Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
The United States and the European Union have reached a preliminary trade deal to avoid a 30% U.S. tariff on imported goods from the EU that President Donald Trump threatened would go into effect on Aug. 1. Trump had argued that higher tariffs were needed because EU tariffs and nontariff policies “cause the large and unsustainable trade deficits” between the U.S. and the EU, but economists disputed that statement.
EU tariffs were already generally low, economists told us, and other economic factors – rather than specific trade policies or regulations – contribute more to the yearslong U.S.-EU trade imbalance.
Under the new agreement, the U.S. will impose a 15% tariff on most imports from the 27 EU nations, Trump said on July 27.
“One reason the US runs a large bilateral trade deficit with Europe is that we have a large multilateral deficit overall,” Robert C. Johnson, an associate professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame, told us. The multilateral deficit refers to the total U.S. deficit in goods and services with all trading partners. Johnson said this reflects macroeconomic forces related to Americans investing more money in the U.S. economy than they save, leading them to “borrow from abroad” to account for the difference.
The economic experts also said that increasing the tariff rate on imports of EU goods is not guaranteed to reduce the existing trade deficit.
Trump announced that a tentative trade deal had been reached on July 27, after he met with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, at one of his golf clubs in Scotland. In addition to the 15% tariff on EU goods, he said that EU representatives agreed to purchase $750 billion worth of U.S. energy, invest $600 billion more into the U.S. economy and buy an unspecified amount of American-made military equipment.
Trump also said the deal would allow imports of U.S. goods into those European nations at a 0% tariff rate. But in a July 28 press conference, Maroš Šefčovič, the European commissioner for trade and economic security, said “both sides will apply a zero tariff rate” on a “significant list of goods” — not all products. Reuters reported that list of goods included aircraft and parts, some generic drugs and chemicals, natural resources, and some agricultural products.
The complete terms have not been revealed, and the trade agreement still needs to be approved by all the individual EU countries.
Trump had threatened weeks ago – in a July 11 letter to von der Leyen – to implement a 30% baseline tariff on U.S. imports of EU goods if no deal was reached by the start of August.
“Please understand that these Tariffs are necessary to correct the many years of European Union Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, which cause the large and unsustainable Trade Deficits against the United States,” the letter said. “This Deficit is a major threat to our economy and, indeed, our National Security!”
In 2024, the U.S. exported $666.7 billion in goods and services to the EU, while it imported more than $815.1 billion — producing a trade deficit of roughly $148.4 billion. In raw numbers, it was the largest deficit the U.S. has had with the EU, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data going back to 1999. (The U.S. regularly has a trade surplus in services with the EU but a larger deficit in goods. Trump usually cites only the deficit in goods, ignoring the surplus in services.)
In his letter to von der Leyen, Trump had argued that even a 30% tariff “is far less than what is needed to eliminate the Trade Deficit disparity we have with the EU.”
But as we said, the experts we asked said that EU tariffs and nontariff policies are not the main factor causing the annual trade deficit.
To support the president’s claim about the cause of the trade deficit, a White House official directed us to a 2021 report from the U.S. Trade Representative that identified certain tariffs and nontariff barriers that the USTR said keep U.S. exporters and investors from “entering, maintaining, or expanding their presence in certain sectors of the EU market.”
But Gene M. Grossman, a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, called it “absurd” to say that EU tariffs are behind the deficit since “the average tariff on US exports to the EU is low and very similar to the average tariff on EU imports to the US.” In an email, he told us that the EU does have “moderately high tariffs on a few goods,” such as automobiles and agricultural products. But “so does the US,” he said.
In a Q&A published in February, the European Commission said “considering the actual trade in goods between the EU and US, in practice the average tariff rate on both sides is approximately 1%.” Bruegel, an economics-focused think tank in Brussels, similarly reported in April that, as of 2024, the average U.S. tariff rate on imports from the EU was 1.47%, while it was 1.35% on EU imports from the U.S.
Johnson, the Notre Dame professor, said U.S. and EU tariffs have been low because of a series of negotiations occurring over decades. “We lowered our tariffs in exchange for reductions by Europe, so tariff reductions were broadly balanced overall (though not sector-by-sector),” he told us.
As for nontariff barriers, which are policies designed to limit imports in favor of domestic industries or to protect domestic interests, an analysis published in April by researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis did find that the EU uses nontariff measures to a greater degree than the U.S.
The authors said the EU “has a higher prevalence of NTMs than the U.S. in 13 out of 15 broad sectoral groups,” such as food-related products, footwear, and machinery and electrical equipment, “suggesting a more extensive use of regulatory measures.”
But those EU policies are not “explicitly targeted at the U.S.” and apply to “all suppliers to the EU market,” said Johnson. He said that the trade deficits the U.S. has with “most of our major trade partners” are “principally driven by macroeconomic forces.”
“For a given value of the macroeconomic trade deficit, individual deficits would be driven by various forces — comparative advantage, differences in geography and trade costs, the structure of global production chains, and trade policy.”
While trade policy is among the contributing factors, “it is not at the top in my view,” said Johnson, who also noted that “deficits with some of our largest partners” are to be expected because the U.S. imports more than it exports overall.
In a February report about U.S. and EU trade relations, the Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan research arm of Congress, also said that “many economists attribute the U.S. goods trade deficit more to macroeconomic variables, such as a relatively low savings rate and relatively high consumer spending in the United States compared to other economies, than trade practices.”
During Trump’s announcement of the deal, von der Leyen said that the agreement was about “fairness” and “rebalancing” trade. “We have a surplus, the United States has a deficit, and we have to rebalance it,” she said.
Yet the experts also told us that raising tariffs on imported EU goods may or may not result in balanced trade as Trump wishes.
“An increase in US tariffs on the EU could decrease the trade deficit with the EU, by diverting US import demand to alternative trade partners,” Johnson said. As an example, he said that when the U.S. raised tariffs on China in the past decade, imports from Mexico increased as a result.
But that could add to the trade deficits that the U.S. has with other countries.
Meanwhile, Grossman said that “historically, tariffs have been associated with, on average, a small reduction in trade deficits, but not consistently.” He added that whether trade between the U.S. and the EU becomes more balanced depends on circumstances such as whether the tariffs are temporary or long term.
Johnson said that Trump is putting too much emphasis on the deficit with individual trading partners anyway.
“In general, one should not read too much into bilateral trade deficits; even with balanced trade overall, we would likely run deficits with some countries and surpluses with others,” he said. “There is no reason why trade ought to be balanced at the bilateral level.”
Tarek Alexander Hassan, a professor of economics at Boston University, has also written that a trade deficit is far from being the “national emergency” that the Trump administration said it is.
“A trade deficit sounds bad, but it is neither good nor bad,” he wrote in an April 8 opinion post, after Trump announced a range of new tariffs earlier that month. “It doesn’t mean the US is losing money. It simply means foreigners are sending the US more goods than the US is sending them.”
Last year, the U.S. goods and services deficit was $903.5 billion.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
In recent months, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary has amplified unfounded concerns about the safety of seed oils, a subset of vegetable oils used in infant formula. There isn’t evidence these fat sources are harmful to infants.
“Generally, they’re believed to be pro-inflammatory,” Makary said of seed oils on June 4 in an interview on “Fox & Friends,” echoing claims that wellness influencers have spread about seed oils, despite a lack of evidence they are harmful when included in people’s diets, as we’ve written before. “We don’t want babies with general body inflammation. Forty percent of our nation’s kids have a chronic condition. Many of those are tied to inflammation and insulin resistance,” he said.
In a June 6 appearance on Fox News, the commissioner grouped seed oils and other formula ingredients with contaminants. “Moms want baby formula without seed oil, without corn syrup, without added sugar, without arsenic and lead and other heavy metals,” he said.
And in a July 10 statement, while touting his efforts to explore bringing “additional and healthier options without ingredients like seed oils, added sugars and heavy metals to market,” Makary again implied that seed oils are unhealthy and that it’s feasible to remove them from baby formula.
