn’t immediately clear how the president wanted law enforcement officials to intervene. The post marked a dramatic escalation of the administration’s anti-trans policies, as well as Trump’s willingness to single out vulnerable individuals in his attacks.

But just before noon, the president appeared to move onto a different issue: Russia’s intensified military operations in Ukraine. “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realize is that if it weren’t for me, lots of really bad things would have already happened to Russia, and I mean REALLY BAD. He’s playing with fire!”

The post, which appeared to show Trump openly admitting that he has protected Putin from serious repercussions over Russia’s war in Ukraine, could stand alone in the power of its unmatched absurdity. It also hinted that Trump, who has yet to impose any punishments against Russia after its recent assaults in Ukraine, is unlikely to go beyond Truth Social to call out Putin after the two engaged in strange name-calling over the weekend.

So there you have it: the president appears to be reading the news and then wildly posting new, radical positions our government will take, with little thought. Fun!

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Trump’s Big Fail: Making America the 1980s Again

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

Gargantuan tax cuts for the well-heeled, draconian cuts in programs for low-income Americans, boondoggle spending for iffy missile defense, and siding with the whites of South Africa: Donald Trump is making America the 1980s again. Last week, he shoved the nation into a time machine and transported it to the Age of Reagan, embracing the worst excesses of the era. In several instances, he has surpassed the outrages and extreme measures of our first made-on-TV president. Trump is putting the failed policies of the past on steroids in his relentless crusade to derail and damage the nation.

On Thursday, House Republicans passed a megabill covering taxes, government spending, and much else that Trump has called for. The tax cuts are obscene—the typical Republican fare, throwing piles of money at the upper crust and crumbs (at best) to the rest. According to the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, the top one-tenth of a percent—people with incomes greater than $4.3 million—will receive on average a $389,000 annual boost from the tax provisions, if the GOP-controlled Senate accepts this plan. Many Americans who make less than $51,000 could lose about $700 a year in after-tax income. It’s truly a rob-the-poor-to-pay-the-rich scheme.

The true beneficiaries of the Trump-GOP measure ain’t a secret. Look at this chart from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy:

One quarter of the entire tax cut ends up in the pockets of the 1 percent. It’s a good time to be an oligarch. The bill proves that the purported populism of Trump and MAGA is a big con.

And why only screw hard-pressed Americans on taxes, when you can screw them by ripping apart social programs they rely upon?

It also illustrates that Republicans—surprise, surprise—are huge hypocrites when it comes to the deficit. They don’t give a damn about red ink, if the green flows to the wealthy. The conservative Manhattan Institute estimates this tax bill will cost more than Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, the Covid stimulus act, Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill plan, and his Inflation Reduction Act combined, adding $6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years. (One GOP House member claimed it would add $20 trillion!) Still, party on, dude. (Okay, Wayne’s World was a 1990s film.)

And why only screw hard-pressed Americans on taxes, when you can screw them by ripping apart social programs they rely upon? To cover a slice of the costs of this tax-cut orgy for oligarchs, the House Republicans included historic slashes of the safety net. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the measure’s assorted reductions and changes in Medicaid and other programs would decrease federal spending on health care by more than $700 billion and leave 8.6 million Americans uninsured by 2030.

It would also shrink the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—a.k.a. food stamps. Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told CNBC this is the “biggest cut in the program’s history.” It would be the first time since SNAP began that the federal government would not ensure children in every state have access to food benefits.

This is so Reaganesque. Remember ketchup as a vegetable?

Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill are trying to revive trickle-down Reaganomics, claiming these tax cuts for plutocrats will juice the economy for all. But supply-side economics has long been discredited. Reagan’s embrace of it led to a recession and such large deficits in the early 1980s that even Republicans voted to raise taxes, and President George H.W. Bush, his successor, accepted the reality that taxes had to be hiked up for fiscal sanity, despite his “read my lips” campaign vow not to increase them.

Trump and his minions on Capitol Hill are trying to revive trickle-down Reaganomics, claiming these tax cuts for plutocrats will juice the economy for all.

In addition to bringing back the trickle-down catastrophe, Trump rebooted another old show: Star Wars. Reagan, enamored with the idea of preventing nuclear war, launched the Strategic Defense Initiative that was supposed to deliver a system for shooting down nuclear missiles lobbed at the United States. The military spent up to $100 billion and perhaps as much as $400 billion—no one seems to know for sure how much was wasted—and no such system was ever built. Top scientists at the time said the whole thing was not technically feasible, and many nuclear strategists feared it would destabilize the nuclear balance and incentivize a Russian first strike on the United States. Eventually—after much money went down the drain—SDI withered.

