Energy policy analysts are in broad agreement about one consequence of major legislation that Republicans are currently pushing through Congress: It will raise energy prices for the average American household by hundreds of dollars, once all is said and done.
That’s because the legislation, which Donald Trump has dubbed the One Big, Beautiful Bill, will repeal the vast majority of clean energy provisions contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, which a Democrat-controlled Congress passed in 2022. That earlier law provided a wide array of financial incentives for the deployment of electricity sources like solar, wind, battery storage, and nuclear power, as well as support for consumers looking to buy zero- and low-emissions products like electric vehicles.
Choking off support for those measures not only hobbles U.S. efforts to fight climate change — the IRA, if left intact, could single-handedly reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 40 percent — but it also means there are fewer new sources of energy for a country that has started to need more and more of it. And reduced supply coupled with increased demand means higher prices.
That’s the virtually unanimous conclusion of the academics and policy experts who have been trying to understand the likely effects of the rollback for the past few months, though each group of experts used different assumptions about the full extent of IRA repeal, given that the legislation is still being revised by the Senate. Part of the reason for this unanimity is that, once constructed, many newer energy sources like wind and solar don’t have substantial operating costs compared to traditional power plants that must be continuously supplied with fuel.
A new animal study suggests that tiny plastic particles
found in food and drinks may disrupt glucose metabolism and damage organs like
the liver. These findings raise concerns about potential health risks in humans
and highlight the need for further research.
As plastic breaks down, it creates microplastics (smaller
than 5 millimeters) and nanoplastics (smaller than 100 nanometers), which can
enter the food chain and accumulate in seafood and other commonly consumed
foods. Estimates suggest that people may ingest between 40,000 and 50,000
microplastic particles each year, with some projections reaching up to 10
million particles annually.
Studying the health effects of polystyrene nanoparticles
“With the growing concern around micro- and nanoplastic
exposure, we wanted to evaluate the impact of this exposure on health,” said
Amy Parkhurst, a doctoral candidate in the laboratory of Fawaz George Haj, PhD,
at the University of California, Davis. “Our observations that oral ingestion
of polystyrene nanoplastics contributes to glucose intolerance and signs of
liver injury, confirm and extend what has been recently reported on the effects
of nanoplastics in animal models.”
Source of life-saving COVID vaccine could do more...if Republicans don't ban it
University of Pittsburgh
A new type of mRNA vaccine is more scalable and adaptable to
continuously evolving viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and H5N1, according to a study
by researchers at University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health and the
Pennsylvania State University. The study was published today in npj
Vaccines.
Though highly effective at inducing an immune response,
current mRNA vaccines, such as those used to prevent COVID-19, present two
significant challenges: the high amount of mRNA needed to produce them and the
constantly evolving nature of the pathogen.
"The virus changes, moving the goal post, and updating
the vaccine takes some time," said senior author Suresh Kuchipudi, Ph.D.,
chair of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology at Pitt Public Health.
To address these challenges, the researchers created a
proof-of-concept COVID-19 vaccine using what's known as
a "trans-amplifying" mRNA platform. EDITOR'S NOTE: Could this be the reason why MAGAs hate mRNA vaccines? - W. Collette
The Trump administration on June 4, 2025, announced travel restrictions targeting 19 countries in Africa and Asia, including many of the world’s poorest nations. All travel is banned from 12 of these countries, with partial restrictions on travel from the rest.
The presidential proclamation, entitled “Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats,” is aimed at “countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a full or partial suspension on the entry or admission of nationals from those countries.”
The latest travel ban reimposes restrictions on many of the countries that were included on travel bans in Trump’s first term, along with several new countries.
But this travel ban, like the earlier ones, will not significantly improve national security and public safety in the United States. That’s because migrants account for a minuscule portion of violence in the U.S. And migrants from the latest travel ban countries account for an even smaller portion, according to data that I have collected. The suspect in Colorado, for example, is from Egypt, which is not on the travel ban list.
As a scholar of political sociology, I don’t believe Trump’s latest travel ban is about national security. Rather, I’d argue, it’s primarily about using national security as an excuse to deny visas to nonwhite applicants.