Makary’s statements came as he promoted Operation Stork Speed, an FDA effort announced March 18 to revisit nutrition standards and strategies for reducing contaminants in infant formula. Experts in infant nutrition are broadly supportive of these goals. But the inclusion of seed oils on Makary’s list of concerns is unfounded, experts told us.
“There is no evidence at present” that infant formulas without seed oils constitute healthier choices, Dr. Steven Abrams, a neonatologist who studies infant nutrition at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, told us via email. He added that he was unaware of available infant formulas in the U.S. or Europe that do not contain seed oils.
“There’s no scientific concern about these seed oils that they are talking about,” Dr. Mark R. Corkins, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, also told us. He added that humans need a high-fat diet at the beginning of life and that vegetable oils contain “some of the essential fatty acids that we need for tissues that are fat-dependent.”
There is some scientific basis for concern about which sugars should be used in infant formula, as we’ll explain. But the broad implication that “added sugar” in infant formula is unhealthy is misleading, since breast milk contains the sugar lactose. All formulas need to have at least some added sugar, preferably in the form of lactose.
We asked HHS for support for Makary’s statements implying seed oils and added sugars in baby formula are unhealthy. A spokesperson said that the remarks “reflect a broader goal of aligning FDA oversight with emerging science and evolving public health priorities.”
“The FDA is actively exploring ways to support innovation in the infant formula market that meets the highest standards for infant health, while also addressing parental concerns about specific ingredients such as added sugars, seed oils, and heavy metals,” the spokesperson said.
To be clear, heavy metals are not intentional ingredients in any infant formula. These contaminants, which are naturally present in the environment and are also spread by pollution, can be found at some level in foods and breast milk. A report released by Consumer Reports the same day Operation Stork Speed was announced found variable levels of the contaminants in different formulas. However, levels were within international standards, Abrams and a co-author noted in a perspective piece published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The article also expressed support for conducting further research and setting standards for heavy metals in infant formula.
Claims on social media about seed oils in infant formula are an extension of unjustified claims from wellness influencers that these oils are harmful when eaten in foods. The evidence in adults doesn’t indicate harm from seed oils — and in fact suggests some possible benefits, particularly when used in place of saturated fat. In baby formula, seed oils are universal because they provide a source of necessary fatty acids.
“Commonly seen statements on social media that seed oils should be completely removed from formulas or that seed oils are not present in formulas originating in Europe are incorrect and inconsistent with the need for essential fatty acids in any sole source nutritional product for infants,” Abrams’ perspective piece said.
Decades ago, the FDA began requiring a minimum amount of an omega-6 fatty acid, linoleic acid, in infant formula to avoid deficiencies in essential fatty acids — or fatty acids that the human body cannot make itself. To meet this fatty acid requirement, formula makers use vegetable oils made from the seeds of plants, such as soybean, safflower and sunflower oil.
The FDA also bases its regulations on the composition of human milk, Abrams said. Human breast milk is relatively high in linoleic acid compared with cow milk. Corkins added that the fat in whole cow milk is “hard to digest” for infants.
The claim that seed oils are “pro-inflammatory” stems from the finding that among the fatty acids, the omega-6 fatty acids “tend to be more involved in the pathways when you have inflammation in your body,” Corkins said, adding that an appropriate level of inflammation is not harmful. A different type of fatty acid, omega-3s, “tend to be more in the pathways that cool things off,” he said, “but that is a generalization, and it’s not all one way or the other.” Humans need some omega-6 fatty acids, he said, and they are recommended as part of a healthy diet by the American Heart Association.
Moreover, research has indicated that consuming linoleic acid — the type of omega-6 fatty acid required in infant formula — does not lead to excess inflammation in the body.
Some influencers who have long misled on seed oils include those who promote animal products. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has himself endorsed replacing seed oil with animal fat, such as when claiming that Americans eating fries are being “unknowingly poisoned” by seed oils and promoting using beef tallow as frying oil.
Calley Means, a health care entrepreneur, special government employee and adviser to Kennedy, long has been raising unwarranted concerns about seed oils in infant formula. “To new parents: IGNORE recommendations on infant formula,” Means posted on X in March 2024, recommending that they instead use a toddler formula without seed oils.
“Toddler formulas are not designed for infants and should not be used for them,” Abrams said. Corkins added that these products “aren’t regulated by the FDA” the way infant formula is and that they do not meet nutrition requirements for infants. Moreover, he said, they are not even necessary for children age 1 and above, who can drink whole milk and eat table food. The White House, where Means is a special government employee, did not reply to a request for comment.
None of this is to say there isn’t room for new research into fat sources in infant formula. Abrams, who participated in a June 4 panel discussion on infant formula at the FDA, has argued in the past that it is time to revisit the FDA’s infant formula nutrient requirements, including those for fats, which were largely established in the 1980s. “Review of guidance is of value for all nutrients,” he told us. Along with the linoleic acids regulations, the FDA has requirements for protein and fat content overall in infant formula, as well as for 27 vitamins and minerals. The agency also inspects infant formula manufacturing facilities and has regulations meant to prevent contamination.
Abrams and a co-author wrote in 2023 that U.S. scientists and regulators should evaluate the evidence on DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid, as well as arachidonic acid, an omega-6 fatty acid, in light of recent European requirements to add DHA to infant formula and related research on the omega-6 acid. These are both often contained in U.S. infant formula. However, it’s unclear what levels are ideal, and there are no FDA requirements guiding their inclusion.
Tom Brenna, an expert on fatty acids at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, also advocated updating fatty acid regulations for infant formula during the FDA event. “Not all seed oils are the same,” he said, explaining that they have different levels of the various types of fatty acids.
Abrams said at the FDA event that the goal of the review should be to “improve what’s already an effective product.” Infant formula sold in the U.S. “is produced safely, is used safely, helps babies grow safely and has been associated with tens of millions of babies safely making it through infancy,” he said.
As we have said, Makary’s implication that it’s desirable or feasible to remove added sugar from infant formula is misleading, given that all infant formula has at least some added sugar to better mimic breast milk. However, there is some validity to concerns about the type of sugar that is used in infant formula.
Corkins said that infant formula should ideally match breast milk as closely as it can. Lactose is the “primary carbohydrate” in human breast milk, he said. It is “extremely, extremely rare” that an infant is not able to digest lactose, he added, although the enzyme that digests it can fade out in some populations after weaning.
Despite this, infant formulas that use non-lactose sugars, such as corn syrup solids, have become more common over the years. These are often marketed as being gentle and easy for babies to digest.
One study that looked at powdered infant formula bought from physical stores in the U.S. between 2017 and 2019 found that 59% of all formula purchased contained at least some sugar other than lactose. A second study, which looked at data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2020, found that the rate of infant formula feeding sessions that included at least some non-lactose carbohydrates increased from around 30% in the first few years studied to 78% in the final years. The rate of formula feeding sessions using formula with corn syrup solids increased from 10% to around 20%.
While babies with a few rare health conditions need low-lactose or lactose-free alternatives, several experts told us that these formulas are being used when they are not necessary.
Still, some social media posts exaggerated the ubiquity of low-lactose formula. Special government employee Means, for instance, in March 2025 posted a screenshot of a formula label on X listing corn syrup as the first ingredient. “This is the best-selling baby formula in America,” Means said, calling out sugar, seed oil and other ingredients. “What the hell are we doing to our kids.”
The pictured formula, Similac Sensitive, is not in fact the “best-selling formula in America,” a spokesman for Abbott, the maker of the product, told us. The company’s most consumed formulas are Similac Advance and Similac 360 Total Care, he said, which are standard formulas that “contain lactose as the primary carbohydrate source.”
An informational page from Abbott also clarified that the formulas listing corn syrup as an ingredient do not include high-fructose corn syrup, the type found in many ultraprocessed foods. Rather, infant formula uses corn syrup or corn syrup solids, which are made of glucose and don’t contain fructose. Some social media posts conflate the two substances.
