Q: Are FEMA funds being used to construct an immigrant detention facility in the Everglades?
A: Yes, the immigrant detention facility in Florida, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” is being “funded largely” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Shelter and Services Program, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said. The funding does not come from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund.
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An immigration detention center has been constructed and was expected to open this week on an airfield in the Everglades, about 45 miles west of Miami, Florida, to house as many as 5,000 detainees before deportation. State officials dubbed the facility “Alligator Alcatraz” because the surrounding swampy area is inhabited by alligators, pythons and mosquitoes, and its isolation is reminiscent of the infamous, former federal prison on an island in San Francisco Bay.
We received several emails from readers asking about the facility and whether it was being funded by FEMA.
The initial $450 million needed to create and operate the detention center in its first year was provided by the state of Florida, WINK News reported. The state will seek reimbursement through FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, not the agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, which supports recovery efforts associated with major disasters and emergencies. As we’ve written, the Disaster Relief Fund receives separate funding from Congress.
The Shelter and Services Program was approved by Congress and created in 2023 under the Biden administration “to alleviate overcrowding in short-term [Customs and Border Protection] holding facilities and support non-federal entities with shelter and related activities for noncitizens released from [Department of Homeland Security] custody and awaiting their immigration court proceedings,” a 2024 DHS report explained.
But DHS Secretary Noem said the purpose of that FEMA program has shifted.
Noem said in an Instagram post on July 1, the day she toured the facility with President Donald Trump, “Alligator Alcatraz will be funded largely by FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, which the Biden administration used as a piggy bank to spend hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to house illegal aliens … Before this program was used to house criminal illegal aliens. Now, it is being used to detain criminal illegal aliens while they await deportation.”
Asked about the funding for the detention center, a FEMA spokesperson told us in an email, “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens. We will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida.”
The Trump administration previously objected to federal funding to assist and house migrants, and in February it clawed back $80 million from New York City that FEMA had transferred for that purpose under the Shelter and Services Program. Trump falsely claimed in 2024 that the Biden administration redirected and depleted FEMA funds intended for disaster relief to shelter and help migrants, as we’ve written.
During the tour of the Florida facility on July 1, Trump said, “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation,” the Associated Press reported. “This is an amazing thing that they’ve done here,” Trump said.
The detention center consists of tents, trailers and temporary buildings, with rows of bunk beds surrounded by chain-link fencing, the AP reported. Officials told the AP that detainees will have access to medical care, air conditioning and a recreation yard, and will receive “support from attorneys and members of the clergy.”
There have been escapes at immigration detention facilities in the past. Three men escaped from a facility in Colorado in 2019 and were recaptured days later, according to a press release from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Four men escaped June 12 from a detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, and three had been caught by June 17, the U.S. Attorney’s Office reported.
ICE is currently holding about 59,000 people in detention facilities across the country, CBS News reported.
We reached out to DHS for information about security and the frequency of escapes at immigrant detention facilities, but we didn’t receive a response.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
As the Republican budget bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, nears the July 4 deadline set by the White House, lawmakers have been ramping up the rhetoric.
Many items in the bill have garnered competing claims from Republicans and Democrats. We’ll lay out what we know about the sometimes disparate interpretations of the bill’s anticipated effects and explain the context around the issues.
The bill narrowly passed the Senate on July 1 — with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote — and will now head back to the House for further debate.
In a June 29 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin said because of the bill “the average household of four is going to bring home pay over $10,000 more a year this year than they did last year.” Days prior, Trump, at a June 26 White House event, said the bill would immediately “increase take-home pay for the normal family of four by at least $13,000.”
But both men appear to be cherry-picking from the high end of an optimistic range of estimates made by the White House’s own Council of Economic Advisers.
In early May, the CEA calculated that under a version of the bill passed by the House Ways and Means committee, take-home pay for a typical family with two children would increase by between roughly $7,800 and about $13,300. Then in late June, when the CEA analyzed a Senate-proposed version of the bill, its estimate of the potential increase in take-home pay for that same-sized family shrunk to a range of between nearly $7,600 and $10,900.
Importantly, both ranges of CEA estimates were based on an assumption that real, or inflation-adjusted, gross domestic product would increase by more than 4% each year, at least for the first four years under the bills. But the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget labeled those “fantasy growth assumptions” that “are many times higher” than the estimates of other independent analysts that have modeled versions of the bill. The CRFB said that modelers other than the CEA have projected economic growth in the range of 0.1% to 1.3% per year, producing less of an increase in take-home pay for families.
Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on the impact that the bill would have on Medicaid, and both sides have misled the public about what’s predicted to happen if it became law.
At the White House on June 26, Trump claimed that under the bill, “your Medicaid is left alone. It’s left the same.” But as we’ve written, the program would change for millions of people because of provisions that significantly reduce future Medicaid spending and modify eligibility criteria for the program, including new work requirements for adults who gained coverage under a Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. The CBO estimated that Medicaid provisions in the House version of the bill would cause 7.8 million to lose their coverage in 2034, with the majority, 5.2 million, expected to lose Medicaid due to the work requirements.
For our previous story, health care experts told us that many beneficiaries would likely have problems submitting the required paperwork to prove their eligibility, leading to people being dropped from the Medicaid rolls. And, experts said, not all of the people losing coverage would be able-bodied adults refusing to work, as some Republicans have claimed.
Meanwhile, Democrats have exaggerated the number of people that the CBO has estimated would lose health insurance because of the bill. For example, Sen. Mark Warner, in a June 29 interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said, “this bill will kick about 16 million Americans off of health care,” a figure he attributed to “the independent referees, CBO and others.”
But the CBO said that the House version would result in 10.9 million more people becoming uninsured in 2034, including current Medicaid beneficiaries and people who now get their health insurance through the ACA marketplaces. And, more recently, the CBO estimated that the Senate version of the bill would lead to 11.8 million losing health insurance in 2034 – although there was no breakdown by the type of coverage lost. The higher figure cited by Warner and other Democrats includes millions of estimated losses under a separate matter — the scheduled expiration in 2025 of ACA premium tax credits that were last extended in 2022. What happens to those previously expanded tax credits is still up in the air, but their extension is not directly tied to the bill under consideration by Congress.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the Senate bill will raise federal deficits by $4 trillion, while the White House said it will cut the deficit by $1.4 trillion. The clash over the deficit projections comes down to different interpretations of how the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act affects the bottom line.
The CBO has said the bill passed by the Senate will add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, taking into account the extension of the 2017 tax cuts championed by Trump. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated the Senate bill will increase the federal debt by more than $3.9 trillion through 2034.
“Congressional Republicans betrayed the American people, passing a bill that will raise our debt by $4 trillion,” Klobuchar said in a July 1 statement shortly after the bill’s passage in the Senate.
The Senate bill includes $4.5 trillion in tax cuts — extending the lower rates passed in 2017 and adding new tax cuts. But Senate Republicans have taken steps to remove consideration of the 2017 tax cuts in determining the bill’s impact on the deficit. Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty, who was presiding over the Senate in April, ruled that Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Senate Budget Committee chair, had the sole authority to decide whether extending the 2017 tax cuts officially adds to the deficit.
Graham and like-minded Senate Republicans have said that because the tax cuts have been in effect and are “current policy,” they are not new and do not add to future deficits.
A June 7 memo from the White House argued that Republicans in Congress would certainly extend the 2017 tax cuts and “an honest portrayal of current future deficits adjusts for the continuation” of the cuts. “On its own, the OBBB reduces the deficit by over $1.4 trillion. Net mandatory savings of $1.7 trillion are partly offset by increases in one-time spending to finally and fully secure the border to defend our Nation from invasion, and to lower taxes from policies such as no tax on tips or overtime that are partly offset with loophole closers in the tax code. The net deficit reduction totals $1.407 trillion,” the White House said.
Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, objected to granting Graham the power to determine how to account for the existing tax cuts. “The ability of the chair to create a phony baseline has never been used in reconciliation, not ever,” Merkley said.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Merkley and Ron Wyden, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sent a letter on March 31 to the Senate Republican leadership saying, “As Members of your conference advocate for the use of budget fraud – the so-called ‘current policy baseline’ – in an attempt to make a second round of Trump Tax giveaways look like it would cost $0, rather than the true $37 trillion over 30 years, we write today to remind you that employing this unprecedented gimmick would upend budget law, erode the remaining fiscal guardrails in the budget reconciliation process, and result in trillions of dollars more in federal debt.”
Taxpayers for Common Sense also criticized the Republican maneuver on assessing the bill’s impact on the deficit in a July 1 statement. “Reconciliation was supposed to be Congress’s tool for fiscal discipline. Instead, senators are using ‘current policy’ scoring — a fancy term for pretending that temporary tax cuts are permanent fixtures — to hide trillions in costs from the American people. It’s the legislative equivalent of cooking the books,” the nonpartisan watchdog group said.
The difference in the rhetoric surrounding who would benefit from the bill’s tax cuts is stark: Democrats say the bill is a boon for billionaires; Republicans frame it as a tax cut for “working-and-middle class Americans.” Both sides are spinning the facts a bit.
Independent analyses indicate that a majority of taxpayers in each income category would see some tax relief, though those with the highest incomes would derive the most benefit.
In the lead-up to the Senate vote, Democrats claimed that cuts to safety net programs were made in service of tax breaks to the very wealthy.
“Why are they doing all this? We know why. Tax breaks for billionaires,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said from the Senate floor on June 28.
“This is just so Republicans can give a big tax cut to the wealthiest Americans,” Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly said on MSNBC on June 30.
Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Jim Banks on “Fox News Sunday” on June 29 called the bill “the biggest tax cut in American history for working class families.”
The White House also put out a release pushing back against the “myth” that the bill “takes from the poor to give to the rich.”
“Low-income workers stand to receive the largest percentage reduction in their tax liability,” the White House said. “One Big Beautiful Bill delivers the largest tax cut in history for working-and-middle class Americans.”
As we have written, on average, taxpayers in every income group would get some tax relief if the 2017 tax cuts are permanently extended. But not everyone. In all, about two-thirds to three-quarters of taxpayers would get a tax cut, according to independent analyses. Also, the cuts skew in favor of wealthy Americans, who would see more tax relief not only in the dollar amount, but as a percentage of income, on average.
(For clarity, people would experience an extension of the 2017 tax law not as a new tax cut, but as the absence of a tax increase if the provisions were allowed to expire.)
The Tax Foundation, for instance, concluded, based on the version of the bill passed by the Senate Finance Committee, and accounting for the economic growth expected to be spurred by the bill, that the percentage change in after-tax income increases — on average – as income rises. For example, in 2034, those in the bottom 20% of earners are expected to see a 0.5% increase in after-tax income. That percentage increases to 2.6% for the next 20% of earners. Those with incomes in the middle 20% — who earn between $38,572 and $73,905 — would see a 3.5% increase in after-tax income in 2034. The largest increase — 3.7% — would accrue to those in the top 20%, the Tax Foundation said.
Based on its analysis of the Senate Budget Committee version of the bill released on June 28, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center wrote, “Average tax cuts are generally larger as a percentage of after-tax income for higher income households than for lower income households, and nearly 60 percent of the tax benefits would go to those in the top quintile (with incomes of about $217,000 or more).”
The Penn Wharton Budget Model looked at the effect of the Senate version of the bill on lifetime income, and factored in the effect of cuts to Medicaid and food assistance. Using a model that takes into account the expected economic growth from the plan, the PWBM found, “that households most affected by the cuts to Medicaid and SNAP — those in the bottom income quintile — experience the largest losses under this bill, averaging $27,500 in lifetime value for the working-age population. In contrast, working-age households in the top income quintile generally benefit from lower taxes, gaining an average of more than $65,000. Working-age households in the middle of the income distribution are largely unaffected, with an average lifetime gain of less than $500, as they face a chance of needing spending programs that have been reduced, but also benefit from some of the tax cuts.
“All future generations are projected to experience lifetime losses under the bill, ranging from $5,700 for high-income households to $22,000 for low-income households,” the PWBM found. “The losses for lower-income groups are primarily driven by a reduced social safety net and lower wages associated with a lower capital stock, while losses for top-income groups are entirely the result of lower wages.”
In a Fox News interview on June 29, Trump again claimed — as he has repeatedly — that if the bill passes there would be “no tax on Social Security.” Not exactly. Under the House and Senate versions of the plan, fewer seniors would pay taxes on Social Security benefits, but not everyone would be exempt.
The version of the bill passed by the Senate would add a $6,000 tax deduction for seniors age 65 and older ($12,000 for married seniors) beginning in 2025 and through 2028 — regardless of whether they receive Social Security benefits. (See Sec. 70103) The House version of the bill proposes a $4,000 deduction for seniors though 2028. (See Sec. 110103)
According to the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, 64% of seniors aged 65 and over who receive Social Security income already receive exemptions and deductions that exceed their taxable Social Security income. So, already, most seniors do not pay taxes on their Social Security income.
Under the more generous Senate version of the bill, an additional 14.2 million would have exemptions and deductions exceeding their taxable Social Security income, so that, in effect, 88% of seniors would not pay any taxes on their Social Security income, according to CEA. The senior deduction would start to decline for individuals with incomes of more than $75,000 and couples with incomes of more than $150,000, and would disappear entirely for individuals making over $175,000.
So, the Senate version of the bill would dramatically reduce the number of seniors who pay taxes on Social Security benefits. But it wouldn’t eliminate taxes on Social Security entirely. According to the CEA’s own analysis, more than 7 million seniors with higher incomes would still pay taxes on Social Security benefits.
Over the last week, the president has repeated an unfounded claim he’s been making since April — warning that if this bill doesn’t pass, there will be a “whopping 68% Tax increase.”
We’ve not been able to find any analysis of the bill that supports that claim, and the White House didn’t answer our question asking for an explanation of how it was calculated.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson did, however, tell us that the talking point reflected the impact of not “ending taxes on tips, overtime, and Social Security,” as proposed in the bill. And Trump has said that it also includes the effect of not extending certain provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are set to expire this year.
Trump, June 27: Well, it comes from the fact that you have automatically the Trump cuts, which were the biggest cuts that we’ve ever had. Now, these cuts are even bigger. But from the last administration we had the Trump cuts. … And that alone is a big chunk of the 68%. And then you have the other taxes that would accumulate. And they say that you’d have about a 68% tax increase.
But those things don’t add up to a 68% tax increase.
“By far the largest part of the bill is extending the expiring tax cuts,” said Joseph Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who researches federal tax issues at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
As we’ve written before, the TPC has estimated that, on average, Americans’ taxes would rise about 7.5% if those 2017 tax cuts aren’t extended at the end of the year.
“Everything else is not going to close the gap,” he said, referring to adding in the proposed changes in taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security to reach a 68% rise in taxes.
Rosenberg pointed to estimates released by the Joint Committee on Taxation on July 1, showing that the total change in new tax-cut provisions in the bill approved by the Senate is 3.5% and the total including the extension of the 2017 tax cuts is 10.7%, which is a far cry from the 68% claimed by Trump.
A June 29 White House release claimed that the bill “unleashes clean, American-made energy, and will reduce the cost of living for Americans nationwide.” However, some analyses indicate it would increase household energy costs.
The bill quickly phases out tax credits for wind and solar power projects and electric vehicles enacted under the Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, and imposes materials sourcing requirements for clean energy projects. The bill keeps longer-term tax credits for some types of zero-emissions energy projects, such as geothermal, nuclear and hydropower, while expanding oil drilling leases, among other energy-related provisions.