Given their abundance in American backyards, gardens and highway corridors these days, it may be surprising to learn that white-tailed deer were nearly extinct about a century ago. While they currently number somewhere in the range of 30 million to 35 million, at the turn of the 20th century, there were as few as 300,000 whitetails across the entire continent: just 1% of the current population.
This near-disappearance of deer was much discussed at the time. In 1854, Henry David Thoreau had written that no deer had been hunted near Concord, Massachusetts, for a generation. In his famous “Walden,” he reported that:
“One man still preserves the horns of the last deer that was killed in this vicinity, and another has told me the particulars of the hunt in which his uncle was engaged. The hunters were formerly a numerous and merry crew here.”
But what happened to white-tailed deer? What drove them nearly to extinction, and then what brought them back from the brink?
As a historical ecologist and environmental archaeologist, I have made it my job to answer these questions. Over the past decade, I’ve studied white-tailed deer bones from archaeological sites across the eastern United States, as well as historical records and ecological data, to help piece together the story of this species.
In a move that could bring future research on HIV vaccines
to a near halt, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID) notified researchers today that it will not renew funding next year for
two major consortia in the beleaguered field, Science has
learned. NIAID also recently stopped funding three research groups that
evaluate experimental vaccines in monkeys.
The notification, which was communicated verbally by NIAID
program officers, “couldn't have happened at a worse time, because the recent
clinical trial results [for candidate HIV vaccines] are very promising,” says
Dennis Burton of Scripps Research, who heads one of the two Consortia for
HIV/AIDS Vaccine Development (CHAVD).
Although researchers in the field acknowledge a vaccine for
the AIDS-causing virus remains far off, the new leads have brought a fresh
sense of optimism, and many scientists say they demand vigorous follow up.
“This sets us back at a pivotal moment,” says Mitchell Warren, executive
director of AVAC, a nonprofit that advocates for HIV prevention. The consortia
“really have been pioneers in vaccine discovery,” says Warren, who is not
involved in their work.
The consortia, initially formed in 2005, have more than a
dozen institutional partners between them. They have moved what are widely
considered the most cutting-edge, experimental HIV vaccines into clinical
trials. In 2019, NIAID awarded 7-year grants worth $129 million each to two
consortia leaders: Scripps Research and Duke University. Today’s notification
means that they will not have a chance to renew the funding when those grants
end in June 2026.
Burton said he was told NIAID was directed to do this, but
it's unclear whether the decision to stop funding the consortia was made by the
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), which oversees NIAID. When asked specifically about this, HHS
spokesperson Andrew Nixon did not answer the question but instead emphasized
that the department will continue to fund “critical” HIV/AIDS work. “We must
end this wasteful and inefficient model of health programming in favor of
strategic, coordinated approaches,” Nixon wrote.
Defenders of Social Security are responding with critical
anger to a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday that side with the Trump
administration in a legal battle over access to sensitive data of tens of
millions of Americans by the Department
of Government Efficiency, the government-eviscerating agency first
spearheaded by right-wing libertarian and mega-billionaire Elon Musk.
The unsigned emergency order from the court came in response
to an emergency application from the Trump administration defending DOGE's
ability to have access to Social Security databases that two labor unions,
alongside the Alliance for Retired Americans, had file a legal suit to protect.
By its ruling, the Supreme Court stayed a lower federal court's ruling that
said DOGE must
"disgorge" and "delete" any of the data it accessed or
downloaded from the agency files.
While the underlying case plays out, DOGE is now authorized
to retain the data and access to the information, which critics say cannot be
entrusted to the newly-created department and unvetted personnel who control
it.
After the Supreme Court declared Donald Trump largely immune
from prosecution for turning the office of the presidency into a criminal
enterprise, and the nation’s voters then chose to reinstall the freshly
convicted felon in the White House, who could have predicted he would use his
office to punish the law abiding and protect the corrupt?
In fact, both the scale and audaciousness of Trump’s
corruption, and of his regime’s assault on the criminal justice system, was
eminently predictable.
