During her confirmation hearing to become surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means had various back-and-forths with senators, who pressed her on topics related to vaccines, her qualifications and disclosure of her conflicts of interest.
Means was first nominated by President Donald Trump to be surgeon general in May. The president had scrapped his prior pick, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, after she misled on where she obtained her medical degree. Means testified before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on Feb. 25, after her scheduled October nomination hearing was postponed because she went into labor.
Means, an ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a medical degree but is not a practicing physician. In nominating Means, Trump cited her “impeccable ‘MAHA’ credentials” and said she would “work closely” with Kennedy. She is an author, wellness influencer and co-founder of the company Levels, which offers continuous glucose monitoring and other testing for people who sign up for a monthly membership. (For people without diabetes, there isn’t good evidence wearing these monitors improves health, and health insurance doesn’t cover these services.) Means has said in government filings she would divest her Levels stock and stock options if confirmed.
We looked into the sometimes-dueling claims from Means and the senators:
The HELP committee includes 11 Democrats and 12 Republicans and is led by Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who has emphatically defended vaccination. Two Republicans said following the hearing they were uncertain about their votes to advance Means’ nomination to the full Senate, and Cassidy did not comment.
The role of the surgeon general, according to the HHS website, is to be the “nation’s doctor” and to communicate the “best available scientific information” to the American people. The role requires leadership on addressing public health threats and advancing related science. The surgeon general also leads the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service, a branch of the uniformed services dedicated to protecting public health.
Means avoided directly answering questions about whether she believes vaccines cause autism, instead repeatedly referencing rising rates of the neurodevelopmental condition. A large variety of studies have looked into whether vaccines cause autism and found no connection, as we have written many times. Moreover, it’s unclear how much of a true increase in autism, if any, there has been.
Early in the hearing, Cassidy asked Means whether she believed that “vaccines, whether individually or collectively, contribute to autism.” Means deflected, saying, “The reality is that we have an autism crisis that’s increasing, and this is devastating to many families, and we do not know as a medical community what causes autism.” She added that “until we have a clear understanding of why kids are developing this at higher rates, I think we should not leave any stones unturned.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, later asked Means about whether vaccines cause autism. “We have a situation where autism is rising,” Means replied. “This is a huge problem.” She added: “I don’t think it’s responsible to say that we’re not going to study, when kids are getting many medications — I think it’s important to just keep it on the table.”
In response to Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who asked a similar question, Means referred to the “childhood chronic disease epidemic and the rising rate of childhood neurodevelopmental diseases.”
The number of people with an autism diagnosis has indeed increased substantially in recent decades. HHS Secretary Kennedy has long claimed there is an autism “epidemic” and invoked the need to find an “environmental toxin” causing the rise. But it’s not clear there is a true rise in the condition’s prevalence. Over time, the diagnostic criteria for autism has broadened to include less severe cases. Screening has also become routine; autism services and awareness have also increased.
“It’s not impossible at all, that just these factors added all together might drive the increase entirely, without the need to invoke any other kinds of causal factors or an epidemic due to an environmental toxin,” Dr. Eric Fombonne, a professor emeritus of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University, told us for a prior article, referring to the factors that would affect autism diagnosis but not true prevalence. Other experts told us there has likely been some true increase, but not as great a rise as Kennedy has made it out to be.
Cassidy further pressed Means, stating that “there’s been a lot of evidence” showing that vaccines are “not implicated” in autism. “Do you not accept that evidence?” he asked.
Means acknowledged the research but again referred to the need for more study. “I do accept that evidence,” she said. “I also think that science is never settled.”
Regardless of whether there has been an increase in the true prevalence of autism, many researchers are interested in further understanding the causes of the condition. Autism researchers have responded positively to $50 million in research projects the National Institutes of Health funded last fall, including efforts to better understand how environmental exposures — from pesticides to air pollution — combine with a person’s genetics to cause autism.
However, researchers have also previously told us that calls for more research into vaccines and autism in particular can be harmful, as there has already been substantial investment into answering the question and it can distract from other priorities.
Moreover, claims about the unsettled nature of science have long been used to mislead on the topic. Pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit explained previously that anti-vaccine activists have long taken advantage of a “technicality in the scientific method” that it is not possible to prove a negative, using this strategy to “promote fear of vaccines despite overwhelming evidence” contradicting a link between vaccines and autism.
In answering Sanders’ questions about vaccines, Means elided her past remarks on the topic.
“Anti-vaccine rhetoric has never been a part of my message,” she said. “I don’t mention the word ‘vaccine’ in my book. This is not a part of my core message.”
It’s true that her 2024 bestseller, “Good Energy,” does not discuss vaccines, and that overall, her comments are far more focused on nutrition and chronic disease. But Means has made numerous public statements discouraging or questioning vaccines that have included incorrect or misleading information. In a complete flip of her Senate remarks, she has previously touted her extensive record of criticizing vaccines.
In an August 2024 post on X, Means called it “absolute insanity” to give a newborn the hepatitis B vaccine if the parents don’t have hepatitis B. She incorrectly added that the disease is “transmitted through needles and sex exclusively” so there is “no benefit” and “only risk” to getting vaccinated. She also called the shot an “unnecessary pharmaceutical.”
“There is no benefit to the baby or the wider population for a child to get this vaccine who is not at risk for sexual or IV transmission. There is only risk,” she added.
This is false. Hepatitis B is highly contagious and is transmitted via small amounts of blood. Babies and children can get the virus from caregivers, who may not know they are infected, through casual contact, such as by sharing contaminated washcloths, toothbrushes or pre-chewed food.
While most pregnant women are screened for the virus, not everyone is tested, and there can be errors or delays in testing. As a result, a birth dose acts as a “safety net” to ensure babies born to mothers who are infected but aren’t known to be can remain virus-free. Moreover, there are no known serious risks of hepatitis B vaccination, other than extremely rare allergic reactions.
Another senator, Democrat Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, also noted during the hearing that Means had previously called the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine “a crime” on X.
“That is not the full tweet,” Means replied.
Alsobrooks then asked her how the vaccine could be “a crime.”
“I support vaccines. I believe vaccines save lives. I believe they’re a key part of our public health strategy,” Means said, which were some of the strongest statements she said in support of vaccines during the hearing.
“I also believe that this administration is committing to making sure we have the … safest vaccine schedule in the world and that we are continually studying the vaccine schedule, vaccine injuries, making sure we’re eradicating conflicts of interest in vaccine research and doing gold standard science on vaccines,” she continued. “These are all things that I support. And I think there’s a nuanced conversation that American families are looking to have about shared clinical decision-making with their doctors about specific vaccines that their children may not be as seriously at risk for. And I think that — that that is the nature and the thrust of my comments.”
Means is correct that the “crime” statement was not her full post. But the rest of the post is hardly vaccine-positive. In the September 2024 post, Means was responding to the podcaster Shannon Joy, who was complaining that Means and her brother, Calley Means, who co-wrote Means’ book and is now a senior adviser to HHS, had not spoken forcefully enough against vaccines.
“I’m flabbergasted, Shannon,” Means wrote. “The wild part to me is that on some of the largest platforms in the world I have spoken out against the current culture of vaccines. On Tucker (the second largest podcast in America) I said the hepatitis B vaccine at birth is a crime.”
She went on to say that she had shared a particular Substack article and the work of Paul Thomas “to my newsletter of over 100,000 people and on social and we are working around the clock to get corruption out of the FDA (which is a lynchpin of actually making progress on vaccine safety), and supporting RFK who is a huge whistleblower about vaccines.”
“I spoke on the record at the Senate about neurotoxin heavy metals in vaccines,” she added at the end.
The Substack article, which Means has indeed shared on a number of occasions to her audience, is a post from J.B. Handley, an anti-vaccine activist. The post is paywalled, but claims “[i]nternational scientists have found autism’s cause” and appears to implicate vaccines — and in particular, aluminum.
As we’ve written, after rigorous investigation, there is no evidence that the small amount of aluminum present in some vaccines to boost the immune response causes autism. And while there are some known genetic causes of autism, scientists do not think that autism has just one cause, nor have they discovered the causes yet.
Paul Thomas is a prominent anti-vaccine pediatrician in Oregon who wrote a 2016 book promoting an alternative vaccine schedule that he falsely claims will prevent autism. In late 2022, Thomas surrendered his medical licence via a stipulated order following allegations of negligence and unprofessional conduct, some related to vaccination. Previously, the medical board had forbidden Thomas from discussing vaccine protocols with patients. Means recommended Thomas’ book on two occasions in her popular newsletter in September 2024.
Means has responded similarly to others who have criticized her for not speaking enough about vaccines, at times calling the vaccine schedule “insane,” saying that she has called vaccine mandates “criminal,” and noting that she seeks out “vaccine safety experts like JB Handley and others to learn more.”
In her Tucker Carlson podcast appearance in August 2024, Means did not actually use the words “a crime” to describe the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose. But she did speak skeptically of the need to vaccinate babies born to mothers who test negative for the hepatitis B virus and misleadingly suggested that certain vaccine components are unsafe.
“Two of the handful of inactive ingredients are formaldehyde and aluminum, which is a neurotoxin,” she said of the hepatitis B vaccine, going on to suggest that it would be better for kids to get vaccinated as teenagers when “they’re much bigger and their bodies can handle more of these, you know, these chemicals and … toxins that are in these shots.”
In a review of her past comments in interviews and on her website about vaccines, we found essentially no positive remarks about them (in one instance, she said that “in many cases” a vaccine “might be useful,” but then said there is “increasing scientific evidence that the current vaccine schedule may be causing harm to children”). Instead, she repeatedly suggested the shots could be dangerous because of their ingredients, and pointed to the seemingly high number of shots given to children (“70+ injected medications”) and the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which gives partial immunity to vaccine makers.
These are all well-known tactics of anti-vaccine activists that distort reality. There is no evidence that the previous vaccine schedule, which only might reach 70 or more shots if including annual flu and COVID-19 vaccines until age 18, is dangerous. Nor have any vaccine ingredients — as scary as they might sound — been shown to cause any serious harm. The NCVIA does not give immunity to vaccine makers in all instances, and in any case, this has little bearing on safety. Vaccines must still pass review by the Food and Drug Administration and are continually monitored for safety; vaccines that have been found to have serious safety concerns have been removed from the market.
We reached out to Means for comment and to ask for examples of when she has spoken positively of vaccines, but we did not receive a reply.
Kim, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, raised questions about whether Means met the requirements to be the surgeon general due to having an inactive medical license. Dr. Jerome Adams, who was surgeon general during the first Trump administration, has contended that Means is required to have an active medical license to be surgeon general.
Means replied that she has an unexpired medical license from Oregon, albeit one that is voluntarily inactive because she is not seeing patients. (Her website says it became inactive in January 2024.) She also said that Adm. Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, “has testified that I’m eligible to serve in this role.”
Doctors need a medical license to practice medicine, including prescribing medications and using other methods to diagnose, treat and prevent disease. Oregon defines an inactive license as being for physicians who do not practice in the state.
Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University, told us it was an “open question” whether a surgeon general needs to have an active medical license.
The law states that the surgeon general must be appointed from the Commissioned Corps of the U.S. Public Health Service. The Commissioned Corps website says that members of the Commissioned Corps are required to maintain “active and unrestricted licenses and certifications.”
However, Gostin raised the possibility that this requirement might not apply to Means’ situation. “While having a medical license has been the historical tradition, the law is unclear whether it is actually required” to be surgeon general, he said. “I do not think the courts would insist on an active medical license from a person who was nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.”
What is clear is that Means’ qualifications are a departure from past norms. Gostin said that he did not know of a past surgeon general who lacked an active medical license. He added that another requirement for a surgeon general is “specialized training or significant experience in public health programs,” which he said he does not believe Means has.
Dr. Richard H. Carmona, surgeon general under President George W. Bush, wrote last spring after Means’ nomination that her qualifications, including her lack of an active license, “raise significant concerns” and that surgeons general historically have been “licensed physicians with deep clinical, scientific and operational credentials.”
To be clear, the surgeon general could be a public health professional who is not a doctor. The acting surgeon general for a few months under former President Joe Biden was a nurse, for example, as was the acting surgeon general early in Trump’s first term. But according to our review, all non-acting surgeons general have been doctors.
HHS spokesperson Andrew G. Nixon defended Means’ credentials, saying that they “give her the right insights” to be surgeon general. “Dr. Means is a licensed medical doctor who graduated with honors from Stanford University and held full-time biomedical research positions at the NIH, Stanford University School of Medicine, NYU, and Oregon Health and Science University, and served as a faculty lecturer at Stanford University,” he told us in an email, repeating qualifications Means had mentioned in her testimony. “She has published scientific peer-reviewed papers in major medical journals.”
According to Oregon state records, Means graduated from Stanford with an M.D. before moving on to a medical residency in otolaryngology at Oregon Health and Science University. She did not complete residency, the standard path for people seeking jobs as practicing physicians, leaving in 2018. She was issued a full medical license in December 2018 and, according to her website, opened a functional medicine private practice the following year, offering a mixture of testing, coaching and classes. Functional medicine is not a medical specialty recognized by the American Board of Medical Specialties, but rather an approach that says it aims to address the “root cause” of disease. Means wrote on her website that she phased out her practice after starting a full-time role as a co-founder at the startup Levels in 2020.
As for Means’ research positions, her current website lists work as a high schooler and summer undergraduate intern at the NIH and a stint as a research technician at NYU between college and medical school, as well as various research roles during her education at Stanford and OHSU. A May statement from Stanford says that Means taught classes in 2022 on food and health as a lecturer.
Means is an author on a total of eight research papers listed on PubMed and her website, mainly related to otolaryngology and published in the course of her training. The most recent paper was published in 2019. The latest PubMed entry is a letter to the editor published in 2020.
During her testimony, Means also said that she has “served as an associate editor of an international journal.” However, the International Journal of Disease Reversal and Prevention, where she has served as an editor, is not indexed on MEDLINE, a baseline standard indicating a journal has received some vetting.
Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, brought up a Feb. 4 letter the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen sent to the Federal Trade Commission asking it to investigate whether Means had violated FTC policies as a wellness influencer.
Under current rules, influencers who are paid by companies must clearly disclose those financial relationships in each post. Means reported receiving more than $450,000 in compensation from sponsorship and affiliate deals between January 2024 and early August 2025, according to our review of her U.S. Office of Government Ethics financial disclosure report.
Speaking of the alleged violations, and noting that the committee had verified the underlying data, Murphy told Means that the Public Citizen complaint found she “routinely violated” FTC policy. “In fact, in the majority of your posts for many of the products you recommend, you did not transparently reveal your financial connection,” he told her.
“That’s false,” she replied.
Murphy then gave an example involving a prenatal vitamin from WeNatal. He said that filings before the committee showed she had started to be compensated by the company in the spring of 2024, but in posts a few months later, she promoted products and specifically said she did not have a relationship with the company.
“In any post where I said I am not receiving money, I had not been receiving money at that time,” Means said in response. “I’m happy to look at whatever documentation you’re talking about, but …. it’s incorrect and it’s a false representation.”
She went on to emphasize that she had spent several months working with the OGE “to be fully compliant with this process,” adding that she takes it “very seriously.”
When Murphy asked her to acknowledge that she did not disclose a financial relationship in “many” cases, Means replied, “I don’t think that’s true. … And if it has happened — if it inadvertently has happened — I would rectify that immediately,” adding that she takes conflicts of interest “incredibly seriously.”
We are unable to referee the dispute with certainty, but will lay out the facts as they are known for context. We reached out to Means to ask her about these allegations, but did not receive a reply.
Murphy’s comments are generally supported by the Public Citizen letter, which states that Means made disclosures “inconsistently and ambiguously.” According to its analysis of her posts, the group found that she had failed to disclose “79 out of 140 (56%) times she promoted affiliated products.” The products included supplements, meal kits, lab tests and basil seeds. Still, the letter does not claim that she definitely violated FTC policy. Instead, it refers to “potential” FTC violations.