A new analysis by Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank focused on energy and climate policy, found that the bill would result in $170 in additional annual energy costs per household in 2035, on average, compared with the alternate scenario where energy policy remained the same.
“Our modeling found that any decrease in fossil fuel prices from increased fossil fuel production is way more than offset by higher electricity costs with the net costs of energy to households and businesses rising dramatically,” Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at Energy Innovation, told us in an email.
A different analysis from the REPEAT Project, led by Princeton University energy systems engineer Jesse Jenkins, projects that the current Senate bill would increase average annual household energy costs by $284 per household by 2035.
Jenkins told us in an email that analyses show the bill “will reduce investment in new clean American energy sources, particularly wind and solar power (the most important and fastest growing sources of clean energy in America) and increase electricity prices and household energy costs.”
When asked for an analysis or other evidence that the bill would reduce costs for Americans, the White House pointed to gasoline prices that are expected to hit four-year lows for the Fourth of July holiday.
“Since taking office, President Trump has unleashed an American energy revolution that has driven down costs – with gas prices currently the lowest they’ve been since 2021 – and brought jobs back to the United States,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told us in an email. “President Trump’s One, Big, Beautiful Bill will supercharge that growth and continue to lower costs for all Americans.”
Other backers of the policy, including conservative-aligned energy nonprofits, have argued the clean energy incentives are unnecessary expenditures with the potential to harm the electrical grid.
“We got to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill so we can stop wasting money on unreliable, intermittent energy,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a video posted to X on June 26, adding that the bill will lower costs by removing “the barriers and shackles that are on the core sources of energy.”
The U.S. is already at record-level energy production. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. produced more energy than ever before in 2024, with natural gas accounting for 38% of total production and crude oil for 27%.
Experts previously told us that while increasing production of fossil fuels could lower prices somewhat temporarily, it is unlikely to move the needle much long-term. Oil is a global commodity, and companies will pull back on production if the price of oil falls too low. And producing natural gas for export could raise prices for Americans.
Earlier in June, Trump posted on his social media platform Truth Social that he did not want any tax credits for clean energy, calling them “largely a giant SCAM.” He also said wind power is the “most expensive and inefficient energy in the world.” But as we’ve written, that’s not true.
As for the notion that the bill will still support energy that is “clean,” burning fossil fuels in the U.S. is often cleaner than doing so elsewhere in the world. But swapping out renewables such as wind and solar for fossil fuels in the U.S. will result in more heat-trapping carbon emissions and other pollutants harmful for the environment and human health.
In a June 27 ruling, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to partially halt nationwide injunctions blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for certain people born in the U.S. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee who wrote the majority opinion, said “universal injunctions” issued by district judges “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”
In the three prior cases addressed in the ruling, district courts issued the injunctions after siding with plaintiffs who argued that the executive order Trump issued on Jan. 20 violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says, in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The idea was to grant citizenship to recently freed slaves, but the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, also forms the basis of the country’s longstanding policy of granting birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil.
Trump’s executive order says that the amendment’s citizenship clause does not apply to individuals born to parents who are in the U.S. illegally or on a temporary visa.
While the Supreme Court did not weigh in on whether the executive order is constitutional, the justices ruled, in a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, that the injunctions blocking its implementation across the country were “broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.” The decision effectively means that federal district judges can no longer issue sweeping injunctions that shield everyone in the country from an administration policy rather than just the parties who challenged the government in court.
Trump hailed the ruling in a June 27 press conference from the White House briefing room.
“This morning, the Supreme Court has delivered a monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law, in striking down the excessive use of nationwide injunctions to interfere with the normal functioning of the executive branch,” the president said. He argued that “a handful of radical left judges” had used universal injunctions “to overrule the rightful powers of the president” and “to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for.”
Over the years, such injunctions have been used to block the policies of Republican and Democratic presidents.
Barrett’s opinion said that Trump’s executive order, which would apply to children born on or after Feb. 19, 2025, could take effect 30 days from June 27, the date of the Supreme Court’s decision. Meanwhile, “lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.”
The executive order originally gave “all executive departments and agencies” 30 days to devise and issue public guidance on how the order would be executed. Yet, at the June 27 press conference at the White House, Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, would not say how Trump’s policy would be enforced.
In response to a reporter who asked, she called it “pending litigation” that would be decided by the Supreme Court in its next term that starts in October. She said that implementation would be discussed “after the litigation,” but it’s not clear when the court may address whether the executive order is constitutional.
In her opinion, Barrett wrote that the court did not address that question because the Trump administration did not ask the court to do so in the application requesting a partial stay of the injunctions. “Instead, the issue the Court decides is whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions,” the opinion says.
As we’ve written, many who argue that the issue has already been settled point to the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision upholding the birthright citizenship portion of the 14th Amendment in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The case involved a man, Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to parents who were citizens of China but legally living in the U.S. (There was no such thing as illegal immigration at the time.) Some argue that while that case settles the issue of whether the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to children born to noncitizen parents in the country legally, it doesn’t necessarily settle the issue regarding children born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally.
For now, the injunctions previously granted by district judges likely only provide relief from Trump’s executive order to the individuals, organizations and 22 states who were part of those cases against the government.
However, the Supreme Court left open the possibility that plaintiffs could pursue class-action lawsuits to more broadly block potentially unlawful federal policies. Class actions allow one or more plaintiffs to bring a case on behalf of a similarly affected group, or class, of people.
Not long after the court’s June 27 ruling, a group of plaintiffs, including two immigrant rights groups, refiled their lawsuit as a class-action case in Maryland, and another lawsuit seeking class-action certification was filed in New Hampshire by a group led by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Because plaintiffs still have time “to switch from universal injunctions to other avenues like class actions” challenging the administration’s policy, Samuel Bray, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, said he believes that the Supreme Court’s ruling will not result in a change to birthright citizenship.
“I expect the courts to continue to reject in case after case the government’s arguments for the birthright citizenship order,” Bray wrote in a June 28 opinion piece for the New York Times. “The likely result is that President Trump’s unconstitutional executive order on birthright citizenship will never go into effect.”
But if those attempts at class-action lawsuits are unsuccessful – because not all cases qualify for class-action status – it may mean that, at least temporarily, some children born in the U.S. are not automatically citizens at the time of birth.
“I mean, this creates a potential for patchwork citizenship,” Amanda Frost, a professor of law at the University of Virginia Law School, said on “PBS NewsHour” last Friday. “And, of course, Americans, all of us inhabiting the United States, are free to move from one state to the other. There’s no borders. There’s no passports. And now you’re a citizen if you’re born in one state or not the other potentially.”
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The location of some enriched uranium is still in question after the U.S. bombed three key nuclear facilities in Iran, according to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and experts on arms control and global security.
At a press conference during the NATO summit in The Hague on June 25, President Donald Trump was asked whether there was any indication that Iran was able to move enriched nuclear material from its targeted sites before the U.S. airstrikes. Trump said, “No, just the opposite. We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move. … If you knew about the material, it’s very hard and dangerous to move. Many people, they call it dust. But it’s very, very heavy, very, very hard to move and they were way down. They were 30 stories down.”
Asked the same question at a June 26 press conference, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “I’m not aware of any intelligence that I’ve reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise.“
But IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said that Iran may have relocated some of its enriched uranium after Israel began its airstrikes and before the U.S. attack on June 21. Grossi said that Iran had sent a letter to the IAEA on June 13 warning that Iran would adopt “special measures” to protect its nuclear equipment and materials, the Guardian reported.
“They did not get into details as to what that meant but clearly that was the implicit meaning of that, so we can imagine that this material” is still somewhere in Iran, Grossi said.
Israeli officials said there was evidence that Iran had moved uranium and equipment from the Fordo site prior to the U.S. attack, the New York Times reported on June 22.