Regardless, emerging research indicates that formulas relying on non-lactose sugars “do have adverse effects on infants [that] include increased risk for obesity,” Michael Goran, a childhood obesity researcher at the University of Southern California, told us via email. He and his colleagues found that among babies receiving formula through the Women, Infants, and Children program, or WIC, in Southern California between 2012 and 2020, those who received formula containing corn syrup solids had a 10% higher rate of obesity at age 2 and a 7% higher rate at age 4. He told us that the FDA should set a minimum amount of lactose in formula and limit the amount of other sugars. There currently aren’t FDA regulations on the amount or type of sugar in infant formula, he said.
Another study, published in March, indicated an association between added sugar amounts overall in infant formula — including lactose and other sugars — and infant weight gain. Jigna Dharod, a nutrition researcher at the University of North Carolina Greensboro who was the first author of the study, told us in an email that she advocated labeling of added sugar content in infant formula, as well as regulation of the amount of added sugar in formula and increased support for breastfeeding.
Despite widespread agreement that non-lactose sugars are overused, not everyone agrees on the strength of the relationship between carbohydrates in formula and obesity. Abrams called the evidence linking corn syrup solids to a small increased risk of obesity “uncertain.”
Corkins said that studies on sugars in infant formula and excess weight gain “are very complicated to interpret given all of the uncontrolled factors that are in play.” For instance, the number of calories a baby is consuming from formula might matter more than the sugar quantity or source. He said that an association between formula feeding and increased weight gain compared with breastfeeding persists “no matter what formula.”
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
In justifying the United States’ rejection of updates to global health regulations, the Department of Health and Human Services and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. falsely claimed that the policy would give the World Health Organization the ability to “order global lockdowns” or “travel restrictions” in response to a pandemic. Experts told us that is “entirely untrue” and “clearly” incorrect.
On July 18, HHS issued a press release stating that the government was formally rejecting amendments to the WHO’s International Health Regulations, which had been adopted by member states last June. The regulations describe the rights and obligations of both the WHO and member countries in preparing for and responding to public health events, including pandemics. (Although President Donald Trump notified the WHO that the U.S. intends to exit the group, the U.S. still needed to say by July 19 if it opposed the amendments, as the process is separate.)
Echoing false claims on social media that have for years exaggerated the power of the WHO, particularly about policy changes negotiated following the COVID-19 pandemic, HHS incorrectly said that the newly revised IHR “would give the WHO the ability to order global lockdowns, travel restrictions, or any other measures it sees fit to respond to nebulous ‘potential public health risks.’”
In a video addressing the American public, Kennedy made the same claim, citing “national sovereignty” as the first reason why the U.S. was rejecting the amendments.
“Nations who accept the new regulations are signing over their power in health emergencies to an unelected international organization that could order lockdowns, travel restrictions, or any other measures,” he said.
He also claimed that the policy “lays the groundwork for global medical surveillance of every human being,” since it “contains provisions about global systems of health IDs, vaccine passports and a centralized medical database.”
“Are we going to be subjects to a technocratic control system that uses ‘health risks’ and ‘pandemic preparedness’ as a Trojan horse to curtail basic democratic freedoms?” Kennedy asked. “Do we want a future where every person, every movement, every transaction and every human body is under surveillance at all times?”
Later in the video, Kennedy acknowledged that “many of these amendments are phrased to be non-binding,” but said that “as a practical matter, it’s hard for many countries to resist them,” calling the agreement “bad for the entire world.”
But Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University who helped draft the amendments, told us that it’s not just that the IHR lacks teeth, but that the regulations also don’t do what Kennedy claims.
“National sovereignty is expressly built into the IHR amendments,” he said in an email. “There is indeed a lack of any enforcement mechanism but even if it could be enforced, there is nothing in the IHR that undermines national sovereignty. It is entirely untrue.”
“The IHR encourages international cooperation in rapidly detecting and responding to novel outbreaks,” he added. “That is decidedly in America’s core national interests.”
“States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to legislate and to implement legislation in pursuance of their health policies,” the text of the IHR reads.
Throughout, the document refers to “recommendations” the WHO may make as a result of a particular health risk, which are defined in the IHR as “non-binding advice.”
“WHO has no authority to tell countries what to do. We cannot impose travel bans, lockdowns, vaccine mandates or any other type of measure. Nor do we seek to,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, said in remarks during a July 23 press briefing. “That is clearly laid out in our founding document, the WHO Constitution. Our job is to provide evidence-based recommendations and guidelines, and to support countries to protect and improve the health of their populations. But how or whether countries implement that advice has always been and always will be up to them, based on their national guidelines and rules.”
A WHO webpage about the IHR amendments also iterates this point.
Ayelet Berman, a global health law expert at the National University of Singapore, explained that under article 12 of the IHR, the director-general can declare a public health emergency of international concern, or PHEIC — and now, under the updated IHR, a “pandemic emergency,” which serves as the highest level alert. With those declarations, the director-general can issue temporary or standing recommendations under articles 15 and 16.
“These are legally non-binding: member states are not legally obligated to follow them. Therefore, it is incorrect to say that the WHO has legal powers to ‘ORDER’ lockdowns or any other public health measures for that matter,” she told us in an email. “The organization can issue recommendations, but it cannot compel states to implement specific measures.”
She said, however, that the recommendations carry significant weight, which may be what the Trump administration is concerned about. “Even though they are not enforceable by law, failure to follow them could lead to international scrutiny/political backlash,” she said. “Hence, these recommendations may shape how governments respond and how they are perceived globally and at home.”
Gian Luca Burci, a senior visiting professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, called HHS’ statement “clearly” incorrect.
“WHO of course expects governments and other stakeholders to take its recommendation seriously, and at the very least not to fall below that standard in their national measures, but the recommendations are what their name says; they are obviously not binding orders and do not deprive states from taking their own final decisions on the national measures they consider necessary,” he told us in an email. “That is clearly stated in article 43 of the IHR and that is exactly what happened during the COVID pandemic, when WHO was not recommending total border closure or mass lockdowns but several states did precisely that.”
Kennedy’s claims about global medical surveillance are also unwarranted. “The IHR certainly does not require vaccine passports but actually discourages them,” Gostin said. “There is no centralized medical database but the Pandemic Agreement does encourage scientific exchange and transparency, something RFK Jr says he likes,” he added, referring to a separate but related policy that has been subject to similar false claims about national sovereignty.
“There is no provision in the IHR that establishes or mandates global systems of health IDs, vaccine passports, or a centralized medical database,” Berman said.
“Annex 6 of the IHR sets out the format and required details of vaccination certificates,” she explained. “Historically, these certificates have been issued in paper form. The recent amendment acknowledges that they may also be issued in digital format. However, states are not required to adopt digital certificates and may continue using paper-based documentation if they choose.”
HHS did not respond to an inquiry asking which provisions Kennedy was referencing or where in the IHR it says that the WHO could order countries to take specific actions.
At one point in the video, Kennedy said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO “failed to enforce the International Health Regulations that were already in place for generations,” particularly with respect to China.
It’s true that the WHO could not force China to provide more accurate or timely information, and that remains true with the updated IHR. “RFK Jr can’t have it both ways — condemning both enforcement powers and lack of enforcement,” Gostin said.
The 2024 amendments to the IHR were prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and were designed to strengthen the world’s ability to prepare for and respond to public health emergencies.
In addition to the new “pandemic emergency” designation, which triggers temporary, legally non-binding recommendations from the WHO, for the first time the regulations incorporate the principles of equity and solidarity to improve access for developing countries to health products, such as vaccines and medicines, during an emergency. The IHR also includes a new financing mechanism for such nations.
Member states are also now asked to create a “National IHR Authority” to implement the regulations in a country, and there is a new committee, composed of member states, to help facilitate implementation.
As Gostin and Alexandra Phelan, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in an article in the Georgetown Journal of International Law, the new committee “is the first time the IHR has adopted any mechanism for government compliance with legal norms.”
Still, the IHR text states the group “shall be facilitative and consultative in nature only, and function in a non-adversarial, non-punitive, assistive and transparent manner.”
Despite the HHS press release’s claim that the World Health Assembly, WHO’s decision-making body, adopted the revised IHR “through a rushed process lacking sufficient debate and public input,” the process took more than a year, and the U.S. was a key negotiating party.