In its letter, Public Citizen explains that its analysis was based on a review of her Instagram, TikTok, newsletter and website posts for the same period covered by Means’ required OGE filings. “However, it is not possible to know [the] exact timing of her affiliate marketing arrangements vis-à-vis her posts based on the information that is publicly available,” the group wrote.
Lacking that information, Public Citizen only counted instances without disclosure that came after Means has previously disclosed a relationship, for the companies listed on her financial disclosure report. “This methodology means that our estimated rate of failed disclosure is likely conservative,” the group wrote.
The alleged examples of failure to disclose are documented in a publicly accessible spreadsheet.
Separately, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin asked Means about her relationship with Genova Diagnostics, a functional medicine lab testing company that previously agreed to pay up to $43 million to settle allegations that it violated the False Claims Act. Baldwin noted that Means received $10,000 from the company and asked if she was aware of the settlement or the allegations when she began promoting the company’s tests. (Means’ disclosure twice lists $10,000 from Genova, for book tour and newsletter sponsorships. Genova was one of the lab companies Means had a financial relationship with but did not always disclose, according to Public Citizen’s analysis.)
“Frankly, I was not familiar with that settlement,” Means said. “There’s a particular test that they make about nutrient quality that I find very compelling because I do think we need to understand a little bit more transparently about how the nutrients from our food are affecting our health. And I would just highlight that I have worked extremely closely with the Office of Government Ethics over the last several months and taken this process very seriously.”
In April 2020, the Department of Justice announced that Genova had agreed to pay at least around $17 million — and as much as $43 million — to resolve allegations that it had billed Medicare and other federally supported health insurance for medically unnecessary lab tests, among other claims. The company has denied all allegations and any wrongdoing.
One of the tests mentioned in the lawsuit is the company’s nutritional NutrEval test. The complaint alleged that there was insufficient evidence the test was medically necessary.
Means has partnered with Genova to promote its Metabolomix+ test, which costs $475 and is an at-home version of the NutrEval test. In a July 2024 YouTube video, Means spent over an hour going over her Metabolomix+ test results with two Genova employees, whom she called her “dear friends.” She said that she had been an “admirer of and fan” and user of the company for “about six years” starting when she opened her functional medicine practice.
“Genova was the first lab that I had a contract with,” Means said, adding that she “was really in love with specifically their nutritional testing, which is called NutrEval.” The video description includes a personalized discount code for the company’s tests but does not clearly state whether Means has a relationship with the company at the time. We don’t know the exact timing of the payments she received from Genova, but Genova did back Means’ book tour, which began a few months prior to the video. She also thanked the company for its support of her book’s launch in a social media post in June 2024.
In discussing his reasoning for launching U.S. airstrikes on Iran, President Donald Trump said, “An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be a dire threat to every American.” But arms control experts have disputed his claim that Iran “soon” could have missiles capable of reaching the U.S., and they say there’s a lack of evidence that the country “attempted to rebuild” nuclear enrichment facilities damaged by U.S. strikes last year.
Trump first made his case for the U.S. and Israeli military bombing, which started on Feb. 28, in two videos that day and the next. In his first remarks, he said, “Our objective is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very hard, terrible people. Its menacing activities directly endanger the United States, our troops, our bases overseas, and our allies throughout the world.” He specifically focused on stopping Iran from having a nuclear weapon.
“It has always been the policy of the United States, in particular, my administration, that this terrorist regime can never have a nuclear weapon. I’ll say it again. They can never have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said. The White House on March 2 sent out a list of 74 times Trump has said something similar, saying in the press release, “This position — rooted in longstanding, bipartisan American policy — guides his actions to ensure the leading state sponsor of terrorism cannot threaten the world with nuclear devastation.”
A year ago, in late March 2025, the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” However, in a congressional hearing about that assessment, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard also said, “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Last June, Trump said he believed Iran was “very close” to obtaining a nuclear weapon, an apparent contradiction to the IC assessment. Days later, the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities. In his Feb. 28 remarks, Trump repeated his claim that those military strikes had “obliterated the regime’s nuclear program” at those sites. (As we’ve written, experts and a classified U.S. intelligence report said the sites were damaged and the enrichment program set back — but the sites and nuclear capabilities weren’t completely destroyed.) Trump said that Iran refused to make a deal after the June bombings and refused to “renounce their nuclear ambitions, and we can’t take it anymore.”
“Instead, they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program and to continue developing long-range missiles that can now threaten our very good friends and allies in Europe, our troops stationed overseas, and could soon reach the American homeland,” the president said.
We’ll explain what arms control experts say about Iran’s long-range missile capabilities and the state of its damaged nuclear enrichment program.
In his Feb. 28 comments, Trump said the U.S. “will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon” and that after the June 2025 U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, “they attempted to rebuild their nuclear program.” Arms control experts told us that last year’s bombing set back Iran’s nuclear program and there’s a lack of evidence that the country was rebuilding it.
“In the absence of IAEA monitoring, accurate information is scant,” Emma Sandifer, program coordinator at the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us in an email, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA hasn’t been able to assess the three bombed nuclear program sites, though it has inspected all other declared nuclear facilities in the country, the IAEA chief told Reuters in January.
“These actions are right,” Trump said in his March 1 video statement, “and they are necessary to ensure that Americans will never have to face a radical, bloodthirsty terrorist regime armed with nuclear weapons and lots of threats.”
A week before the recent military operation, on Feb. 21, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was more definitive in describing a time frame for Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Witkoff said in a Fox News interview that while Iran says that its nuclear capability is “about their civil program … they’ve been enriching well beyond the number that you need for civil nuclear. It’s up to 60%. They are probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material, and that’s really dangerous.” But experts told us it would likely take months for Iran to enrich uranium to that level and then much longer before the “bomb-making material” could be made into a weapon.
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us that “it is clear that it would take Iran years to fully rebuild its enrichment plants” that were bombed in June 2025. “It is possible that Iran may have a very small number of operational centrifuges somewhere undisclosed,” Kimball said. “But it would still take months for a smaller number of centrifuges to accomplish what thousands of centrifuges at these major facilities could’ve done,” which would be to enrich small amounts of uranium to weapons-grade level and then turn it into metal to be used for a weapon. “It would take longer to fashion a nuclear explosive device.”
Eliana Johns, a senior research associate with the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists told us that “if Iran enriches uranium to weapons-grade, they will need to weaponize the material and develop a nuclear device with other sensitive components. It’s relatively easy to put various payloads on a missile; however, while Iran certainly has ballistic missiles that could theoretically be used for this purpose, there are still challenges with designing a nuclear device that can be mated with the intended missile, will detonate when desired, survive reentry, and arrive accurately at its target.”
As we’ve reported before, the “breakout time” — a term that refers to the time Iran would need, if it chose to do so, to produce weapons-grade uranium that could then be used for one bomb — had been about a week or so for at least the past few years. However, “‘breakout time’ is often misleading,” Sandifer said. “While the time it may have taken Iran to enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear weapon may have once been a matter of weeks, that is only one piece of the puzzle. After this point, once you have the weapons-grade uranium, Iran would then need to manufacture the rest of the weapon. This process would likely take much longer, perhaps months to a year.”
She said that estimating this time is difficult, since the IAEA hasn’t been able to assess Iran’s operations since the June 2025 airstrikes. “Regardless, the damage to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, however severe, likely lengthened any ‘breakout time’ whether it relates to Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium or the manufacturing of a nuclear weapon.”
Kimball said that last year’s bombings “severely damaged Iran’s major uranium enrichment facilities, but not its resolve to retain a nuclear program or its nuclear know-how. Nor did the operation remove or help account for 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235 that Iran already had stockpiled, and that the IAEA reported this week is buried [at] Iran’s nuclear complex near Isfahan.”
To be weapons-grade, the uranium would need to be enriched to 90%. Isfahan is one of the sites hit in the June strikes, but, again, the IAEA hasn’t had access to the site in order to account for the 60% enriched material.
As for Trump’s statement that Iran “attempted to rebuild their nuclear program” after last year’s airstrikes, Kimball and Sandifer said there wasn’t evidence of that. “There is no evidence from the IAEA, from independent analysis of commercial satellite imagery, nor any evidence presented to Congress from the U.S. intelligence Community that Iran was rebuilding the damaged nuclear facilities and preparing to restart enrichment operations,” Kimball said.
Sandifer said that satellite images in January “showed repair activity at two of the Iranian nuclear sites bombed in June of 2025, the Natanz and Isfahan facilities. However, there is a lack of evidence that Iran had taken steps toward rebuilding its nuclear program beyond these repairs. Some experts believe that this activity was not a sign of reconstruction but an assessment of the damage to key assets.”
Other experts similarly have said there’s not evidence of Iran restarting a nuclear enrichment program. “There’s a general conclusion today that there’s a de facto suspension of enrichment,” Robert Einhorn, a senior fellow in the arms control and non-proliferation initiative at the Brookings Institution think tank and a former State Department official during the Obama administration, told the Wall Street Journal. “There’s no enrichment taking place.”
Before the June 2025 bombings, a May 31, 2025, report from the IAEA said it “has no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear programme” to develop nuclear weapons in Iran, and it noted high officials in the country have said that using nuclear weapons was “incompatible with Islamic Law.” But the IAEA said it had concerns about “repeated statements by former high-level officials in Iran related to Iran having all capabilities to manufacture nuclear weapons.”
The agency said, “[T]he fact that Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon State in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60% remains a matter of serious concern, which has drawn international attention given the potential proliferation implications.”
In Trump’s Feb. 28 remarks, he spoke generally of “eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.”
Kimball told us that “[w]hile Iran’s nuclear program remains a medium- to long-term proliferation risk, there was and is no imminent Iranian nuclear threat; Iran is not close to ‘weaponizing’ its nuclear material so as to justify breaking off negotiations and launching the U.S.-Israeli attack.”
Speaking in the White House on March 3, Trump said of the U.S. military strikes: “If we didn’t do what we’re doing right now, you would have had a nuclear war, and they [Iran] would have taken out many countries.”
In his State of the Union address on Feb. 24, Trump said Iran was “working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States of America.”
While “soon” is a subjective term, experts say the threat of Iran developing an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the mainland of the United States was not particularly imminent. One expert put the time frame at several years, while others have said it would take Iran a decade or more to develop a functioning ICBM.
“Iran’s missile arsenal remains one of the pillars of its security strategy,” Sandifer, of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us. “However, there is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future. Recent estimates determined that not only does Iran have no intercontinental ballistic missile capability, but the country appears to have maintained its self-imposed missile range limit of 2,000 km.”
Rosemary Kelanic, director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington-based think tank advocating restraint in U.S. foreign policy, said Iran currently lacks the technological ability to build an effective ICBM.
“If you’re building an ICBM, there’s lots of technical details behind it, but broadly speaking, you’ve got to be able to shoot something out of the atmosphere into low Earth orbit,” Kelanic told us in a phone interview. “Then you need to be able to have it reenter the atmosphere and not burn up on reentry, which is a different level of technological difficulty. There’s no evidence Iran can do that yet. And then you also have to be able to put a warhead on it … and the added difficulty that you need to miniaturize the warhead, to put it on a missile that would be capable of shooting that far out of the atmosphere and then coming back in and not burning up on reentry. Then you also have to do guidance systems to make sure it lands in the right place. And there’s no evidence that Iran can do that either.”
In addition to the State of the Union speech, Trump has on two other occasions this past week said that Iran is developing long-range missiles that could “soon” reach the U.S.
A day after the State of the Union address, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was more circumspect when a reporter asked how far away Iran was from achieving the development of missiles that could reach the U.S.
“I won’t speculate as to how far away they are, but they are certainly trying to achieve – and this is not new — they are trying to achieve intercontinental ballistic missiles,” Rubio said. “For example, you’ve seen them try to launch satellites into space. You’ve seen them increasing the range of the missiles they have now, and clearly they are headed in the pathway to one day being able to develop weapons that could reach the continental U.S. They already possess weapons that could reach much of Europe — already now, as we speak. And the ranges continue to grow every single year exponentially, which is amazing to me. For a country that’s facing sanctions, whose economy’s in tatters, whose people are suffering – and somehow they still find the money to invest in missiles of greater and greater capacity every year. This is an unsustainable threat.”
Several Democrats pushed back on the idea that Iran would “soon” be able to reach the continental U.S. with missiles.
“There was no way that any Iranian ballistic missile can hit the U.S. mainland,” Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego said on CNN on March 1. “That is just entirely false.”
“All of the intelligence I’ve seen in 13 years on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees tell me there is no imminent threat from Iran that justifies sending our sons and daughters into war,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said on Fox News. “The missile issue is important. The intelligence suggests that Iran might have missiles that could reach the United States within a decade. There was nothing imminent about this.”
Kaine was referring to a Defense Intelligence Agency report released last May that stated, “Iran has space launch vehicles it could use to develop a militarily-viable ICBM by 2035 should Tehran decide to pursue the capability.” The report, which assessed missile threats that might be faced by a Trump-proposed “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, projected Iran could have 60 ICBMs by 2035.
“So basically, the U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Iran would need 10 years to build ICBMs capable of hitting the United States militarily if they chose to do so,” Kelanic said. “And it did not necessarily say that there was evidence that Iran had chosen to do so. … To me, that doesn’t register as soon.”
“Concern about the development of long-range missiles by Iran is not anything new,” Kimball of the Arms Control Association told us in an email. “The United States is 10,000 km away from Iran. The longest range of a deployed Iranian ballistic missile is 2000 km.”
Kimball noted that the 10-year window has been the intelligence estimate for nearly three decades now.
“A 1999 U.S. National Intelligence estimate predicted that the United States would probably face an ICBM threat from Iran by 2015. It is now 2026,” Kimball said.
Kimball said that the 2025 DIA assessment not only forecast it would take a decade for Iran to develop a ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S., but that “Iran would need to make a determined push to achieve those capabilities on that timeline,” he said. “A decade or more is not ‘soon.’”
In several posts on X on Feb. 25, however, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on global security at Middlebury College, warned that many were misreading the context of the Defense Intelligence Agency report.
“The question wasn’t ‘When will Iran have an ICBM’, it was ‘What will the threat environment look like in 2035 when Golden Dome is to be fully operational,'” Lewis wrote. “In other words, it isn’t ‘How soon can my friend have a baby?’ Instead, the question is ‘In 2035, how many children will my friend have?’ It’s easy to say your friend could have a child within ten years and that you expect she might have three.”
A March 2 article in the Wall Street Journal reported that Lewis “said that even if Tehran wanted to pursue building the weapons, it would likely take two to three years at least to build a single missile based on the history of how other nations developed similar missiles.”
“US officials have been saying since the late 1990s that Iran is a little over a decade away from developing an ICBM and is pursuing that capability,” the Federation of American Scientists’ Johns told us. “However, building an ICBM capable of accurately striking the US mainland would require overcoming substantial technical hurdles with propulsion, guidance, and reentry, among other things. And there is little evidence to indicate that Iran has this capacity or intends to pursue it. Given the lack of publicly available and verifiable information, the DIA’s assessment and the statements by the administration are difficult to evaluate, especially regarding what timeline Iran could develop and deploy these longer-range missiles. It is also worth noting that parts of Eastern Europe have technically been within range of Iranian missiles for years.”
In an interview with India Today TV released on Feb. 25, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi denied that Iran was developing ICBMs, Reuters reported.
“We are not developing long range missiles. We have limited range to below 2000 kilometers intentionally,” he said. “We don’t want it to be a global threat. We only have (them) to defend ourselves. Our missiles build deterrence.”
On March 2, Rubio spoke about destroying Iran’s short-range ballistic missiles as the objective of the U.S. military operation. “This operation needed to happen because Iran, in about a year or a year and a half, would cross the line of immunity, meaning they would have so many short-range missiles, so many drones, that no one could do anything about it, because they could hold the whole world hostage,” he said.
Many Democrats have claimed that President Donald Trump didn’t have the legal authority to unilaterally order the Feb. 28 joint military airstrikes with Israel that resulted in the death of the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Experts have told us that, according to an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, congressional approval for the use of military force against another country is required. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives the power “To declare War” to Congress.
However, in practice, several presidents have unilaterally ordered military action abroad without authorization from Congress.