But it’s back. Last week, Trump announced Golden Dome, a supposedly “next generation” missile defense shield that would go beyond the aspirations of SDI and protect the nation from not only ballistic missiles but cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, and drones. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the initial down payment would be $25 billion. Once again, scientific experts are calling this a pipe dream. In March, the American Physical Society released a report that concluded:

Creating a reliable and effective defense against the threat posed by even the small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs…remains a daunting challenge. The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse-intercept to the severe reach-versus-time challenge of boost-phase intercept. Few of the main challenges have been solved, and many of the hard problems are likely to remain formidable over the 15-year time horizon the study considered.

Sound familiar? The report added, “The costs and benefits of such an effort therefore need to be weighed carefully.” It doesn’t seem like such a weighing is underway.

A Carnegie Endowment paper reached a similar conclusion, noting “the challenge of developing a space-based missile defense shield remains formidable.” It cited a National Research Council study from 2012 that estimated the total cost of a space-based missile defense system could be as much as $831 billion (in 2025 dollars).

Hundreds of billions of dollars, a system that might not work, more weapons, more global instability—what a deal.

It added that this program will likely prompt Russia to build more and better nukes: “Russia will…need to respond. That will entail accelerating existing efforts to modernize each leg of the nuclear triad by replacing Soviet-era delivery systems with newer Russian designs. We can also expect renewed emphasis on exotic weapons that promise to evade all conceivable missile defense systems.” The latter includes the Poseidon, a nuclear-powered torpedo that can hit coastal targets in the United States. Say, New York City. “Golden Dome,” this paper noted, “will therefore press Russia into a new arms race.”

Hundreds of billions of dollars, a system that might not work, more weapons, more global instability—what a deal.

As for South Africa, Trump hosted a visit from that nation’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, on May 21. In front of his guest in the Oval Office, Trump pushed the fraudulent notion that Afrikaner farmers have been the victims of a white genocide. That’s why he said he had to take in 59 of them recently as refugees—because they are victims of persecution. (Trump’s administration is not accepting persecuted refugees from other African nations for some reason.) With all this, Trump was promoting a phony narrative that has also been championed by Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, as well as by white nationalists.

A recent analysis by PolitiFact cast this story of white genocide as rubbish: “White farmers have been murdered in South Africa. But those murders account for less than 1% of more than 27,000 annual murders nationwide. Experts said the deaths do not amount to genocide, and Trump misleads about land confiscation.” It quotes Gareth Newham, who heads a justice and violence prevention program at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, who said, “The idea of a ‘white genocide’ taking place in South Africa is completely false. As an independent institute tracking violence and violent crime in South Africa, if there was any evidence of either a genocide or targeted violence taking place against any group based on their ethnicity this, we would be amongst the first to raise (the) alarm and provide the evidence to the world.”

In the White House, Trump was peddling a racist fairy tale promulgated by bigots—in what was yet another throwback to the decade of Reagan. Throughout his presidency, Reagan and the right fought the anti-apartheid movement, voicing support and sympathy for the racist regime of Pretoria. They opposed calls for divesting from South Africa. They denigrated Nelson Mandela and his freedom movement as commies. Some right-wingers went so far as to buy Krugerrands, gold coins minted in South Africa that were boycotted around the world, to express solidarity with the repressive white ruling class.

Decades later—after the liberation of South Africa—it might be tough for Trump to call for reinstating apartheid. (Make Apartheid Great Again?) But he has found another way to exploit that country for his racism-fueled politics. With this unfounded conspiracy theory, he depicts a Black-ruled nation as a place of savagery. Thus, he signals to white nationalists he’s on their side and characterizes Blacks as a threat to white people.

It’s back to the future. (That movie came out in 1985!) We’ve dumped big hair and tacky leg warmers, but Trump is emulating policy disasters of the past, and he’s poised to do far more damage than Reagan. The nation has not learned from the past. We are reliving it with another show-biz president—as both farce and tragedy.

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What’s One Way to Help Preserve the Antarctic Climate? Penguin Poop.

New research shows that penguin guano in Antarctica is an important source of ammonia aerosol particles that help drive the formation and persistence of low clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting some incoming sunlight back to space.

The findings reinforce the growing awareness that Earth’s intricate web of life plays a significant role in shaping the planetary climate. Even at the small levels measured, the ammonia particles from the guano interact with sulfur-based aerosols from ocean algae to start a chemical chain reaction that forms billions of tiny particles that serve as nuclei for water vapor droplets.

The low marine clouds that often cover big tracts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica are a wild card in the climate system because scientists don’t fully understand how they will react to human-caused heating of the atmosphere and oceans. One recent study suggested that the big increase in the annual global temperature during 2023 and 2024 that has continued into this year was caused in part by a reduction of that cloud cover.