An HHS webpage, last updated in November, notes that the U.S. proposed 13 amendments to the IHR in January 2022.
“In proposing these amendments to the IHR,” the webpage reads, “the United States aimed to provide clearer, more transparent, and more actionable steps for detection, reporting, and responding to outbreaks with potential of crossing international borders. The United States is working with Member States to enhance their core capacities and capabilities in surveillance, assessment, notification, and reporting of public health events to prevent future potential international health emergencies.”
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claims to have uncovered “overwhelming evidence” that former President Barack Obama and others in his administration manipulated intelligence to “lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.” But the foundation for her case is misleading.
Gabbard’s claim relies heavily on an alleged contradiction between a Jan. 6, 2017, intelligence assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered an “influence campaign” in an attempt to help elect Donald Trump and earlier intelligence assessments that concluded Russia did not successfully use cyberattacks on election infrastructure in the 2016 election. But those two assessments are not in contradiction.
“No one ever claimed Russia altered votes, but everyone claims that Russia tried to interfere on Trump’s behalf,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a video message posted on X on July 21. That interference was “well documented” and “well vetted” not only by the Intelligence Community but also by a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee and as part of then special counsel Robert S. Mueller’s report, he said.
Nonetheless, on Fox News on July 20, Gabbard said she was “referring all of the documents that we have uncovered to the Department of Justice and the FBI for a criminal referral,” adding, “In my view, we have the evidence to be able to move forward and bring about justice, yes, to prosecute and indict those responsible.”
Trump has picked up on Gabbard’s statements, posting to Truth Social a fake video showing Obama being handcuffed by FBI agents as well as a message that said there is now “Irrefutable EVIDENCE” that Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden perpetrated “THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY!”
In a press conference on July 22, Trump claimed Gabbard had “caught President Obama absolutely cold. … And there should be very severe consequences for that.”
“After what they did to me and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said. “Obama’s been caught directly. … Look, he’s guilty. … This was treason, this was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”
Obama’s office responded on July 22 with a statement on Gabbard’s memo and release of unsealed documents, saying, “Nothing in the document issued undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes.”
“These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” Obama’s office said.
Gabbard, who was a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii who ran for the party’s nomination in 2020 and left the party in 2022, announced on July 18 what she said was “new evidence” of an Obama administration “conspiracy to subvert President Trump’s 2016 victory and presidency.”
In her press release, Gabbard wrote, “In the months leading up to the November 2016 election, the Intelligence Community (IC) consistently assessed that Russia is ‘probably not trying … to influence the election by using cyber means.'” As her unsealed documents show, Gabbard was citing a Sept. 9, 2016, email from an intelligence official who wrote, “Russia probably is not … trying to influence the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure.” (Emphasis is ours.)
Gabbard misleadingly claimed the assessments changed after a White House meeting of Obama’s top National Security Council principals on Dec. 9, 2016.
She said the IC was tasked with creating a new assessment at Obama’s request that led to the Jan. 6, 2017, release of a declassified Intelligence Community report that concluded “President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election.” In addition to a sophisticated social media campaign in support of Trump’s candidacy, the report said Russian intelligence services gained access to the Democratic National Committee computer network and released hacked material to WikiLeaks and other outlets “to help President-elect Trump’s election chances.”
Gabbard claimed that assessment “directly contradicted the IC assessments that were made throughout the previous six months.” Gabbard created a timeline that purports to detail how the Intelligence Community’s assessment changed over time, and she linked to 114 pages of newly unsealed intelligence documents and communications to lay out her case.
But Gabbard conflated assessments that Russia was not successful in hacking voting infrastructure to alter the election results with intelligence documenting Russia’s efforts to influence the election by swaying the American electorate’s opinions.
For example, Gabbard cited:
Gabbard claimed the assessment changed after a Dec. 9, 2016, meeting of National Security Council principals, including Clapper, John Brennan, and Susan Rice, the then CIA director, and national security adviser, respectively.
The Gabbard memo accompanying her press release cited a subsequent email from Clapper’s assistant to his top aides directing them to “produce an assessment per the President’s request, that pulls together the information we have on the tools Moscow used and the actions it took to influence the 2016 election, an explanation of why Moscow directed these activities.” (The unclassified version is what was released on Jan. 6, 2017.) That Obama had ordered an investigation and assessment into a wider scope of malicious cyberactivity was widely reported in the press at the time.
The evening of that NSC meeting, the Gabbard memo alleged, someone leaked the following story to the Washington Post, which Gabbard deems false.
Washington Post, Dec. 9, 2016: The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.
The article made no mention of attempts to interfere with voting equipment. Rather, it cited the hacking and release of the DNC emails, which was described as “part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.”
In an interview on Fox News on July 20, Gabbard called for prosecution of Obama administration officials responsible for “treasonous conspiracy” and a “yearslong coup” against Trump. She said they did so by “creating this piece of manufactured intelligence that claims that Russia had helped Donald Trump get elected” and relying on an intelligence assessment that “contradicted every other assessment that had been made previously in the months leading up to the election that said exactly the opposite, that Russia neither had neither the intent nor the capability to try to — quote unquote — ‘hack’ the United States’ election for the presidency of the United States.”
“There was a shift, a 180-degree shift, from the intelligence community’s assessment leading up to the election to the one that President Obama directed be produced after Donald Trump won the election that completely contradicted those assessments that had come previously,” Gabbard said in an interview on Fox News on July 22.
But again, Gabbard is conflating statements about Russian attempts or success in altering voting infrastructure with assessments about Russian attempts to influence the election outcome via a sophisticated social media campaign and by releasing hacked DNC emails. Several subsequent and exhaustive reports supported the findings about a Russian influence campaign contained in the IC’s Jan. 6, 2017, assessment.
According to the 2019 report released by special counsel Mueller, “[T]he Special Counsel’s investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign and then released stolen documents.”
Regarding Mueller’s inquiry into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russians, the report said that “the investigation established multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government. Those links included Russian offers of assistance to the Campaign. In some instances, the Campaign was receptive to the offer, while in other instances the Campaign officials shied away.”
It continued: “Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”
But that does not mean that the Russians did not attempt to influence the election — they did, the Mueller investigation concluded.
The special counsel’s office in February 2018 secured an indictment against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for their role in that interference. In July of that year, 12 Russian military officers were also indicted.
Similarly, in April 2020, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee released its report examining the Intelligence Community’s assessment of Russian election interference, concluding “the ICA presents a coherent and well-constructed intelligence basis for the case of unprecedented Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
The Intelligence Community Assessment “reflects strong tradecraft” and “sound analytical reasoning,” then Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican, said at the time. “The Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions.”
One of the members of the committee was then Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state.
“Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy,” Rubio stated on Aug. 18, 2020, when the report was released publicly. “We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive. We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.”
Rubio also added, “What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”
“Let there be no doubt, the Russians did meddle, and they continue to meddle, along with Iran and China,” Rubio said in a Fox Business News interview on Aug. 20, 2020.
Rubio also criticized the FBI for “their acceptance and willingness to rely on the ‘Steele Dossier’ without verifying its methodology or sourcing.”
The “dossier” is a series of memos compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele on supposed contacts between Russian officials and members of the Trump campaign. It alleged the Russian government had compromising information on Trump. Steele was hired by the research firm Fusion GPS, which had been hired by a law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the DNC.
A 2019 Justice Department inspector general report criticized the use of the Steele dossier in an application from the DOJ and FBI under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct electronic surveillance on a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser.
A special counsel, John Durham, appointed in Trump’s first term to “investigate the investigators,” released a report in May 2023 that was highly critical of the FBI’s decision to launch a full investigation into potential links between Russian officials and Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign — and for using the Steele dossier.
Durham’s investigation, however, led to criminal charges against just three people. And only one, an FBI lawyer, was convicted (though sentenced to no jail time) for making a false statement that was used to extend the court-approved surveillance of a former Trump campaign official. Although the Durham report did not delve deeply into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential campaign, Durham did credit the Mueller and Senate Intelligence Committee reports for “the amount of important information gathered, and the contributions they have made to our understanding of Russian election interference efforts,” citing them as “a tribute to the diligent work and dedication of those charged with the responsibility of conducting them.”
