Trump administration officials have claimed that they are saving Americans over $1.3 trillion by ending regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. But the figure does not incorporate any benefits of the emissions standards. By one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s own calculations, getting rid of the standards could cost billions.
On Feb. 12, the EPA announced that it was revoking the 2009 endangerment finding, which allowed the agency to regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that trap heat and cause climate change. Without that policy in place, the agency said it was terminating its rules that limit such pollution from vehicles. The regulation has primarily acted to increase fuel efficiency, since more efficient cars and trucks burn less gas and release less carbon pollution.
Since unveiling the finalized rulemaking last month that eliminates the emissions standards, officials have frequently touted an alleged savings of $1.3 trillion.
“This action will save American taxpayers over $1.3 trillion,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in the press conference announcing the policy change. “What that means is lower prices, more choices, and an end of heavy-handed climate policies. With today’s announcement, American families will save over … $2,400 for a new vehicle.”
In the same briefing, President Donald Trump and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, also mentioned the $1.3 trillion figure. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has similarly referred to it, and in official communications, the EPA has also emphasized it.
But the $1.3 trillion is not a net total. It only includes the added cost of making cars and trucks more fuel efficient over a period of nearly three decades, without considering any of the benefits, such as reduced fuel or maintenance costs. One of the agency’s own estimates, which also ignores any health or environmental benefits, shows that repealing the policy could ultimately cost Americans $180 billion.
“This is a very biased and misleading way to talk about the effects of this rollback,” Jason Schwartz, regulatory policy director at New York University School of Law’s Institute for Policy Integrity, told us of the $1.3 trillion framing. “It’s actually worse than only looking at one half of the equation because they’ve also left a bunch of really important effects off the other side of the equation.”
“I honestly can’t recall another rulemaking where the focus of all of the fact sheets and press releases was ONLY about the costs of the policy,” Kenneth Gillingham, a Yale University economics professor, told us in an email.
With the elimination of these standards, soon there will be effectively no fuel efficiency standards in place on American cars and trucks. While the Department of Transportation’s fuel economy standards still technically exist, with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this year, Congress set the compliance penalties in the program to zero. The Trump administration is also now working to finalize significant rollbacks to the standards.
Here, we’ll take a closer look at the EPA’s calculations and explain why the administration’s singular focus on $1.3 trillion is misleading.
According to an EPA fact sheet, the $1.3 trillion in alleged savings for U.S. consumers includes about $1.1 trillion in avoided vehicle technology costs and $200 billion in avoided electric vehicle charger and equipment costs between 2027 through 2055.
Those figures are taken from the agency’s regulatory impact analysis. The analysis modeled four different scenarios, making different assumptions about the future cost of gasoline and to what degree fuel savings are counted, under two discount rates. (A discount rate is how much future money is discounted on an annual basis to convert it to a present value.) For each of the scenarios at the 3% discount rate, the EPA estimated a “savings” of either $1.29 trillion or $1.34 trillion.
But those estimates are only one half of the EPA’s ledger. Partially or fully offsetting the alleged savings are a variety of increased costs as a result of undoing the standards, primarily due to higher fuel and maintenance costs (electric vehicles are cheaper to maintain). In no case is there a net savings of $1.3 trillion.
Most of the EPA’s modeled scenarios do show a net savings in repealing the greenhouse gas emissions standards. However, as we said, that analysis does not factor in any health or environmental benefits.
“A correct cost-benefit analysis – even under the Trump Administration’s Circular A-4 guidance document – must include all relevant benefits and costs,” Gillingham told us, referring to the Office of Management and Budget’s guidance for such analyses. “In this rule, they are simply arguing that the benefits don’t exist. The science is not on their side on this one.”
Even still, one of the agency’s key estimates — one using the Energy Information Administration’s best guess for future fuel prices — shows that rescinding the policy will cost Americans $180 billion on net. Even with nearly $1.3 trillion in savings, there will be almost $1.5 trillion in costs under that scenario.
The other scenarios assume either lower fuel prices or only factor in fuel savings for 2.5 years, or both — each of which lowers the benefits of any fuel efficiency policy and makes the standards appear more expensive.
In response to a series of questions about the agency’s calculations and why the agency is using the $1.3 trillion number when it is not a net figure, the EPA press office told us that the analysis included eight projected net impacts under different modeling assumptions (four scenarios under two discount rates). “We didn’t single out scenarios to suit a narrative, we followed the data,” the agency said in an email, which again highlighted the $1.3 trillion.
Although the agency and officials routinely refer to “over” $1.3 trillion in savings by ending the emissions standards program, only two of the EPA’s four scenarios at the 3% discount rate actually top $1.3 trillion in terms of the avoided higher technology costs that make vehicles more fuel-efficient. And at the 7% rate, those avoided costs never go above $870 billion.
“Rescinding the 2009 Endangerment Finding means real dollars back in the pockets of American families and unleashing consumer choice. Now, Americans will be able to buy the car they want, including newer, more affordable cars with the most up to date safety standards and that emit fewer criteria and hazardous air pollutants,” the agency continued, adding that the action “does not affect regulations on any non-GHG air pollutants.”
It’s true that the EPA retains its other regulations on vehicles that limit the release of so-called criteria air pollutants, such as ozone and fine particle pollution. But it’s not the case that ending the emissions standards will have no effect on those pollutants. Schwartz said the standards “would have had important indirect impacts on criteria pollutants.”
He cited an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund, which estimated that with a repeal of the greenhouse gas emissions standards, there would be up to 58,000 more premature deaths and as many as 37 million more asthma attacks through 2055.
In its final rule, the EPA argued that removing the standards would have “only marginal and incidental impacts” on non-greenhouse gas emissions. The agency also said it “is no longer monetizing benefits” from reducing particle and ozone pollution because of uncertainty in how to do those calculations precisely.