As House Speaker Mike Johnson recently pointed out, Trump’s
corruption is “out in the open.” The same is true of his use of criminal
justice system and other levers of government as weapons against his
ever-growing list of enemies.
But even the most cynical have been surprised by the
Trumpist effort to portray the provision of healthcare to children, veterans,
and the elderly as “waste” and “fraud,” as well as Trump’s effort to render
those who follow the laws into criminals.
The most vulnerable among us, including immigrants and the
sick, are currently among Trump’s primary victims. But the entire nation will
soon pay a heavy price for his systematic assault on the rule of law in service
of his bottomless desire for corrupt wealth and self-aggrandizement.
Retroactive criminalization
During the campaign, Trump and his cronies declared they
would deport the allegedly massive numbers of “criminal aliens.” When Trump
came into office, however, he faced a problem: The vast majority of
undocumented immigrants are law abiding.
Trumpists, however, came up with an answer: Create fake
crimes and thereby turn the law abiding into criminals.
Trump announced the US is “under invasion” by a foreign
power in order to invoke the rarely used Alien Enemies Act and justify the
summary deportation of supposed gang members to foreign prisons, this despite a
US intelligence
report concluding there is no such invasion. Then, when courts caught
the administration deporting migrants who are not gang members, or in violation
of existing immigration laws, Trumpists have prevaricated and outright lied,
transforming their purported law enforcement initiative into a fraud.
The administration has also attacked judges and elected
officials who have the temerity to question their illegal conduct.
Alina Habba (the parking garage lawyer Trump installed as
New Jersey’s acting US attorney) ordered the arrest of Ras Baraka, the Mayor of
Newark, on bogus charges arising from his participation in a protest at a
private DHS jail, leading to what a federal magistrate judge called an “embarrassing
retraction.” After that gambit failed, Habba brought equally flimsy charges
against a member of Congress who accompanied Baraka at the protest, asserting
that she “assaulted” armed ICE thugs.
Similarly, last month in New York City, an ICE gangster
terrorized and handcuffed
a crying staffer of Rep. Jerry Nadler after armed agents invaded his
office without a warrant.
Trumpists have resorted to inventing new offenses so as to
transform law-abiding immigrants into criminals. For example, Trump has
declared slivers of land along the border to be “military zones” for the sole
purpose of charging migrants with trespassing.
The administration has also declared that undocumented immigrants have an
obligation to “register”
with the government so they can be indicted for failing to do so. They’re
jailing immigrants who legally entered the United States under a Biden-era
asylum law by retroactively
declaring the program to be “illegal.”
Most tellingly, and insidiously, ICE agents desperate to
meet the increasing quotas the White House has set for deporting “illegals”
have taken to targeting the most vulnerable immigrants: Those intent on
following the law and engaging in productive work.
As Sen. Markwayne Mullin put it on CNN yesterday,
“regardless of what they may be doing right now” — including whether they are
abiding by the law and are gainfully employed — undocumented persons “are
illegal and they are criminals.”
It’s become routine for gangs of ICE goons to gather at
immigration courts and arrest immigrants who are following the law by showing
up for hearings. Immigration judges, cowed into facilitating Trump’s mass
deportation schemes, have been dutifully
dismissing cases so as to allow the immigrants to be immediately
jailed as “illegals.”
In one recent case, armed thugs dragged into
an elevator an immigrant who had fainted after they had swooped in to grab her
while her attorney was in the restroom.
State courts have also become favored hunting zones for ICE.
Judges who have the temerity to point out that this tactic discourages
immigrants from complying with court orders, and thus the law, are being
threatened. Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, for example, was jailed and indicted
on the flimsiest of criminal charges for allegedly helping a man evade ICE. Her
indictment has been decried
by other jurists as a "threat [to] public trust in the judicial
system and the ability of the public to avail themselves of courthouses without
fear of reprisal.”
ICE gangs are also now routinely assembling in restaurants
and other places of work, often bearing submachine guns, cuffing everyone in
sight, and jailing some, simply on suspicion of being “illegals.” Recently, a
gang of armed and masked ICE officers terrified patrons and workers in a San
Diego restaurant, and even
cuffed the manager. The rifle-toting “law enforcement” officers retreated
from the scene by shooting flash bang grenades into a crowd of citizens
distressed by their misconduct. (They only managed to arrest two “illegals.”)