Asked on Fox News on July 20 why none of those previous investigations concluded — as Gabbard has — that multiple members of the Obama administration had participated in a “treasonous conspiracy,” Gabbard said: “There is no rational or logical explanation for why they failed.”
“The only logical conclusion that I can draw in this … is that there was direct intent to cover up the truth about what occurred and who was responsible and the broad network of how this seditious conspiracy was concocted and who exactly was responsible for carrying it out,” Gabbard said.
But Gabbard’s claim of a “treasonous conspiracy” distorts the facts and relies on a nonexistent contradiction in the 2017 intelligence assessment. The January 2017 IC report, in addition to outlining an “influence campaign” in support of Trump, also concluded that while “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards,” the Department of Homeland Security “assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying.”
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
In recent speeches and media scrums, President Donald Trump has lauded the federal budget surplus for the month of June, claiming the surplus had not happened in “many, many years” or “decades.” To be clear, the U.S. had not recorded a surplus in June since 2016 – but the country has had several surpluses in other months since that time.
Furthermore, while Trump has attributed the surplus in June to “good management and tariffs,” the latter of which have produced record revenue, the Congressional Budget Office said there would have been a budget deficit last month if the government had not made billions of dollars in payments in May that are usually paid in June.
Also, as of June, the U.S. still had an overall budget deficit of more than $1.3 trillion through the first nine months of fiscal year 2025, according to Treasury Department data. That’s about $64 billion more than the deficit during the same period in fiscal year 2024.
Trump first mentioned the roughly $27 billion surplus in June during remarks at the White House Faith Office luncheon on July 14 – and he sounded surprised by the news.
“And on Friday, it was announced that the United States Treasury ran a budget surplus. Is that true, Scott?” Trump said, asking Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who was in attendance. “In June, for the first time in many, many decades. Wow! I didn’t know that.”
Trump told Bessent that he would add that information to his “repertoire,” and the president has since mentioned the June surplus several times, including in July 15 remarks at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh.
“And did you notice that two days ago they just announced that they had a budget surplus of $25 billion in this country,” he told attendees, referring to the June surplus, which he lowered by about $2 billion. “They never saw anything like that. Everyone’s saying where did that — that’s been like decades.”
But it has happened before, and it wasn’t as long ago as he suggested.
In fact, prior to June, the most recent monthly surplus was in April, when government revenue exceeded its expenditures by about $258 billion, according to the Treasury. And most recently before that, there were six months with surpluses during the Biden administration (January 2022, April 2022, April 2023, August 2023, April 2024 and September 2024).
Trump may have been referring to the last time there was a surplus in June — that was June 2016, during the Obama administration, which still wasn’t “decades” ago.
Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told us that federal budget surpluses regularly occur in April, because of Tax Day, which is the deadline for most U.S. tax filers to submit their annual income tax returns and make tax payments. He said that surpluses also tend to occur in June, which the Wall Street Journal noted “is one of Treasury’s biggest revenue months of the year … because it’s a month when companies and individuals file their quarterly estimated tax payments.”
For example, the Treasury recorded four consecutive surpluses in June from 2013 to 2016. There have also been a number of surpluses in the month of September, which is the last month of the third quarter of the calendar year.
As we said, Trump has credited this year’s June surplus to tariffs and fiscal restraint.
New tariffs that Trump put in place this year did help. Last month, the government brought in about $26.6 billion in revenue from tariffs, or customs duties – a 321% increase from the $6.3 billion collected in the same month last year. June was the second straight month in which revenue from tariffs reached well over $20 billion, and the CBO recently estimated that a number of tariffs implemented earlier this year, between Jan. 6 and May 13, could reduce total federal deficits by $2.8 trillion over 10 years.
But tariffs aside, the CBO said there was another major reason that there was a June surplus instead of a deficit: the shifting of certain federal expenditures from June to May.
In its most recent “Monthly Budget Review,” the CBO said that federal spending was lower than it would have been in June because the government made billions of dollars in payments in May that were due on June 1, a Sunday. The Treasury said that some payments for active-duty military, veterans, Supplemental Security Income and Medicare were moved to May because June 1, the normal payment date, was a non-business day.
“If not for those [timing] shifts, the government would have recorded a deficit of $71 billion in June 2025,” the CBO said, emphasizing the word deficit.
So, Trump was off on the timing of previous budget surpluses, and he overlooked a key reason for the most recent surplus in June.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Contrary to President Donald Trump’s claim that no one will die as a result of the Republican budget bill, an analysis from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University estimated that the legislation’s changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act will result in at least 42,500 preventable deaths each year. At the same time, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has slightly overstated the estimate.
In the run-up to and in the wake of the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law on July 4, politicians of both parties have sparred over the budget reconciliation bill’s effects on mortality.
Democrats, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have said that “tens of thousands” of people will die as a result of losing health insurance.
“51,000 Americans will die each year so that the top 1% can get a $1 trillion tax break,” Sanders wrote in a July 3 post on X. “This bill is a death sentence.”
Sanders repeated the claim in a July 9 post, using a figure of “more than 50,000.”
Meanwhile, Trump has insisted that the Democratic talking point isn’t true.
“The Democrats have come up with a false narrative. … It’s death, death, everyone’s going to die,” he said in a July 8 Cabinet meeting. As he had before, Trump said that the bill was “just the opposite. Everyone’s going to live.”
“Somebody gave them a soundbite, ‘it’s going to cause death,’” Trump said in a July 12 interview on Fox News, referring to Democrats and the law. “It is not going to cause death. It’s going to keep people alive and it’s going to make our country successful.”
Sanders is using a higher estimate than he should, but researchers at Yale and Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics projected in June that the House-passed version of the bill would “result in more than 42,500 deaths annually.”
The tally includes 11,300 deaths as a result of people losing Medicaid or Affordable Care Act marketplace insurance, as well as 18,200 deaths from low-income Medicare patients losing prescription drug benefits and 13,000 deaths from rescinding a Biden-era rule that required a higher minimum staffing level in nursing homes.
The group, which performed its analysis in response to an inquiry from Sanders and Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, based its projections on a preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimate that 7.7 million people would lose insurance coverage as a result of the bill.
The CBO later projected that due to the House bill, 10.9 million people would be uninsured in 2034, a figure that includes 7.8 million becoming uninsured because of Medicaid changes in the bill and 3.1 million losing coverage due to changes to the Affordable Care Act. The CBO hasn’t yet provided an estimate for the final legislation, but said that a modified Senate version of that bill would increase the uninsured by 11.8 million people in 2034.
Dr. Rachel Werner, a co-author of the analysis and LDI’s executive director, told us in an email that it’s “incorrect to say that no one will die as a result” of the legislation. “There is strong evidence that Medicaid coverage saves lives,” she said.
“Getting someone insurance allows them to get screened for diseases like cancer. It’s a major source of providing people with treatment for the opioid epidemic,” Werner explained in a conversation with the Tradeoffs podcast. “It allows people to get medications to manage their chronic conditions. And so if you suddenly pull back all those resources that have been allowing people to get the care they need, the evidence is very clear now that we will lose lives.”
Another projection, published in mid-June in the Annals of Internal Medicine by researchers at Harvard Medical School and the City University of New York, estimated that the House bill’s Medicaid spending cuts would lead to between 8,200 and 24,600 medically preventable deaths a year, with a mid-range estimate of 16,642.
The study’s estimate, Werner explained, is “comparable” to the single 11,300 component of deaths from loss of insurance in her group’s total estimate. As she said on the Tradeoffs podcast, “we’re at the low end of that range, which is reassuring to us.”
Both the Harvard-CUNY and Penn-Yale authors have noted that the CBO estimates themselves may be low. When doing its calculations, the CBO assumed that states, which will lose some federal Medicaid funding under the bill, would use state money to make up for half of those losses.