Satellite images released by Maxar Technologies “at the tunnels leading into the Fordo mountain, taken in the days before the American strike, show 16 cargo trucks positioned near an entrance,” according to the Times, which also noted it was “unclear” what might have been removed from the site.
Responding to the reports about those satellite images, Trump said in a June 26 Truth Social post, “The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts. Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!”
The Financial Times reported on June 26 that preliminary assessments shared with European governments “indicate that Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile remains largely intact following US strikes on its main nuclear sites,” and that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium “was not concentrated” at the Fordo plant when the U.S. bombs hit the site. The intelligence assessments said the stockpile “had been distributed to various other locations,” the Financial Times also reported.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, previously told us it is “now quite clear that the Iranians, in anticipation of the U.S. attack, removed” a stockpile of nearly 900 pounds of uranium “enriched to 60%,” as well as other equipment from at least one of the nuclear sites. “This is the material that could be further enriched to bomb grade (90%) and provide enough raw material for about 10 nuclear devices; which would according to U.S. intel before the strikes take another 1-2 years to fashion into warheads small and light enough to be delivered via a ballistic missile.”
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told NPR on June 22, “Today, [Iran] still has that material and we still don’t know where it is.”
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, and Spencer Faragasso, a senior research fellow at the institute, posted an assessment on June 24 of the U.S. and Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities, saying they “have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program. It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack. That being said, there are residuals such as stocks of 60 percent, 20 percent, and 3-5 percent enriched uranium and the centrifuges manufactured but not yet installed at Natanz or Fordow. These non-destroyed parts pose a threat as they can be used in the future to produce weapon-grade uranium.”
We don’t know if Iran was actively working or planning to build a nuclear weapon. The U.S. Intelligence Community in late March assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” But Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, noted that “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
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The chair of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s newly constituted vaccine advisory committee announced in his first meeting that the panel will revisit the longstanding practice of vaccinating all babies against hepatitis B, questioning whether it was “wise” to administer shots “to every newborn before leaving the hospital.” Experts, however, say there are valid reasons to vaccinate babies against hepatitis B, and that it has proven to be safe and very effective.
“It’s virtually eliminated hepatitis B acquisition during childhood,” one infectious disease expert told us.
Martin Kulldorff, the chair and one of seven new members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is a former Harvard Medical School professor who became known for opposing various public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. ACIP has for more than 60 years advised the agency on who should get which Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccines, how often and when.
Earlier this month, Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, removed all 17 existing members of the panel, alleging conflicts of interest issues and inadequate scrutiny of vaccines. As we’ve written, there isn’t evidence for those claims. Kennedy is a longtime anti-vaccine advocate.
Two days after dismissing the committee, Kennedy announced eight new members, including several with a history of spreading false and misleading information about vaccines and others with little or no expertise in vaccines. (The night before the group’s first meeting, HHS told the New York Times that one of the named panelists decided to withdraw “during the financial holdings review.”) Some remaining panelists have past ties to vaccine-related litigation, including Kulldorff, who served as an expert witness for plaintiffs alleging harm from HPV vaccination.
Near the beginning of the group’s first meeting, Kulldorff announced that two new work groups, or ACIP subgroups, would be formed: one that will look at the “cumulative effect” of the childhood and adolescent vaccination schedules, and another that would look at vaccines that have not been reviewed “in more than seven years.”
The latter work group, Kulldorff suggested, would revisit hepatitis B vaccination, which has been recommended for babies since 1991.
“Among other topics, this new vaccine group may look at the universally recommended hepatitis B vaccine at the day of birth,” Kulldorff said. “Is it wise to administer a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine to every newborn before leaving the hospital? That’s the question. Unless the mother is hepatitis B positive, an argument could be made to delay the vaccine for this infection, which is primarily spread by sexual activity and intravenous drug use.”
It’s true that sex and intravenous drug use are major transmission pathways for hepatitis B in adults. But as we’ve explained before, when Kennedy similarly questioned why newborns would need to be vaccinated, infected mothers can spread the virus to babies during birth and infants or older children can pick up the virus from caregivers who may not even know they are infected.
While pregnant mothers are usually tested for HBV, results can be delayed or incorrect. As a result, vaccinating all infants at birth “acts as a safety net,” an archived CDC FAQ explains. Starting the vaccine series at birth also increases the chance that a child will complete the three-shot series. Claims appealing to the youth of babies and pointing to adult risk factors are common techniques used by activists to argue against hepatitis B vaccination.
Preventing infection in childhood is particularly important, since babies and young children are far more likely than adults to be unable to clear the virus from their bodies and develop a chronic hepatitis B infection. These infections can cause serious problems, such as liver cancer or liver failure.
Kulldorff’s line of inquiry also ignores the history of hepatitis B vaccination in the U.S.
When the vaccine was first approved in the 1980s, the U.S. tried a risk-based vaccination approach that included infants born to mothers with the virus.
“It didn’t work,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told us.
It was only after 1991, when the U.S. switched to a universal recommendation, that hepatitis B infections in children began to dramatically decline.
“The safety and impact of the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine has been well studied, is well established, and is very, very effective,” Schaffner said. “It’s virtually eliminated hepatitis B acquisition during childhood.”
Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us that in 1991, there were about 18,000 cases of hepatitis B diagnosed in children below the age of 10 every year. About half of those cases were in babies infected by their mothers. The other half, he said, were infected through “relatively casual contact.”
In 2018, following recommendations from ACIP, the CDC changed its guidance to say that infants should be vaccinated within 24 hours of birth, rather than being vaccinated “preferably” before hospital discharge and no later than 2 months of age. While Kulldorff suggested there might be an advantage to waiting, there is no safety reason to delay the dose. The 24-hour recommendation is what the World Health Organization advises.
“Hepatitis B can be passed from parent to baby at birth – and when that happens, the consequences can be deadly. It is unscientific and dangerous to intentionally ignore the success of U.S. vaccination programs or argue that the U.S. should not vaccinate babies for hepatitis B at birth,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a post on social media shortly after Kulldorff’s remarks.
The group announced in a video earlier in the day that following Kennedy’s disbanding of the former ACIP members, the panel’s immunization policy setting “is no longer a credible process,” and that AAP would continue to issue its own vaccine recommendations, now separately from ACIP.
It’s worth noting that while Kulldorff said the work group would look at vaccines that haven’t been reviewed in the past seven years, ACIP has discussed the hepatitis B vaccine as recently as 2024, although those recommendations were specific to adults. The 2018 pediatric recommendation is also barely more than seven years old.
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at University of California Law San Francisco, told us that the latest discussions have been about adults “because there has not been new evidence about babies,” adding that ACIP reviews vaccines on a rolling basis but generally “does not go in depth without new questions or new data.”
As for the idea that the cumulative effects of multiple vaccines have not been sufficiently studied, that has also long been used to raise doubts about vaccine safety. Citing the number of vaccinations American children receive, Kulldorff announced a new work group to look at “the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule,” including “interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients, and the relative timing of different vaccines.”
But new vaccines are routinely studied in the context of the standard vaccine schedule, and the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule is well-established. Although often cast as a negative, the addition of more vaccines over time means children today are protected against more diseases than their grandparents or even parents were.
“The basic, frequent immunization of infants has been studied up, down and around” in countries around the world, Schaffner told us.
Offit explained that a new vaccine undergoes a large, randomized controlled trial to determine whether it is safe and effective. These trials are by definition looking at the cumulative impact of vaccination, since participants will also have received age-appropriate, standard vaccines.
Before adding a new safe and effective vaccine to the schedule, Offit said, it’s then required to test whether giving it at the same time as other vaccines interferes with safety or the body’s immune response to one or more of the vaccines. The results of these studies help determine which vaccines are given together at the same appointment.
It is “a well-hewn schedule,” Offit said. “It’s built on a mountain of scientific evidence.”