Despite the fact that Trump has had to resort to fabricating
new crimes to turn law-abiding immigrants into targets for deportation, the GOP
is now about to make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency. Trump’s
“Big Beautiful Bill” includes over $150
billion for immigration enforcement and seeks to make ICE the most
highly funded law enforcement agency in the United States.
And as Trump’s threats about a military invasion of Los
Angeles County, which appeared to be commencing through the use of federalized
National Guard units as this piece was being prepared for publication Sunday
evening, demonstrate that his administration is intent on using its growing
immigration “law enforcement” apparatus to wreak havoc in America’s cities, and
to threaten to make peaceful protest a crime.
Redefining fraud
During his last presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly pledged
he would not allow Congress to cut Medicaid or Medicare, a promise that has
been echoed by Speaker Johnson and his other stooges.
But as it turned out, Republicans felt the need to make a
pretense of attacking the “deficit” even as they pursued a budget-busting
package of tax cuts weighed overwhelmingly in favor of the wealthiest
Americans. So of course, Trump and the party he controls decided to harm the
most vulnerable Americans — including children, the elderly, veterans, and the
working poor — by targeting Medicaid for cuts.
Trump’s solemn “pledge” to protect Medicaid proved to be no
barrier at all, given his ever-flexible definition of “crime.” Trump declared
that 10 million or more Americans Republicans will be leaving without
healthcare — resulting in tens
of thousands of avoidable deaths a year — are engaged in “fraud”,
“waste,” or “abuse.” Johnson, meanwhile, falsely announced that the people
Republicans will be cutting off from live saving care are “illegals,” despite the
fact that undocumented immigrants don’t receive federal dollars for coverage.
Trumpists have become so comfortable with their inverted
definition of “fraud” that they are turning it into the subject of morbid
humor. During a town hall, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst replied to a question about the
many people who will die prematurely as a result of the GOP’s massive Medicaid
cuts by declaring with a smirk that “we are all going to die.”
After Ernst was widely criticized for her callousness, she
taped a video in a cemetery in which she offered a sarcastic “apology” and
urged those facing premature death due to her cruelty to find faith in Jesus.
Predictably, Republican senators have indicated they are
planning to add
Medicare to the targets of their “cost cutting” efforts by defining
seniors’ need for healthcare to be a “fraud.”
Even as they have redefined the poor, sick and elderly as
“fraudsters,” Trumpers have embarked on a campaign to make actual fraud and
other financial crimes legal.
The administration is systematically dismantling the
Department of Justice’s mechanisms for preventing, investigating, and
prosecuting securities and other actual crimes. The DOJ has, to date,
terminated over $800
million in grants, including for programs that combat human
trafficking and gun violence and provide support to local police. The DOJ has
also shut down, or crippled, its enforcement of whole categories of the most
serious federal crimes, including those involving
the cryptocurrencies Trump is brazenly using to enrich himself and his
family.
Meanwhile, under the dysfunctional leadership of Kash Patel,
the FBI has been engaged in wholesale firing of career agents, including as
many as 4,000 personnel charged with investigating terrorism threats
inside and outside the United States. Patel appears determined to place Trump’s
goals of rooting out “disloyal” law enforcement personnel — and targeting
immigrants — far above the agency’s statutory mandate to investigate
serious crimes.
And Trump’s first major law enforcement action was to
terminate the strong public corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric
Adams — who has been assiduously stooging for Trump and his immigration
“crackdown” — thereby loudly declaring that the DOJ will be adjusting its
historical focus on combatting public corruption to excuse corruption among
those favored by the Leader.
‘When the president does it, that means it is not
illegal"
When Richard Nixon uttered those words in 1977 three years
after being driven out of the White House for his crimes, he was mocked and
repudiated. But now Trump, with the cover of the Supreme Court’s immunity
ruling, has set out to make Nixon’s declaration a reality.