“I’m constantly surprised at the depth of how one small change affects everything else. This really does show that there is a deep connection between ecosystem processes and the climate.”

“I’m constantly surprised at the depth of how one small change affects everything else,” said Matthew Boyer, a coauthor of the new study and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research. “This really does show that there is a deep connection between ecosystem processes and the climate. And really, it’s the synergy between what’s coming from the oceans, from the sulfur-producing species, and then the ammonia coming from the penguins.”

Aquatic penguins evolved from flying birds about 60 million years ago, shortly after the age of dinosaurs, and have persisted through multiple, slow, natural cycles of ice ages and warmer interglacial eras, surviving climate extremes by migrating to and from pockets of suitable habitat, called climate refugia, said Rose Foster-Dyer, a marine and polar ecologist with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

A 2018 study that analyzed the remains of an ancient “super colony” of the birds suggests there may have been a “penguin optimum” climate window between about 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, at least for some species in some parts of Antarctica, she said. Various penguin species have adapted to different habitat niches and this will face different impacts caused by human-caused warming, she said.

Foster-Dyer has recently done penguin research around the Ross Sea and said that climate change could open more areas for land-breeding Adélie penguins, which don’t breed on ice like some other species.

“There’s evidence that this whole area used to have many more colonies…which could possibly be repopulated in the future,” she said. She is also more optimistic than some scientists about the future for emperor penguins, the largest species of the group, she added.

“They breed on fast ice, and there’s a lot of publications coming out about how the populations might be declining and their habitat is hugely threatened,” she said. “But they’ve lived through so many different cycles of the climate, so I think they’re more adaptable than people currently give them credit for.”

In total, about 20 million breeding pairs of penguins nest in vast colonies all around the frozen continent. Some of the largest colonies, with up to 1 million breeding pairs, can cover several square miles. There aren’t any solid estimates for the total amount of guano produced by the flightless birds annually, but some studies have found that individual colonies can produce several hundred tons. Several new penguin colonies were discovered recently when their droppings were spotted in detailed satellite images.

A few penguin colonies have grown recently while others appear to be shrinking, but in general, their habitat is considered threatened by warming and changing ice conditions, which affects their food supplies. The speed of human-caused warming, for which there is no precedent in paleoclimate records, may exacerbate the threat to penguins, which evolve slowly compared to many other species, Foster-Dyer said.

“Everything’s changing at such a fast rate, it’s really hard to say much about anything,” she said.

Recent research has shown how other types of marine life are also important to the global climate system. Nutrients from bird droppings help fertilize blooms of oxygen-producing plankton, and huge swarms of fish that live in the middle layers of the ocean cycle carbon vertically through the water, ultimately depositing it in a generally stable sediment layer on the seafloor.

Boyer said the new research started as a follow-up project to other studies of atmospheric chemistry in the same area, near the Argentine Marambio Base on an island along the Antarctic Peninsula. Observations by other teams suggested it could be worth specifically trying to look at ammonia, he said.

Boyer and the other scientists set up specialized equipment to measure the concentration of ammonia in the air from January to March 2023. They found that, when the wind blew from the direction of a colony of about 60,000 Adélie penguins about 5 miles away, the ammonia concentration increased to as high as 13.5 parts per billion—more than 1,000 times higher than the background reading. Even after the penguins migrated from the area toward the end of February, the ammonia concentration was still more than 100 times as high as the background level.

“We have one instrument that we use in the study to give us the chemistry of gases as they’re actually clustering together,” he said.

“In general, ammonia in the atmosphere is not well-measured because it’s really difficult to measure, especially if you want to measure at a very high sensitivity, if you have low concentrations like in Antarctica,” he said.

The goal was to determine where the ammonia is coming from, including testing a previous hypothesis that the ocean surface could be the source, he said.

But the size of the penguin colonies made them the most likely source.

“It’s well known that sea birds give off ammonia. You can smell them. The birds stink,” he said. “But we didn’t know how much there was. So what we did with this study was to quantify ammonia and to quantify its impact on the cloud formation process.”

The scientists had to wait until the wind blew from the penguin colony toward the research station.

“If we’re lucky, the wind blows from that direction and not from the direction of the power generator,” he said. “And we were lucky enough that we had one specific event where the winds from the penguin colony persisted long enough that we were actually able to track the growth of the particles. You could be there for a year, and it might not happen.”

The ammonia from the guano does not form the particles but supercharges the process that does, Boyer said.