“In the past, EPA has always considered air pollution benefits as part of a cost vs benefit sort of study. Here the assumption is that the pollution benefits are all zero,” Mark Jacobsen, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, told us, adding that the benefits are not just to the climate, but to air quality, which the EPA “has typically found to be quite important.”
In its 2024 rule finalizing increased greenhouse gas emissions standards under then President Joe Biden, the EPA estimated that those standards would provide $200 billion in health benefits due to less particle pollution and $1.6 trillion in climate benefits (in 2022 dollars, 3% discount rate). The overall net benefit was estimated at $2 trillion.
Even without factoring in health or environmental benefits, the EPA two years ago found a $62 billion net benefit to the increased standards, with higher vehicle technology and battery port costs more than offset by lower fuel, repair and maintenance costs.
This gets at problems several experts identified in the EPA’s analysis. Jacobsen told us that the agency’s estimates are “deeply flawed.”
Jacobsen, along with Gillingham and other economist and mechanical engineer co-authors, several of whom the EPA has frequently cited in its rulemaking, wrote a comment to the EPA explaining their criticisms of the agency’s proposed rule in September. While not all of the issues still apply to the revised final rule, some remain.
One of the biggest issues affects half of EPA’s scenarios, which only factor in 2.5 years of the standards’ fuel savings. In these scenarios, the fuel savings are dramatically reduced.
Gillingham, who said there were “many issues” with the EPA’s analysis, said this is “simply incorrect and flips it from how it has always been done.”
A major question for the cost-benefit analysis is why consumers undervalue fuel efficiency. As noted in the EPA’s regulatory impact analysis, some evidence suggests that buyers are only willing to pay for about 2.5 years’ worth of fuel savings upfront for a more fuel-efficient car. If it’s a market failure and buyers are simply not properly considering the benefits of better gas mileage for the lifetime of the car, then a cost-benefit analysis should factor in the fuel savings beyond the first 2.5 years. But if consumers dislike the features of fuel-efficient cars, then they could be already valuing and “paying” for those future fuel savings in the form of a less desirable vehicle, so those fuel savings should not be counted.
For half of its scenarios, the EPA assumes that the latter is true in full, so it doesn’t include fuel savings beyond the 2.5 years in its cost-benefit calculation.
“This makes a gigantic difference to the costs and benefits,” Gillingham told us.
Jacobsen, Gillingham and colleagues note in their comment that this assumption “is not supported by the economics literature.” Moreover, they said, the EPA is ignoring that some electric vehicle attributes are superior to conventional gasoline vehicles.
In its analysis, the EPA defended its approach on undervaluation, noting that it uses scenarios that both likely overestimate and underestimate the costs of the rule, and that it views them as “a form of a bounding exercise.”
Schwartz, of NYU, independently flagged the same concern about zeroing out most fuel savings as well. “They’re saying there must be $900 billion in lost vehicle features,” he said of the EPA. “That is absolutely not the case.”
At the same time, when the EPA estimates the cost of making vehicles more fuel efficient, the agency assumes that manufacturers preserve vehicle performance, and don’t opt for cheaper solutions, such as lowering a car’s horsepower, Schwartz said.
“By modeling both extra costs to maintain performance and assuming additional costs of alleged performance losses,” an economic report from Schwartz’s group explains, the EPA is “effectively double-counting costs.”
Gillingham and Jacobsen noted the same problem, calling it an “inconsistent combination” that makes the cost of regulation appear high and the benefits appear small.
Half of the scenarios also assume a “low” oil price to “take into account the policies being implemented by President Trump that are intended to drive down the price of gasoline and diesel,” according to the regulatory impact analysis.
But as Schwartz noted, and as we have explained before, oil is a global commodity. The price is set based on worldwide supply and demand. Economists and energy experts told us during the 2024 presidential campaign that Trump’s plans to reduce prices by increasing production are unlikely to be very successful over the long term. U.S. and global producers wouldn’t be incentivized to produce more if prices are low. In a world with less-fuel-efficient vehicles, demand will also be higher, driving up the cost of gasoline — a feature the EPA also did not fully account for in some scenarios, Schwartz said.
The various oil prices used are projections from the Energy Information Administration. Although the EIA also projects a “high” oil price, EPA did not use it for any of its scenarios.
“Every step of this analysis is biased in an effort to make their repeal look as favorable as possible and to hide from the public the real costs to consumers, to public health, and to the environment, that [are] going to result from this rollback,” Schwartz said.
Along with the $1.3 trillion, officials have often referred to an average per-vehicle savings of “over” $2,400 by eliminating greenhouse gas emissions standards. Zeldin gave this figure during the policy repeal announcement, and an agency fact sheet includes it.
In the announcement press conference, Trump also said that the repeal would “help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically. … You’re going to get a car that starts easier, a car that works better for a lot less money.”
But this figure, too, is not a net number and only captures the costs of the regulation, ignoring all benefits. The EPA’s estimate of $2,400 appears to comes from dividing the $1.1 trillion in reduced new vehicle costs by its estimated figure of how many new vehicles will be purchased.
As Gillingham told us, the savings “comes from fuel-saving technology not being installed. It definitely would not be reducing the price of a car by $2,400. It would mean that cars would not increase in price as quickly and that car buyers would lose out on a lot of fuel savings.”
The Food and Drug Administration on March 10 changed the approval for a version of the prescription drug leucovorin to include people with a very rare genetic condition. FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary had previously implied that the drug’s new label would cover a much broader group of people with autism, saying that “hundreds of thousands of kids” would benefit.
The condition targeted in the FDA approval is a genetic version of cerebral folate deficiency, caused by mutations in a folate receptor gene. People with CFD — whether from genetic or other causes — have low levels of folate in their cerebrospinal fluid, which leads to reduced folate in the brain. This affects brain development. Patients with genetic CFD can experience developmental delays, movement disorders and seizures. Some behaviors are similar to those with autism.