Offit questioned what sort of further study would be feasible to understand the cumulative effects of the vaccine schedule. “Would you just take children who got all the vaccines and compare them to children who got some of the vaccines and see whether or not they did better if they only got a few of the vaccines?” he said. “I don’t see how you would do that.”
One common concern that is not borne out by the evidence is that getting a large number of vaccines relatively quickly might have some negative effect on a child’s immune system. This misunderstands how the immune system works. Children are exposed to far more immune challenges in everyday life from viruses and bacteria than they ever receive from vaccines. And Offit said that vaccines today each have fewer antigens, or microbial components used to produce an immune response, than vaccines of the past.
“I would argue you had a greater immunological challenge from the one vaccine we got 100 years ago than the 14 different vaccines to prevent 14 different diseases that we give to children today,” Offit said.
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In the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, numerous Democrats claimed the president’s actions were unconstitutional and a violation of the War Powers Resolution.
It is a contentious and hotly debated issue not only in Congress but also in academia. Constitutional experts told us those who are claiming the president’s decision was unconstitutional may be correct according to an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. But Congresses over the last several decades have allowed presidents some latitude to engage militarily without prior consent from lawmakers.
“A lot of people over the next few days are going to argue with confidence that President Trump violated, or didn’t violate, the Constitution when he bombed Iran over the weekend without congressional authorization,” Jack Landman Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a June 23 op-ed headlined, “Was the Iran Strike Constitutional?”
“You might think that the Constitution would provide a clear answer to such a momentous question. But it doesn’t,” Goldsmith wrote.
Although the military hostilities involving Iran, Israel and the U.S. have ended, numerous Democrats have continued to press the issue, and have proposed legislation to try to rein in the president’s military reach.
Allegations that the president’s decision was unconstitutional began almost immediately after Trump made an announcement via Truth Social on June 21 that the U.S. had bombed the Iranian nuclear sites.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated in a press release on June 21 — after Trump had announced the bombings — that “the Constitution makes clear that the power to authorize war lies with Congress.”
Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat member of the House Intelligence Committee, also stated in a press release the same day that “Donald Trump’s decision to launch direct military action against Iran without Congressional approval is a clear violation of the Constitution, which grants the power to declare war explicitly to Congress.”
“This was not constitutional, it was not lawful in the absence of a declaration by Congress,” Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on June 22. “And so the administration should have come to Congress. We will have a vote on a war powers resolution. But there’s a reason to bring this to Congress. And it is, you want the Congress bought in, you want the American people bought in on an action this substantial that could lead to a major outbreak of war.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went one step further, stating on X that Trump’s actions were “a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers” and are “absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”
A day after Trump announced a ceasefire between Iran and Israel on June 23, Ocasio-Cortez continued to post about Trump “illegally bombing Iran.”
“None of this [related to the ceasefire] changes my deep belief that the Constitution gives the Congress – not the President – the power to decide whether or not we send Americans into the hell of war,” Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio wrote on X on June 24.
Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler also posted a statement saying that he “remain[s] resolute that, regardless of the outcome, the Trump Administration’s military action against Iran was unconstitutional, as only Congress has the power to authorize the use of military force.”
It wasn’t just Democrats who raised the constitutional issue. In a response to Trump’s post about the airstrikes, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie said simply, “This is not Constitutional.”
Last week, Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna teamed up on a resolution calling on Trump to “terminate the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”
After the announced ceasefire, Massie said he told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he “wouldn’t push” the resolution “if the ceasefire holds.” Khanna added, in an MSNBC interview, “If there’s a ceasefire, that’s great. And let’s see if it holds. If it doesn’t hold, then we’re ready to have a vote on the War Power resolution.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 22, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham pushed back on members of Congress alleging that Trump violated the Constitution by acting without congressional approval.
Graham said Trump acted “within his Article II authority. Congress can declare war or cut off funding. We can’t be the commander in chief. You can’t have 535 commander in chiefs. If you don’t like what the president does, in terms of war, you can cut off the funding. But declaring war is left to the Congress. We’ve declared war five times in the history of America. All of these other military operations were lawful. He had all the authority he needs under the Constitution. They are wrong.”
Johnson also defended the president in a post on X. “The President made the right call, and did what he needed to do. Leaders in Congress were aware of the urgency of this situation and the Commander-in-Chief evaluated that the imminent danger outweighed the time it would take for Congress to act. The world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, which chants ‘Death to America,’ simply could not be allowed the opportunity to obtain and use nuclear weapons.
“The President fully respects the Article I power of Congress, and tonight’s necessary, limited, and targeted strike follows the history and tradition of similar military actions under presidents of both parties,” Johnson wrote.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that Congress holds the power “To declare War.” Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution establishes the president as the commander in chief of the armed forces. So, at what point and under what circumstances would the president need congressional approval before launching military activity?
“I think this is a tough question because practice has strayed so far from the text and original understanding of the Constitution,” Kermit Roosevelt, a professor and constitutional expert at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, told us via email. “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. (Presidents are supposed to be able to respond to attacks by using the military, but that’s not relevant to this situation because obviously we were not attacked.) So the president was not supposed to be able to start a war without Congressional authorization. That’s pretty clear. (An authorization for the use of military force is effectively the same thing as a declaration of war, so the fact that Congress has used authorizations rather than declarations after WWII does not matter.) 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.”
Peter Shane, a leading scholar in U.S. constitutional law and adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, told us via email that it is “difficult to give a definitive answer on constitutionality because there is so much disagreement about how the Constitution should be interpreted with regard to the unilateral presidential deployment of military force. For originalists, the answer would seem a straightforward, ‘No.’ Under the most persuasive reading of the Founding era, the Constitution does not authorize Presidents to deploy military force abroad without advance congressional authorization. As to Iran, there was none.
“However,” Shane told us, “presidents of both parties have operated for decades under a Justice Department framework that ‘reflects not only the express assignment of powers and responsibilities to the President and Congress in the Constitution, but also . . . the ‘historical gloss’ placed on the Constitution by two centuries of practice.’ It has thus long been the position of the DOJ’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.’ Trump’s letter to Congress reporting on the bombing relies on this framework.”
Seeking to claw back some of its power, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 on a bipartisan basis, and over the veto of then-President Richard Nixon. As the Congressional Research Service explains, the War Powers Resolution requires presidents within 48 hours “to report to Congress any introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.”
Once 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.” Section 3 of the resolution “requires that the ‘President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing’ U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.”
“The War Powers Act is often interpreted as saying that the President can do what he wants for 48 hours before notifying Congress, or for 60 days even if Congress doesn’t approve, so that it means the President can actually start a war and then put Congress in the position of authorizing it or not,” Roosevelt 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.’
“So I think that 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. I think that if the WPA does mean that the President can start a war, it’s an unconstitutional delegation of the power to declare war,” Roosevelt said. (Emphasis is his.)
“The WPA does clearly require that the president ‘in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities’ so it seems pretty clear that Trump violated that, at least,” Roosevelt said.
Whether Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites was an act of war is also a matter of debate.
An opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel in April 2011 — after Obama began military strikes against Libya without seeking congressional approval — argued that the scope and duration of the military strikes determine whether a military action constitutes a war.
“In our view, determining whether a particular planned engagement constitutes a ‘war’ for constitutional purposes instead requires a fact-specific assessment of the ‘anticipated nature, scope, and duration’ of the planned military operations,” the opinion states, citing a prior OLC opinion from 1994. “This standard generally will be satisfied only by prolonged and substantial military engagements, typically involving exposure of U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period.”
On “Meet the Press” on June 22, Vice President JD Vance insisted, “We’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
“We have no interest in a protracted conflict. We have no interest in boots on the ground,” Vance said, adding that the bombings were “a very precise, a very surgical strike tailored to an American national interest.”