It is not mere happenstance that Trump’s DOJ and SEC have
set out to effectively legalize whole categories of financial fraud and
corruption. Trump himself has, very publicly, turned the presidency into what
amounts to a criminal financial enterprise, enriching himself and his family by
billions of dollars through various “business” deals (many of them
transparently corrupt).
Trump’s most lucrative “deals” have — surprise, surprise —
included cryptocurrency transactions in which he and his own children (as well
as the offspring of cronies including Steve Witkoff and Howard Lutnick) have
yielded massive profits for themselves while causing huge losses for
others.
His inner circle is not just leaping headfirst into the crypto
“business,” but are doing so with many of the sleaziest participants in the
market, some of whom have been the subjects of
investigations and SEC enforcement proceedings. Trump has even welcomed some of
these ripoff artists into the White House, where it is now a matter of near
public record that a large payoff can get nearly anyone an audience with him
regardless of their criminal background.
Trump has also regularized the sale of pardons that began
during his first term, with Trump hangers-on reportedly charging
millions to get wealthy criminals out of jail. Paying third parties is
rapidly becoming an outmoded way of currying favor with Trump, given that there
are now many ways to line his pockets directly for favors. Nonetheless, Trump
recently pardoned a tax
cheat after his mother donated large sums to his campaign.
In a fashion familiar to observers of systemically corrupt
regimes, Trump (sheltered by the Supreme Court’s assurance that he can freely
engage in corruption) has made bribe solicitation an integral element of
governance. For example, the FCC, headed by a notorious Trump stooge, has made
it plain that Paramount’s planned merger transaction will not be
approved until that company pays a huge bribe to Trump, in the form of a
“settlement” payment for a bogus lawsuit Trump brought against 60 Minutes over
the editing of a segment about Kamala Harris.
Despite what Mike Johnson claims, the fact that Trump’s
undermining of the rule of law is being done openly and brazenly does not make
it any less corrosive. In fact, the opposite is true.
There has been much (accurate) discussion of how Trump’s
systemic attacks on the rule of law are destroying our democracy. But the
destruction will not end there. The United States’ longstanding status as a
nation of laws is also a foundation of our economic success. Investors in and
outside the US have long felt confident placing their wealth in this country
because, unlike so many other places in the world, laws are usually enforced
predictably, not according to the wishes of a despotic or authoritarian leader.
Trump’s scheme to upend the rule of law in this country —
and install himself as a quasi-dictator, who gets a “taste” of whatever
business he chooses — is going to induce many investors to look elsewhere to
make their investments. A nation where investors must pay bribes and possibly
risk later being charged with crimes as a routine “cost of doing business”
cannot remain the thriving financial center of the world for long. The question
is whether the United States can rid itself of this budding despotism before
even more grave and irreparable damage is done.
While fires can be caused for a variety of reasons, manmade and natural, invasive phragmites, like these in Charlestown, sometimes pose an overlooked risk. (URI Photos / Laura Meyerson)
Laura Meyerson was
stepping through a marsh on the Housatonic River in Connecticut on a
picture-perfect day as a young graduate student, when an offhand remark changed
her whole outlook on the landscape in front of her.
Meyerson was observing a beautiful scenic outlook
overlooking cattails. Then her professor made a comment that stopped her in her
tracks. He pointed out that the scene was pretty, but that the nearby invasive
reeds were going to wipe out the native muskrats. The day became a turning
point in her career.
“I knew then I wanted to study this plant species,” Meyerson
recalls.
Meyerson, today a professor of natural resources science at
the University of Rhode Island, would like to see other New Englanders
recognize the ubiquitous plant known as Phragmites australis growing
by roadways and ponds for what it is.
Meyerson’s research on invasive species is global in nature,
taking her to
Iceland this fall. After getting her Ph.D., Meyerson worked in biosecurity
for the Environmental Protection Agency and consulted with Homeland Security on
pathogens that could cripple the U.S. food supply. She has served on the U.S.
National Invasive Species Council Advisory Committee, is co-editor for the
journal Biological Invasions, and has conducted research on invasive species at
the Smithsonian Institution.