However, this form of genetic CFD is estimated to occur in 1 in a million people, according to the FDA. That would translate to around 70 kids in the U.S. — far from “hundreds of thousands of kids.” Leucovorin had already been used for decades to treat genetic CFD via off-label prescribing, a common practice when evidence shows a drug approved for one condition improves another.
Despite this limited approval, Makary had initially implied a more substantial change. “Today the FDA is filing a Federal Register notice to change the label on an exciting treatment called prescription leucovorin so that it can be available to children with autism,” Makary said in a Sept. 22 press conference. “We are going to change the label to make it available,” he went on to say. “Hundreds of thousands of kids, in my opinion, will benefit.”
This was the same press conference in which President Donald Trump and others touted an unproven link between autism and the use of Tylenol, or acetaminophen, during pregnancy.
Makary later referred to a subset of people with autism with antibodies that block their own folate receptors, called autoantibodies. Some researchers have hypothesized that a subset of people with autism have CFD caused by these autoantibodies, but this is not well-established, as we will explain.
The FDA “is approving prescription leucovorin for treatment of autistic children,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said at the same event. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the treatment “may benefit large numbers of children who suffer from autism.” He had previously vowed by September to identify “what has caused the autism epidemic.”
The Federal Register notice Makary referred to described data on the rare genetic form of CFD, however. The notice also stated that data on leucovorin for people who have symptoms with “autistic features” along with antibodies targeting the receptor “is limited” and that “additional studies are needed.”
The then-head of the FDA’s drugs division, Dr. George Tidmarsh, also subsequently clarified that the new indication was the rare genetic one. “We’re not proposing to approve leucovorin for [people with] the diagnosis of autism,” he told the autism publication the Transmitter in an interview for a story published Oct. 2.
When asked this week about the discrepancy between Makary’s earlier comments about broad benefits for kids with autism and the ultimate FDA approval for a rare genetic condition, a spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services told us that Makary previously had been talking about an antibody-related form of CFD, and not the rare genetic disorder.
“Dr. Makary was referring to cerebral folate deficiency — which can be caused by antibodies blocking folate receptors — rather than cerebral folate transport deficiency, which is caused by a specific genetic mutation,” the HHS spokesperson wrote in an email.
However, as we’ve said, the idea that a large subset of people with autism have CFD and can benefit from leucovorin has not been well-established.
“There is no substantive evidence that cerebral folate deficiency (CFD) plays a role in the pathogenesis of autism,” two researchers with expertise in folate and cancer treatment wrote in a January perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine. They also said that despite claims that antibodies against folate receptors play a role in autism, most experts consider this conclusion to be “inconclusive.” They added that the presence of the antibodies doesn’t necessarily mean that folate is low in the cerebrospinal fluid, which is the defining feature of CFD.
The new approval was for GSK’s Wellcovorin, a brand-name version of leucovorin that has long been off patent and that is no longer made by the company. Leucovorin remains available in generic versions. It is mainly used for cancer patients alongside certain chemotherapy regimens to reduce toxicity or to improve effectiveness.
While clarifying that Makary’s remarks about broad benefits applied to a different form of CFD, the HHS spokesperson also said that the rare genetic form of CFD “was the focus of the September announcement about this drug.”
But during the Sept. 22 press conference and subsequent media appearances, Makary repeatedly emphasized potentially sweeping benefits of the new leucovorin label.
“For many kids with autism, it will provide some improvement in their symptoms, and for some subset, marked improvement,” Makary said in a Sept. 22 NewsNation interview, urging people to talk to their doctors. “There are 2.5 million kids suffering, and I hope hundreds of thousands of them will see some improvement with this new treatment that we’re going to approve in about two to three weeks,” he went on to say.
“I think the biggest story today was that the FDA is taking action to make leucovorin available to kids with cerebral folate deficiency,” he told ABC News that same day. “That may be 20% to 50% of kids with severe autism, and they have a clinical improvement in studies.” In a Sept. 25 interview on C-Span, he gave an even larger estimate, saying “we are going to approve a drug called leucovorin for the treatment of autism” and that it “may help 50% or 60% of kids with autism.”
There is very limited evidence to support the assertion that wide groups of kids with autism could benefit, as we wrote in September. David S. Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health, told us then that the evidence on leucovorin “as a treatment for autism is very weak.”
Other researchers told the Transmitter in September that the literature on autism and leucovorin was “meager” and that it would be “extremely premature” for the administration to recommend the treatment for autism.
“These leucovorin studies are small, lack validated biomarkers or outcome measures, and certainly are not generalizable to all children with autism,” Dr. Shafali Jeste, a neurologist at UCLA, told the Transmitter. “The over-simplified conclusions and media hype from these studies take advantage of vulnerable families who are searching for answers and hope.”
At the time, this evidence included a small collection of studies that looked at the impact of leucovorin on communication and other characteristics in children with autism. One of these studies — among the largest, with 80 participants recruited — has since been retracted due to concerns about its data and statistical analysis, according to a notice on the journal website. Another of the studies had been terminated for “investigator non-compliance,” although the authors still published results.
“Larger, well-designed, multisite trials using objective outcome measures are necessary to determine whether leucovorin is safe and effective in autism and in which subgroups it may be most beneficial for,” says an FAQ page from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Despite these uncertainties and the lack of a broad approval, people appear to have heeded Makary’s advice to talk to their doctors about leucovorin. New outpatient prescriptions of the drug increased by 71% in children ages 5 and older in the first couple of months following the September announcement, according to a study published March 5 in the Lancet.
President Donald Trump claimed that Iran essentially shutting down the Strait of Hormuz “doesn’t really affect” the United States the way it does “other countries.” It’s true that a small share of U.S. oil imports comes from the Persian Gulf. But the U.S. has been affected by the global increase in the price of oil.
Since the waterway has been effectively closed – significantly reducing crude oil exports from the Persian Gulf region – oil prices have increased by double-digit percentages, which has contributed to a 50-cent-plus spike in the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S.