Indeed, Trump appealed for immediate peace in the same post in which he made the bombing announcement. Two days later, Trump announced the ceasefire, saying it put an end to what Trump said should be called “THE 12 DAY WAR.”
“Given past practice and the language of the WPR, I don’t think that the single strike by itself violated either the Constitution or the WPR,” Stephen Griffin, professor of constitutional law at Tulane Law School, told us via email. “At the same time, it would have been better under the Constitution for President Trump to obtain congressional authorization in advance.”
Nonetheless, said Griffin, author of “Long Wars and the Constitution,” if hostilities between Iran and the U.S. extend beyond the WPR’s 60-day limit, “President Trump may well be in violation of the WPR, just as Republicans argued when the same circumstances occurred in the Clinton and Obama presidencies.”
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The bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21 by American B-2 aircraft damaged the sites and set back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, but didn’t completely destroy the sites or Iran’s nuclear capabilities, according to experts we spoke with and a classified U.S. intelligence report.
But in a televised address on the night of the U.S. attack, President Donald Trump said, “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
The president claimed in a June 23 Truth Social post, “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!”
At a June 22 press conference at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth echoed Trump’s assessment of the strike, saying, “Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been obliterated.”
Trump went further in a Truth Social post on June 24, claiming the U.S. attack ended Iran’s nuclear weapons capability: “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!”
But the key nuclear sites — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan– were not “obliterated,” nor was damage done “to all Nuclear sites in Iran.” And Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability is still viable, experts say. (We don’t know if Iran was actively constructing or seeking to construct a nuclear weapon — the U.S. Intelligence Community in late March assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” However, when presenting that assessment, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, also noted that “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”)
A five-page, preliminary, classified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, said the U.S. bombing of Iran’s three sites sealed off entrances of two facilities but didn’t destroy their underground buildings and set back Iran’s nuclear program by just a few months, CNN and the New York Times reported on June 24.
People familiar with the report told CNN the facilities’ centrifuges, which enrich uranium, remained largely “intact.”
Also, in anticipation of the attack, Iran moved equipment and a large amount of enriched, nearly bomb-grade uranium to an unknown location, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and Israeli officials, the Times reported.
Officials told the Times the classified report was an initial assessment and others will follow. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the preliminary report was “flat-out wrong.”
Update, June 26: CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a statement on June 25 regarding the agency’s intelligence on the U.S. attack, saying, in part: “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes. This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
In addition, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission issued a statement on June 25: “The devastating US strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable. We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years. The achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material.”
Some leaders in Trump’s administration took a more cautious approach in describing the results of the U.S. attack on the day after. Asked by NBC News’ Kristen Welker on June 22 if he was confident Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites were destroyed, Vice President JD Vance said, “I’m not going to get into sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground there in Iran. But we’ve seen a lot, and I feel very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon.”
At the June 22 Pentagon press conference, asked by a reporter about Iran’s nuclear capability after the U.S. strike, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “it would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”
“The early indications confirm that even U.S. heavy bombing” of Fordo and the other key sites has “only ‘severely damaged’ not ‘destroyed’ these facilities, let alone the Iranian nuclear program and the regime’s determination, for now, to keep it going,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us in an email.
“It is also now quite clear that the Iranians, in anticipation of the U.S. attack, removed” a stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of uranium “enriched to 60%,” as well as other equipment from at least one of the nuclear sites, Kimball said. “This is the material that could be further enriched to bomb grade (90%) and provide enough raw material for about 10 nuclear devices; which would according to U.S. intel before the strikes take another 1-2 years to fashion into warheads small and light enough to be delivered via a ballistic missile.”
No one, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, knows where that material is now, he said.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told NPR, “I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means.”
Albright also said Iran may have thousands of other uranium-enriching centrifuges, and the uranium stockpiles at the sites targeted by the U.S. may have been moved to another facility where it could be enriched for a nuclear weapon in a short period of time.
“Iran also retains a centrifuge manufacturing capability that can help it reconstitute machines [to] enable further enrichment activities, and it likely has another site for enrichment that does not appear to have been affected so far by U.S. or Israeli bombardment,” Kimball said.
John Erath, senior policy director of the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us that if the U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Iran and Israel is sustained, “it should be used as an opportunity for negotiation for a durable peace agreement.”
“And as part of that negotiation, that should be one of the things the international community is demanding to know — just how much of this stuff there is and where it is,” Erath said, referring to Iran’s enriched uranium.
Kimball also addressed next steps in monitoring Iran’s nuclear program. “It will take time, a return to real diplomacy, and the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to Iran, to fully assess the status of Iran’s nuclear activities and to try to account for its nuclear material, including the highly-enriched uranium it had already accumulated before the war and to re-establish verifiable limits on its nuclear weapons potential, which remains,” he said.
“The bottom line is that the combined Israeli and U.S. strikes have set Iran’s program back some months, but at the cost of obliterating trust between the key parties, strengthening Tehran’s resolve to reconstitute its sensitive nuclear activities, possibly prompting it to consider withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and possibly proceeding to weaponization,” Kimball said.
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Treasury Department data show that revenue from tariffs on imported foreign goods increased substantially in April and May, setting monthly records. But the total is less than half the figure President Donald Trump has cited. At least twice this month, the president has wrongly claimed that the U.S. “brought in $88 billion” from tariffs in “two months.”
We asked the White House for the source of the president’s claim, but we didn’t receive a response. Trump’s figure is close to the tariff collections from October to May, which totaled more than $81 billion, but included about three and a half months under Trump’s predecessor.
Trump first made the claim while speaking to reporters at a June 11 event at the Kennedy Center. “We took $88 billion in tariffs in two months, far beyond what anybody expected,” the president said.
The following day, during a bill signing ceremony at the White House, Trump again said: “We’ve taken in $88 billion in tariffs in two months. $88 billion with no inflation.” As we’ll explain, there’s more to the story on inflation, with economists expecting that the higher tariffs will cause inflation to rise in the coming months.
On other occasions since, he has cited the figure without including a time frame.
As we said, from October to May, which includes more than three months when Joe Biden was president, the federal government received $81.4 billion from tariffs, formally known as customs duties, that are paid by U.S. importers. That’s according to data for fiscal year 2025 that the Treasury Department released earlier this month. (The $81.4 billion was about 65% more than the $49.3 billion received in the same period in fiscal year 2024.)
In addition, as of June 18, the U.S. had collected $5.4 billion in customs duties and excise taxes in June, according to Treasury’s latest daily statement of cash and debt operations. That puts the U.S. closer to $88 billion in tariff revenue for the current fiscal year – but not for any two-month period in that time, as Trump initially claimed.
The U.S. got $22.2 billion from tariffs in May, a record amount in one month, the Treasury figures show. That was up almost 42% from $15.6 billion in tariff revenue in April, and the April total, the previous record, had increased more than 90% from $8.2 billion in March. The most revenue the U.S. has raised from tariffs in a calendar year was $102.3 billion in 2022.
Tariff revenue took off in April, which is when Trump implemented a minimum 10% tariff on U.S. imports of foreign goods. He had announced higher tariff rates on goods imported from dozens of countries, rates that he later paused for 90 days, he said, to negotiate better trade terms with those nations.
Prior to that, in March, Trump put in place a 25% tariff on certain goods imported from Canada and Mexico, and he increased from 10% to 20% a tariff on goods coming from China – a tariff rate on Chinese goods that he would later increase to 145% in April before lowering it to 30% in May. Trump’s administration also has levied new 25% tariffs on imported steel, aluminum, automobiles and auto parts.
More than $28 billion of the revenue from tariffs in the 2025 fiscal cycle was collected in October, November, December and January – a four-month period in which Trump was president for about 11 and a half days.
Also, Trump’s claim of $88 billion in tariff revenue with “no inflation” is not the whole story.