Meyerson finds many reasons to be concerned about invasive
species. The fire risk posed by phragmites is just one. She says that while
local fire departments are aware of the plant’s risk, those living or working
near large stands of the plants may not be.
During an NBC interview on November 6, Robert F. Kennedy
Jr. was cleaning up his lifelong anti-vaccination act as he lobbied to
become Health and Human Services secretary in the Trump administration.
“If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take
them away,” he said. “People ought to have choice…”
Kennedy is not a doctor or a scientist, but he got the job
as America’s top public health officer. Now he’s making the wrong choices for
all of us.
What Happened
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for
Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) report to Kennedy. As with flu shots, the
agencies have approved and recommended Covid-19 vaccines as they have been
adjusted annually to deal with the evolving virus.
On May 20, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad,
director of the FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, announced a new obstacle to FDA approval of any
Covid-19 vaccine. For healthy Americans under 65, it must be subjected to large scale and time-consuming clinical trials. That data
will replace the prior requirement of evidence showing only
an immune response, which was the basis for approving the initial “Project Warp
Speed” vaccines and all subsequent boosters.
Makary and Prasad asserted that they’re merely requiring
“gold-standard data on persons at low risk.” But by not requiring
such randomized, placebo-controlled trials for the elderly and other high-risk
groups, they’re conceding that the vaccine prevents infection.
Even trying to follow the new requirement poses problems.
It’s unethical to perform a clinical study that would give
some people a worthless placebo instead of a vaccine, according to Dr. Paul
Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the University of
Pennsylvania:
[W]e have a vaccine that works, given that we know that
SARS-CoV2 continues to circulate and cause hospitalizations and death, and
there’s no group that has no risk.
Responding to street protests in Los Angeles against federal immigration enforcement raids, Donald Trump ordered 2,000 soldiers from the California National Guard into the city on June 7, 2025, to protect agents carrying out the raids. Trump also authorized the Pentagon to dispatch regular U.S. troops “as necessary” to support the California National Guard.
Trump’s orders did not specify rules of engagement about when and how force could be used. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who did not request the National Guard and asserted it was not needed, criticized the president’s decision as “inflammatory” and warned it “will only escalate tensions.”
I am a historian who has written several books about the Vietnam War, one of the most divisive episodes in our nation’s past. My recent book, “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” examines a historic clash on May 4, 1970, between anti-war protesters and National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio.
The confrontation escalated into violence: troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine others, including one who was paralyzed for life.
In my view, dispatching California National Guard troops against civilian protesters in Los Angeles chillingly echoes decisions and actions that led to the tragic Kent State shooting. Some active-duty units, as well as National Guard troops, are better prepared today than in 1970 to respond to riots and violent protests – but the vast majority of their training and their primary mission remains to fight, to kill, and to win wars.
Protests in Los Angeles began after federal agencies conducted immigration raids across the city on June 6, 2025. Local police responded with pepper spray, rubber bullets and tear gas.
Eighteen private and public gardens tended by URI Master Gardener volunteers will open their gates for the 12th Gardening with the Masters Tour this July 19-20. Tickets are on sale now. (URI Photo / Alice LaBelle)
Gardens are constantly
evolving, but the state’s most dedicated gardeners will pause their planting,
weeding, and dividing to open their gardens across the state to the public this
summer.
Eighteen private and public gardens tended by University of Rhode
Island Master Gardener volunteers will open their gates for the 12th Gardening
with the Masters Tour, a biennial event.
This year’s garden tour takes place Saturday and Sunday,
July 19 and July 20, rain or shine, from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.
The two-day event lets ticket holders visit some of the
state’s most beautiful public and private gardens tended by certified URI
Master Gardener volunteers. Environmentally-friendly garden practices on
display include composting, native plant pollinator gardens, hugelkultur,
low-input vegetable growing, small-space and container gardening, and more.
URI Master Gardeners will greet visitors in all gardens,
ready to answer questions and share science-based horticultural information
about best gardening practices. This year’s tours include gardens from
Chepachet to Charlestown, and in nearby North Stonington, Connecticut.