“The US is definitely affected,” Mark Finley, the nonresident fellow in energy and global oil at Rice University’s Baker Institute, told us in an email. Because it’s a global oil market, “if something goes wrong anywhere, the price goes up everywhere,” he said.
Iran has blocked the flow of oil and other goods through the strait in retaliation for joint U.S. and Israeli airstrikes that began on Feb. 28. Iran has threatened to shoot or bomb vessels that attempt to pass through the narrow body of water that separates Iran from Oman and connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea.
About 20 million barrels per day of crude and other oil products were transported through the strait in 2025. That has slowed “to a trickle” since the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran began, according to the International Energy Agency.
In a March 9 press conference, Trump talked about offering “risk insurance” to oil tankers operating in the region, possibly by having U.S. Navy ships escort the tankers, “because you have to keep the straits flowing.”
But then he said, “With all of that, it affects other countries much more than it does the United States. It doesn’t really affect us. We have so much oil. We have tremendous oil and gas, much more than we need.” And he added, “I mean, we’re doing this for the other parts of the world, including countries like China. They get a lot of their oil through the straits. So, we’re doing this.”
Compared with some other nations, the U.S. does get just a fraction of its crude oil from Middle Eastern countries for whom the strait is the primary route of exporting oil products.
Last year, the U.S. imported approximately 490,000 barrels of crude oil per day from countries in the Persian Gulf, which include Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. That was about 8% of the almost 6.2 million barrels per day the U.S. imported in total, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (Canada and Mexico were the source of roughly 70% of U.S. crude imports last year, with Canada alone accounting for a little more than 63%.)
Meanwhile, “About 80% of oil and oil products transiting the Strait in 2025 was destined for Asia,” the IEA has reported – with China, India and Japan being the main importers in the region. China, which Trump mentioned by name, receives between 45% and 50% of its imports through the strait, according to the Center on Global Energy Policy.
But it’s not accurate to claim that Iran’s blockade on the strait “doesn’t really affect” Americans, as Trump claimed. The fact that the U.S. is the world’s leading producer of crude oil, and relatively little of its imports come from the Persian Gulf, doesn’t mean that Americans won’t feel any pain.
“It insulates us in the sense that we’re not going to have a hard time finding supply, but the prices are global, so prices go up anyway,” Abhi Rajendran, director of Oil Markets Research at Energy Intelligence, told us in an interview.
As we’ve reported, the U.S. still relies on some imports because much of the crude oil produced domestically is lighter, or less dense, while many refineries in the U.S. were long ago configured to use the heavier crude oils produced in other parts of the world, such as Canada. That’s also why the U.S. exports a lot of the oil produced in the States.
Trump wrote on social media that higher oil prices are actually a positive thing. “The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” the president said.
In his email, Finley told us that “US oil companies, their employees, and the states where they operate benefit from higher prices.” As for consumers, including households and businesses, he said they “bear the burden of higher prices at the pump” as well as on “everything that uses oil.”
He noted that the price of gasoline, diesel fuel and other petroleum products in the U.S. “have gone up sharply” since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran.
In a February update, the IEA said, “With around 25% of the world’s seaborne oil trade transiting the Strait, and options to bypass it being limited, any disruption to flows through the Strait would have huge consequences for world oil markets.” It warned that a prolonged disruption of shipments would lead to oil supply shortages and make price increases inevitable.
As we’ve written, most of the cost of gasoline is determined by the price of crude oil, which refiners use to make gasoline and other petroleum products. The price of crude oil is set internationally and is largely based on supply and demand factors around the world.
Since the airstrikes on Iran began, the price of West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, has increased about 41% to almost $95 a barrel, and the price of Brent crude, the international standard, rose about 32% to just over $94 a barrel, according to the Energy Information Administration. As a result, as of the week ending March 9, the average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline had increased to $3.50 per gallon – up by about 56 cents, or roughly 19%, since the week ending Feb. 23, which was five days before the fighting with Iran began, EIA data show.
On March 11, “to address disruptions in oil markets stemming from the war in the Middle East,” the 32 nations that are members of the International Energy Agency — which include the U.S. — announced that they collectively would make 400 million barrels from their oil reserves available for purchase “over a timeframe that is appropriate” for each country.
For the U.S., the Department of Energy said that Trump had authorized the release of 172 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve over several weeks.
Experts have said that whether the releases help stabilize oil markets and lower prices depends on how fast the crude can be shipped and how much longer the fighting lasts.
“I think it will help,” Rajendran told us about the planned releases. But he added this caveat: “as long as the conflict doesn’t drag on past early to mid-April.”
Beyond that point, he said, countries would likely have to keep drawing more from their oil reserves or start making other adjustments to address demand.
Is the U.S. at “war” with Iran? Americans are getting conflicting messages from the Trump administration and congressional leaders.
“We are not at war. We have no intention of being at war,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on March 5, hours after Republicans in the House blocked a war powers resolution that would have required congressional approval for any further military action against Iran. Instead, Johnson called the military action a “limited operation.”
But in remarks to reporters on March 7 — and on other occasions — “war” is exactly how President Donald Trump has described it.
“We’re winning the war by a lot,” Trump told reporters on March 7. “The war itself is going unbelievably. It’s as good as it can be.”
While there are varying definitions of war even among academics who study such things, the war-or-not political debate is mostly about the legal definition of war according to the Constitution, and the implications that come with such a designation.
While Article II of the U.S. Constitution designates the president as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy,” Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress — and only Congress — the power “To declare War.” In other words, the president is obligated to seek authorization from Congress before he initiates a war.
But Congress hasn’t formally declared a war since World War II. And it didn’t happen with the military attack initiated by Trump in Iran. Rather, in accordance with the 1973 War Powers Resolution, Trump provided a report to Congress on March 2 about the administration’s justification for the U.S.-Israeli joint strikes against Iran initiated on Feb. 28.
“So currently, if political leaders were to say that this is a war, they would also be acknowledging that the administration’s actions were unconstitutional,” Stephanie Savell, director of Brown University’s Costs of War project, told us.