In this story, we’ll look at what Democrats have said about Trump’s latest military order and review what experts already told us in similar past cases.
Not long after the attack on Saturday, several Democrats were quick to criticize Trump’s military operation in official statements or media appearances.
Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said in a Feb. 28 statement on his congressional website, “President Trump promised no more forever wars. Instead, he has illegally dragged us into another one without congressional authorization and no long term strategy.”
Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called it an “illegal war” on “Fox News Sunday” on March 1.
“The Constitution says no declaration of war without Congress,” he said. “The president has called this war against Iran. The president can act to imminently defend the United States against imminent attack, if that happens, without congressional approval, needing later ratification by Congress. But if you’re going to initiate war, you need Congress. The president not only did not come to Congress to seek a debate or vote, he acted without even notification to the vast majority of us.”
That same day, on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut also called Trump’s actions “illegal” without authorization. “Congress wouldn’t vote to give him the permission to do it, but he’s obligated to come to Congress,” Murphy said.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that members of Congress were informed consistent with current law.
“We notified Congress,” Rubio told reporters in a March 2 press gaggle. “I mean, we notified the Gang of Eight. We notified congressional leadership. There’s no law that requires us to do that. The law says we have to notify them 48 hours after beginning hostilities. We’ve done that.”
The Gang of Eight refers to a special group of eight members of Congress, including the four top Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate, as well as the chairperson and ranking member of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X that, prior to the attacks, Rubio “called all members of the gang of eight to provide congressional notification, and he was able to reach and brief seven of the eight members.”
Rubio said there was no legal requirement to notify all members of Congress at that time.
We previously examined the legality of unilateral uses of military force by presidents when the U.S. bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in June, and again when the U.S. carried out the military operation in Venezuela that led to the capture of that country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January.
One of the experts we quoted in our January story, Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School, was definitive in her assessment of the latest use of military force abroad.
“The strikes on Iran are blatantly illegal,” she wrote in an X post on Feb. 28. “I explained in June why the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were unlawful under US and international law. Everything I wrote then is true today, but this is a far larger assault with far graver consequences.”
In her guest essay for the New York Times last year, Hathaway wrote, “It has become almost quaint to observe that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. Yes, the president is commander in chief of the military, but he is obligated to seek authorization from Congress before he initiates a war.”
Hathaway said the only time that a president does not need advance congressional approval “is when the United States has been attacked and he must act quickly to protect the country.” She said the president is also “required to seek authorization from the United Nations Security Council,” since the U.S. long ago signed on to a U.N. Charter that prohibits unjustified uses of military force by one country against another.
But other legal experts have told us that the issue of legality isn’t so clear.
Peter Shane, a constitutional law scholar and adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, told us in June that it is “difficult to give a definitive answer” on the constitutionality of such military actions “because there is so much disagreement about how the Constitution should be interpreted with regard to the unilateral presidential deployment of military force.”
In an email, he said, “Under the most persuasive reading of the Founding era, the Constitution does not authorize Presidents to deploy military force abroad without advance congressional authorization.” But he added that it has “long been the position” of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel “that history has ratified unilateral presidential deployments of military force as long as (1) the deployment serves ‘sufficiently important national interests,’ as judged by the President, and (2) the deployment does not portend a ‘prolonged and substantial military engagement, typically involving exposure of U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period.’”
Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, made similar points to us for our June story.
“The Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war, and the records of the Constitutional Convention are pretty clear that the drafters did not want to give one person the power to take the United States into war,” Roosevelt told us in an email. “However, presidents have done things that count as acts of war under international law without congressional authorization, like the Libya bombings [under then-President Barack Obama], and no one has stopped them, so our practice has departed from the text and original understanding.”
As for when Congress has to be notified of military action, the Congressional Research Service has explained that the 1973 War Powers Resolution passed by Congress requires presidents within 48 hours “to report to Congress any introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.” After the military action is reported, the resolution “requires that the use of forces must be terminated within 60 to 90 days unless Congress authorizes such use or extends the time period.” It also “requires that the ‘President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing’ U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.”
Roosevelt told us that the resolution should not be interpreted to mean the president “can do what he wants for 48 hours before notifying Congress, or for 60 days even if Congress doesn’t” grant its approval. He said, “That’s not consistent with the Constitution and it’s not consistent with the purpose and policy section of the WPA, which says that the intent is to make sure that the President’s power to engage in military action is exercised ‘only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.’”
The “48 hour and 60 day windows are supposed to be relevant to presidential responses to attacks, and the President is not supposed to be able to initiate wars at all,” he explained, with emphasis.
On March 2, Trump sent a report informing Congress that the strikes he authorized against Iran “were undertaken to protect United States forces in the region, protect the United States homeland, advance vital United States national interests, including ensuring the free flow of maritime commerce through the Strait of Hormuz, and in collective self-defense of our regional allies, including Israel.”
The president said he “acted pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct United States foreign relations.”
Since earlier this year, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has been saying that the debate among experts about the legality of unilateral presidential uses of force is largely meaningless.
“Immediately after these operations happen, every time this happens – Libya, Kosovo, Iran, all of these unilateral uses of force without congressional authorization – we immediately jump to the law and commentators immediately say this is illegal, depending on whether they like the war or not, or they defend it as being lawful, and we have this debate about whether it’s lawful or not, and I frankly think it’s kind of a meaningless debate in almost every circumstance,” he said in a Jan. 5 online discussion with another legal scholar, Bob Bauer, a New York University School of Law professor of practice.
Goldsmith said the question is why has Congress ceded the power to use military force to the president without restrictions. He made the same points in a Feb. 28 analysis after the U.S-Israel attack on Iran.
“As I’ve been saying for a while, there are no effective legal limitations within the executive branch. And courts have never gotten involved in articulating constraints in this context. That leaves Congress and the American people,” he wrote. “They have occasionally risen up to constrain the president’s deployment of troops and uses of force—for example, in Vietnam, and in Lebanon in 1983, and in Somalia in 1993. But those actions are rare and tend only to happen once there is disaster.”
He said “rhetoric of legal constraint, and debates about the legality of presidential uses of force, are empty,” and “deflect attention from Congress’s constitutional responsibility to exercise its political judgment and the political powers that the framers undoubtedly gave it to question, to hold to account, and (should it so choose) to constrain presidential uses of force.”
Congress may vote this week on war powers resolutions drafted by members of the House and Senate, including Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Republican Sen. Rand Paul, both of Kentucky. The resolutions would require congressional approval before any further military action in Iran is taken.
Trump could veto a passed resolution, and if that happens, there may not be enough support in Congress to override the veto. Few Republicans have indicated support for a war powers resolution.
Last June, the Senate failed to pass a war powers resolution that was introduced after the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities. Then in January, the House and Senate failed to pass a resolution after the military raid in Venezuela.
Trump told the New York Times that the U.S-Israel attacks on Iran could go on for “four to five weeks.”
In the first State of the Union address of his second term, President Donald Trump proclaimed that “our nation is back, bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever before.”
“What a difference a president makes,” Trump said. “A short time ago, we were a dead country. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
But our review of his speech found that he distorted a number of facts about the state of the economy, health care, immigration and other topics.
Trump’s Feb. 24 address was longer than any prior SOTU, clocking in at over 1 hour and 47 minutes, as measured by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Trump falsely claimed that he inherited “a stagnant economy” with “inflation at record levels.”
Economists have told us that the U.S. economy under Joe Biden was not stagnant. “Real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us for a Feb. 11 story.
Bureau of Economic Analysis data show that under Biden, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation), grew at an annual rate of 6.2% in 2021 (during the COVID-19 recovery), 2.5% in 2022, 2.9% in 2023 and 2.8% in 2024. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate also decreased under Biden, going from 6.4% when he was inaugurated to 4% in his last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average monthly unemployment rate for Biden’s presidency was 4.1%, below the historical average
As for inflation, when Trump took office, the annualized rate of inflation was 3%, based on the Consumer Price Index. That was far from the 9.1% rate in June 2022, under Biden, which was the highest 12-month increase since November 1981, according to the BLS. The worst inflation in U.S. history was not long after World War I, when the Consumer Price Index was up 23.7% for the 12 months ending in June 1920.
Trump later said in his speech that “the roaring economy is roaring like never before.” But under Trump, real GDP growth was down to an annual rate of 2.2% in 2025, and the unemployment rate was up to 4.3% as of January.
Trump also claimed that the 43-day shutdown of the federal government ended up “costing us two points” on GDP.
Fourth quarter growth in 2025 was 1.4%, much lower than economists had projected. The Bureau of Economic Analysis said that was partly due to the extended shutdown, but attributed just 1 percentage point — not 2 — of reduced GDP growth to the shutdown.
Trump misleadingly claimed to be bringing down “high prices” he blamed on Democrats.
“Their policies created the high prices,” the president said. “Our policies are rapidly ending them. We are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward.”
He went on to name some food items that he claimed have seen average price declines and cited energy prices as well. “Nobody can believe when they see the kind of numbers, especially energy,” he said. “When they see energy going down to numbers like that, they cannot believe it.”
Prices had increased substantially during the first half of Biden’s term, due largely to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic — not just Democratic policies.
Furthermore, overall prices are not down under Trump. As we said, in January, the annual inflation rate was down to 2.4%, which is above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. So, prices are still increasing, but at a slower pace than when Trump took office.
In addition, while the average price of some grocery items, such as eggs and bread, have come down since the start of Trump’s second term, other items, such as beef, or ground chuck, have seen an average price increase, contrary to what Trump said. And average food prices overall are up instead of down. As of January, the Consumer Price Index for at-home food products purchased at a grocery store or supermarket had increased about 2.2%, year over year, according to the most recent BLS data.
As for energy prices, it wasn’t clear from his remarks which energy prices Trump was referencing. The CPI for energy overall was down 0.3% for the 12 months ending in January, while the index for household energy specifically rose 6.6% in that period, according to BLS data. Also, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour has risen about 7.3% in the last year.
During the speech, Trump claimed, “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.” While accurate, the statistic loses some luster when factoring in steady U.S. population growth. In fact, job growth slowed and the employment-to-population ratio declined a bit in the first year of Trump’s second term.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,627,000 people employed in the U.S. in January, and that’s the highest number on record. But by and large, as the population of the U.S. has grown over the years, so too has the number of people employed in the U.S., with notable exceptions during recessions.
Since employment recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2022, jobs have reached new highs nearly every single month. Trump’s claim also overlooks that job growth was lower between January 2025 and January 2026 under Trump — a gain of 359,000 jobs or 0.2% — than it was for Biden’s final year — a gain of 1.2 million jobs or 0.8.%.
There are other, more relevant statistics, on employment growth that factor in population growth. BLS’ employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population that is working, declined from 60.1% in January 2025 to 59.8% in January 2026. Another measure is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work. That rate has stayed relatively the same, going from 62.6% in January 2025 to 62.5% in January 2026. The so-called “prime age” labor force participation rate, focusing just on those ages 25 to 54, rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026.
Trump misleadingly said that he had taken prescription drugs “from the highest price in the entire world to the lowest.” He also said that Americans “will now pay the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs.”
The Trump administration’s negotiations with drugmakers may have lowered prices for specific drugs to some degree, and in limited situations. However, there’s no evidence of a broad decrease in U.S. drug prices, as we wrote in a recent story. In fact, the median list price for hundreds of brand-name drugs rose by 4% in 2025 and in 2026 thus far, according to the research firm 46brooklyn.
Trump’s drug pricing strategy is based on the concept of most favored nation pricing. Under an MFN policy, a country bases its prices off of those in other countries.
So far, the Trump administration has made deals with 16 drug companies, securing commitments to offer selected brand-name drugs at discounted cash prices for people not using insurance. Companies have also promised to launch new drugs and offer drugs to Medicaid at MFN prices. In return, companies have gotten various benefits, including promised exemptions from tariffs and from future mandatory MFN policies.
TrumpRx, the federal website designed to highlight the administration’s cash deals, launched on Feb. 5 and so far shows cash prices for 43 brand-name drugs from the first five companies to make deals with the administration.
However, experts previously told us that while the site does offer a few good deals — for example, for people taking fertility or weight loss drugs that are often not covered by insurance — its impact is limited.
“Manufacturers have agreed to discount prices on some drugs that are not well covered by insurance or already have generic competition, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not necessarily going to help a lot of people, right now anyway,” Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, told us.
For most people, insurance will offer a better deal, she said. And even for people paying for their drugs in cash, at least 18 of the drugs on TrumpRx are available as generics for lower prices elsewhere, an analysis from STAT found.
Trump claimed that the prices are now the lowest in the world, but even for the select drugs on TrumpRx, it’s not clear if that’s true. A spokesperson for the White House previously told us the administration was using prices from other G7 nations as comparators on the site but didn’t specify what prices were being compared. Cubanski told us that it’s difficult to determine whether the prices are the lowest internationally, as countries may get rebates or discounts that are not disclosed.
Trump said he was asking Congress to “codify” his MFN program but his Great Healthcare Plan is light on specifics regarding the legislation he is suggesting Congress should pass.
Trump repeated a regular talking point, saying, “In 12 months, I secured commitments for more than $18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe.” That’s an unsubstantiated figure.
A White House website tallying such promises puts the total at $9.6 trillion for “U.S. and Foreign Investments,” providing very few details on these agreements. But as we’ve written before, even that number is shaky because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not happen.
“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April 2025 analysis when Trump began making such claims.
In looking at the White House list in May, we found that some investments may not be due to Trump. A $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, for example, was reportedly in the planning stages in March 2024, well before the election. And both a labor union and a Democratic governor took credit for the announced reopening of an auto assembly plant that also was on the Trump administration’s list.
Trump made the unsupported claim that “the flow of deadly fentanyl across our border is down by a record 56% in one year.”
Experts who study drug flow and policy have told us before that it’s not possible to know how much more or less of an illicit drug is getting into the U.S. That’s because there is no comprehensive data on the total flow of drugs into the country, which includes drugs that have not been detected by authorities, as the Congressional Research Service has reported.
“The best thing that we have as a gauge for what comes into the country is the seizure data,” and that “is not a metric of how much is actually coming into the U.S.,” Katharine Neill Harris, a fellow in drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us for an October 2024 story. “This is just the data that’s coming through the border security,” she said, noting that this excludes drugs that are smuggled into the country other ways, such as by mail.
Some use the seizure data as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected, with more drug seizures suggesting that more drugs are coming into the country — or vice versa.
The amount of fentanyl seized by federal border officers decreased by about 49% in the first year of Trump’s second term, going from 21,075 pounds seized in Biden’s last full 12 months in office to 10,674 pounds seized in Trump’s first full 12 months, according to the most recent Customs and Border Protection data. A White House spokesperson pointed to a CBP announcement in September that said since Trump took office in January, “fentanyl trafficking at the southern border is down by 56% compared to the same period in 2024.”
The number of pounds seized has been on the decline since peaking in fiscal year 2023. The fact that the seized amount has gone down could mean that less of the drug is being trafficked to the country, but it could mean that authorities are simply catching less of it. (The declining number of fentanyl overdose deaths since late 2023 suggests that it may be the former.)
But not having the figure for the total fentanyl flow to the U.S. makes it difficult to know if the president’s claim is accurate. “If you don’t know the denominator, you can’t have an answer,” David Luckey, director of the RAND Rural America Partnership Initiative and professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy, told us in 2024.
Trump continued to making false claims about gasoline prices, saying: “Gasoline — which reached a peak of over $6 a gallon in some states under my predecessor was, quite honestly, a disaster — is now below $2.30 a gallon in most states. And in some places, $1.99 a gallon. And when I visited the great state of Iowa just a few weeks ago, I even saw $1.85 a gallon for gasoline.”
As of Feb. 24, there were no U.S. states where the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was below $2.30, according to state price data from AAA. Oklahoma was the closest to that figure, with an average price of $2.37. That also means there are no states with an average price below $2 per gallon. In Iowa, the state Trump mentioned, the average price statewide was $2.55, at the time of his remarks.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us for a Feb. 19 story that, as of Feb. 14, there were “about 40 stations in the nation with gasoline below $2/gal, which is what we’ve generally seen on a daily basis for February thus far.” In a Feb. 24 post on Substack, he wrote that, as of that date, $2.69 was the “most common price being charged at stations nationwide.”