“It’s really the dimethyl sulfide from phytoplankton that gives off the sulfur,” he said. “The ammonia enhances the formation rate of particles. Without ammonia, sulfuric acid can form new particles, but with ammonia, it’s 1,000 times faster, and sometimes even more, so we’re talking up to four orders of magnitude faster because of the guano.”

This is important in Antarctica specifically because there are not many other sources of particles, such as pollution or emissions from trees, he added.

“So the strength of the source matters in terms of its climate effect over time,” he said. “And if the source changes, it’s going to change the climate effect.”

It will take more research to determine if penguin guano has a net cooling effect on the climate. But in general, he said, if the particles transport out to sea and contribute to cloud formation, they will have a cooling effect.

“What’s also interesting,” he said, “is if the clouds are over ice surfaces, it could actually lead to warming because the clouds are less reflective than the ice beneath.” In that case, the clouds could actually reduce the amount of heat that brighter ice would otherwise reflect away from the planet. The study did not try to measure that effect, but it could be an important subject for future research, he added.

The guano effect lingers even after the birds leave the breeding areas. A month after they were gone, Boyer said ammonia levels in the air were still 1,000 times higher than the baseline.

“The emission of ammonia is a temperature-dependent process, so it’s likely that once wintertime comes, the ammonia gets frozen in,” he said. “But even before the penguins come back, I would hypothesize that as the temperature warms, the guano starts to emit ammonia again. And the penguins move all around the coast, so it’s possible they’re just fertilizing an entire coast with ammonia.”

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Inside Palm Springs’ Queer Rodeo

In early May, the small city of Banning, California, hosted the Palm Springs Hot Rodeo. The competition, which has occurred most years for the past 50, salutes the homoeroticism of rodeo culture. The four-day event—an official stop on the International Gay Rodeo Association circuit—features traditional rodeo events like steer wrestling and calf roping, along with more whimsical activities like a wild drag race, in which a person in drag rides a steer while their teammates guide it, and goat dressing, in which a pair attempts to put tighty-whities on a goat as quickly as possible.

All events are open to any gender—men can barrel race and women can bull ride. “A lot of gay people can’t be incorporated into the other rodeo world,” contestant Savannah Smith told me. “You can do whatever you want here,” she added, “and everyone here is supportive.”

This year, the festive event took place against increasing attacks on queer rights. Two days after the rodeo ended, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration’s ban on transgender soldiers in the US military. It is unclear what will be targeted next; some fear the overturning of Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 decision legalizing gay marriage. Against this backdrop, the Hot Rodeo serves as an important reminder of the resilience of queer culture in America, with its inclusive celebration of LGBTQ athleticism and joy.

Curt Black and Bob Bayne set up contestant registration at the Tool Shed, a gay bar in Palm Springs, 30 minutes away from Banning, where the Hot Rodeo takes place.

Alexander Saites partners with Matthew Garcia during the rodeo’s dance contest.

Curt Black shows off his Palm Springs Hot Rodeo Outstanding Volunteer buckle.

Zac Rogen, a Hot Rodeo participant, says gay rodeos help keep queer representation in Western culture.

Brian Helander warms up his horse before competing in the Hot Rodeo.

Bob Bayne and Daniel Guevara participate in the rodeo’s “riderless horse” tradition. The riderless horse symbolizes those involved with the International Gay Rodeo Association who have since died, particularly those who died from complications with AIDS.

Rodeo director Sylvia Mower takes off her hat during the riderless horse procession.

David Lawson and Greg Begay compete in the steer decorating event. The goal is for a team of two to tie a ribbon on a steer’s tail as quickly as possible. Begay, who has been involved with gay rodeos for years, says, “It’s always been my goal in life to rodeo, and it just so happens that I’m gay.”

Brian Contratto and Gunner Sizemore compete in the goat dressing event. The goal is to catch a goat and place a pair of underwear on it as quickly as possible.

Brian Contratto shows off a tooth that broke in half during his steer riding event.

Katie Shaw and Pepe Lozada compete in the team roping event.

Love Bailey, the rodeo’s community grand marshal, performs during the grand entry.

Chris Otten holds his cowbell, painted with a pride flag, after competing in the bull riding event.

Rodeo contestants Steven Housley and Scott Reed pose for a portrait. The Palm Springs Hot Rodeo is the first gay rodeo Reed has participated in. “It’s the most welcoming group I’ve ever been around,” he says, adding, “Everyone here is equal.”

Two men dance together at the Dancing Under the Stars party hosted by the Palm Springs Hot Rodeo at Oscar’s, a bar in downtown Palm Springs.

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Trump Unleashes Bizarre Commencement Speech at West Point

You may assume that derision of drag shows would not come up in a commencement address at the prestigious US Military Academy known as West Point—but you would be wrong.