In a March 1 post for his Substack, Foreign Exchanges, journalist Derek Davison wrote that Trump had “made a little verbal slip” when referring to the military operation as a war.
“You’re not supposed to refer to these sorts of things as ‘wars’ when you’re the president of the United States, at least not at their outset, because by law wars have to be declared by Congress,” Davison wrote. “Presidents have leeway to engage in military action prior to a congressional vote but only in self-defense, which was plainly not the case here even if one were to stretch that term beyond all comprehension.”
But Trump numerous times has referred to the situation with Iran as a war.
“We have unlimited middle and upper ammunition, which is really what we’re using in this war,” Trump said in remarks on March 3.
“We’re doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly, I would say,” Trump said on March 4.
In his remarks on March 7, when talking about American casualties, Trump commented, “It’s part of war. It’s a sad part of war. It’s the bad part of war.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has also repeatedly referred to the armed conflict as war.
“We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it,” Hegseth said in a press conference on March 2. “We set the terms of this war from start to finish.”
Those characterizations are in stark contrast to the way many Republican members of Congress have described the military conflagration.
“Nobody should classify this as war. It is combat operations,” Republican Rep. Brian Mast said on CNN the day the U.S. and Israel initiated airstrikes on Iran.
In a press conference on March 3, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pointed to Trump’s own words to argue that the president “has unconstitutionally and illegally chosen to launch a war.”
“He’s describing it as a war,” Jeffries said. Hegseth “is describing it as a war. Other members of the administration are describing it as a war. And it’s a requirement under the Constitution that it’s members of Congress who make the decision as to whether to get us entangled in this kind of armed conflict.”
As we’ve written before, legal experts have told us that under an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, congressional approval for the use of military force against another country is required. But in practice, several presidents have launched military actions in other countries without congressional authorization.
Robert Johnson, director of Oxford University’s Changing Character of War Center, told us via email, “There is a political reason not to call the campaign against Iran a war. The President must consult Congress and gain approval after 60 days. Until that time, he is permitted to take actions which are in self-defense of the United States, a power the POTUS was granted because [of] the Cold War and the speed at which a nuclear armed attack could be launched.”
“Most scholars and lawyers do not use the term war, even when they should,” Johnson said. “The term in use is armed conflict. This is further defined as an armed attack. A pattern has been set in the last three decades of not declaring war and taking military action, that is, using lethal force to obtain political ends and to neutralise an emergent threat, such as a terrorist attack. Legally, the criteria are that it should be a threat which cannot be dealt with reasonably by any other means and it should be ‘imminent’ as a threat.”
The media and academics, of course, use other definitions of war that have nothing to do with the legal or constitutional considerations.
The Associated Press, for example, decided on March 1 to start using the word “war” to refer to the Israeli-U.S. strikes on Iran and Iran’s retaliation.
“This reflects the scope and intensity of the fighting,” the AP wrote.
The AP noted that the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines war broadly as, “A state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations,” or “a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism.”
“Even though none of the countries have officially declared war, the attacks by the United States and Israel, combined with Iran’s retaliation, meet those criteria,” the AP noted. “The decision by the Trump administration and Israeli leaders to attack and the subsequent destruction and casualties are enough to call the actions, and Iran’s response, a war. Trump himself has used the word war to describe the conflict.”
Johnson, of the Changing Character of War Center, said, “As a phenomenon, war is a contest of organised polities using lethal armed force at scale. Under this definition, the U.S. is ‘at war.'”
Savell, at the Costs of War project, cited the words of Douglas Fry, an anthropologist of war, in his 2007 book “Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace.” Fry defined war as: “A group activity, carried on by members of one community against members of another community, in which it is the primary purpose to inflict serious injury or death on multiple nonspecified members of that other community, or in which the primary purpose makes it highly likely that serious injury or death will be inflicted on multiple nonspecified members of that community in the accomplishment of that primary purpose.”
“This fits what the US is doing in Iran,” Savell said.
But there are other definitions used in academia as well.
Scott Wolford, a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, and Jeff Carter, a professor in the Department of Government and Justice Studies at Appalachian State University, are co-directors of the Correlates of War Project, which provides a “systematic accumulation of scientific knowledge about war” dating back to 1816.
COW defines war as “‘sustained combat’ between belligerents, or what we might call competitive violence used by groups organized for violence against other groups organized for violence,” Wolford and Carter told us via email.
The conflict between the U.S. and Iran meets their definition of “sustained combat,” they said.
“Operationally, though, to enter the COW data as a war (as opposed to lower-level violence) there’s a battle death cutoff of 1000, above which a conflict enters the data as a war,” they said.
Seven American troops have been killed in the military conflict so far, and retaliatory Iranian strikes have also killed nearly two dozen others in the Middle East region, according to a March 8 New York Times report. Iran’s U.N. ambassador said on March 6 that more than 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed in the conflict.
Those figures from Iran have not been verified, however, and Carter noted that COW’s 1,000 threshold “applies to members of the combatants’ armed forces,” not civilians.
If the military conflict leads to 1,000 battle deaths, it would be categorized as a war in the COW database, regardless of what either Iranian or U.S. leaders call it. (Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, did call the conflict a “war,” telling PBS News on March 9, “This is a war imposed on us.”)
“The virtue of those definitions is that they’re independent of what governments *say* about whether or not they’re at war,” Wolford and Carter wrote.
“But that’s distinct from the political-legal question of whether this is a war,” they said. “Declarations of war are pretty rare, though Congressional authorizations for the use of force aren’t, and the fact that this conflict began and continues with neither is probably what’s at issue in the public argument over the definition.”
But experts told us the political classification of the conflict could change over time, if the number of American casualties rose, if ground troops were deployed, or if the military action continues for a protracted amount of time.
“If there was a specific and limited set of armed attacks, of short duration, the Administration could sustain the argument that they are not yet at war,” Johnson said. “However, the scale, extent, and possibly duration of [counter] attacks would take us beyond purely legal definitions.”