Nationwide, gasoline prices are roughly 17 cents (or about 5%) lower than they were when Trump took office. As of the week ending Feb. 23, the average price in the U.S. for a gallon of regular gasoline was almost $2.94, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Trump continued to make his inflated claim about ending “eight wars.”
“My first 10 months, I ended eight wars, including Cambodia,” Trump said. “Cambodia and Thailand, Pakistan and India would have been a nuclear war. Thirty-five million people, said the prime minister of Pakistan, would have died if it were not for my involvement. Kosovo and Serbia, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Congo and Rwanda. And, of course, the war in Gaza, which proceeds at a very low level, it’s just about there.”
When his claim was seven wars last year, experts in international relations told us that Trump played a substantial role in ending fighting in four of those conflicts — although the Indian government denied that the U.S. played a role in negotiating the ceasefire with Pakistan. Trump also counts some international disagreements that weren’t wars, as well as some battles that haven’t ended.
Trump includes the more than two-year-long war between Israel and Hamas as the eighth war, as the two sides agreed in October to a ceasefire and the return of hostages and prisoners. Many have said that Trump should get credit for getting the deal done, including Biden’s former national security adviser.
Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that implementing Trump’s 20-point peace agreement comes with challenges. “Whether this leads to an end to the war remains an open question,” Cook said.
We’d note that both Israel and Hamas have accused the other of violating the terms of the ceasefire deal.
Trump claimed to have presided over a “tremendous renewal” of religion in America, but recent polling has found the opposite.
A Gallup poll conducted in November found that less than half of Americans reported that religion was an important part of their daily lives, which is a 17 percentage point decline since 2015, the year before Trump won his first election.
“The steady decline in U.S. religiosity over the past decade has been evident for years,” according to Gallup. “Fewer Americans identify with a religion, church attendance and membership are declining, and religion holds a less important role in people’s lives than it once did.”
That contradicts the president’s claim that “during my time in office, both the first four years, and in particular, this last year, there has been a tremendous renewal in religion, faith, Christianity and belief in God.”
Trump went on to claim, “This is especially true among young people, and a big part of that had to do with my great friend, Charlie Kirk.”
A study released by the Pew Research Center in December found that Americans have remained roughly steady in whether or not they identify as religious since 2020, and that there is no surge in religious belief among the young.
“On average, young adults remain much less religious than older Americans,” according to Pew. “Today’s young adults also are less religious than young people were a decade ago. And there is no indication that young men are converting to Christianity in large numbers,” as had been suggested in some recent reporting.
The president touted the so-called “warrior dividend” bonus checks that were sent to military personnel in December.
“Every service member recently received a warrior dividend of $1,776,” Trump said, later adding, “we got the money from tariffs and other things.”
It’s true that about 1.5 million active-duty and reserve military members received checks, but the money didn’t come from tariffs.
Those bonuses were a reallocation of funds initially earmarked for an increased Department of Defense housing allowance, funded by a $2.9 billion appropriation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
During his address, Trump repeated — as he does in virtually every speech — his unsupported claim that many of the immigrants who came to the U.S. during the Biden administration “poured in by the millions and millions, from prisons, from mental institutions” in other countries. Trump has never provided any credible evidence of that.
Trump also claimed that Biden’s immigration policies allowed the entry of “11,888 murderers.” He has been citing variations of this figure for more than a year. But as we’ve written, he’s referring to noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list, known as the agency’s non-detained docket, included 13,099 people as of July 21, 2024. The “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a 2024 statement, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders.
Trump boasted, “The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year. Boosting pensions, 401(k)s and retirement accounts for the millions and millions of Americans are all gaining. Everybody’s up, way up.” The stock market is up in Trump’s first year, but it’s down from the gains seen in the last two years under Biden.
Since Trump took office, the S&P 500 has risen 14.9% (that’s for the period between the close of the market on Jan. 17, 2025, the last business day before the inauguration, and the close of the market on the Feb. 24, 2026). Although Trump has said stocks far outperformed Wall Street expectations, that’s only a little better than many financial analysts forecast for 2025 just before Trump took office.
As Yahoo! Finance wrote on Jan. 2, 2025, “The median year-end target for the S&P 500 among strategists tracked by Yahoo Finance sits at 6,600. This would represent about a 12% increase from the index’s current level.”
Trump claimed the Dow Jones “broke 50,000 four years ahead of schedule, and the S&P hit 7,000 where it wasn’t supposed to do it for many years.”
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, reached 50,000 in early February, but has since dropped a bit, and was at 49,174 at the close of the market on Feb. 24.
Although Trump’s claim may make it seem like the stock market rebounded since he took office, the stock market performed well in Biden’s final two years in office — with the S&P 500 rising over 20% each of those years — better than the 13% gain Trump saw in his first year. As we wrote in our story, “Biden’s Final Numbers,” the S&P grew by nearly 58% over the entirety of Biden’s four years. The stock market has been on a good long-term run, with the S&P rising nearly 68% during Trump’s first four years in office and by 166% during the eight years under President Barack Obama before that.
We also note that while Trump said that “everybody’s up, way up,” only about 62% of Americans own any stock, according to a Gallup poll in 2025. Ownership of stock skews heavily to the wealthy — 87% among those in households earning at least $100,000. It was 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.
“With the great Big Beautiful Bill, we gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors,” Trump said, recycling some of his favorite short descriptors to describe the reconciliation bill he signed into law in July.
As we’ve noted before, the law boosted the number of people who don’t have to pay any tax on their Social Security benefits through 2028, but does not eliminate the tax for all seniors since there is a phase-out for those with higher incomes.
According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, 88% of Social Security recipients 65 years or older will not pay any tax on those benefits under the law. That’s up from the 64% of senior recipients who already did not have to pay. (The law does not exempt individuals younger than 65 from having to pay taxes.)
The situation is similar with Trump’s claims of “no tax” on overtime or tips, which are also temporary and have phase-outs as income increases and other limitations. There is a maximum deduction of $25,000 for tips and $12,500 for overtime pay.
As he has for years, Trump insisted, without evidence, that “cheating is rampant in our elections.”
Trump urged Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and also photo identification to vote in federal elections. Under the current law, registrants must attest that they are a citizen under penalty of perjury, and noncitizens who vote risk deportation and being permanently inadmissible for return to the U.S. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 14 states and Washington, D.C., don’t require identification at the polls.
We’ve written a lot of articles about Trump’s false, misleading and unfounded claims about fraud in the 2020 election (and other elections). We’ve also looked at the Trump campaign’s 2020 legal challenges, which lacked evidence of voter fraud and were almost universally dismissed by judges.
Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” And William Barr, U.S. attorney general in Trump’s first term, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud.” Barr told the committee the election fraud narrative the Trump campaign was “shoveling out to the public … was bullshit.”
Trump said the SAVE America Act was needed “to stop illegal aliens and others — they’re unpermitted persons — from voting in our sacred American elections.” He called that kind of illegal voting “rampant” in American elections. But that’s not what was found when numerous states used a program called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, to check the citizenship status of people on the voter rolls in numerous states.
According to the New York Times, of the 49.5 million voter registrations checked, the Department of Homeland Security referred about 10,000 cases to investigators. As the Times noted, that’s about 0.02% of registrations that were flagged as potentially being noncitizens. But even that number is inflated. The Times found that when several counties began looking into those on the voter rolls who were marked as potentially noncitizens, it turned out that only a fraction of them were. Moreover, there was no indication of how many of those who may have improperly registered to vote actually voted.
A spokesperson for the Trump administration noted that most of the states using the verification program are Republican-led states, and that the program might identify more noncitizens if it were embraced by Democratic-led states, many of which have less strict voter ID laws.
A systematic review and analysis of claims about noncitizen registrants and voters in all 50 states by the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, updated in February, found that “sweeping allegations about noncitizen registrations or voting appear to arise from misunderstandings, mischaracterizations, or outright fabrications about complex voter data. In every examined case, when claims about large numbers of noncitizens on voting rolls are subject to scrutiny and properly investigated, the number of alleged instances falls drastically.”
Trump also criticized mail-in ballots, calling them “crooked,” and saying they should only be allowed, “for illness, disability, military or travel.”
Mail-in voting is widely used around the country. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 28 states offer “no excuse” mail-in voting, meaning that any voter can request a mail-in ballot without needing to provide a reason. As we have written, experts have told us that voter fraud via mail-in ballots is rare, though more common than in-person voting fraud.
Trump made the dubious claim that the federal budget can be balanced by eliminating fraudulent spending.
“I am officially announcing the war on fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance,” he said. “We’ll get it done, and if we’re able to find enough of that fraud, we will actually have a balanced budget overnight. It’ll go very quickly.”
In a 2024 report, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the entire federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.” But the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2025, which ended on Sept. 30, was nearly $1.8 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office projected in its February budget outlook that the deficit will be $1.9 trillion for fiscal year 2026 and rise to $2 trillion or more in 2028 and subsequent fiscal years.
Trump claimed that he inherited “rampant crime at home” and later boasted “last year, the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history. This is the biggest decline, think of it, in recorded history, the lowest number in over 125 years.”
Crime data show that violent crime continued to decline in 2025, but the trend began in 2022 after a spike in crime, particularly murders, in 2020 — the year the pandemic began and the last year of Trump’s first term. Trump is right in touting the good news that violent crime continues to fall, but he wrongly paints this as a stark turnaround from when he took office.
U.S. violent crime rate peaked in the early 1990s and has generally declined since, even with the bump up in 2020. The rate dropped by 33.2 percentage points under Biden and was less than half the 1990s peak in 2024, the year before Trump took office, according to estimates from the FBI, which relies on voluntary reports from law enforcement agencies nationwide. The number and rate of murders also declined since 2020.
In 2024, Trump claimed such crime data amounted to “fake numbers.” But now that he’s in office, and the drop in crime continues, he has embraced those numbers.
Full-year nationwide data from the FBI won’t be released until later this year, but, as we reported last month, other groups that aggregate crime data reported by law enforcement agencies across the country show violent crime, including murder, went down again in 2025. Trump has highlighted a report by the Council on Criminal Justice that found a 21% decline in the homicide rate from 2024 to 2025 in 35 cities.
CCJ reported, “When nationwide data for jurisdictions of all sizes is reported by the FBI later this year, there is a strong possibility that homicides in 2025 will drop to about 4.0 per 100,000 residents. That would be the lowest rate ever recorded in law enforcement or public health data going back to 1900, and would mark the largest single-year percentage drop in the homicide rate on record.”
The nationwide homicide rate was 5 per 100,000 in 2024.
Trump has attributed the crime drop to his policies of sending federal law enforcement, including the National Guard or immigration officers, into cities, as he mentioned repeatedly in the NBC News interview. But crime experts say such claims need robust research. “Without rigorous evidence, it is not possible to confidently pinpoint the factors fueling the drop in homicide,” the CCJ report said. “Any assertive claims about the influence of specific policy interventions, such as National Guard deployments and increased immigration enforcement or expanded community violence intervention programs, should be supported by robust research designs intended to measure their causal effects.”
Trump repeated a dubious claim he’s made several times before — and we’ve written about twice — regarding the ability of his increased tariffs to replace income taxes.
“I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” the president said.
But, as we’ve explained, there’s a wide margin between the revenues raised from personal income taxes versus those raised from tariffs.
For example, the federal government brought in a total of $560 billion in January, according to the Treasury’s most recent monthly report. More than half of that revenue came from individual income taxes, while just 5% came from tariffs.
“It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes,” Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, economists with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote in 2024. “Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.”
Replacing the income tax with higher tariffs would cause job losses, higher inflation, larger federal deficits and a recession, Clausing and Obstfeld said.
“It would also shift the tax burden away from the well off, substantially increasing the tax burden on the poor and middle class,” they argued.
Many economists also say Trump is wrong to say tariffs are “paid for by foreign countries.” A Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis published on Feb. 12 concluded that “nearly 90 percent of the tariffs’ economic burden fell on U.S. firms and consumers.”
White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett blasted the report as an “embarrassment,” saying, “It’s, I think, the worst paper I’ve ever seen in the history of the Federal Reserve system.” Hassett claimed the authors “put out a conclusion which has created a lot of news that’s highly partisan based on analysis that wouldn’t be accepted in a first-semester econ class.”
But the New York Fed is hardly alone in holding that position. A working paper revised in February from Harvard University professor and former International Monetary Fund economist Gita Gopinath and Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago for the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that “tariff pass-through to U.S. import prices is almost 100 percent, so the United States is bearing a large share of the costs.”
Trump said that last year, the U.S. “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and “wiped it out.” But experts told us at the time that the June bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities damaged the country’s nuclear capabilities but that they were not “obliterated.” A preliminary classified intelligence assessment, described by CNN and the New York Times, said that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back by just a few months.
Indeed, Iran’s nuclear program continues. On Feb. 21, special envoy Steve Witkoff told Fox News that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb-making material.” Meanwhile, the U.S. has been amassing warships and warplanes in the Middle East, and Trump has threatened military action against Iran. There will be further talks between the U.S. and Iran about the Iranian nuclear program on Feb. 26.
“We will always protect Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,” Trump insisted, about a third of the way through his speech.
To partially pay for the tax cuts in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans cut more than $990 billion in spending on Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for people who have low incomes or disabilities. The law has many Medicaid-related provisions, but a major way spending was brought down was by modifying Medicaid eligibility requirements and introducing new work requirements. With fewer people on Medicaid, the program costs less.
Republicans have previously argued that Medicaid remains available and has not changed, but the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Medicaid-related changes in the law would result in 7.5 million fewer Americans having health insurance in 2034. A much smaller number of people — 100,000 — would lose coverage in a decade as a result of changes to Medicare under the law, CBO said. Another 2.1 million were estimated to lose coverage as a result of changes to the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.
Trump exaggerated the increase in U.S. oil production and gave himself too much credit for the country’s record output of natural gas.
“American oil production is up by more than 600,000 barrels a day, and we just received, from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil,” he said. “American natural gas production is at an all-time high because I kept my promise to drill, baby, drill.”
As of November, U.S. crude oil production had increased to an average of more than 13.6 million barrels per day in Trump’s first full ten months in the White House, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s up about 2.5%, or 334,600 barrels per day, from less than 13.3 million barrels per day during the same period in 2024.
Before Trump was inaugurated, and before any of his policies were in place, the EIA had already projected in its January Short-Term Energy Outlook that average daily production would increase to a 13.5 million barrels a day in 2025 — up from the previous record of 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024.
Meanwhile, through November, production of dry natural gas had increased to an average of nearly 3.3 trillion cubic feet per month in Trump’s first full ten months in the White House, according to EIA data. That’s up about 4.2% from more than 3.1 trillion cubic feet produced per month during the same period in 2024, which was already a record year for natural gas production in the country, the EIA said.
Correction, Feb. 25: We have corrected Trump’s quote about the price of gasoline. He said gasoline is “now below $2.30 a gallon in most states,” not $2.36.
Clarification, Feb. 25: We edited the summary to make clear that the annual inflation rate was 3% when Trump took office in January 2025, not 9.1%.
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has made a series of claims about the economy, a topic that should feature prominently in his State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 24.
“We have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said at a White House press briefing on Jan. 20, adding later that “America is booming.” He made similar comments the following day, asserting that “we were a dead country” a year ago.
But his economic boasts include false or misleading claims, and he sometimes pushes an incorrect narrative of an abrupt change in some economic indicators since he came back to the White House.
As preparation for what we might hear in Tuesday night’s speech, we offer a guide to a dozen of Trump’s recent claims about the economy, most of which we’ve written about before. They touch on inflation, economic growth, manufacturing, wages, jobs, the deficit, stock market and more.
Proud of federal data showing that economic growth in the second and third quarters of 2025 exceeded expectations, Trump in Iowa on Jan. 27 falsely claimed that “under my leadership, economic growth is exploding to numbers unheard of. They’ve never had them before.”