In a nearly hour-long speech by President Donald Trump on Saturday at the academy in New York—his second time speaking there—Trump also trashed diversity, equity, and inclusion policies; took credit for rebuilding the military; and cast himself as an unfairly persecuted victim who beat the odds by becoming president for a second time. Curiously, he madeno mention of his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth (a former Fox News host accused of alcoholism, mismanagement, and sexually inappropriate behavior and rape, which Hegseth’s lawyer has denied) or the recent classified war plans that Hegseth infamously shared in a Signal chat.

There were a few moments of normalcy in the commencement speech: Trump praised the students’ accomplishments, congratulated a few standout students in particular, told them to thank their parents; and urged them to “never give up.” But they were sandwiched in between multiple bizarre comments from Trump, some of which are excerpted below, alongside fact checks:

• “The job of the US Armed Forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, but to spread democracy to everybody around the world at the point of a gun.” (Under the Biden administration, Department of Defense officials said military bases could not host drag shows, though reportedly there is no evidence federal funds were ever used for such events—so it’s unclear what Trump was referring to.)

"The job of the US Armed Forces is not to host drag shows, to transform foreign cultures, or to spread democracy … at the point of a gun," says @POTUS.

"The military’s job is to dominate any foe and annihilate any threat to America — ANYWHERE, ANY TIME, and ANY PLACE." pic.twitter.com/u1dv6mCAzQ

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 24, 2025

• “Peace through strength. You know the term, I’ve used it a lot. Because as much as you wanna fight, I’d rather do it without having to fight. I just wanna look at them and have them fold. And that’s happening.” (Russia’s war in Ukraine is still raging more than four months since Trump re-assumed office—its military just killed at least a dozen people in a drone and missile strike in Ukraine on Sunday—despite Trump’s campaign trail claim that he would end the war within 24 hours if reelected.)
• “And we are buying you new airplanes, brand-new, beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand-new planes, totally stealth planes. I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sorta wondering. You mean if we shape a wing this way, they don’t see it, but the other way they see it? I’m not so sure.” (Trump conspicuously did not mention the $400 million luxury jet his administration formally accepted from Qatar this week, despite the objections of Republicans and Democrats who worry that doing so violates the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution and that the plane will lack proper security measures to prevent surveillance.)
• “We couldn’t get anybody to join our military. We couldn’t get anybody to join our police or firefighters. We couldn’t get anybody to join anything. And right now, just less than a year later, we just set a brand new peacetime recruiting record.” (As CBS News reports, Trump’s attempt to take credit for boosting military recruitment is misleading: Data show the military is still struggling to recruit compared to earlier this decade, and experts say recent progress is likely due to reforms introduced under former President Joe Biden.)
• “There will be no more critical race theory or transgender for everybody forced onto our brave men and women in uniform or on anybody else for that matter in this country. And we will not have men playing in women’s sports if that’s okay.” (Where to start with this word salad of right-wing paranoia? As retired Gen. Mark Milley previously told Republican lawmakers, “We do not teach critical race theory. We don’t embrace critical race theory, and I think that’s a spurious conversation.” Less than two percent of the population identifies as transgender, and approximately 0.2 percent of the military is estimated to be trans, based on Defense Department data released earlier this year; still, the Trump administration has moved to ban trans troops from the military—a decision the Supreme Court upheld earlier this month.)
• “I went through a very tough time with some very radicalized sick people, and I say, I was investigated more than the great late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster, he was a very hardened criminal. I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone, and now I’m talking to you as president, can you believe this?” (Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts of fraud and former DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith said that he believed Trump would have been convicted for trying to overthrow the 2020 election had he not won reelection last November. A prior fact check from CNN found that Trump’s claim he was indicted more than Capone was false: Trump has been indicted four times, but Capone was indicted six times.)

Too bizarre for a fact check: Trump telling the graduates to avoid marriages to “trophy wives” while delivering a rambling story about real estate developer Bill Levitt.

Trump's West Point commencement audience is totally silent as he rants about trophy wives and yachts pic.twitter.com/LRb97OXJ7K

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 24, 2025

Trump departedafter concluding his rant, breaking with his predecessors’ traditions of shaking all graduates’ hands as they crossed the stage. Trump claimed he had to go “deal with” Russia and China.

A White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, provided a different explanation, stating in an email to Mother Jones that Trump “shook hundreds of hands of military leaders and cadets right before his speech and has shaken the hands of thousands of military members during his first and second term.”

Rogers also echoed Trump’s claim that he had pre-scheduled calls with Russia and China, and added: “While the mainstream media fabricates falsehoods, President Trump is planning a magnificent parade as a grand tribute to honor the service and sacrifice of the brave soldiers who have fought, bled, and died to keep us free.”