In remarks on March 11, Trump referred to the military action in Iran as “a little excursion.”
A reporter asked, “You just said, ‘It is a little excursion,’ and you said, ‘It is a war.’ So which one is it?”
“Well, it’s both,” Trump said. “It’s both.”
President Donald Trump has claimed that the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was “a road to a nuclear weapon” and the country “would be sitting with a massive nuclear weapon three years ago” if he hadn’t withdrawn the U.S. from the deal in 2018 during his first term. The multilateral deal aimed to restrict Iran’s uranium enrichment program, and experts told us that after the U.S. withdrawal, Iran accelerated it instead.
It’s not possible to predict what would have happened if the agreement, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and negotiated by former President Barack Obama’s administration, had remained in place. In addition to imposing restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of uranium, the deal required international inspections of the country’s nuclear facilities.
On March 3, when speaking about the U.S. airstrikes on Iran that began Feb. 28, Trump said that Obama “made maybe the worst deal I’ve ever seen, because he gave all power in the Middle East to Iran, he went the exact opposite way, and I terminated that. If I didn’t terminate that deal, they would be sitting with a massive nuclear weapon three years ago, which would have been used already on Israel at least, and other countries also. And we wouldn’t be talking about it right now.”
The president went on to say that Obama “was giving them the right to have the path to a nuclear weapon,” saying that deal “expired.”
The next day, Trump said: “If we didn’t terminate the worst deal, one of the worst deals ever made, the Obama nuclear deal … it was a road to a nuclear weapon. Bad things would have happened four years ago, because they would’ve had a weapon four years ago, if I didn’t terminate that deal.”
And during a speech on March 11, Trump said, “But that deal, the Iran nuclear deal gave them the right to have a nuclear weapon as of three years ago.”
But several experts we spoke to disputed Trump’s claim and told us that Iran advanced its nuclear program after Trump’s decision to pull out of the agreement in his first term.
“Iran was able to advance its nuclear programme to the point where it was before the 12 Day War last June not because of the JCPOA, but because President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA,” Laura Rockwood, senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, told us in an email. Rockwood worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency for 28 years, retiring in 2013.
Similarly, Richard Nephew, an international and public affairs senior research scholar at Columbia University who worked as a special envoy for Iran and for the State Department under the Biden administration, told us, “Trump’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA in 2018 had a significant accelerating effect on the program.”
“The JCPOA would absolutely not have allowed Iran to develop nuclear weapons,” Nephew said. “First of all, there were prohibitions; then there were transparency requirements; and, then, there were the risks of snapback and punishment” if Iran violated the terms.
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 for an earlier story that the 2015 nuclear deal “established an array of limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment and uranium stockpiling” and a rigorous monitoring and verification program. After the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal, “Iran began to reconstitute its nuclear capabilities, including by deploying large numbers of advanced centrifuges and stockpiling” highly enriched uranium.
As we’ve explained before, the nuclear agreement, which took effect in 2016 and was signed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — and Germany, restricted Iran’s ability to enrich uranium for 15 years and required monitoring and inspections of Iranian facilities for the same amount of time.
Under the deal, Iran agreed to do away with much of its nuclear program and, in exchange, the signatories lifted sanctions, the Council on Foreign Relations explained.
Trump announced on May 8, 2018, that the U.S. would withdraw from the deal and reinstitute sanctions. About a year later, in July 2019, Iran had exceeded the limits on its stockpile of low-enriched uranium that had been set in the JCPOA, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported at the time. Iran’s foreign minister said the country would begin to enrich uranium beyond the low level allowed under the deal (3.67%), which was the level needed for civilian nuclear power.
“The JCPOA dramatically restricted Iran’s ability to produce fissile material and, in particular, not only placed a cap on the quantity of enriched uranium Iran could stockpile and on the level of enrichment, but required the dismantlement of 2/3 of its centrifuges and limited its ability to produce advanced centrifuges,” Rockwood said. “Iran simply would not have been able to enrich to the point of possessing over 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium had the JCPOA remained in place.”
Rockwood was referring to the amount of 60% enriched uranium that Iran had stockpiled before the June 2025 U.S. bombing of nuclear program sites in the country. To be weapons-grade, the uranium would need to be enriched to 90%, as we’ve explained.
Of course, Iran could have violated the terms of the nuclear deal and pursued a nuclear weapon.
“No single element blocks Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons, but taken together, the nuclear restrictions and monitoring form a comprehensive system that will put nuclear weapons out of Iran’s reach for at least 15 years,” the nonpartisan Arms Control Association explained in an August 2015 analysis. “Many of the JCPOA provisions also extend beyond 15 years. Monitoring of centrifuge production facilities continues for 20 years, and monitoring of uranium mines and mills continues for 25 years. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors will have enhanced access indefinitely.”
Critics of the JCPOA — including Trump — have argued that the deal didn’t go far enough, and they objected to the lifting of economic sanctions.
“One of the main arguments used against the JCPOA was that it allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium and move closer to nuclear capability while remaining technically in compliance,” the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation wrote in a June report. “The JCPOA also contained so-called ‘sunset provisions’ on various aspects of the deal such as lifting limits on centrifuges after 10 years or reduced enrichment beyond 3.67% only lasting for 15 years. This led to concerns that the deal would only temporarily delay Iran’s nuclear program while preventing parties from finding a more permanent solution. Additionally, critics worried that lifting sanctions on Iran in return for the JCPOA’s focus on constraining Iran’s nuclear program would diminish the United States’ ability to address other security concerns such as Iran’s missile program or its funding of violent non-state groups in the Middle East.”
In saying that Iran would’ve had a nuclear weapon “three years ago,” Trump may have been referencing one of these provisions, known as “transition day,” which was set to take effect on Oct. 18, 2023, eight years after implementation of the deal. On that day, if Iran had complied with its commitments under the deal, some of the restrictions on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs would have been lifted. However, while U.N. restrictions expired, countries that remained in the JCPOA after the U.S. withdrawal chose to maintain their restrictions, citing Iran’s noncompliance.