After declining by an annualized rate of 0.6% in the first quarter of 2025, which covers the three months from January to March, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation) grew at a rate of 3.8% in the second quarter of 2025 and at a rate of 4.4% in the third quarter, according to estimates from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
But those were not record-setting numbers. They were the largest quarterly increases since the economy expanded at a rate of 4.7% in the third quarter of 2023, under President Joe Biden.
As we wrote this month, the quarterly growth record is 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020, which was at the beginning of the economic recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, according to BEA estimates back to 1947, the record was 16.7% growth in the first quarter of 1950. Yearly growth in GDP has averaged about 2.75% over the last 50 years.
Trump told NBC News in a Feb. 4 interview: “We have, it was just announced, more jobs right now occupied in the United States of America than at any time during its existence, 250 years. There are more people working today than at any time in the history of our country. Pretty good stat.”
While accurate, the statistic loses some luster when factoring in steady U.S. population growth. In fact, job growth slowed and the employment-to-population ratio declined a bit in the first year of Trump’s second term.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 158,627,000 people employed in the U.S. in January, and that’s the highest number on record. But by and large, as the population of the U.S. has grown over the years, so too has the number of people employed in the U.S., with notable exceptions during recessions. This graph from BLS gives the long-term picture:
Since employment recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-2022, jobs have reached new highs nearly every single month. Trump’s claim also overlooks that job growth was lower between January 2025 and January 2026 under Trump — a gain of 359,000 jobs or 0.2% — than it was for Biden’s final year — a gain of 1.2 million jobs or 0.8.%.
There are other, more relevant statistics, on employment growth that factor in population growth. BLS’ employment-population ratio, which is the percentage of the population that is working, declined from 60.1% in January 2025 to 59.8% in January 2026. Another measure is the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work. That rate has stayed relatively the same, going from 62.6% in January 2025 to 62.5% in January 2026. The so-called “prime age” labor force participation rate, focusing just on those ages 25 to 54, rose from 83.5% in January 2025 to 84.1% in January 2026.
Trump has frequently cited this hollow statistic about more people being employed than ever before during both his first and second terms, including during his State of the Union address in 2019.
In the NBC News interview, Trump repeated his false claim that he “inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country,” and added that “now we have almost no inflation.”
When Trump took office in January 2025, the annualized rate of inflation was 3%, based on the Consumer Price Index. That was far from the 9.1% rate in June 2022, under Biden, which was the highest 12-month increase since November 1981, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worst inflation in U.S. history was not long after World War I, when the Consumer Price Index was up 23.7% for the 12 months ending in June 1920.
Trump has repeatedly mocked Democrats for raising the issue of “affordability,” which Trump says he has since solved.
“Prices are way down. You don’t hear the Democrats talking about affordability anymore, which they caused the affordability problem, very badly,” Trump said on Feb. 6. “But you don’t hear that word. I haven’t heard that word spoken in a week and a half because they can’t speak because the prices are down.”
But overall prices are not down. As of January, one year into Trump’s second term, the annual inflation rate was down to 2.4%. However, that’s above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. So, prices are still increasing, but at a slower pace than when Trump took office.
In the Jan. 20 press briefing at the White House, Trump falsely claimed to have “ended Biden stagflation,” which he said is “far worse than inflation.” The U.S. was “plagued by the nightmare of stagflation” under Biden, and now “we are witnessing the exact opposite,” Trump said at a World Economic Forum meeting on Jan. 21.
But, as we’ve written, economists told us that the U.S. economy under Biden did not experience stagflation, which Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us “refers to a sustained period of high inflation combined with weak or stagnant real economic growth, typically alongside rising unemployment.” He said that definition did not apply to the Biden economy.
Inflation was high during Biden’s first two years in office, then declined sharply in the last half of his presidency. “However, real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Handley said.
In addition, Aeimit Lakdawala, an associate professor of economics at Wake Forest University, told us that there has not been a complete economic turnaround under Trump.
“What we’re really seeing is a continuation of trends that were already well underway before Trump took office in January 2025,” Lakdawala said. He noted that the annual inflation rate is “modestly lower” under Trump, while the average annualized increase in real GDP under Trump is “a touch lower” than in Biden’s last two years. The unemployment rate, at 4.3% as of January, is also slightly higher than it was when Trump took office.
Trump has repeatedly boasted that the stock market has outperformed expectations. “Your 401(k)s are doing very well,” Trump said in a speech to military families in North Carolina on Feb. 13.
A Feb. 16 press release from the White House put some additional spin on the claim, saying the stock market has “rebounded strongly under President Trump’s leadership.” The release notes that the S&P 500 “surg[ed] nearly 40% from its early-year low.” That’s true. But the low in 2025 came just a few days after Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcement on April 2 that sent stock prices tumbling. Since then, stocks have rebounded and achieved new highs.
Since Trump took office, the S&P 500 has risen 14.5% (that’s for the period between the close of the market on Jan. 17, 2025, the last business day before the inauguration, and the close of the market on Feb. 18, 2026). Although Trump has said stocks far outperformed Wall Street expectations, that’s only a little better than many financial analysts forecast for 2025 just before Trump took office.
As Yahoo! Finance wrote on Jan. 2, 2025, “The median year-end target for the S&P 500 among strategists tracked by Yahoo Finance sits at 6,600. This would represent about a 12% increase from the index’s current level.”
“And if you remember when I was first elected, everybody said, if I got it to 50,000, the Dow, or 7,000 with the S&P, if I got it to 50,000 with a Dow, that would be an amazing — that would be in four years from then, from the election,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 13.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, reached 50,000 in early February, but has since dropped a bit, and was at 49,576 at the open of the market on Feb. 19.
But it’s misleading to suggest the stock market “rebounded strongly” under Trump. The stock market performed well in Biden’s final two years in office — with the S&P 500 rising over 20% each of those years — better than the 13% gain Trump saw in his first year. As we wrote in our story, “Biden’s Final Numbers,” the S&P 500 grew by nearly 58% over the entirety of Biden’s four years. The stock market has been on a good long-term run, with the S&P rising nearly 68% during Trump’s first four years in office and by 166% during the eight years under President Barack Obama before that.
We also note that while Trump often boasts that everyone’s 401(k) retirement account has risen, only about 62% of Americans own any stock, according to a Gallup poll in 2025. Ownership of stock skews heavily to the wealthy — 87% among those in households earning at least $100,000. It was 28% among those in households earning less than $50,000.
In a Feb. 6 gaggle with reporters, in which he claimed that “we’ve had massive price reductions,” Trump misleadingly said that “if you look at gasoline, $1.99 a gallon.” That was far from the national average price.
Gasoline prices are about 19 cents (or 6%) lower than they were when Trump took office, but, as of the week ending Feb. 9, the average price in the U.S. for a gallon of regular gasoline was $2.90, nearly $1 more than Trump said, according to the Energy Information Administration. One week later, the average price was $2.92, as of the week ending Feb. 16.
There also were no states in which the average price was below $2 at the time of Trump’s claim. Oklahoma had the lowest average price at $2.36 per gallon on Feb. 6, according to AAA data. That state, at $2.29, also had the lowest average price on Feb. 18.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told us in an email that, as of Feb. 14, there were “about 40 stations in the nation with gasoline below $2/gal, which is what we’ve generally seen on a daily basis for February thus far.” In a Feb. 16 post on Substack, he wrote that, as of that date, $2.79 was the “most common U.S. gas price encountered by motorists.”
In a Jan. 27 press gaggle, Trump also claimed to have “made a lot of progress” on the “very, very high prices” that he inherited. “So, we have the groceries going down. We have the energy going down,” he said. That’s misleading.
While the average price of some grocery items, such as eggs and bread, has decreased since the start of Trump’s second term, average food prices overall are up — not down. As of January, the Consumer Price Index for at-home food products purchased at a grocery store or supermarket had increased about 2.2%, year over year, according to the most recent BLS data.
As for energy prices, it’s not clear what Trump is referring to. The CPI for energy overall was down 0.3% for the 12 months ending in January, while the index for household energy specifically rose 6.6% in that period, according to BLS data. Also, the average price of electricity per kilowatt hour has risen about 7.3% in the last year.
In his Jan. 30 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Trump exaggerated when he wrote that “with the help of tariffs, we have cut that federal budget deficit by a staggering 27% in a single year.”
Budget deficits occur when federal spending exceeds revenue. The White House has said that Trump’s figure was calculated by comparing the cumulative budget deficit from February to November in 2025 with the combined deficit for the same 10 months in 2024.
But organizations that track the budget deficit typically compare deficits based on months in fiscal years, not calendar years. The $1.78 trillion budget deficit for fiscal year 2025, which began on Oct. 1, 2024, and ended on Sept. 30, decreased about 2.3% from the $1.82 trillion budget gap in fiscal year 2024. (Trump alone was president for a full eight out of the 12 months in FY 2025.)
As of January, the budget deficit was down about 17% through the first four months of FY 2026 when compared with the same period in FY 2025. An increase in federal revenue, including from tariffs, contributed to the decline. On Feb. 9, the Congressional Budget Office said, “Customs duties, including tariff revenues, collected this year were more than four times the amount recorded in the first four months of last year, an increase of $90 billion.”
However, in its most recent long-term budget outlook, the CBO projected that the final FY 2026 budget deficit will end up being close to $1.9 trillion, higher than the deficit in FY 2025. That would be about $140 billion higher than the deficit that CBO projected for FY 2026 in January 2025, before any of Trump’s policies had been implemented.
Trump’s claim that he has “slashed our gaping trade deficit by a staggering 77%,” as he said Jan. 27 in Iowa, is misleading. In 2025, the U.S. trade deficit in goods and services decreased by 0.2%, or about $2.1 billion, from 2024, according to data the Bureau of Economic Analysis released Feb. 19. The 2025 goods-and-services trade deficit of roughly $901.5 billion was the third largest going back to 1960.
Instead, as we wrote on Feb. 3, Trump’s claim appears to compare the monthly trade deficit in January 2025 to the deficit nine months later in October, a 16-year low. That’s a decrease of 77.6%, according to BEA figures revised this month. (The decrease from January to December was 45.2%.) But economic experts told us that comparing the trade deficit in one month to another is not preferable because monthly trade figures can be volatile.
For instance, in the first three months of 2025, the trade imbalance surged to between roughly $120 billion and $136 billion, as U.S. importers loaded up on foreign goods to get ahead of tariffs on imported products that Trump had proposed. Imports went back down after the tariffs went into effect, producing smaller trade deficits in the months later in the year.
“Large month-to-month swings are common, even in periods with no underlying structural change in trade policy or economic conditions,” Handley, at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email for our story. “For that reason, economists almost never evaluate claims about the ‘trade deficit’ based on comparisons between two individual months.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that “factory construction is up by 41%” under his second term. That’s misleading. The Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data, which the White House referred us to, shows that spending has declined since Trump took office.
The quarterly data show a 6.7% decline, while the drop was 7.3% on a monthly basis, from January 2025 to October, the latest data available.
As we’ve explained, the White House gets a 41% increase by comparing the monthly average from January to August 2025 with the yearly average for 2021 to 2024. But that methodology fails to take into account the 212% increase in factory construction spending over Biden’s four years, partly fueled by the 2022 CHIPS Act, which helped fund semiconductor manufacturing facilities and continues to affect construction spending. Anirban Basu, chief economist for the Associated Builders and Contractors, an industry trade association, told us that the manufacturing construction spending in 2025 is “largely due” to the CHIPS Act.
It’s worth noting that the economy lost 83,000 manufacturing jobs in Trump’s first 12 months. In the year before he took office, the decline was 202,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump has repeatedly mentioned the decline in real wages, meaning they are adjusted for inflation, over the four years of Biden’s presidency and the increase in real wages so far under his second term. It’s true that real average weekly earnings fell 4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, during Biden’s term, and they’ve gone up 1.9% in the year since January 2025. But Trump at times has left the misleading impression that this has been an abrupt turnaround. Over Biden’s last year, real wages went up 0.7%
On Jan. 13, Trump said: “After real wages plummeted by $3,000 under sleepy Joe Biden, real wages are up by $1,300 in less than one year under President Trump.” Later that month, he said that “wages have gone up … much faster” than inflation. With Biden, he said, “it was just the opposite. Wages in the United States in the last year have gone up.”
Wages rose faster than inflation over the last year-and-a-half of Biden’s presidency. They’ve outpaced inflation since June 2023, and they’ve continued to do so since Trump took office.
“It remains the case that both at the tail end of the Biden administration and the beginning of this Trump administration, real wages have been rising. That is to say, inflation has been rising more slowly than wages have been,” Gary Burtless, a senior fellow emeritus in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told us in a phone interview when we wrote about this topic in December.
As for the specific dollar amounts Trump has mentioned — a $3,000 decline in real wages under Biden and a $1,300 increase under his term — the White House told us that’s based on weekly wage data from BLS that’s adjusted for inflation using the CPI-W, which is the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers. It measures the change in prices for a basket of goods purchased by such workers, and it’s the index Social Security uses to calculate cost-of-living adjustments. Using that method, we got a decline of nearly $2,900 over Biden’s four years and an increase of about $1,400 for Trump’s first year ($1,363 to be exact), a figure that includes January data released this month.
Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank, cautioned against looking at wage growth only over presidential terms, calling it “deeply misleading” because “macroeconomic cycles occasionally have huge effects that have nothing to do with presidential performance.”
Bivens noted that average wages jumped up during the COVID-19 pandemic when the unemployment rate also spiked as mainly low-wage workers lost their jobs. As those low-wage workers regained employment, “it had the effect of artificially lowering measured wages in the aggregate.” (Burtless also said the pandemic had this impact on wage data.)
“The lesson is that the proper way to measure macroeconomic variables like average wages is from business cycle peak to business cycle peak, not from the trough to a peak. That’s why, for example, we measure from 2019-2024 or 2025,” Bivens said.
But presidents of both parties are apt to take credit or cast blame for increases or declines in real wage growth.
The president continues to make the exaggerated boast that “we secured commitments for a record breaking plus $18 trillion” in “new investments,” as he said in Iowa in late January. In his pre-Super Bowl NBC News interview, Trump also made the claim, saying “$18 trillion is being invested in our country as we speak.” At times, he has attributed this to his policies on tariffs.
A White House website tallying such promises puts the total at $9.6 trillion for “U.S. and Foreign Investments,” providing very few details on these agreements. But as we’ve written before, even that number is shaky because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not happen.
“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April 2025 analysis when Trump began making such claims.
In looking at the White House list in May, we found that some investments may not be due to Trump. A $500 billion artificial intelligence infrastructure project, for example, was reportedly in the planning stages in March 2024, well before the election. And both a labor union and a Democratic governor took credit for the announced reopening of an auto assembly plant that also was on the Trump administration’s list.
President Donald Trump has said that Americans are now paying or will pay “the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs,” thanks to the administration’s negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. The administration has announced discounted cash prices for a small number of brand-name drugs. There isn’t evidence Trump’s deals so far have led to broad decreases in drug prices, nor is it certain they will in the future.
Despite these caveats and ambiguities, Trump often has presented lower drug prices as a fait accompli. “We now are paying the lowest price anywhere in the world for drugs,” he said in a Jan. 27 speech in Iowa. “Every other president tried for it. They didn’t try very hard. They didn’t get anything. I got it done.”
“The American people were effectively subsidizing the cost of drugs for the entire world, and it’s not going to happen any longer,” he said during the Feb. 5 launch for TrumpRx, the new federal website pointing people toward cash prices negotiated by the administration for brand-name drugs. “We ended it.”
The TrumpRx website makes similarly sweeping statements, claiming that the approach of basing U.S. prices off of prices in other countries — referred to as most favored nation, or MFN, pricing — is “guaranteeing huge savings for Americans.”
Trump’s efforts may have lowered prices for some consumers buying certain drugs. But experts told us there’s no guarantee of substantial savings for Americans in general.