Based on the Consumer Price Index, the inflation rate was 2.4% for the 12 months ending in May – which is down from the 3% annualized inflation rate when Trump took office in January. The rate as of May was also only up 0.1 percentage points from the rate of 2.3% in April, suggesting that tariffs have had little impact on inflation and the price of most goods.
(Trump also said on June 18 that there was “a lot of inflation” when he took office, saying there were “four years of the highest inflation in the history of our country” under Biden. Annualized inflation hit 9.1% in June 2022, which wasn’t the “highest” ever, but it had declined considerably before Trump was inaugurated.)
However, some economists still predict that Trump’s second-term tariffs will increase inflation.
“Price increases are coming,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Santander U.S. Capital Markets, told the New York Times for a June 13 story about the tariffs and inflation. He said that consumers “have lucked out a bit, in that retailers have shown restraint” so far in not passing their higher costs from tariffs on to shoppers.
The Times reported that a “buildup in inventories that retailers amassed earlier this year … created a buffer for sellers to offer discounts, such as around Memorial Day, and generally hold off on raising prices until those stockpiles run out.”
In a June 16 opinion piece for MSNBC, Jared Bernstein, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Biden administration, said once the “temporary factors” that are “for now, holding back price passthrough” are no longer an option, “we should see more of a tariff bump in the inflation data.” Bernstein predicted that an inflation increase could happen in three to six months.
The Federal Reserve also declined to lower interest rates last week, with its chairman, Jerome Powell, citing “uncertainty” over “tariff inflation.” “Everyone that I know is forecasting a meaningful increase in inflation in coming months from tariffs because someone has to pay for the tariffs,” Powell said during a June 18 press conference.
In his own remarks on June 18, Trump criticized Powell for the Fed not lowering interest rates, claiming that Powell “maybe … was a Democrat.”
Powell served in the Treasury Department under President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, and he was appointed Fed chairman by Trump in 2018 before being reappointed to that post by Biden in 2022. In a June 18 story, the Hill newspaper described Powell as a “lifelong Republican.”
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A document the Department of Health and Human Services distributed to members of Congress to justify recent changes to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations misrepresented scientific research to make unfounded claims about vaccine safety for pregnant people and children.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly announced May 27 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had stopped recommending COVID-19 vaccination for healthy pregnant women or healthy children. He did not work through regular channels for updating the CDC’s vaccine schedule, which normally would include a presentation of the relevant evidence at a meeting open to the public and input from expert advisers.
Rather, Politico reported, in the days before Kennedy’s announcement, HHS circulated a document to lawmakers titled “COVID Recommendation FAQ,” citing seven studies as evidence justifying Kennedy in repealing the recommendations. (The CDC did remove its recommendation that pregnant adults get vaccinated. While Kennedy has said the vaccines are no longer recommended for healthy children, the CDC vaccine schedule now lists them as vaccines that may be given under shared clinical decision-making. There’s a full recommendation only for kids who are moderately to severely immunocompromised.)
A closer look at the citations shows that the authors of the document misrepresented the studies’ findings and cited research that itself misused data.
For instance, one study the document claimed showed higher rates of miscarriage in pregnant women who got COVID-19 vaccinations in fact concluded that there was no increased risk after adjusting for other factors that could influence the risk of miscarriage. Another study cited as showing placental blood clots after vaccination did not look at this outcome at all.
Yet another cited study misused data from a vaccine safety surveillance system to exaggerate the risk of myocarditis, a real but rare side effect of COVID-19 vaccination that can also occur following COVID-19. The study, co-authored by people with a history of spreading false and misleading information on vaccines, now carries an “expression of concern” that states the publisher is investigating “potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest.”
The distortion of data is part of a larger pattern. Since taking the helm at HHS, Kennedy has repeatedly misrepresented scientific data on topics ranging from measles to chronic disease, as have HHS spokespeople and reports.
In fact, the safety and effectiveness of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy “have been established in studies undertaken independently by scientists working for governments, healthcare systems and universities all over the world, including in the USA,” Victoria Male, a senior lecturer in reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, told us via email.
And while there have been legitimate differences of opinion on whether or how often healthy children need COVID-19 vaccines, the HHS document omits evidence showing safety and effectiveness in this group while overstating risks.
The document “ignores the overwhelming real-world data on vaccine safety and benefit in children and pregnant women,” vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris of the University of Auckland told us in an email. She added that it misuses safety surveillance data and “cherry-picks quotes and studies while ignoring the broader scientific consensus and context.” She subsequently posted a version of her comments in a blog post.
Studies have found COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is safe and protects both the mother from severe disease and the baby from hospitalization from COVID-19 during the early months of life.
“The data remain clear: getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is still the best way for pregnant people to protect themselves and their pregnancies,” Dr. Steven J. Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement reacting to the FAQ. “It is alarming that HHS is propagating misinformation.”
Going against this extensive record, the HHS document raised unfounded concerns about COVID-19 vaccines and pregnancy outcomes.
As we’ve said, the document misrepresented a paper showing no increased risk of miscarriage after COVID-19 vaccination, using it to support the claim that studies “showed higher rates of fetal loss if vaccination was received before 20 weeks of pregnancy.”
Dr. Maria Velez, a reproductive epidemiologist at McGill University who was the lead author of the study, told Politico that her work had been “misinterpreted” and did not find an association between COVID-19 vaccination and miscarriage after adjusting for a variety of factors that could impact both miscarriage risk and the likelihood of getting vaccinated. Adjustment for such factors is necessary before concluding that there may be an association.
Citing the study “as evidence for harm is a clear misrepresentation,” Petousis-Harris said.
We asked HHS if it stood behind its claims or could further explain this and other citations.
“The study cited showed a higher percentage of fetal loss before 20 weeks among pregnant women who received the COVID-19 vaccine compared to those who did not,” Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told us via email. “The underlying data speaks for itself—and it raises legitimate safety concerns. HHS will not ignore that evidence or downplay early pregnancy loss.”
Hilliard went on to call it “disturbing that FactCheck.org appears to dismiss the significance of the underlying data. Every miscarriage is a tragedy. Suggesting otherwise is offensive to the families who have experienced that loss.”
But Male called it “inappropriate” to calculate miscarriage rates without accounting for risk factors, pointing out that “the vaccinated groups were more likely to have comorbidities that put them at risk of miscarriage than the unvaccinated group.”
Furthermore, the larger body of research also has not found an association between COVID-19 vaccination and miscarriage.
This body of work includes a second study the HHS document cited to justify its unfounded claim on fetal loss. The study, which looked at outcomes for patients who underwent in vitro fertilization, again found that getting COVID-19 vaccines was not associated with pregnancy loss.
The HHS document also misleadingly cited a study it said “showed statistically significant increases in preterm birth.” One of the paper’s sub-analyses that looked just at the second trimester did find a statistically significant association between vaccination and increased preterm birth. But overall, there wasn’t an association between vaccination and preterm birth. And another sub-analysis, of the third trimester, found the opposite — an association between vaccination and a reduced risk of preterm birth.
Male pointed out that the study authors themselves said that some factor they did not take into account may have influenced both the preterm birth rate and whether someone got vaccinated in the second trimester.
Preterm births occurred on average 14.3 weeks after the first vaccination, and there were no preterm births within two weeks of vaccination. If the vaccines were in fact causing preterm births, at least some would be expected to occur more quickly after vaccination and at a greater variety of points in pregnancy, Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and mathematician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, wrote in a June 18 blog post responding to the HHS document.
The scientific literature in general indicates that COVID-19 vaccines do not cause preterm birth. Male said that “three other studies published almost simultaneously with this one confirmed no increased risk of preterm birth associated with COVID vaccination in the second trimester.”
Kucharski also wrote that studies that do many comparisons are liable to find some associations simply by chance.
“Just like a roulette player having another spin, the more times we compare things in a dataset, the bigger the chance that we might mistake a random coincidence for a genuine, consistent effect,” he said.