We asked the White House about Trump’s remarks, but we didn’t get a response.
While Trump claims that the JCPOA would have brought Iran closer to having a nuclear weapon and his withdrawal stopped that, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimated that the withdrawal sped up the so-called “breakout time,” or the time Iran would need to produce weapons-grade uranium that could then be used for one bomb – if the country chose to do so. The center estimated, as of November 2024, that the breakout time went from two to three months before the deal to 12-plus months during the deal. And then, after the U.S. withdrawal, the breakout time was reduced to just a couple of weeks.
As we’ve explained, it would take more time to actually develop a nuclear weapon. “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,” Emma Sandifer, program coordinator at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us for an earlier story.
She said that last June’s airstrikes likely lengthened the “breakout time,” but the IAEA hasn’t been able to inspect the damaged nuclear program sites since then.
In 2017, several months before withdrawing from the nuclear deal, Trump had claimed that Iran “has committed multiple violations of the agreement.” But as we wrote at the time, the IAEA said in its multiple reports after the deal went into effect that Iran was abiding by it. Trump himself had twice certified to Congress that Iran had complied with the deal, before claiming there had been violations.
In late September 2017, Gen. Joseph Dunford, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress that “Iran is adhering to its JCPOA obligations” and that the agreement “has delayed Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.”
Multiple news outlets have reported that video, satellite images and expert analysis indicate that the United States was likely responsible for the Feb. 28 bombing of an Iranian school for young girls, contradicting President Donald Trump’s unsupported claim that the deadly strike “was done by Iran.”
When a reporter aboard Air Force One asked Trump on March 7 if the U.S. had bombed the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school, the president said, “No, in my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” He continued: “We think it was done by Iran – because they are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions. They have no accuracy whatsoever. It was done by Iran.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was standing near Trump at the time, didn’t echo the president’s version of events when a reporter asked if that claim was accurate.
“We’re certainly investigating,” Hegseth said, before adding that “the only side that targets civilians is Iran.”
But the available evidence suggests that Iran wasn’t at fault, according to several news reports.
The bombing happened on the first day of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran as part of the joint military mission known as Operation Epic Fury. The school was located in very close proximity to an Iranian naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that was bombed in the air attacks. NBC News reported that the naval base had closed more than a decade ago, according to an official with Iran’s education ministry and a mother the network interviewed.
Iranian officials have said that more than 160 people, mostly students, were killed when the school was hit. But the number of casualties hasn’t been independently verified.
A video posted March 8 by the Mehr News Agency, which has been described as a semiofficial Iranian news service, shows a missile striking in the vicinity where the naval base and school were in southern Iran, according to news reports. Smoke was already visible in the surrounding area when the missile landed and exploded, creating a new, darker plume of smoke and debris. Multiple news organizations verified the video using geolocation tools.
The New York Times reported that satellite images it obtained from Planet Labs show “that multiple precision strikes hit at least six Revolutionary Guards buildings along with the school,” including four buildings that were completely destroyed. The Times, citing a timeline of the strikes, said that the video suggests that the school could have already been struck when that missile made impact with another structure.
The Washington Post reported that eight munitions experts said that the missile seen in the Mehr News Agency video, based on its shape, appears to be a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, which the U.S. developed and is known to have used in its air assault on Iran. The U.S. military has released several videos and photos of those long-range missiles being launched from Navy warships during the now 11-day conflict.
Trevor Ball, a former U.S. Army explosive ordnance disposal technician who covers munitions for the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, wrote in a thread on X that the posted video “shows a US Tomahawk missile hitting an IRGC facility in Minab, Iran, on Feb 28, showing for the first time that the US struck the area.” He said, “The footage appears to contradict President Donald Trump’s claim it was an Iranian missile that hit the school.”
In a March 9 press conference in Miami, Trump still insisted that Iran could be responsible, saying it “also has some Tomahawks” and Iran “wish[es] they had more.” The president added: “But whether it’s Iran or somebody else, the fact that a Tomahawk, a Tomahawk is very generic.”
But there is no evidence that Iran has acquired Tomahawk missiles. “Iran has none, though it has lots of missiles of different kinds,” Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, told us in an email.
Ball wrote on X that the U.S. “is the only participant in the war that is known to have Tomahawk missiles.”
In addition, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference on March 4 that the initial U.S. airstrikes were focused in the south of Iran, where the school bombing occurred. Israel “predominantly” targeted air defense systems in Iran’s “northern flank,” he said.
“An Israeli military official said the military was looking into the school incident but wasn’t aware of an Israeli strike in that area” with the school, the Wall Street Journal reported.
When asked about the school bombing, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, Capt. Tim Hawkins, told reporters that “it would be inappropriate to comment given the incident is under investigation.”
Meanwhile, Reuters, citing two unnamed U.S. officials, reported on March 5 that “U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls’ school.” U.S. officials requesting anonymity to speak about the preliminary findings told the Associated Press, CBS News and the Wall Street Journal the same thing.
CBS News said “[t]he preliminary U.S. assessment suggests that the United States is ‘likely’ responsible for the deadly attack but did not intentionally target the school and may have hit it in error, possibly due to the use of dated intelligence which wrongly identified the area as still part of an Iranian military installation.”
In response to early reports about the probe, a White House spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, issued a statement to reporters saying that the “investigation is ongoing” and has reached “no conclusions at this time.” She called it “both irresponsible and false for anyone to claim otherwise.”
Reuters said in its reporting that the officials it spoke with “did not rule out the possibility that new evidence could emerge that absolves the US of responsibility.”
Even with satellite images and video of the airstrikes, remnants of the missile would need to be examined to more definitively determine culpability, N.R. Jenzen-Jones, an arms and munitions intelligence specialist who directs the Armament Research Services, told the newswire.