Thus far, the Trump administration’s drug price negotiations have resulted in voluntary agreements with 16 companies, though many of the details remain unclear. Under those agreements, drug manufacturers have promised to offer discounts on select drugs to people who pay cash and are not using insurance. Companies have also agreed to launch new drugs or to offer Medicaid drugs at MFN prices. In exchange, the companies have said, they have been promised exemptions from tariffs and other benefits, such as exemptions from future mandatory MFN pricing.
“With rare exception,” the negotiations with drugmakers “don’t appear to have translated into actual savings for people at the pharmacy counter or for public or commercial payers yet,” Rena Conti, a health economist at Boston University Questrom School of Business, told us. These exceptions include certain weight loss and fertility drugs, which are often not covered by insurance to begin with and are now being offered at reduced cash prices, she said.
There is no single, easily tracked measure of drug prices in the U.S., making it challenging to assess broad claims about whether drug prices are rising or falling. Companies provide list prices, but individuals, health insurers and the government rarely pay these prices, often benefiting from rebates or other discounts.
That said, there are no signs of widespread slashing of list prices in the U.S. “Typically in January, we will see price increases for already-launched brand drugs, and just like we’ve seen in previous years, we saw prices rise,” Conti said. The median list price increase for hundreds of brand-name drugs so far in 2026 was 4%, which is the same median increase as in 2025, according to the research firm 46brooklyn.
When we asked whether Trump is claiming that Americans in general are now paying the lowest prices, a White House spokesperson asserted they would in the future. “We are going to be paying the same if not lower than other wealthy nations,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Either via TrumpRx or once the MFN deals are codified upon passage of Great Healthcare Plan.”
The Great Healthcare Plan is a series of health policy proposals, released Jan. 15, which Trump has called on Congress to pass as legislation. To lower drug prices, the plan calls for “codifying” MFN deals. The Trump administration has also said it will add more drugs to TrumpRx, and in December the administration released proposals to apply MFN pricing to a subset of Medicare beneficiaries.
It is unclear how or whether the MFN deals will be codified, however. Nor is it a given that even a widely applied MFN policy would reduce prices substantially.
Trump’s claim that he is the first president to lower drug prices also ignores past efforts that have had some success.
Separate from the MFN pricing efforts, the Trump administration has continued to negotiate lower Medicare prices for some specific drugs under the Inflation Reduction Act. However, this law was passed in 2022 under the Biden administration.
And rather than promoting these Medicare negotiations, the Trump administration is “talking about this unclear political pressuring that the White House is applying in general in the health industry and specifically on drugs,” Joseph Antos, a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute, told us. AEI is a conservative-leaning think tank. “Is there any way to actually objectively measure the impact of any of that? I don’t think there is.”
Below, we explain what we know and don’t know about the impacts of Trump’s MFN negotiations and proposed policies on drug prices.
There is some support for Trump’s claim that he has lowered drug costs, in the case of a few specific drugs being offered at relatively low cash prices.
However, TrumpRx, the website the administration built to promote these cash prices, echoes Trump’s exaggerated claims about the scope of the price reductions.
TrumpRx shows cash prices for 43 drugs from five manufacturers that made deals with the administration. People can either print a coupon to use at pharmacies or, in some cases, go to a manufacturer’s website to make the purchase.
GoodRx, a prescription drug coupon site that launched in 2011, has partnered with the administration to provide many of the TrumpRx-branded coupons, and people can in some cases use GoodRx to access coupons providing the same Trump administration-negotiated prices.
The TrumpRx website advertises the “lowest cash prices” and shows discounts of 50% to 93% off the list price. But most people, particularly those with insurance coverage, don’t pay the list price.
“Manufacturers have agreed to discount prices on some drugs that are not well covered by insurance or already have generic competition, and that’s not nothing, but it’s not necessarily going to help a lot of people, right now anyway,” Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, told us. KFF is a nonpartisan health policy organization. She explained that most people with health insurance will fare better using their insurance than paying in cash.
For example, a person with health insurance who pays a flat copay for medications is unlikely to get a better price by going to TrumpRx, two economists from the University of Washington explained in an opinion piece published in STAT. In fact, the TrumpRx website says: “If you have insurance, check your co-pay first—it may be even lower.”
People with insurance also benefit from caps on their spending in the form of deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums, the economists wrote, as well as prices for drugs negotiated by their insurers. But for now, drugs purchased via TrumpRx are not counted toward deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. “A family might hit their out-of-pocket maximum by midyear using insurance, after which their insurer pays 100% of the prescription cost for the rest of the year,” the economists wrote. “Under TrumpRx, the family would pay full freight all year long, with no ceiling on their out-of-pocket spending.”
One group of people who are sometimes asked to pay list prices for drugs are those without insurance or whose insurance does not cover a specific drug, Cubanski explained.
But even for those without insurance or whose insurance doesn’t cover a certain drug, Conti said, there are better deals available on the U.S. market for some drugs featured on TrumpRx. “The majority of drugs that are listed on the TrumpRx website actually have generic competition, and for consumers it pays to shop,” she said. “You can get a better deal by simply buying the generic, even when this coupon is being offered.”
GoodRx or Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, another website that negotiates with drug manufacturers, offer cheaper cash prices for generic versions of at least 18 of the 43 brand-name drugs promoted on TrumpRx, according to a review by STAT. TrumpRx does not notify people that generics may be cheaper than the brand-name drugs.
Conti did highlight some drugs for which cash prices appear to be “good deals.” These include insulin, the fertility drug Gonal-F and the GLP-1 weight loss drug Zepbound. Patients may benefit from low-cost insulin, which is offered at $25 per 10 milliliters, if they have gaps in their insurance coverage or have a health plan requiring high out-of-pocket payments, she said. Fertility and GLP-1 drugs for weight loss cost more but are often not covered by insurance even for those who have it, so patients may benefit from buying them for reduced cash prices.
Gonal-F is now available on TrumpRx at $168 for the lowest strength, compared with its list price of around $966. There were already discounts available for people paying for the drugs without insurance, but “the price that’s listed on the TrumpRx coupon is lower than the price being offered by the specialty pharmacy, even with other special discounts available,” Conti said.
Zepbound is being offered for $299 per month for the lowest dose, reduced from a list price of $1,087. (However, the lowest dose of the drug had previously been available for $349 per month for cash buyers.)
Cubanski said the latest weight loss medication discounts “can be seen as a pretty direct byproduct of negotiations between the manufacturers and the White House,” but said that the makers of these drugs have been “steadily offering increasing discounts” even before the negotiations. This is partly because for a while, there were shortages of the drugs, she explained, and companies have been allowed to market relatively inexpensive compounded versions, even though the drugs are under patent and do not have generics.
“The competitive pressures in the GLP-1 market have likely been responsible to some degree for bringing down cash pay prices,” Pragya Kakani, a health economist and assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, told us. She added that it is “challenging to disentangle the effects from the Trump administration’s MFN initiatives vs. pre-existing competitive pressures.”
As for the claim on the website that TrumpRx is offering the “world’s lowest prices,” or the lowest in the developed world, this is challenging to check.
The Trump administration has provided limited information on how the prices were arrived at during the closed-door negotiations with drug companies. We asked the White House for more detail on what international prices the TrumpRx prices are being compared with, and a spokesperson told us the administration was using prices from other G7 nations but did not provide more details.
Cubanski said it is difficult to check whether prices are the lowest, as “there’s not a lot of transparency in drug pricing internationally.” It’s possible to find prices, but it’s unclear what rebates or discounts countries have negotiated off of these prices.
Conti agreed, adding that in many cases, brand-name drugs may not even be offered in other countries because other countries drop brand-name drugs once a generic is available. Since many of the drugs now promoted on TrumpRx are available as generics, it is challenging to determine international prices.
People can make statements about offering the lowest drug prices internationally “because it’s impossible to check,” Conti said.
The Trump administration has also said that as part of the MFN deals, companies agreed to sell drugs at MFN prices to Medicaid programs. A voluntary initiative invites companies to negotiate prices for certain drugs “aligned with those paid in select other countries,” according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services website. The initiative launched in January, a spokesperson for the agency told us.
It remains unclear exactly what drugs are being offered to Medicaid at these prices and what companies and states are participating, Cubanski said. The CMS spokesperson told us that the agency hasn’t yet published a list with these details.
It’s also not clear MFN prices would compare favorably to the prices the programs are already getting. “States pay among the lowest prices through the Medicaid program for prescription drugs of all payers in the U.S.,” Cubanski said. “So whether the so-called most favored nation price that pharmaceutical companies will be offering on specific medications is lower than what states are currently paying isn’t really something that we’re able to rigorously quantify.”
The average net Medicaid prices for top-selling drugs are 65% lower than those in Medicare Part D, according to an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, Kakani said.
Furthermore, Cubanski said, “People on Medicaid pay very little if not nothing for prescriptions, so the savings would be to the state and federal government, not to people with Medicaid directly.”
Conti said that the larger current issue for drug affordability for people on Medicaid is that provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will lead to health care coverage losses. The CBO estimated that the law would increase the number of uninsured people in the U.S. by 10 million over 10 years, with 7.5 million of those due to changes to Medicaid. “The administration is weakening insurance protections at the same time that they are offering out the hope of these potential deals,” she said.
Despite the discounts for a limited group of cash payers, experts said that the Trump administration’s MFN deals do not so far directly affect drug affordability for those with private insurance.
“The biggest affordability challenges are ones that are related to very high-cost brand drugs,” Conti said. “It’s not obvious that much of what the administration is pursuing right now is going to really make a difference for people who are commercially insured and who are using these high-cost brand drugs.”
Kakani said that the MFN deals have only addressed commercial insurance in a limited way, to the degree that the negotiations might indirectly influence negotiations between drugmakers and insurers. However, she added that the TrumpRx prices “are unlikely to be lower than net prices commercial plans were already negotiating,” as many of the drugs “face significant competition.”
Recently, CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz has argued that the cash discounts the Trump administration has negotiated will translate into wider price reductions, including for people with private insurance, due to increased transparency.
“Now that everyone knows the true worldwide most favored nation drug prices, it’s going to allow employers, insurers and everyone in between to be able to take out the middlemen and drive those prices down,” Oz said in a Feb. 6 CNN interview. He suggested on CNN two days later that if employers saw a drug price on TrumpRx that was lower than what they were paying, they would ask for that price.
However, Conti disagreed that transparency would uniformly lead to better deals for Americans. She explained that the current opaque system likely allows some Americans to get particularly good deals on drug prices, because plans and pharmacy benefit managers are negotiating and passing on some savings as lower out-of-pocket costs and premiums.
“If we move towards more radical transparency in this system, yes, there are consumers that will benefit, absolutely,” she continued. “But it also might erode the company’s willingness to offer really good deals” to some payers.
Trump has often said that drug prices will dramatically fall due to MFN policies, referring to discounts of as much as 80% or 90%.
As we have said, proposed MFN strategies range from voluntary deals to launch new drugs or offer Medicaid drugs at lower prices to mandatory MFN pricing for some Medicare beneficiaries or a “codified” MFN strategy.
However, experts said that many details are missing regarding these strategies. Drugs are often launched in the U.S. before they are available in other countries, Conti said. It’s unclear how the U.S. will ensure it is getting the lowest prices internationally if there are no prices in other countries yet.
In the case of Medicare, CMS has proposed mandatory pilot programs testing MFN prices for some beneficiaries. But it’s unclear what drugs and companies will participate. Drug companies that voluntarily agreed to Medicaid MFN pricing may be exempted, Cubanski said, which “could potentially undercut savings.” CMS has estimated that its two initiatives — impacting drugs given by physicians or prescription drugs picked up at pharmacies — will generate around $12 billion of savings to Medicare over seven years and $14 billion over six years. “That’s not nothing, but given that Medicare spends roughly $200 billion per year approximately on drugs,” Cubanski said, the programs don’t “really move the needle all that much.”
As for broader, mandatory MFN pricing, it could face political headwinds, Cubanski said. “Historically, Republicans have not been in support of efforts to regulate drug prices,” she said, and pharmaceutical companies would also be expected to push back.
Even if widely implemented, MFN pricing may or may not lead to widespread and substantial reductions in drug prices.
A survey of health policy experts published Feb. 4 in Health Affairs found that around half thought MFN pricing would “substantially reduce” average net prescription drug prices in the U.S. for branded drugs, even if such a policy were broadly implemented.
“The overall takeaway was it’s really hard to predict what the effect of this policy is going to be, and the simplistic idea that this is going to suddenly reduce drug prices by … 80%, 90% are probably just that – overly simplistic,” said Kakani, the study’s lead author.
Companies would likely change their international strategies in response to a broad MFN policy, Kakani said. Companies could make it more difficult for the U.S. government to determine what other countries were paying, by issuing rebates in other countries and not disclosing them; they could delay product launches abroad, particularly in countries with very low prices, to set a higher benchmark; or they could increase international prices to a degree that the U.S. did not pay significantly less than before.
Kakani added that drug prices in the U.S. are not as high as Trump’s 80% or 90% discount claims have implied, when compared with other countries. A RAND report, based on 2022 data, found that on average, U.S. prices are 2.78 times higher than in other developed countries, and 4.22 times higher when looking at brand-name drugs before adjusting for discounts by manufacturers, as we’ve written in the past. Generic drugs had lower prices overall in the U.S. than in most countries.
Antos pointed to practical challenges to setting MFN prices. For example, he said it is unclear how the proposed Medicare programs to try out MFN pricing are supposed to work. “CMS doesn’t have the authority to force Germany to tell them everything about their pricing, and they also don’t have the ability to get Pfizer to open its books,” he said.
“Trying to tie it to some kind of European price is doing it the hard way,” Antos said, suggesting that if the U.S. wants price controls, it could just ask more broadly for the already-good prices it gets for Medicaid. “We have domestic reference pricing right here.”
While Trump claimed that it would be other countries that now pay higher prices, Antos said that “by and large” manufacturers “are not in a position to renegotiate a price” with other countries. (As part of tariff negotiations, the U.K. did agree to increase what it pays for new drugs, although it’s unclear what will happen with drug prices in other countries overall.)
Antos said that regardless, any attempt at price setting is “not going to necessarily translate into lower prices at the drug store for most people.”
And it will be difficult to evaluate whether U.S. policies are making a difference for consumers. If copays or deductibles went down, for example, perhaps insurance companies would make up for this by slightly increasing the growth rate of premiums, Antos said, which would be hard to quantify because premiums go up each year and are driven by hospital and doctor costs.
“In other words, it’s very hard to know what the net impact of any of these policies is,” he said.
Update, Feb. 18: We added that Conti is at the Boston University Questrom School of Business.
Este artículo también está disponible en español.
One of the sticking points in the standoff between Democrats and Republicans over funding for the Department of Homeland Security has been the Trump administration’s expanded use of administrative warrants to forcibly enter people’s homes to make immigration arrests. Democrats argue the new DHS policy runs afoul of the Constitution and have demanded immigration officers obtain judicial warrants — a higher legal bar that requires a judge’s approval — to forcibly enter a home.
The Trump administration contends that immigrants in the country illegally who have received a final order of removal from immigration judges are not entitled to Fourth Amendment protections — a position many immigration law experts dispute. And several lawmakers have argued that the additional requirement for judicial warrants would significantly curtail immigration enforcement efforts.
Funding for DHS lapsed on Feb. 14 as Republicans have balked at Democrats’ demands to rein in several immigration enforcement measures. Among other requests, Democrats are asking for a ban on ICE agents wearing masks, requirements for displaying identification and using body-worn cameras, and the use of judicial warrants on private property. As Congress failed to pass legislation on Feb. 13, parts of DHS, including the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Coast Guard, will be affected by the lapse in funding. ICE has enough money to keep operating due to billions in funding from the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last summer.
Debate over the use of administrative versus judicial warrants has emerged as one of the main impediments in the negotiations.
During a press conference on Jan. 30, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries emphasized that Democrats would “not walk away from” their demand that “judicial warrants should be required before ICE can storm homes and rip people out of their cars.” On Feb. 4, Jeffries joined Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer in writing a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to propose “targeted enforcement,” where “DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant.” In the letter, Jeffries and Schumer proposed 10 “common sense solutions that protect constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, during a Feb. 1 interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Republican Sen. Ron Johnson called the Democrats’ demand for judicial warrants “completely unacceptable,” stating that “immigration has always been enforced through administrative warrants.” Also, on Feb. 3, House Speaker Johnson said that “adding an entirely new layer of judicial warrants” was “unimplementable.”