Rogers made no mention of the fact that the military parade is scheduled to take place on Trump’s birthday, June 14, and could cost an estimated $25 to $45 million, according to an Army spokesperson.

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Report: Police Killings Rose in the Five Years After George Floyd’s Murder

Five years ago today, George Floyd, a 46-year-old unarmed Black man, was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in Minneapolis.

The harrowing footage of the murder—in which Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes after a nearby store clerk alleged he tried to purchase cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill—sparked nationwide protests over police brutality against Black people, and the persistence of anti-Black racism more broadly. Chauvin was found guilty on all charges in the case and sentenced to more than 20 years in prison; three other officers who were also on the scene and failed to get Floyd help as he struggled to breathe were found guilty of federal civil rights violations and sentenced from 30 to 42 months in prison. But a new report from the New York Times, coupled with recent actions from the Trump administration, suggests that whatever progress appeared to come in the wake of Floyd’s murder was not lasting.

A New York Times analysis published Saturday, based on data from the Washington Post and the database Mapping Police Violence, found that the number of police killings nationwide has risen every year since 2020—with Black people constituting a disproportionate number of the victims. Last year, for example, there were a total of 1,226 people killed by police, an 18 percent increase from 2019, the Times found. While most of the victims killed by police reportedly were armed, some, like Floyd, were not. Last year, 53 unarmed people were killed by police, compared to 95 in 2020, according to the Times analysis. Over the past decade, Black people have been killed by police at more than two times the rate of white people. (Native Americans were the racial group with the highest rate of police killings, according to the Times data.)

The rates of police killings were higher—and have increased since 2020—in the redder states that President Donald Trump won in the last election; the bluer states that former Vice President Kamala Harris won, on the other hand, saw stabilized rates of police killings since 2020.

The actions of the Trump administration do not inspire confidence that those numbers will decrease anytime soon. This week, the Department of Justice announced it was dismissing lawsuits and consent decrees against police departments in Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, and in Louisville, Kentucky, where police killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020. (Officials in Minneapolis and Louisville said they would continue working to implement police reforms.) The DOJ also announced it was ending Biden-era investigations into a half dozen other police departments that the prior administration accused of constitutional violations. Civil rights groups said those moves would likely worsen police violence; the ACLU said Trump’s DOJ was sending “a message that the government is willing to look away from harm being inflicted on our communities—even when the harm is plain as day.”

Those shifts come as the Trump administration has also prioritized the abolishment of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, or DEI, across the federal government and beyond.

The current political climate may help explain why more than 70 percent of adults recently surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they do not believe the increased focus on race following Floyd’s murder made Black Americans’ lives better. And the amount of Americans who say they support the Black Lives Matter movement has dropped 15 points since 2020, though a majority—52 percent—still say they are in favor of it, according to Pew.

On Sunday,various Democratic lawmakers commemorated Floyd’s passing on social media, including Minnesotans Gov. Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar, along with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Rep. Monica McIver (D-N.J.), Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.). Crockett, Omar, and McIver called on Congress to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill first introduced in 2021 that would increase accountability for law enforcement. Its measures include creating a national registry to track police misconduct, limiting no-knock warrants and chokeholds, and requiring training on implicit bias and racial profiling for law enforcement officers. The bill was most recently reintroduced in the House last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas), but it failed to get a vote.

Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes sees reasons for hope, despite the limits to the progress of the past five years:

If 2020 was The Awakening, and the last four years have been The Retrenchment, then 2025 may mark the beginning of a new phase: The Reevaluation.

I think the 2020 BLM protests were about bolstering Black social and political power, and despite all of the attacks that effort has endured, Black people aren’t giving up on it any time soon.

In Louisiana, Black voters helped defeat a constitutional amendment that would have made it easier to try children as adults — a move that many viewed as a veiled attempt to deepen mass incarceration.

We’re seeing it in economic protest too, with Black consumers leading boycotts of major corporations like Target, disrupting profit margins and forcing boardroom conversations.

And we’re seeing it in grassroots organizing. Activists like Angela Rye and journalist Joy Reid are crisscrossing the country on the State of the People Power Tour, mobilizing and educating Black communities on how to build lasting political power from the ground up.

So, five years later, when we ask what’s changed, maybe the most honest answer is that we changed; and that might be the most powerful change of all.

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Another Trump Casualty: A Tiny Office That Keeps Measurements of the World Accurate

This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Cuts made by the Trump administration are threatening the function of a tiny but crucial office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that maintains the US framework of spatial information: latitudes, longitudes, vertical measurements like elevation, and even measurements of Earth’s gravitational field.