In a stunning move, the US Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) today announced plans to reconstitute the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices
(ACIP), firing 17 current members and replacing them with people under current
consideration.
The move comes just ahead of ACIP’s next regularly scheduled
meeting from June 25 to June 27,
during which the group is slated to take up COVID-19 vaccine matters, as well
as those for several other vaccines. Also, the announcement comes in the wake
of a recent top-down
decision about COVID vaccine recommendations, which deemphasized
recommended use in children, pregnant women, and other groups.
Typically, ACIP makes vaccine recommendations following
robust public deliberations. HHS did not detail the scientific basis of its new
recommendations.
Resident Anne Schneider, right, hugs her friend Eddy Sampson
as they survey damage caused by Hurricane Helene, October 1, 2024, in Marshall,
North Carolina.
June 1 marked the beginning of hurricane season, a period
whose existence was news to Trump’s head of FEMA, David Richardson, who had
no prior experience managing disaster relief. Richardson was appointed to
replace FEMA acting chief Cameron Hamilton, who was fired summarily after telling a congressional subcommittee that
he didn’t think FEMA should be shut down.
Trump’s attack on FEMA goes beyond even the Project 2025 design, which proposed to cut FEMA and
turn some of its functions over to the states. Homeland Security Secretary
Kristi Noem said in March that she wanted FEMA shut down entirely (she later backpedaled and spoke of shrinking and
reforming it). But most states have nothing like FEMA’s capacity or experience,
and don’t want FEMA reduced or closed.
Due to actions early in Trump’s term, FEMA has lost an
estimated 2,000 employees out of about 6,100, according to The Wall Street Journal. Many of
these were nominally probationary employees, but due to the agency’s need to
quickly staff up in an emergency, these tended to be experienced staffers who
work for FEMA part of every year.
More damage is coming in the Big Beautiful Budget Bill.
Trump’s budget request called for cutting FEMA by $646 million.
This is occurring as FEMA’s much-depleted sister agency, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is predicting as many
as 19 hurricanes this summer and fall, including three to five major ones
likely to cause massive damage.
To add injury to insult, Trump has rejected
bipartisan requests to continue the Biden policy of covering 100 percent of the
costs of relief and recovery operations after major disasters. The usual split
is 75 percent federal, matched by 25 percent state.
In April, FEMA refused to declare a major disaster in
Washington state to provide funding for recovery from a bomb cyclone in
November 2024; and denied North Carolina more funding for cleanup after
Hurricane Helene. In September 2024, Helene caused massive damage in six
Southeastern states. The agency was generally praised for its response, including by North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis,
but its resources were spread very thin. This season, they will be even
thinner.
DOGE Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to “Munch” Veterans Affairs Contracts
By Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman and Eric Umansky for ProPublica
As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.
The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”
The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.
The DOGE AI tool flagged more than 2,000 contracts for “munching.” It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled — the Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box. The VA uses contractors for many reasons, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.
VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.
We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.
ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it “deeply problematic.”
Last night, hundreds of Butler Hospital union
workers, family members, fellow union members, clergy, and community allies
gathered for a candlelight vigil to reaffirm the value of the care and
dedicated frontline staff as they provide essential mental health services
every day.
Established in 1844, Butler
Hospital is considered the oldest hospital in Rhode Island and was
founded to treat psychiatric illnesses. Today, it continues to play a vital
role as the region’s leading facility for mental health and substance abuse
support, a need that has grown significantly since the pandemic. Since the
hospital’s inception, Butler’s frontline staff have provided life-saving care
and support to patients from diverse backgrounds.
The reductions came just days before the release of the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again report, an analysis of the factors causing chronic disease in children. One of those factors, the report says, is poor diet.
Dr. Marlene Schwartz, a professor of human development and family sciences and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health at the University of Connecticut, discusses why cutting the Local Food for Schools and the Local Food Purchase Assistance programs means less fresh food will be available to children and families – and could hurt local farmers and ranchers too.
Dr. Marlene Schwartz discusses why these programs were cut.
The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, edited here for brevity and clarity.
Could you explain the two programs that were cut?