“I think that that is a long shot,” Werner told Tradeoffs. “States budgets are very tight right now. Some states may be able to make up half of what they lose from the federal government, but I think it’s not a stretch to say most states can’t. And so if the funding that’s available for Medicaid goes down more than the CBO estimated, more people are going to lose access to coverage. So I think that I’m pretty confident that we are at the low end of the right ballpark.”
Both projections capture only a portion of the possible mortality effects. Dr. Eric Roberts, a co-author of the Penn-Yale analysis, said that his estimate does not include any deaths that might result from potential hospital closures, for example.
We asked the White House if they were aware of the Penn-Yale analysis and for support for Trump’s claim that the budget law would not lead to preventable deaths. “Reporters ignoring the commonsense reforms of The One, Big, Beautiful Bill that protect and preserve Medicaid while raising wages and growth to instead push debunked Democrat talking points with these sort of pointless ‘fact checks’ that rely on mindless hairsplitting is exactly why public trust in the media is at a record low,” White House spokesman Kush Desai replied in an email.
As for Sanders’ 51,000 figure, the number appears in the Penn-Yale estimate, and a Sanders spokesperson confirmed the analysis was the source of his claim. But it reflects an additional 8,811 preventable deaths that come from not extending expanded ACA premium tax credits that are set to expire at the end of the year. That is not part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act itself, as we’ve written before.
Werner told us that the correct figure to use from her estimate when speaking of the provisions of the law is 42,500.
The overstatement is similar to what Democrats have done before, when they exaggerated the number of people who would lose health insurance under the bill using the same logic.
A Sanders spokesperson pointed us to Sanders’ full statement when the Penn-Yale estimate was first released, which repeatedly highlights the 51,000 number, but also explains the source of each of the four added figures.
Sanders spokesperson Anna Bahr also argued that the lack of action to extend the premium tax credit could be viewed as part of the legislation. But whether those credits are extended remains to be seen.
“Whether it’s by making massive cuts to Medicaid that community health centers, nursing homes, hospitals, and health care providers rely on, whether it’s by using red tape to kick millions of people off of their ACA coverage, or whether it’s by failing to extend premium tax credits that made health coverage affordable for millions of working families throughout the country, the result is unacceptably the same: more people won’t go to the doctor on time because they don’t have insurance or they can’t afford it, more will get sicker, and this research shows just how many more people’s lives are at risk,” she said in a statement.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
An attack ad by a super PAC called MAGA Kentucky targets Republican Rep. Thomas Massie — a longtime conservative foil of President Donald Trump — with claims that distort the congressman’s votes on some of Trump’s policy goals.
The 30-second broadcast and digital ad, the first phase in a $1 million ad buy, according to Axios, began airing in late June in the northern Kentucky district where Massie is seeking reelection in 2026. The ad is titled “RADICAL DEMOCRATS,” and its narrator asks, “What happened to Thomas Massie? When did he decide to start voting with the radical Democrats? Massie voted against President Trump’s tax cuts. Massie voted against finishing Trump’s wall. Massie even voted against Trump’s ban on taxpayer-funded sex changes for minors.”
The ad is referring to Massie’s votes against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Massie was one of only two Republicans to vote against the initial House version of the bill on May 22, and the final Senate version of the bill on July 3. Although the bill contained elements of all three issues highlighted in the ad, Massie’s opposition was based on the bill’s impact on the national debt. The ad singles out aspects of the bill that Massie has generally supported.
During Trump’s first term, Massie voted for Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017, and he has said repeatedly that he supports extending tax cuts in it that were scheduled to expire at the end of this year.
“Look, I’m for the tax cuts, extending those tax cuts. I voted for those in 2017,” Massie said in a May 20 interview on Newsmax2. “Here’s the problem: we’re cutting more taxes, and we’re increasing spending. And to the extent they say we’re cutting spending, that doesn’t happen in these first few years. They’re saying, ‘We’ll do that in the later years.’ The problem is the later years never come.”
“There are a lot of good things in this bill,” Massie said in a Newsmax interview on June 11. “We do need to deport the people who’ve come to this country illegally. I do support renewing the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that I voted for. But let me tell you what they’re not talking about … Number one issue, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, the tax break for seniors, that all expires in three years. And that’s because they’re using a budget gimmick where they’re trying to say this thing balances five years from now. But it doesn’t balance now.”
As for voting against “finishing Trump’s wall,” Massie has been a staunch supporter of building more border wall, though he has not always agreed with Trump’s method for funding it. In 2019, for example, Massie voted with Democrats to upend Trump’s attempt to fund the wall by declaring a national emergency. Massie argued that Congress, not the president, should decide on funding for construction of the border wall.
But he also supported and voted to provide more than $5 billion to fund Trump’s border wall in fiscal year 2019. And in 2023, Massie co-sponsored H.R. 164, the Close Biden’s Open Border Act, which sought to provide $15 billion for border wall construction.
As for the ad’s claim that Massie “even voted against Trump’s ban on taxpayer-funded sex changes for minors,” Massie has opposed gender-affirming surgery for children.
Massie said in post on X after his vote: “Although there were some conservative wins in the budget reconciliation bill (OBBBA), I voted No on final passage because it will significantly increase U.S. budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates.”
As we’ve written, multiple independent analyses have found that the legislation, which Trump signed into law on July 4, will add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit over 10 years.
Massie had sought to amend the reconciliation bill to address federal jurisdiction in various cases of gender-affirming surgery. When the bill made its way through the Senate, according to Massie, the legislation allowed for funding of such medical procedures. Alluding to the MAGA Kentucky ad, Massie said on X, “What’s ironic is the senate stripped the ban on sex changes for minors from the BBB (referenced in the ad), so now everyone supporting the current BBB is for sex change for minors, using their logic?”
The political friction between Trump and Massie goes back years. In March 2020, the Kentucky lawmaker tried to block Trump’s $2 trillion coronavirus economic stimulus package by forcing Congress to return to Washington for a vote on the bill, leading Trump to call Massie a “third rate Grandstander.”
In 2024, Massie was critical of Trump for not fighting to ensure funding to complete the southern border wall during the president’s first term.
Massie also endorsed one of Trump’s early challengers in 2024, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in the Republican presidential primary.
Massie and Trump clashed again in June, after the U.S. bombed the uranium enrichment facilities in Iran. Massie posted support for a War Powers Resolution vote in Congress to rein in Trump’s actions. “This is not our war,” Massie said on X. “But if it were, Congress must decide such matters according to our Constitution.”
After Massie registered opposition to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump lambasted Massie on Truth Social as “a LOSER” and as “weak, ineffective,” and Trump has vowed in speeches to endorse a Republican primary opponent to Massie in the 2026 election. “I think he should be voted out of office,” Trump said.
Massie has held his office in Kentucky’s 4th Congressional District since 2012, and he easily defeated primary challengers in the last three election cycles, winning 75% of the vote in 2024, 75% in 2022 and 81% in 2020.
Trump advisers are looking for a viable challenger in 2026, and Fox News posted a July 1 video of Trump saying Massie will have “a good opponent.”
Massie has been gearing up for the fight. He has $1.7 million in his war chest, the AP reported, including $584,000 raised between April and June.
He also has the support of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who said he plans to endorse Massie in 2026, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.
Another supporter of Massie is Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who is engaged in his own feud with Trump over the recently passed “big beautiful” law, saying he will support primary challengers to members of Congress who voted for the bill.
Musk shared a July 1 post by another user on X that said, “I donated again to @RepThomasMassie’s re-election campaign. Who’s next?” Musk responded, “Me.”
We reached out to Massie’s office for comment on the MAGA Kentucky ad, but did not get a response to our questions.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
The Trump administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, has been repeating the misleading claim that there are “over 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal records walking the streets of this nation.”
That number includes legal immigrants, not just those who entered the country illegally; about a third of them have only been charged, not convicted; and it’s unclear how many of them have been, or currently are, incarcerated. The figure also includes people who entered the country over the last several decades.
Homan made the claim on July 12, at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida, and twice on July 7, including in an appearance on Fox News, which reported that new funding to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will enable the current force of 5,000 agents to triple to 15,000. There, Homan said, “This is going to make this community safer. … We’ve got over 600,000 illegal aliens with criminal records walking the streets of this nation. With this plus up, we can take them into custody and remove them quicker.”