Staff losses at the National Geodetic Survey (NGS), the oldest scientific agency in the US, could further cripple its mission and activities, including a long-awaited project to update the accuracy of these measurements, former employees and experts say. As the world turns more and more toward operations that need precise coordinate systems like the ones NGS provides, the science that underpins this office’s activities, these experts say, is becoming even more crucial.

The work of NGS, says Tim Burch, the executive director of the National Society of Professional Surveyors, “is kind of like oxygen. You don’t know you need it until it’s not there.”

“NOAA remains dedicated to providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience,” NOAA spokesperson Alison Gillespie told Wired in an email when asked about the downsizing of NGS.

NGS was formed in 1807 by Thomas Jefferson, the son of a surveyor and cartographer. Originally called the Survey of the Coast, the organization, led by a young Swiss immigrant named Ferdinand Hassler, was tasked with mapping the coastlines of the new country. Over the next 200 years, its mission expanded to cover the practice of geodesy: the science of calculating the shape of the Earth, its orientation in space, and its gravitational field.

“Hassler understood that before you put pen to paper and make a chart or a map, if you wanted to [know how] things relate accurately one to another, especially if you’re going to do that over a large area like the United States, then you have to have a very strong mathematical foundation to put all these pieces together,” says Dave Doyle, a former chief geodetic surveyor at NGS. “That is, in a very simple way, what the science of geodesy brings to the nation.”

NGS is currently responsible for maintaining and updating what’s known as the National Spatial Reference System, a consistent system of physical coordinates used across federal and local governments, the private sector, and academia. This includes not only latitude and longitude but also measurements of depth and height as well as calculations around Earth’s gravitational field—crucial mathematics that inform much of the basic infrastructure around us, from constructing bridges to mapping out water and electric lines. NGS also maintains and operates more than 1,700 federally owned satellite receivers across the US, which provide publicly available geospatial information.

While individual surveyors can compare heights and distances in smaller areas, it’s far more difficult to compare mountains thousands of miles from each other or know exactly how sea level rise may be affecting different areas of the country that have vastly different coastlines. Having a coordinated frame of reference across the entire country—both latitude and longitude as well as depth and height—underpins the accurate positioning of locations across the US in relation to each other, as well as in relation to other geospatial measurement systems across the world.

The Earth is also constantly shifting: the motion of tectonic plates causes latitude and longitude coordinates to slowly move, mandating that they be updated every few decades. In some places—like the coast of Louisiana, where subsidence is causing between 25 to 35 square feet of land loss each year—these shifts manifest much quicker.

“Most people can stand on the beach and see the water and turn around and look at a dune behind them and go: ‘Oh, yeah. That’s about 5 or 6 feet above sea level,’” says Doyle. But when it comes to building things, you need to be able to accurately take measurements at scale. “You have to have some system of heights that is standardized across a large geographic body. I want consistent heights from New York to Maryland so we can build highways, so we can build utility infrastructure. You want to make sure water is always flowing in the appropriate direction.”

“Do you want to get in an autonomous taxi that is plus or minus two and a half meters going down the road? I don’t. That is part of the critical piece here: all these systems have to be this tight and this precise moving forward.”

The US is currently working with a particularly outdated set of coordinate systems. The current measurements contained in the National Spatial Reference System—including latitude, longitude, and vertical heights, a set of reference systems called datums—were established in the 1980s, shortly after the US launched the world’s first GPS satellites. In the years since those datums were created, increasingly advanced satellite technology has enabled geodesists to more accurately measure the shape and orientation of the Earth and to better position their measurements. As a result, each point of measurement in the US datums is now, on average, around two meters off from its actual, accurate location. In some locations, it’s even more extreme.

As anyone who has tried to go for a run with a glitchy Garmin watch knows, current GPS technology has limits in terms of on-the-ground precision. For everyday navigation, exact locations aren’t truly necessary—but for a variety of activities, from mapping floodplains to building bridges to measuring sea level rise, every centimeter becomes crucial. Ensuring hyper-accurate location is also becoming increasingly important as more and more industries are building up around automation that relies on precise spatial measurements.

“Do you want to get in an autonomous taxi that is plus or minus two and a half meters going down the road?” says Burch. “I don’t. That is part of the critical piece here: all these systems have to be this tight and this precise moving forward.”

In order to update the US’s datums to be in line with satellite data, land shifts, and accurate measurements of the Earth, staff at NGS were planning on rolling out a long-awaited modernization of the National Spatial Reference System, bringing it into the 21st century and making it easier to update moving forward. Originally scheduled to be completed in 2022, the agency posted a notice in the federal register last fall detailing its updated timeline for rolling out the new datums and associated products in 2025 and 2026.