Marlene Schwartz: Most schools were eligible for Local Food for Schools, a $660 million program, which has now been cut. The funds for Local Food for Schools were on top of the reimbursement that schools get for meals and would have allowed them to buy more local, fresh food.
How will these cuts affect families and schoolchildren?
Schwartz: Many children eat two of their meals, five days a week, at school. During the 2022-2023 school year, about 28 million kids ate lunch at school. More than 14 million had breakfast there.
Having fresh, local produce in the school cafeteria provides the opportunity to introduce children to more fruits and vegetables and teach them about the food grown in their own communities. Think about how powerful a lesson about nutrition and local agriculture can be when you not only hear and read about it but can taste it too.
How will these cuts affect farmers and ranchers?
Schwartz: When the funding was there, the farmers and ranchers knew they had guaranteed buyers for their products. So the loss of these funds, especially so quickly, will have a very negative effect on them. Suddenly, the buyers they counted on don’t have the money to buy from them.
When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.
His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.
The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.
Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.
News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.
Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.
This is Donald Trump's new official portrait. Really. Meet the new Big Brother. White House photo.
Why is Trump trying to cancel “Sesame Street,” which has
helped children learn to read and count for over half a century?
Why is he seeking to destroy Harvard University?
Why is he trying to deter the world’s most brilliant
scientists from coming to the United States?
Because he is trying to destroy American education — and
with it, the American mind.
Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major
enemy is an educated public. Slaveholders prohibited enslaved people from
learning to read. The Third Reich burned books. The Khmer Rouge banned music.
Stalin and Pinochet censored the media.
And Trump, like past authoritarians, wants to control not
just what we do, but also how and what we think.
He has embraced one of the mottos from George Orwell’s 1984: “Ignorance is strength.” He knows that an uninformed public
is easier to divide and conquer.
There are five facets to Trump’s authoritarian attack on the
American mind:
1. Rewrite history
The protagonist of 1984 works in the
so-called Ministry of Truth, where he’s made to literally rewrite history
because Big Brother knows that he “who controls the past controls the future.”
Authoritarians know that if they can convince us our country
has never been wrong, they can make us believe our ruler is always right.
If they can make us forget how brave activists fought for
change in the past, they can stop us from seeking change in the future.
Trump wants us to forget (or never know) that he lost the
2020 election and then instigated a coup against the United States.
He even claimed last weekend that former President Joseph R.
Biden was “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone.
2. Gut education
As Trump tries to abolish the Department of Education, he’s
also proposing to cut funding for K-12 public schools and to force universities
to let him influence student admissions, faculty hiring, and what is taught.
As a professor, I know firsthand how education empowers
young people’s minds. We can’t have a functioning democracy if people cannot
deliberate critically about it. That’s why authoritarians replace education
with indoctrination.
But the Trump regime doesn’t want a functioning democracy.
Instead of teaching students to think for themselves,
authoritarians seek to instill blind allegiance and suppress dissent. As Trump
adviser Stephen Miller said: “Children will be taught to love America. Children
will be taught to be patriots.”
This is why the Italian and German fascists of the 20th century immediately turned
their countries’ educational systems into instruments of the party.
He’s also abducting and deporting international scientists
who disagree with his administration. Can you imagine a crueler way to rob
America of the global intellectual capital that has helped us become the world
leader in scientific research?
He is now revoking visas of some Chinese college students.
Some 277,000 students from China attended school in the United States last
year, second only to the number of students from India. The United States
employs tremendous numbers of scientific and technological experts originally
from China. We need this continued pipeline of intellect and skill.
How can medical research and disease prevention be
political? How can scientific research in general become political? Why is
Trump afraid of science?
Because science acknowledges objective facts. Authoritarians
insist that the ruler is more powerful than the facts. Trump wants to control
the facts.
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Responding to street protests in Los Angeles against federal immigration enforcement raids, Donald Trump ordered 2,000 soldiers from the California National Guard into the city on June 7, 2025, to protect agents carrying out the raids. Trump also authorized the Pentagon to dispatch regular U.S. troops “as necessary” to support the California National Guard.