We’ll explain the differences between the two types of warrants and how the Trump administration’s use of administrative warrants has departed from past practices.
According to the National Immigration Law Center, judicial warrants are “formal written [orders] authorizing a law enforcement officer to make an arrest, a seizure, or a search.” They are issued by state and federal courts and signed by judges or magistrate judges. As these warrants allow search, seizures and arrests on private property, they are more specific than administrative warrants, and include details like the address, time frame and targets of the search.
Administrative warrants authorize law enforcement officers with federal agencies to make an arrest or seizure, but not a search. “An administrative warrant does not confer authority to enter a home or private area,” the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service explained in a 2021 report, linking to a 2007 DHS letter.
“Administrative warrants are not reviewed or signed by a federal judge or even an immigration judge, they are reviewed and signed by immigration officers,” John Gihon, an immigration attorney and past chair of the American Immigration Lawyers Association Central Florida Chapter, told us in an email.
There are two forms of administrative warrants, known as I-200 and I-205 forms. According to the American Immigration Council, I-200 forms are issued to arrest “anyone federal agents believe to be present in the United States in violation of federal immigration law.” Conversely, the I-205 form “authorizes an immigration officer to arrest and deport someone who has previously been ordered removed from the United States.”
Under the Trump administration, immigration arrests by ICE have increased considerably, and agents can more quickly obtain administrative, versus judicial, warrants, experts said.
Regarding Speaker Johnson’s characterization of judicial warrant requirements as “unimplementable,” Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and U.S. immigration policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us in a phone interview that when you consider “the number of arrests that the Department of Homeland Security says that they made last year, which is in the hundreds of thousands … if they had to get judicial warrants for all of those people, that would certainly be a significant administrative burden.”
Historically, Sen. Johnson’s statement that immigration enforcement has “always” been conducted with administrative warrants is accurate. According to Gihon, “immigration law has always been enforced through [administrative] warrants,” as “[u]nder the Immigration and Nationality Act, a judicial warrant is not required to make an immigration arrest.”
However, the Trump administration has determined — contrary to the practice of previous administrations — that administrative warrants allow immigration officers to “arrest illegal aliens with final orders of removal in their homes,” as DHS has said. This position has raised concerns about the Fourth Amendment.
The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” That has historically prevented immigration agents with only an administrative warrant from forcibly entering homes.
In an analysis updated on Feb. 4, Hannah James, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, wrote that “the home receives the highest protection under the Fourth Amendment,” and reiterated that the ability to enter a home with a judicial versus an administrative warrant is “very different from a Fourth Amendment perspective.”
However, in January, the Associated Press obtained a leaked May 12, 2025, memo written by Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, in which he said: “Although the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has not historically relied on administrative warrants alone to arrest aliens subject to final orders of removal in their place of residence, the DHS Office of General Counsel has recently determined that the U.S. Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the immigration regulations do not prohibit relying on administrative warrants for this purpose.”
Lyons was referring to the I-205 warrants, which target noncitizens with a final order of removal. According to an American Immigration Council fact sheet, final orders of removal are issued when “an immigration judge finds a noncitizen to be removable” and the noncitizen fails to file an appeal within 30 days, waives the right to appeal or has an appeal dismissed by the Board of Immigration Appeals. The government can then choose to execute the removal order, where it notifies the noncitizen to surrender to ICE for deportation or face arrest.
In using the I-205 warrant, the DHS memo said, immigration officers should knock on a resident’s door and identify themselves. Then, they should “allow those inside the residence a reasonable chance to act lawfully. Should the alien refuse admittance, ICE officers and agents should use only a necessary and reasonable amount of force to enter the alien’s residence, following proper notification of the officer’s or agent’s authority and intent to enter.”
In a Feb. 4 DHS press release setting “the record straight on administrative warrants,” DHS stated that there is “broad judicial recognition that illegal aliens aren’t entitled to the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.” Accordingly, the press release said, “While administrative warrants may satisfy the Fourth Amendment for any arrest of an illegal alien, ICE currently uses these warrants to enter an illegal alien’s residence only when the alien has received a final order of removal from an Immigration Judge.”
Therefore, immigration enforcement agencies have claimed the power to use administrative warrants to enter private homes to arrest noncitizens with final orders of removal. However, immigration experts told us this interpretation runs contrary to constitutional protections, particularly the Fourth Amendment.
Bush-Joseph told us that “the understanding had been that immigrants, like U.S. citizens, were protected by the Fourth Amendment from forcible entry into their homes without a judicial warrant.”
James wrote that the Supreme Court “has never held, nor suggested, that undocumented immigrants within the United States receive lesser Fourth Amendment protection than citizens or noncitizens with legal status.” James explained that “among lower courts, the [prevailing view] is that undocumented immigrants within the United States have the same Fourth Amendment protections as U.S. citizens.”
On Feb. 3, Speaker Johnson described his frustration with limitations on administrative warrants, specifically when someone runs into a private home. Johnson commented that “the controversy has erupt where if someone is … going to be apprehended and they run behind a closed door and lock the door. I mean, what is ICE supposed to do?”
The DHS press release echoed such concerns, arguing that “[b]ecause Congress hasn’t created a mechanism to obtain a judicial warrant, this meant that under previous presidential administrations, ICE would sit outside the homes of fugitive aliens waiting for them to come outside before arresting them.” DHS said, “Illegal aliens quickly identified this loophole” and would “openly taunt the ICE officers” waiting outside.
When asked about the situation Johnson described, Gihon said via email, “Prior to the current Trump term, immigration officers were trained not to enter private residences or private areas of public property without consent or an exception to the 4th amendment’s warrant requirement.”
We reached out to Johnson’s office for comment, but did not receive a response.
The May 2025 DHS memo said that “standard exceptions to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement apply equally in the context of Form I-205 warrants,” including getting consent to go into a person’s home and “exigent circumstances,” such as “hot pursuit,” risks of evidence destruction or potential violence, attempts to flee, and “a substantial risk of harm to the persons involved or to the law enforcement process if the officer or agent must wait for a warrant.”
According to a 2021 Congressional Research Service report, the hot pursuit doctrine “provides that police may pursue a fleeing felony suspect into a home, when they have probable cause to make an arrest and when they set that arrest in motion in a public place.”
However, Gihon told us that the hot pursuit exception wouldn’t apply to arrests for civil immigration violations. “The U.S. Supreme Court has held that hot pursuit does not even extend to all criminal offenses,” he said, citing the 2021 Supreme Court case Lange v. California.
Referring to the DHS concerns about judicial warrants, James wrote that “DHS’s view that it lacks sufficient access to judicial warrants is not a valid basis for the agency to dispense with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment,” and that “constraints on ICE’s ability to obtain judicial warrants … may very well reflect Congress’s decided judgment that civil immigration violations should not be pursued by entering people’s homes.”
Finally, regarding the DHS position that ICE can use administrative warrants to enter a person’s residence when there is a final order of removal, Gihon told us that he was unaware of “any previous controlling interpretation of administrative or constitutional law” that would permit such entry.
Ultimately, the issue could be decided by the courts. James wrote that “the case law in this area is sparse,” citing three rulings by District Courts. “The paucity of case law is likely in part because DHS has historically conceded that administrative arrest warrants do not authorize ICE officers to enter people’s homes to arrest them. As a result, courts have rarely had occasion to comment on the issue.”
A social media post cited by Elon Musk to bolster his argument that mail-in voting should be curtailed, and which was subsequently amplified by President Donald Trump, makes the false and long-ago debunked claim that in the 2020 election, “Pennsylvania sent out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots but received back around 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballots.”
As the Pennsylvania Department of State’s final report on the 2020 election shows, there were 2,673,272 mail-in ballot applications approved for the 2020 general election, so that’s how many were sent out. And of those, 2,273,490 votes were cast. (See charts 6.2 and 6.3 in the report.) Another 435,932 absentee ballots were also approved, and 374,659 of them were cast.
“This claim is based on mixing up statistics from the primary and the general election,” Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab, explained to us via email.
As online Pennsylvania records show, there were roughly 1.8 million absentee and mail-in ballots approved for the primary election in 2020, nearly 1.5 million of which were cast. In other words, the post mixes up the number of mail-in ballots (including absentee ballots) sent out for the 2020 primary election and then cites approximately the number of mail-in ballots cast in the 2020 general election.
“These are long-ago debunked claims that will not disappear despite the availability of official data,” Stewart said.
Trump has been making false and unfounded claims related to mail-in voting for years. And he has long called for ending mail-in voting “other than if you’re in the military, or you’re sick, or you’re away, or some reasonable but good excuse,” as he said on Feb. 9.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk, a former Trump adviser, agrees, according to a Feb. 8 post from an X account called The Leading Report: “Elon Musk calls for mail-in voting to be abolished nationwide except for troops overseas or a serious medical condition.” Musk reposted it and commented, “Critical to avoid fraud.”
The same day, The SCIF — an X account whose bio identifies the operator as a “Digital Operator, Creator and Intelligence Researcher” with the motto, “Truth is the most effective weapon in a war of information filled with lies” — weighed in with an X post that read: “Elon is right, banning mail-in voting is critical to avoiding fraud in our elections. During the 2020 election, Pennsylvania sent out 1,823,148 mail-in ballots but received back around 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballots. This accounts for Biden’s fraudulent and impossible 682,000+ vote spike, which were counted with NO observers and were all for Biden, which magically just happened to be enough to steal Trump’s almost 700,000 vote lead in PA before swing states shut down counting locations at the same time, to steal the 2020 election. PA’s own Secretary of State website then wiped the 2.5 MILLION mail-in ballot number after the total number was questioned. Trump won the 2020 election in a landslide.”
Musk reposted that, and commented, “Essential to stop fraud in elections.” On Feb. 10, Trump reposted the claim and Musk’s response on Truth Social, without comment.
This latest criticism of mail-in voting comes as Congress considers the SAVE America Act, which would require voters to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, and also photo identification to vote in federal elections. It would not abolish mail-in voting, but it would require a copy of identification to both request and submit a mail-in ballot.
Mail-in voting is widely used around the country. Eight states and Washington, D.C., conduct their elections mostly by mail, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Another 28 states — including Pennsylvania — offer “no excuse” mail-in voting, meaning that any voter can request a mail-in ballot without needing to provide a reason. (Pennsylvania has both no-excuse mail-in ballots as well as absentee ballots for those who can’t make it to a polling place due to illness, disability, work or travel.)
The post claiming there were hundreds of thousands more mail-in ballots received than were actually sent out in Pennsylvania — a swing state that broke for Biden in 2020 — originated in a Nov. 25, 2020, hearing held by Pennsylvania Senate Republicans (a video of which is attached to the post). During that hearing, then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani referred to Pennsylvania voting data and said, “Now this is the part that is a mystery. Mailed ballots sent out: 1,823,148. But when you go to the count of the final count of the vote, there are 2,589,242 mail-in ballots.” Giuliani asked witness Phil Waldron, a retired Army colonel, “How do you account for the 700,000 mail-in ballots that appeared from nowhere?”
Waldron, who has promoted many unfounded theories about manipulated voting machines, speculated the voting machines may have been tampered with and called for a “detailed forensic analysis” of the voting machines used in Pennsylvania.
(Waldron later circulated a PowerPoint document to Trump allies that drew the attention of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. At the time, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the panel, called the document “an alarming blueprint for overturning a nationwide election.” According to the Jan. 6 committee report, Waldron was among those who “invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked by the Select Committee what supposed proof they uncovered that the election was stolen.”)
But again, the premise of Giuliani’s question was flawed. There were not more ballots returned in Pennsylvania than had been sent out.
“This is completely false,” Kathy Boockvar, who was the Pennsylvania secretary of the commonwealth at the time of the 2020 election, said in an email to us about the online claim. She explained the same thing at the time in a Dec. 16, 2020, letter to U.S. Sens. Ron Johnson and Gary Peters about similar claims.
All of the election data are, and were, in public records available online, and they contradict Giuliani’s claim.
The claim is also contradicted by the contemporaneous reporting made to the U.S. Elections Project, a clearinghouse for voting data maintained by Mike McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida.
“The individual-level Pennsylvania 2020 mail ballot data I received on a daily basis from the Secretary of State’s office does not substantiate these allegations,” McDonald told us via email. “Pennsylvania election officials reported issuing a little over 3 million mail ballots during the COVID crisis, of which election officials accepted a little more than 2.6 million returned ballots.” Those figures include both mail-in and absentee ballots.
And the claim is further contradicted by news accounts before the election that cited the correct number of ballot requests for the general election.
Indeed, the bogus claim was widely debunked at the time.
“It’s pretty unbelievable this is still being used,” Eric Kraeutler, a member of the board of directors and former chair of the Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based election watchdog, told us in a phone interview. “They mixed up data for these two separate elections (the 2020 primary and general elections). … As far as we’re concerned, this was disposed of five or six years ago.”
In the second and third quarters of 2025, the U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace in two years. Those growth rates were not “numbers unheard of,” or figures the U.S. “never had” before, as President Donald Trump has claimed.
In addition, economic experts told us that federal data do not support Trump’s claim that there was economic “stagflation” during the Biden administration and “the complete opposite” during Trump’s first year back in office. Inflation was high during much of Joe Biden’s presidency, but economic growth was not stagnant, another key indicator of stagflation, the experts said.
They also said that Trump’s tariff policies likely hindered economic growth, rather than helped spur it, as the president has suggested.
Trump made those claims while touting the U.S. economy in recent speeches and remarks, as well as in a late January opinion piece written for the Wall Street Journal.
During a Jan. 27 speech in Iowa, Trump said, “So, under my leadership, economic growth is exploding to numbers unheard of. They’ve never had them before.”
He later said in an interview with NBC News on Feb. 4, “We have low inflation and we have tremendous growth. You haven’t had these numbers like this.”
And when claiming to have achieved “unprecedented” growth numbers in a Jan. 29 Cabinet meeting at the White House, Trump said that if not for the 43-day federal government shutdown last fall, “we would have picked up about a point and a half more than [the] already high numbers, record setting numbers.”
While the U.S. economy grew significantly in the second and third quarters of 2025, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the numbers did not set records, as Trump claimed.
After declining by an annualized rate of 0.6% in the first quarter of 2025, which covers the three months from January to March, real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation) grew at an annualized rate of 3.8% in the second quarter of 2025 and at a rate of 4.4% in the third quarter. Those were the largest quarterly increases since the third quarter of 2023, under Biden, when the economy expanded at an annualized rate of 4.7%, according to BEA estimates.
The record for quarterly growth is 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020, which happened right after the economy shrunk by 28% at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pre-pandemic quarterly growth record is 16.7% in the first quarter of 1950, according to BEA quarterly data going back to 1947.
On several occasions, Trump has said that fourth quarter growth is projected to be 5.4%, a figure that he has attributed to the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta. But that projection is now out of date.
Throughout much of January, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 5.4% for the fourth quarter of 2025. Then, on Jan. 29, the projection lowered to 4.2%, and, as of Feb. 10, it was down again, to 3.7% projected growth.
The BEA is scheduled to release its advanced estimate of GDP for the fourth quarter, and all of 2025, on Feb. 20.
Trump also has claimed that he turned around an economy that had stalled under Biden.
“Under the Biden administration, America was plagued by the nightmare of stagflation, meaning low growth and high inflation, a recipe for misery, failure and decline. But now, after just one year of my policies, we are witnessing the exact opposite – virtually no inflation and extraordinarily high economic growth,” Trump said at a World Economic Forum meeting on Jan. 21.
He repeated the “stagflation” claim in his Jan. 30 opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal.
But economists told us that the U.S. economy under Biden did not experience stagflation, which has a specific economic meaning.