Complicating matters, the AP said, is the fact that “[n]o independent agency has reached the site during the war to investigate.”
At the March 9 press conference, Trump was asked why he is the only person in the U.S. government claiming that Iran was responsible for the bombing of the school. He replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are used by others, as you know. Numerous other nations have tomahawks. They buy them from us.”
But Cancian told us that the only countries other than the U.S. using Tomahawks are the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan and the Netherlands.
The U.K. and Australia have previously purchased the missiles, according to their own defense departments. The U.S. State Department approved selling the weapons to Japan and the Netherlands, in 2023 and 2025, respectively.
Those four countries are not involved in the U.S-Israeli conflict with Iran.
Ultimately, once the investigation is complete, “whatever the report shows, I’m willing to live with that report,” Trump said.
During a speech in South Carolina on Feb. 27, Joe Biden touted his record as president while criticizing his successor, President Donald Trump. But during his remarks, Biden made a number of false, misleading or exaggerated claims.
Biden was in South Carolina to celebrate winning the state’s Democratic presidential primary six years earlier. Biden’s win there helped propel him to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2020.
When Biden compared his jobs record with Trump’s, he exaggerated the figures.
“In fact, [in] just my last year as president of the United States in 2024, we created — just the last year — 2.2 million additional jobs,” he said. “You know how many jobs Trump’s created in his first year as president? 185,000 jobs total. That’s it.”
However, the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that total employment increased by a little more than 1.2 million between January 2024 and January 2025, which covers Biden’s last full year in office. (He left office on Jan. 20, 2025.)
Meanwhile, in the first full year of Trump’s second term, employment increased by 359,000, from January 2025 to January 2026.
For his speech, Biden may have relied on outdated data, or data covering a different period. We reached out to his office about his claims, but we didn’t receive a response.
BLS did report in January 2025 that total employment had increased by 2.2 million in 2024. That covers most of Biden’s final year as president. But that report came out before the BLS made annual data revisions for the 12 months ending in March 2025 that lowered its estimates of the increase in employment during Biden’s time in office. The final revisions were made on Feb. 11.
The latest BLS data also show that total employment in 2025 increased by 181,000, when measured from December 2024 to December 2025. That’s close to the 185,000 figure that Biden used for Trump. But Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, and BLS bases its job figures on a monthly survey of households covering the week that contains the 12th day of the month. That means the January 2025 job numbers were under Biden.
We got an increase of 359,000 for Trump by measuring from January 2025 to January 2026, which more closely aligns with the period covering his first full year back in office.
We would also note that the employment for January 2026 is preliminary and subject to be revised. Also, as we’ve said before, presidents shouldn’t receive all the credit, or the blame, for employment figures on their watch.
Biden also claimed that “the economy grew with record growth” during his presidency. We found no basis for that statement.
Real gross domestic product (meaning it has been adjusted for inflation) grew by 34.9% in the third quarter of 2020 and by 18.9% in all of 1942, which are the quarterly and annual economic growth records, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates. The highest quarterly GDP growth under Biden was 7% in the second and fourth quarters of 2021, when the economy was rebounding from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the highest annual GDP growth during his administration was 6.2% that same year.
Average annual growth during Biden’s four years was 3.6%. That was still lower than the almost 4.5% average during Bill Clinton’s second term, and the average of nearly 5.2% during Lyndon B. Johnson’s full four-year term. There was even average annual growth of about 15.4% in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third term, during World War II.
Taking out the bounce-back year after GDP plunged as a result of the pandemic, economic growth in the last three years of Biden’s presidency was about 2.7% annually, which is close to the yearly average of about 2.8% annual growth over the last 50 years.
Biden later turned to the subject of immigration, saying, “The day I left office, border crossings in the United States were lower than the day that I entered an office inherited from Trump.” That’s accurate, but misleading.
Border Patrol made 47,320 apprehensions of people illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico in December 2024, Biden’s last full month in office. Then apprehensions at the southern border declined further to 29,105 in January 2025, and Biden left office a little more than halfway through that month.
Those figures were down from 71,141 apprehensions by Border Patrol in December 2020, the last full month of Trump’s first term, and 75,316 in January 2021, when Trump exited the White House.
But in our story “Biden’s Final Numbers,” which looks at various statistical measures during his presidency, we wrote: “Illegal border crossings, as measured by apprehensions at the southwest border, were 107% higher in Biden’s final year in office compared with the last full year before he was sworn in, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.” We also said “that snapshot undersells the surge in illegal immigration during Biden’s four years in office, because apprehensions dropped dramatically in the second half of 2024 after Biden initiated some emergency policies to curb illegal border crossings.
“Before then, the U.S. was experiencing historically high illegal immigration,” we reported.
We also pointed out that apprehensions were only part of the picture, since the number of people seeking asylum at legal ports of entry remained high under Biden, as his administration began accepting CBP One mobile app applications that allowed immigrants to request asylum or parole and be screened for entry to the U.S. Plus there was an additional surge in immigrants coming to the U.S. via newly created legal methods, such as noncitizens granted parole, which allows them to temporarily live in the U.S. for “urgent humanitarian or significant public benefit reasons.” Biden offered parole to immigrants from countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. (Trump has largely halted those humanitarian programs through executive orders.)
While Biden suggested that the increase in migration earlier in his presidency was due to the pandemic, Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, previously told us that there were several reasons for the surge.
“There were many different drivers in the growth of the unauthorized immigrant population during the Biden presidency: strong labor demand in the U.S. as the country rebounded from the COVID-19 recession, and push factors such as authoritarian governments in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and intense gang violence and extortion in countries like Haiti and Ecuador,” she said. “It’s also possible that some people moved in order to take advantage of new pathways created by the Biden administration.”
Correction, March 12: Border Patrol apprehensions for December 2020 and January 2021 were 71,141 and 75,316, respectively, as confirmed by CBP. We had slightly different figures in our original article.
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.”