Another citation appears unrelated to the point the HHS document was trying to make. The document states that a study “showed an increase in placental blood clotting in pregnant mothers who took the vaccine.” But the cited study looked at a subset of COVID-19 vaccine side effects and did not address placental blood clotting at all.
“Our study does not show an increase in placental blood clotting,” said Petousis-Harris, who was a co-author of the cited study. “This study did not even assess this outcome.”
The study also “did not find safety concerns warranting the removal of vaccine recommendations,” she said. Rather, the study concluded that “the findings support ongoing vaccine safety,” she added.
Male said that three studies did analyze 181 placentas of vaccinated people following delivery. “None of these found any evidence of placental pathology (which would include clotting) associated with COVID vaccination,” she said.
The HHS document also adopted the old anti-vaccine tactic of using context-free language in vaccine prescribing information to stoke fear about vaccines.
The document cited a line from the Pfizer and Moderna package inserts saying that available data on the vaccines “are insufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy.”
“It’s true that the safety and efficacy of mRNA
COVID vaccines in pregnancy has not been established by the manufacturers,” Male said. Pregnant people were excluded from the original clinical trials. But subsequent studies from scientists around the world show COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for pregnant people, Male added.
By contrast, package leaflets in the U.K. and Europe do include independent research findings, she said. These conclude that the available data have not shown an increased risk of miscarriage during the first trimester, although data from this trimester is “limited.” They also say that a “large amount” of data on women vaccinated later in pregnancy does not show “negative effects on the pregnancy or the newborn baby.”
The document took a similar tack in justifying the change in COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children, citing statements in prescribing information that safety and efficacy in children under age 12 “have not been established by manufacturers.”
Petousis-Harris said that such cherry-picking of regulatory language is a “common tactic used by people trying to discredit vaccines” and said the language “does not mean the vaccines are unsafe or ineffective.”
An opinion piece by the Vaccine Integrity Project staff and advisers explained that the prescribing information says this because the vaccines in children under 12 are still available under an emergency use authorization rather than full licensure. FDA documents supporting the EUA do have information on the shots’ safety and efficacy. The Vaccine Integrity Project is an initiative “dedicated to safeguarding vaccine use in the U.S.” and is led by volunteer public health and policy experts.
The Vaccine Integrity Project article additionally cited a large meta-analysis that found COVID-19 vaccination in children 5 to 11 years old was associated with reduced rates of infection and severe disease — and that severe side effects were rare.
The HHS document also followed a familiar pattern of exaggerating the risk of myocarditis following vaccination while leaving out key context.
Petousis-Harris said that there is a “known signal for myocarditis, particularly after the second mRNA dose in adolescent males.” However, this side effect is very rare and is “typically mild and self-resolving,” she said.
And, as we have written before, myocarditis can occur following COVID-19 and is generally more severe after infection than after vaccination. Furthermore, “concerns about post-vaccination myocarditis are now largely in the rear-view mirror,” the Vaccine Integrity Project piece said. This side effect tended to occur in adolescent and young adult males getting a primary series of two COVID-19 vaccines close together. “Almost no one other than infants is receiving primary vaccine series doses anymore,” the authors wrote.
The HHS document leaves out this context.
One study in the HHS document — the one authored by researchers with a history of misleading on vaccination — misused safety monitoring data. The HHS document cited this study to claim that data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System showed that myocarditis reports in 2021 were “223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years.”
But as we have explained many times, the VAERS database cannot be used to compare vaccines and any sort of derived math from it is invalid. The early warning system collects reports of health problems following vaccination from anyone, regardless of whether the symptoms were caused by a vaccine.
Because VAERS is largely voluntary, the number of reports is highly dependent on awareness. Given the scale and unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, along with increased reporting requirements at the time, there was a huge surge of reports to VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines. But that by itself does not mean the vaccines are dangerous. In this case, VAERS successfully flagged myocarditis as a possible concern, which was then confirmed in other systems to be a rare side effect.
“The cited claim that ‘myocarditis reports were 223x higher’ ignores the lack of a denominator and the influence of reporting bias following media attention,” Petousis-Harris said.
The HHS document went on to claim that a preprint looking at COVID-19 vaccination in adolescents and children found that “cases of myo and pericarditis were found exclusively in those that received the COVID-19 vaccine.” But Petousis-Harris called this a “misreading” of the study, pointing out that other studies show myocarditis can occur in unvaccinated children after getting COVID-19.
The same study previously had been misused on social media to make the false claim that only vaccination — and not COVID-19 — causes myocarditis. At the time, an author of the study told USA Today that this was a misinterpretation, as the study compared vaccinated versus unvaccinated people and not vaccinated versus infected people.
Finally, the HHS document correctly described a study using a Japanese adverse events database, which found elevated rates of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination, particularly in younger males. Petousis-Harris said that the findings were in keeping with other global surveillance data on the vaccines and added that “the study does not argue against vaccination.”
Q: Has President Donald Trump issued a rule that VA doctors can refuse treatment to Democrats?
A: No. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs changed the wording in its bylaws to comply with recent executive orders. In making the changes, words including “national origin, politics, marital status” were removed from language prohibiting discrimination. But existing federal law already prohibits discrimination on those grounds, the VA says.
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The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs updated its bylaws in order to comply with recent executive orders, a department spokesperson told us in an email. “These updates will have no impact whatsoever on who VA treats or employs,” he said.
For instance, a copy of the bylaws for the VA’s Palo Alto Health Care System published in April shows changes compared with an archived 2023 version. In the section describing “acceptable behavior” from VA medical staff, the older document said staff should not discriminate “on the basis of race, age, color, sex, religion, national origin, politics, marital status, or disability in any employment matter or in providing benefits under any law administered by VA.” The new version of the document shows that several of those characteristics were removed, including “national origin, politics, marital status,” as well as “age” and “disability,” and instead language about “any legally protected status” was added.
The bylaws now say medical staff should not discriminate “on the basis of any legally protected status, including legally protected status such as race, color, religion, sex, or prior protected activity in any employment matter or in providing benefits under any law administered by VA.” MedPage Today reported on the Palo Alto bylaw changes, noting similar differences in a section on medical staff membership.
We received several questions from readers asking about the changes after the Guardian published a story that initially said, “new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans.” The story has since been amended to focus instead on the wording change. “After publication, the VA contacted the Guardian citing a 2013 policy directive that it says will continue to protect patients from discrimination despite the redactions in its bylaws; the VA also cited federal law protecting staff from discrimination,” the publication wrote.
The VA spokesman who told us that the change was made to comply with recent executive orders specifically cited the Jan. 20 order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government.” The VA also cited that order in March when it rescinded its directive specifying “respectful delivery of health care” for transgender veterans, a policy that was last updated in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
“Under no circumstances whatsoever would VA ever deny appropriate care to any eligible Veterans or appropriate employment to any qualified potential employees,” the spokesman said in his email. “Under no circumstances whatsoever would VA ever allow any employees to refuse to provide appropriate care to any eligible Veterans or appropriate employment to any qualified potential employees.”
We asked if there were laws or rules beyond the bylaws that would prohibit the VA from denying care to patients based on their national origin, politics or marital status, and the spokesman cited two sections of federal law that govern veterans’ benefits — Title 38 of the U.S. Code, sections 1705 and 1710, which detail the eligibility and enrollment priority for veterans seeking health care through the VA. The priorities are based largely on the patient’s level of service-connected disabilities.
The spokesman also cited a 2013 VA directive titled “Nondiscrimination in Federally-Conducted and Federally-Assisted (External) Programs,” which prohibits discrimination “in federally-conducted and federally-assisted programs and activities based on race, color, religion, national origin, Limited English Proficiency (LEP), age, sex (includes gender identity and transgender status), sexual orientation, pregnancy, marital and parental status, political affiliation, disability, genetic information, harassment, or retaliation.”