The White House told us that Homan’s claim was based on data from a 2024 letter from then Department of Homeland Security Deputy Director Patrick Lechleitner to Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from Texas who had requested information on the number of noncitizens on the ICE docket who had been convicted or charged with a crime.
The data showed that, as of July 21, 2024, “nearly 650,000 criminal aliens were on the [Non-Detained Docket],” a White House spokeswoman told us, referring to the list of noncitizens who have been charged with a crime but are not in ICE custody.
But there are important caveats missing from Homan’s claim.
Of the total 647,572 noncitizens with criminal histories who were listed as being “non-detained” as of July 2024, 126,343 — or, about 20% — had “traffic offenses.” Another 92,075 had “immigration” offenses. So, at least a third of the total did not have violent criminal histories.
In comparison, 14,944 were listed as having “homicide” charges; 20,061 were listed as having “sexual assault” charges; 105,146 had “assault” charges; 30,631 had “larceny” charges; and 21,106 had “fraudulent activities” charges.
Not all of those listed in the 2024 data had been convicted, though. Of the 647,572 total, 222,141 — or 33% — had been only charged. It’s unclear how many of those pending cases ended in convictions.
It’s also important to note that the data doesn’t distinguish between immigrants who crossed the border illegally, immigrants who overstayed their visas, and immigrants who are in the country with documentation.
“The non-detained docket includes not just unauthorized immigrants but green-card holders and noncitizens on long-term non-immigrant visas who have made themselves removable by virtue of a criminal conviction,” Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us when we wrote about this data last year.
Lechleitner’s letter was sent in September, and President Donald Trump, who was campaigning at the time, distorted the data, falsely claiming that then Vice President Kamala Harris “let in 13,099 convicted murderers.” More recently, Trump has repeatedly used the figure “11,888 murderers,” though he appears to be citing the same data.
We asked the White House why the number is different, but we didn’t get a response to that question. Instead, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told us in an emailed statement, “Joe Biden let thousands upon thousands of violent criminal illegal aliens into American communities including murderers, rapists, gang members, and other violent criminals. President Trump will deport them all.”
When we wrote about Trump’s claims in September, DHS told us that the figures weren’t just for recent immigrants, but included people who entered the country over the last 40 years or more.
And DHS said in a statement at the time that the data “also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.” So, the 647,572 people on the list were not being detained by ICE, but some number of them were in the custody of state, local, or other federal authorities. We asked DHS last year, and again this week, how many were in the custody of other agencies, but we didn’t receive a response.
Also, given that the data cover several decades, “[i]t would be worth noting that people with criminal convictions who are not in custody have, for the most part presumably, served whatever sentence was imposed on them,” Mittelstadt told us in an email last week.
It’s also possible that some of them have been deported.
Since the Trump administration has put an emphasis on deporting immigrants with criminal backgrounds, we asked DHS for updated figures. The department didn’t respond to our request for that data, but a spokesperson provided a statement that said Secretary Kristi Noem was using ICE to “target the worst of the worst.”
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
Unfounded rumors linking an extreme weather event to human efforts to control the weather are again spreading on social media. It’s not plausible that available weather modification techniques caused or influenced the July 4 flash flooding along the Guadalupe River in Texas.
The flooding, which is known to have killed at least 134 people, including at least 37 children, as of July 15, occurred after remnants of a tropical storm moved north and stalled over a region known as “Flash Flood Alley” that is prone to flash flooding due to its terrain. Experts have said that climate change likely played a role in worsening the rain.
However, popular social media posts implied without evidence that the Texas flooding resulted from attempts to modify the weather. Some posts, including ones amplified by former Trump national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, made an unfounded suggestion that cloud seeding by a particular company may have caused the flooding.
“This isn’t just bad weather,” read one post. “It looks a hell of a lot like weather warfare.”
Cloud seeding is a real weather modification method, often used in an attempt to alleviate drought, that can sometimes nudge clouds to produce small amounts of rain or snow. It does not cause rain at the scale seen in the Texas flooding.
Cloud seeding “had no influence on the outcome of the July 4th flooding,” Katja Friedrich of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences told us in an email, basing her comments on her own past research on the subject.
“I love how confident people are in science but if cloud seeding would work as they often think, we would probably be able to solve the water crisis in the western US or in other arid regions but we are not able to do so,” she added.
In contrast, climate change caused by heat-trapping pollution, in large part due to the burning of fossil fuels, is known to increase extreme rainfall events. “It is pretty clear that climate change increased rainfall” in Texas, Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told us via email. It’s more difficult, he said, to say what role climate change played in how high or how quickly the water levels rose, since this requires modeling taking into account complex local factors.
We previously wrote about conspiracy theories — fueled by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia — that someone deliberately caused or steered Hurricane Helene in 2024 via weather modification. It is not possible to cause or steer a hurricane. On July 5, Greene announced new legislation to restrict weather modification. Florida, Tennessee and Louisiana have enacted or are set to enact laws curtailing weather modification.
In July 5 posts on X and Substack, Kandiss Taylor, a Republican candidate for Congress from Georgia, also pushed the idea of “fake” and “manufactured” extreme weather. Taylor suggested that Hurricane Helene, which she said personally cost her family $57,000 in damages, was the result of weather modification, or “targeted destruction,” as she put it, and other disasters might be as well.
“If storms are being manipulated, and people die because of it, that’s not just tragedy,” she wrote. “That’s murder.”
Taylor told us via email that her posts were “in response to proposed new legislation in congress not about Texas. The media twisted what I posted.” But in her Substack and elsewhere, she suggested the Texas flooding could be due to weather manipulation. “Now, I’m watching in nonstop prayer what’s happening in Texas. And let me tell you, the patterns, the timing, the scale raises serious questions,” she wrote on Substack.
Cloud seeding relies on releasing small particles, most often silver iodide crystals, into clouds, which can help raindrops or ice crystals form from existing moisture and fall from the sky. As of July 2024, there were active cloud seeding projects in nine states, including Texas, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.
Many social media posts have suggested that Rainmaker Technology Corporation may have caused the flooding. The company performed cloud seeding on July 2 in Karnes County, Texas, several counties southeast from where the flooding took place.
But it’s not plausible the company’s activities played a role in the Texas flooding, experts told us and other news outlets.
For one thing, the cloud seeding in Karnes County happened too far in advance of the storm to be relevant at all, Friedrich told us, explaining that her team’s research has shown that “cloud seeding material usually stays in the atmosphere for 2-4 hours depending on wind speed and conditions.”
If the cloud seeding happened on July 2, there was “no way that material was still in the atmosphere” by the time of the storm, Friedrich said. Thunderstorms, of course, are also able to produce large amounts of rainfall on their own, she said, adding that there is “no need for cloud seeding.”
Indeed, Rainmaker’s CEO, Augustus Doricko, responded to Flynn on X, writing that the two “clouds that were seeded on July 2nd dissipated over 24 hours prior to the developing storm complex that would produce the flooding rainfall.”
But even if cloud seeding had happened closer to the relevant storm, experts said, it would not have caused the extreme amount of rain that fell.
Friedrich said that her team’s past work showed that “cloud seeding produces rather small amounts of precipitation” — on the order of fractions of a millimeter of snow. In fact, a challenge in quantifying the results of cloud seeding, she said, has been that the amount of precipitation “is so small and often much smaller than natural precipitation.”
During the Texas flooding, the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes at Hunt, Texas, and 2 to 3 inches of rain fell each hour at times, a National Weather Service spokesperson previously told us.
“The amount of energy involved in making storms like that is astronomical compared to anything you can do with cloud seeding,” Bob Rauber, an atmospheric scientist and emeritus professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, similarly told the Washington Post. “We’re talking about a very small increase on a natural process at best.”
Furthermore, as we’ve said, the slow movement of the storm helped cause the flooding. “Cloud seeding influences how cloud particles grow but not the movement or stalling of thunderstorms,” Friedrich said.
As we’ve said, multiple natural factors conspired to cause the flooding. But experts said that climate change likely did increase the rain.
Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, who is also director of the Southern Regional Climate Center and a professor at Texas A&M University, agreed via email that climate change likely increased total rainfall.
He explained that warmer air can carry more water vapor and can “produce larger rainfall rates.” Another factor influencing the severity of the flooding was the short amount of time it took for a large amount of rain to fall. “There’s evidence that shorter-duration extreme rainfall is intensifying more rapidly than longer-duration extreme rainfall, so maybe storms themselves are becoming more concentrated,” he said.
ClimaMeter, an international project to rapidly interpret the relationship between extreme weather and climate, compared conditions in the past with those in more recent decades, finding that conditions in parts of central Texas were 7% wetter in the years since 1987 than between 1950 and 1986. However, the scientists said they had “low confidence in the robustness of our approach,” given the available data and the exceptionality of the flooding. The group concluded that the heavy rain was “locally intensified by human-driven climate change.”
Wehner informally estimated that climate change likely increased rainfall by at least 7%, based simply on the increase in water vapor in the air caused by warming in the Gulf. After taking into account factors associated with the “extra available energy in warmer temperatures,” he said, he came up with a possible 20% increase in rainfall. Wehner has done formal attribution studies in the past for extreme weather events, which he said his calculations did not replace, but he told us he wouldn’t be doing one for this event.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the House version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would reduce Medicaid enrollment and cause millions of people to become uninsured by 2034. It didn’t say that “5 million” of the people who are “going to lose insurance” would have “other insurance” so “they’re still insured,” as National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett misleadingly claimed.
Hassett was talking about some of the estimated changes to Medicaid coverage and access to other types of health insurance. But he exaggerated the number who the CBO said would still retain some coverage, and his remark may leave the mistaken impression that he was addressing the CBO’s estimate of the increase in the uninsured.
Some who are expected to lose Medicaid coverage will not be left entirely uninsured. For example, the figure that Hassett cited includes individuals the CBO said would lose Medicaid but keep their Medicare benefits. And Hassett’s figure includes people expected to be unenrolled from Medicaid in one state but remain enrolled in another state – meaning they wouldn’t actually lose Medicaid.
But Hassett also counted individuals the CBO said would lose Medicaid and not obtain other coverage for which they were eligible. That group wouldn’t still be insured, as Hassett claimed. Experts told us there are several reasons, such as affordability, why an uninsured person may not enroll in a health plan available to them.
Hassett, who directs the NEC for the Trump administration, made his claim during a July 6 “Face the Nation” interview, in which he criticized the CBO’s analysis of the legislation backed by congressional Republicans. The GOP-led House passed a Senate-approved version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and President Donald Trump signed it into law on July 4.
Weijia Jiang, who was hosting the CBS show, asked Hassett to comment on “the CBO’s projections that as many as 12 million Americans could lose Medicaid coverage because of this law.” In response, Hassett said: “[I]f you look at the CBO numbers, if you look at the big numbers, they say that people are going to lose insurance, about 5 million of those are people who have other insurance. They’re people who have two types of insurance. And so, therefore, if they lose one, they’re still insured.”
Jiang may have been referring to a CBO estimate that, under a Senate version of the bill, 11.8 million people would become uninsured in 2034 — although not all of them would be people who lost Medicaid.
But Hassett’s response to her question also isn’t what the CBO reported.
A White House official told us that Hassett was referring to the CBO’s analysis of a House version of the bill. Under that proposed bill — which was different from the Senate version that became law — the CBO estimated that Medicaid enrollment would decrease by 10.5 million in 2034, and that 7.8 million people would be left wholly uninsured because of Medicaid-related provisions in the bill.
The 10.5 million figure included 1.3 million individuals who have both Medicaid and Medicare, but are projected to lose their Medicaid coverage. “They would retain Medicare coverage and not become uninsured,” the CBO said.
Meanwhile, the agency said the “10.5 million figure also reflects a reduction of 1.6 million people enrolled in Medicaid in more than one state; those enrollees would maintain Medicaid coverage in their home state.”
In addition, the CBO said that 1.6 million of the 7.8 million people estimated to become uninsured due to the bill’s Medicaid policies “would have access to, but would not take up, other forms of subsidized coverage,” such as employer-sponsored health insurance or a health plan available through insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act.
That 1.6 million “also includes people who would remain eligible for Medicaid but would not enroll,” the CBO said.
Adding those three figures together produces a total of 4.5 million, which is close to the 5 million that Hassett cited. But his figure is misleading.
For one, the 1.6 million people that the CBO said would lose Medicaid and not obtain alternative coverage means they wouldn’t “have other insurance,” as Hassett said.
The White House official we contacted argued that these are people who “will voluntarily forgo insurance coverage available to them,” but the CBO didn’t elaborate on why those people wouldn’t “take up” other insurance. There are multiple reasons why an uninsured person who qualifies for a health plan may not enroll.
“Surveys of Americans without insurance show that most either don’t think coverage is affordable or don’t know what programs they’re eligible for,” Dr. Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard University professor of health care economics and medicine, told us in an email.
Sommers used an example of an employee making $20,000 annually who loses free Medicaid coverage but can’t afford to pay a $300 monthly premium for an insurance plan offered by an employer. He also emphasized that some people “will be losing Medicaid – even though they’re still eligible – because this law creates a lot more red tape” in the form of paperwork that has to be filed twice a year to document that beneficiaries meet new work requirements.
“This law makes getting into and keeping Medicaid much harder, even for those who are already working and should still be eligible,” he said.
Also, the CBO didn’t say that the 1.6 million people who would be unenrolled from Medicaid in one state, but still have it in another, are “going to lose insurance.” Those people are essentially being double-counted on the Medicaid rolls, which is why unenrolling them in one of the states only appears to reduce the number of people on Medicaid.
“This number is about Medicaid enrollment and has nothing to do with the increase in the uninsured under the Medicaid and [Children’s Health Insurance Program] provisions under the law,” Edwin Park, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us in an email.
Park said that people sometimes end up being enrolled in Medicaid in two states because of paperwork issues and delays in disenrolling people after they have moved from one state to another.
Akeiisa Coleman, senior program officer for Medicaid at the Commonwealth Fund, told us that beneficiaries “may not be aware” that they “are required to notify the state they are moving.”
As for the other 1.3 million people the CBO said would remain insured under Medicare but not Medicaid, they could still be negatively affected, experts told us.
“Medicaid helps to cover services not covered by original Medicare, such as dental, home and community based services, and transportation to doctor’s appointments, which are services provided to Medicaid recipients in most states,” Gretchen Jacobson, vice president for the Medicare program at the Commonwealth Fund, told us in an email.
She said, “Medicaid also helps to cover Medicare’s premiums and cost-sharing requirements, which helps to make basic preventive and acute care medical services affordable for low-income people.”
Park also noted that seniors enrolled in Medicare Savings Programs administered through Medicaid automatically become eligible for Medicare’s Low Income Subsidy, which reduces the cost of Medicare’s prescription drug coverage and helps beneficiaries pay for prescriptions.
And Sommers added that “traditional Medicare has no out-of-pocket cap, meaning someone can rack up tens of thousands of dollars of costs if they have a catastrophe illness, which Medicaid would cover if they have both.”
Therefore, “the 1.3 million dual eligibles who would lose Medicaid under this law would thus face higher costs and less access to needed care,” Park said.
The CBO ultimately projected that the House bill would cause the uninsured population in 2034 to grow by a total of 10.9 million people. That includes the 7.8 million individuals it said would become uninsured because of Medicaid changes in the bill, as well as 3.1 million more estimated to lose coverage due to other health insurance changes in the legislation.
Under a modified Senate version of that bill, the CBO said the number of people without insurance would increase to 11.8 million people in 2034. (An estimate based on the final legislation that became law is not yet available.)
But the agency didn’t say that “5 million” people who would lose Medicaid or other health insurance under either bill “have two types of insurance” so that “if they lose one, they’re still insured,” as Hassett claimed. His figure refers to changes to Medicaid enrollment and access to other insurance, not the change in the uninsured.