“It refers to a sustained period of high inflation combined with weak or stagnant real economic growth, typically alongside rising unemployment,” Kyle Handley, a professor of economics at the University of California, San Diego, told us in an email. “By that definition, the U.S. economy during the Biden years does not qualify as stagflation.”
Handley said that the annual inflation rate did “rise sharply” during Biden’s first two years in office. It peaked in June 2022, at 9.1%, before declining dramatically in Biden’s last two years in office.
“However, real GDP growth during the Biden presidency was positive and often above trend, and unemployment remained historically low,” Handley said. “Real GDP grew strongly in 2021 during the post-pandemic recovery, slowed in 2022 as monetary policy tightened, and then re-accelerated in 2023 and 2024. That is not a period of economic stagnation.”
In an infographic from November, the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland wrote that the “last major case” of stagflation in the U.S. “occurred in the mid-1970s, when global crude oil prices surged, triggering widespread rises in other prices and fueling inflation of more than 12 percent and unemployment that peaked at 9 percent.” The infographic said that stagflation — the combination of rising unemployment and inflation, and slowing economic growth all at the same time — was “rare” and “an unusual pattern.”
When we asked about the basis for the president’s stagflation claim, a White House spokesperson told us that “[r]eal wages shrank markedly during the Biden presidency, and growth – once you put aside the early bit of Biden admin when Democrat state officials finally started lifting unscientific and draconian lockdowns – was tepid with inflation at 40-year highs.”
There was a decrease in real wages under Biden, as we’ve written. But the economy grew by well over 2% each year during his administration, and the rate of inflation, while still elevated, was not near a 40-year high when he left office. The 9.1% annual rate in June 2022 was the highest since November 1981. The rate was 3% in Biden’s final 12 months.
The unemployment rate also decreased under Biden, going from 6.4% when he was inaugurated to 4% in his last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average monthly rate for Biden’s presidency was 4.1%, below the historical average.
“You had high inflation, yes, but paired with strong growth and a robust labor market,” Aeimit Lakdawala, an associate professor of economics at Wake Forest University, told us in an email. “That’s just not stagflation by any standard definition of the term.”
He said that Trump’s claim of engineering a complete turnaround from the Biden economy is an overstatement.
“What we’re really seeing is a continuation of trends that were already well underway before Trump took office in January 2025,” Lakdawala said.
He noted that the annual inflation rate had cooled to 3% when Trump’s second term started. It had been as low as 2.4% in September 2024.
“That disinflation happened under Biden, driven largely by the resolution of supply chain issues and Fed monetary policy,” he said, referring to the Federal Reserve. “Under Trump’s second term so far, inflation has averaged about 2.7%. That’s modestly lower, but it’s not a dramatic reversal.”
Although Trump considers the 2.7% annual inflation rate, as of December, to be “very low” or “virtually no inflation,” it is still above the 2% target set by the Federal Reserve. Prices are still increasing, just at a slightly slower pace than before he became president again.
As for economic growth, Lakdawala said that the increase in real GDP has “averaged about 2.5% annualized so far under Trump’s second term, which is solid but actually a touch lower than the 2.9% we saw” in Biden’s last two years as president.
“So characterizing this as ‘extraordinarily high economic growth’ is a stretch,” he said about Trump’s claim. “It’s good growth, roughly in line with where we’ve been.”
The unemployment rate, meanwhile, was 4.3% in January, slightly higher than when Trump took office.
In his Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Trump said that the “entire Trump economic agenda deserves credit for this explosion of growth” — but he specifically gave credit for the country’s “economic success” to his tariff policies.
“We have proven, decisively, that, properly applied, tariffs do not hurt growth — they promote growth and greatness, just as I said all along,” the opinion piece said.
But the experts we consulted told us that the economy likely grew despite the tariffs, not because of them.
“Year-over-year real GDP growth over the past year looks similar to the years immediately preceding the new tariffs,” Handley said. “Outside of the pandemic period, growth has been relatively stable across administrations, which makes it difficult to attribute recent performance to tariffs rather than economic momentum.”
He noted that the tariffs that Trump placed on imported foreign goods last year were not as high as the rates he originally proposed, and that tariff revenue, which did increase significantly in 2025, is still quite small in relation to GDP (about 1% of GDP as of the third quarter of 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
“By construction, a policy of that size cannot plausibly explain an increase in aggregate economic growth,” he said.
Lakdawala had a similar take.
“Crediting tariffs for economic growth gets the causation backwards,” he said. “The economics on this is fairly clear and there is broad consensus among economists: tariffs are essentially a tax on imports that raises costs for domestic consumers and businesses. If anything, they’ve been a modest drag on growth, not a driver of it.”
He pointed to an analysis done by the Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan research center, that said that in 2025 tariffs slowed real GDP growth by 0.5 percentage points and increased the unemployment rate by 0.3 percentage points. The Budget Lab estimated that tariffs will reduce real GDP growth by 0.4 percentage points in 2026, and said that “[i]n the long run, the US economy is persistently 0.3% smaller, the equivalent of $100 billion annually in 2025 dollars,” because of tariffs.
“These aren’t catastrophic numbers and the economy is resilient and has absorbed the tariff shock reasonably well,” Lakdawala said. “But they clearly point in the wrong direction for someone trying to credit tariffs with economic success.”
The pro-business Tax Foundation also said that Trump’s imposed tariffs, if the Supreme Court rules that some of them can remain in effect, “will raise $2.0 trillion in revenue from 2026-2035 on a conventional basis and reduce US GDP by 0.5 percent, all before foreign retaliation” from other countries.
The White House told us that, under Trump, the “[a]nnualized rate of inflation has been trending in the mid-twos and GDP growth in Q3 surpassed expectations by over a full point, hitting above 4 percent. Largely driven by the investments we are seeing thanks in part to tariffs.”
But Handley noted that many of the investments touted by Trump are “announcements rather than realized outcomes.”
“Foreign investment commitments do not directly enter GDP, and they often reflect projects planned years in advance,” he said, adding that some of the pledges made by foreign countries and companies “may never come to fruition.”
We’ve already written that Trump’s claim that he has brought in about $18 trillion in investments to the U.S. is exaggerated, according to experts and a White House webpage.
Giacomo Santangelo, a senior lecturer of economics at Fordham University, told us in an interview that consumption is the “largest portion” of GDP, and that people are currently taking on more debt to finance that spending. “That’s what’s driving this economy,” he said.
Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, wrote in December that the third-quarter growth was due to “[h]ousehold consumption driven by higher-income consumers and AI-related investment,” which he said “accounted for just under 70% of total growth during the [third] quarter.”
In its news release about third-quarter growth in 2025, the BEA said, “The increase in real GDP in the third quarter reflected increases in consumer spending, exports, government spending, and investment.” For the second quarter, the BEA said the increase “primarily reflected a decrease in imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, and an increase in consumer spending.”
As the U.S. formally exited from the World Health Organization last month, Trump administration officials misleadingly claimed that the WHO “pushed” or “promoted” lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The group did not explicitly recommend lockdowns, although it also did not advise countries not to implement them. It said it recognized that the measures might be needed in some cases.
More than six years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal health officials are spinning the facts about the WHO as part of their justification to leave the organization. The U.S. formally exited the WHO on Jan. 22, a year after giving notice to do so, much to the chagrin of many in public health.
The WHO “ignored rigorous science and promoted lockdowns,” Acting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Jim O’Neill wrote on the day of the exit in an X post that also made claims about Taiwan.
The same day, National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya similarly said in an interview on Fox News that the WHO “absolutely failed during the pandemic … pushing, still to this day … lockdown policies that plagued Americans for years.”
Those comments led to contentious exchanges with WHO officials who have taken issue with the statements.
“All untrue,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease epidemiologist and the WHO’s technical lead for COVID-19, responded to O’Neill in a Jan. 24 post, adding, “we don’t ignore science and WHO never recommended lockdowns.”
The WHO also pushed back in a Jan. 24 statement, writing, “WHO recommended the use of masks, vaccines and physical distancing, but at no stage recommended mask mandates, vaccine mandates or lockdowns. We supported sovereign governments to make decisions they believed were in the best interests of their people, but the decisions were theirs.”
The dispute recalls a similar situation in October 2020 when President Donald Trump, then in his first term, incorrectly said that the WHO had “just admitted” that he was “right” about lockdowns. Trump had criticized lockdowns, saying they were “worse than the problem itself.” Trump was in office at the height of the pandemic when COVID-19 restrictions in the U.S. were the most stringent.
As we wrote then, the WHO’s position on lockdowns had always been more nuanced — the group neither recommended the measures nor advised against them, saying it recognized that lockdowns can harm society but are sometimes necessary.
The organization did at times praise China’s aggressive response, and supported countries in their decisions, which could be interpreted as an implicit endorsement of the measures. But it’s an oversimplification to say that the WHO “pushed” or “promoted” lockdowns. We did not find evidence that the WHO explicitly recommended them, consistent with the organization’s statements.
We reached out to the NIH to ask about Bhattacharya’s comments and to the CDC to ask about O’Neill’s, but did not receive a reply. The WHO pointed us to a Q&A post — last updated Dec. 31, 2020 — that we also previously referenced, which notes that so-called “lockdown” measures can work to slow viral transmission but can have “a profound negative impact,” especially for disadvantaged groups.
“WHO recognizes that at certain points, some countries have had no choice but to issue stay-at-home orders and other measures, to buy time,” the post continues, adding that “WHO is hopeful that countries will use targeted interventions where and when needed, based on the local situation.”
Similar language also appears in an April 2020 WHO document, which states there is an “urgent need” to transition away from lockdown measures, but also cautions that premature lifting of restrictions without careful planning is likely to lead to an uncontrolled surge in COVID-19 cases.
It’s worth noting that there is no unified definition of what “lockdowns” are. While they generally refer to what the WHO terms “large scale physical distancing measures and movement restrictions,” they varied greatly in scope and severity in different countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. version — which at its most restrictive involved stay-at-home orders and school and business closures, implemented by states and local governments — was far lighter than measures imposed in China, for example.
In some parts of China, residents at times could not leave their cities, were not allowed to use their own cars and needed permission to leave their apartments. In the U.S., there was never a federal lockdown, although the Trump administration issued guidelines that told people to avoid large gatherings and encouraged school and nonessential business closures early in the pandemic.
“My administration is recommending that all Americans, including the young and healthy, work to engage in schooling from home when possible. Avoid gathering in groups of more than 10 people. Avoid discretionary travel. And avoid eating and drinking at bars, restaurants, and public food courts,” Trump said on March 16, 2020, when announcing the government’s “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” which was later extended. On March 23, 2020, Trump said that “America will again, and soon, be open for business — very soon.”
The word “lockdown” has sometimes erroneously been applied to any public health measure, even those that don’t limit social interactions.
In response to Van Kerkhove’s post about O’Neill, Bhattacharya pointed to some text of the WHO-China Joint Mission report in February 2020, and wrote, “That is just plain false. The WHO mission to China in 2020 lauded the Chinese lockdown as a success, in effect endorsing the model for the rest of the world.”
The text he cited stated that the measures employed in China — at their core, proactive surveillance, rapid diagnosis and case isolation and tracking and quarantine of close contacts — “are the only measures that are currently proven to interrupt or minimize transmission” of the coronavirus. “Given the damage that can be caused by uncontrolled, community-level transmission of this virus, such an approach is warranted to save lives and to gain the weeks and months needed for the testing of therapeutics and vaccine development,” the report added.
Van Kerkhove, however, replied: “What you’re reading here is that we acknowledged that governments had to take tough decisions to protect their populations, but lockdowns were never recommended, nor were they a policy recommendation by @WHO.”
Finishing the exchange, Bhattacharya wrote: “What I’m not reading here is a condemnation of lockdowns at a time where governments worldwide were seriously considering them. If you want the world to trust the WHO, take honest ownership of this failure.”
Bhattacharya has also objected to statements from the WHO’s leader, Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who had responded to an X post from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., saying that the HHS statement “contains inaccurate information” and that the WHO “never recommended lockdowns.”
“That is just deeply dishonest,” Bhattacharya wrote in a Jan. 24 X post. “If the WHO opposed lockdowns, where was the WHO condemnation of them in 2020 or 2021? Or of China’s lockdowns in 2022?”
A day later, Bhattacharya posted a thread with what he called “receipts” of evidence that the WHO is wrong, which included statements from the WHO about what countries should ideally do before lifting lockdown measures.
The disagreement between U.S. and WHO officials partly comes down to semantics. Bhattacharya is correct that the WHO mission praised China’s response — and that the group did not come out against lockdowns. But Van Kerkhove and the WHO have not claimed to have done so. Moreover, not opposing lockdowns is different from recommending them.
“WHO neither recommended nor categorically opposed lockdowns,” Van Kerkhove told us in an email responding to questions about the claims. “We recommended a comprehensive risk-based approach including surveillance, contact tracing, testing, quarantine (for those infected), isolation (for contacts), physical distancing, the use of masks/respirators, personal protective equipment for health workers, improved ventilation, vaccines, therapeutics and more. At the same time, we acknowledged that in some circumstances, countries felt they had no choice but to introduce lockdowns to prevent their health systems being overwhelmed resulting in more lives lost. We respected that choice, as it was their sovereign right, but we said that lockdowns should not be used as the primary or default strategy for controlling COVID-19, and highlighted their serious social and economic consequences.”
“We did say, repeatedly and clearly, that lockdowns came with risks and potential harms, and that they were not a sustainable solution,” she added.
She pointed to multiple examples of the WHO expressing this view or warning about the harms or potential harms of lockdown measures, including a speech the director-general gave in April 2020 that reminded nations that “there is a need to respect human rights and dignity” and that the “restrictive measures governments are implementing are already having a massive impact on livelihoods.”
“Lockdowns are a blunt instrument that have taken a heavy toll in many countries,” the WHO director-general similarly said in September 2020. “With the right mix of targeted and tailored measures, further national lockdowns can be avoided.”
Van Kerkhove also cited a Q&A video from the WHO that Van Kerkhove appeared in and was shared on social media in October 2020.
Bhattacharya cited the same video in his X thread, saying, “A WHO epidemiologist lauds lockdowns as a way to ‘stop’ covid outbreaks.”
Van Kerkhove said that was a “deliberate misinterpretation of what was said.” In the clip, speaking for the WHO, she said, “we haven’t recommended” lockdowns, adding that “we do recognize that some countries and some areas have had to use what is called so-called lockdown measures because they needed to buy themselves some time.”
“This clip cannot be interpreted as me ‘lauding’ lockdowns,” she said.
Other individuals on social media have highlighted statements from February 2020 by Dr. Bruce Aylward, a Canadian physician and epidemiologist who was then a senior adviser to the WHO director-general, that Bhattacharya reshared on X.
During the press conference for the WHO-China joint mission, Aylward emphasized that what China had done did appear to be working. “What China has demonstrated is, you have to do this,” he said at one point. “If you do it, you can save lives and prevent thousands of cases of what is a very difficult disease.”
Van Kerkhove said this was also a case of misinterpretation. “Dr Aylward spoke positively about China’s overall response to COVID-19, and recognized that other countries including Italy were now taking ‘extremely aggressive actions,’” she told us in an email. “Dr Aylward’s comment that ‘you have to do this’ was a reference to the overall ‘aggressive’ or ‘rigorous’ approach that was needed to stop transmission and save lives, not specifically to the role of lockdowns.”
Aylward “did not recommend that countries impose lockdowns,” she added, pointing to earlier comments of his that day, in which he said “it’s important that other countries think about” applying “not necessarily the full lockdowns … but that same rigorous approach.”
Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University, told us that it is “certainly true that WHO officials praised China’s COVID-19 [response], and that was irresponsible.”
But, he added, “we forget how frightening the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were. We had no vaccines or treatments and the virus was spreading exponentially. In that context, a temporary lockdown was clearly justified to buy time for the development and deployment of vaccines. Lockdowns were also intended to protect overwhelmed hospitals and health workers. It is easy to blame WHO for its proactive response in the midst of a global crisis. But it’s wrong.”
He said Bhattacharya’s posts “lack any subtlety or context” and emphasized that the WHO “has no power to order lockdowns & it never did.”