But three former staffers who left NGS in the past month say this planned rollout may be pushed even farther behind by staff losses, thanks to employees like them who took retirements, left their jobs, or were laid off as part of federal restructuring. According to former staff, NGS was sitting at 174 employees at the start of the year, with staff looking to fill an additional 15 positions to help with rolling out the new datum and educating federal agencies and local governments on their use. Since January 20, the agency has lost nearly a quarter of its staff and has had to freeze planned hiring. (When asked about the accuracy of these numbers, Gillespie, the NOAA spokesperson, told WIRED that the agency has a “long-standing practice not to discuss personnel or internal management matters.”)

The remaining staff are in an “all hands on deck” situation with the rollout, says Brett Howe, the former geodetic services division chief at NGS, who opted to retire at the end of April. Despite a dedicated staff, Howe says that the loss of many in senior leadership with decades of experience and institutional knowledge means that the agency can’t afford to go through any more cuts.

“If we get to hire back some people, we are still going to have trouble meeting that timeline of 2025 and 2026 [for the rollout], but we’ll be able to make it work,” he says. “If there are further cuts, or we’re not able to execute our [National Spatial Reference System] modernization plan, and then we get to a year, a year and a half from now, and we lose more people—either through other layoffs or they just retire—then I think we’re in real trouble. Then I wonder how we function as an agency.”

“At this time, the ongoing NSRS modernization plans are still aligned with the dates in the Federal Register notice,” Gillespie told WIRED. “NGS will be releasing foundational data and supporting products for testing and feedback in 2025.”

The fate of NGS under the Trump administration is unclear. A NOAA budget proposal from the White House Office of Management and Budget sent to the agency in April cuts the budget for the National Ocean Service, which houses NGS, by more than half. Project 2025 does not mention NGS by name, but it does mandate moving NOAA’s surveying capabilities to other agencies.

“We don’t speculate about things that may or may not happen in the future,” Gillespie said when asked about potential upcoming changes to the agency. “NOAA will continue to deliver weather information, forecasts, and warnings, and conduct research pursuant to our public safety mission.”

The sharp drop in staff numbers at NGS is the tail end of a long decline for the practice of geodesy in the US. In 2022, a group of leading geodesic experts authored a paper on what they dubbed the US’s “geodesy crisis,” detailing how other world powers have invested in training geodesists over the past three decades while the US has wound down funding and training. China has invested particularly heavily in creating more geodesists: the country graduates between 9,000 and 12,500 geodesy students per year, many of whom are then employed by the government. By contrast, around 20 students graduated with advanced degrees in geodesy from US universities over the past decade.

This, the authors argue, has contributed to China rapidly overtaking the US in geospatial technologies and disciplines of all kinds. Nowhere is this clearer than with China’s satellite navigation system, BeiDou, which has been gaining on the US’s GPS system in accuracy. In 2023, a US government advisory board on GPS stated in a memo that GPS is now “substantially inferior” to BeiDou.

Like other cuts to public science made under the Trump administration, the losses from blows to this agency could be substantial. A 2012 analysis found that every taxpayer dollar spent on NGS’s coastal mapping program returned $35 in benefits, while a 2019 report found that the NGS program that models gravitational fields would provide between $4.2 and $13.3 billion worth of benefit over 10 years. The private sector also relies heavily on public data provided by NGS. Some analyses project that the geospatial economy will grow to $1 trillion by the end of the decade. It’s even more crucial, experts say, to have an updated spatial reference system in the US, as well as institutional knowledge of the basic science of how to measure and understand our Earth.

Many industries now “want that high accuracy positioning” that comes with advanced geospatial technology, Doyle says, “yet they don’t understand the basics of the science. Now you’ve got all these people punching buttons and getting numbers, and only a tiny percentage of them really understand what the numbers mean, and how one set of numbers relates to another.”

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IDF Deliberately Targeting Children in Gaza, US Doctors Allege

When Dr. Mimi Syed returned from her first volunteer trip to Gaza in the summer of 2024, she started flipping through her notes—and came to a shocking conclusion. In one month, the ER physician had treated at least 18 children with gunshots to the head or chest. And that’s only the patients she had time to make a note of.

“They were children under the age of 12,” she says. “That’s something I saw every single day, multiple times a day, for the whole four weeks that I was there.”

Syed’s not the only one. Other physicians who have worked in Gaza report seeing similar cases on a regular basis, suggesting a disturbing pattern. The doctors allege that members of the Israeli military may be deliberately targeting children.

This week’s Reveal, in partnership with Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, follows Dr. Syed from the Gaza Strip to the halls of Congress and the United Nations, as she joins a movement of doctors appealing to US and international policymakers to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

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