Several Democrats have claimed that the Trump administration’s Jan. 3 military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, was “illegal,” violating both domestic and international law.
Experts we consulted told us that the operation runs afoul of the United Nations Charter that prohibits unjustified uses of military force by one country against another. Experts also previously told us that the U.S. Constitution, according to an originalist interpretation, requires congressional approval for such use of force abroad. In practice, however, multiple presidents — like President Donald Trump in this instance — have unilaterally ordered military action without input from lawmakers.
In this story, we’ll review some of the legal arguments that have been made.
Several Democrats have claimed that the Trump administration’s military actions in Venezuela violated international law.
“It’s clearly illegal under international law, right?” Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Jan. 4. “Full stop. U.N. charter. No question there.”
In an interview on CNN on Jan. 5, Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, called the military action “blatantly illegal.”
“We’ve signed on to a U.N. charter that says you can’t violate sovereign territory in this way, even to arrest somebody who has a indictment against them,” Smith said. “The U.N. Charter is clear. We signed on to the U.N. Charter, so therefore we were clearly breaking the law and doing a regime change operation. That’s not even debatable. And President Trump’s contempt for that law does undermine any sort of legal action going forward. Across the globe, we increasingly send the message the law is just a matter of convenience. Do what you want.”
Numerous experts in international law agree with them.
Specifically, Article 2 (4) of the U.N. Charter states that members “shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”
In a Jan. 5 statement, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that he was “deeply concerned that rules of international law have not been respected” and warned about “the precedent it may set for how relations between and among states are conducted.”
There are 193 members of the U.N., including Venezuela, which has been a member since 1945.
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Bill Burke-White, an expert on international law, told us via email that the military action in Venezuela was “illegal under international law in every imaginable way.”
“Under international law and pursuant to articles 2(4) and 51 of the UN Charter, the use of force is only justified in two circumstances: authorization by the UN Security Council or an act of self defense in response to an armed attack,” Burke-White said. “Neither applies here.”
“In addition,” Burke-White said, “Maduro (while a despicable individual) was the sovereign leader of Venezuela. He therefore enjoys sovereign immunity, which means a foreign government can not arrest or prosecute him.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump administration officials have called Maduro an “illegitimate” leader. (World leaders widely disputed Maduro’s supposed 2024 election.) And therefore, the administration’s argument goes, he can be criminally prosecuted in the United States.
That is an issue “the American courts are going to have to weigh in on,” Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and the director of its Center for Global Legal Challenges, said in an interview with the New Yorker.
The problem, Hathaway said, “is that merely saying that he’s not head of state doesn’t then justify the use of military force in Venezuela.”
In a Jan. 5 article for Just Security, international law experts Michael Schmitt, Ryan Goodman and Tess Bridgeman agreed.
“The bottom line is, unlike the boat strikes the U.S. military has carried out to date that have occurred in international waters against stateless vessels, this operation, striking Venezuela and abducting its president, is clearly a violation of the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter,” the three wrote. “That prohibition is the bedrock rule of the international system that separates the rule of law from anarchy, safeguards small States from their more powerful neighbors, and protects civilians from the devastation of war.”
Echoing Burke-White’s comments, they wrote that the only exceptions are with authorization from the U.N. Security Council or “in self-defense against armed attack.” Given there was no U.N. Security Council authorization, “the sole possible legal basis for the operation would be self-defense,” they wrote.
And that is what Trump administration officials are arguing.
In an interview with Fox News on Jan. 4, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz dismissed the “hand-wringing” about Article 2 of the U.N. Charter, adding that Article 51 of the charter permits “a nation’s inherent right to self-defense.”
Article 51 of the U.N. charter states, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”
“So, in this case, you have a drug kingpin, an illegitimate leader indicted in the United States coordinating with the likes of China, Russia, Iran, terrorist groups like Hezbollah, pumping drugs, thugs and weapons into the United States of America, threatening to invade its neighbors,” Waltz said. “And at the end of the day, was the United States, was President Trump just going to let that status quo continue? Absolutely not.”
Maduro and his wife were brought to New York and indicted on cocaine-trafficking conspiracy charges.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Jan. 4, Rubio echoed the defense argument.
“We can’t have a country where the people in charge of its military and in charge of its police department are openly cooperating with drug trafficking organizations. We can’t. We’re not going to allow that,” Rubio said. “These things are direct threats to the United States.”
John Bellinger, adjunct senior fellow in international and national security law at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the defense exceptions in the U.N. Charter “do not apply here.”
“President Trump has claimed that President Maduro had sent criminal gangs, including Tren de Aragua, ‘to terrorize American communities nationwide’ but there is no factual support for this statement,” said Bellinger, quoting the president’s Jan. 3 press conference on the military action. Bellinger, who served as the legal adviser for the Department of State and the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration, noted that the administration’s own National Intelligence Council concluded in an April 7 intelligence assessment that the Maduro regime “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with [Tren de Aragua] and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
“The action violated international law,” Tom Dannenbaum, a professor at Stanford Law School with expertise in international law relating to armed conflict, told us via email. “This analysis does not turn on an assessment of the Maduro regime. It depends instead on the strict prohibition of the resort to military force in international relations, except in narrow and specific circumstances, none of which obtains in this case. Serious legal objections to Maduro’s regime do not eliminate the need for a legal basis to use military force in Venezuela. Under international law, the use of force on another state’s territory is presumptively unlawful.”
While the Trump administration has argued the U.S. was defending itself against drug traffickers, Hathaway told the New Yorker that argument “really doesn’t work under international law.”
“There is a right of self-defense under the United Nations charter, which allows states to use force in self-defense against an armed attack,” Hathaway said. “But it’s never been used for something like drug trafficking. And so all of these boat strikes that have been taking place over the past couple of months, which have been justified as self-defense, don’t fall within anything that anyone would recognize as self-defense under international law. Self-defense generally requires that there’s actually an armed attack.”
Dannenbaum similarly disagreed with the argument that Venezuela drug trafficking met the threshold of an armed attack on the U.S.
“Venezuela has not engaged in an armed attack against the United States or any other state on whose behalf the US could claim to be acting,” Dannenbaum said. “Nor is there any reason to believe such an attack was imminent. The concept of ‘armed attack’ captures the ‘most grave’ forms of the use of armed force. This is widely understood to entail direct injurious or destructive action. Even assuming it can be attributed to the state, drug trafficking does not satisfy that threshold and it has never been recognized as doing so, in part because the harm associated with drug use involves multiple points of intervening agency and is too far attenuated from the act of trafficking itself. The fact that drug trafficking is a serious crime does not entail an authorization to use military force against another state, even if that state’s officials are suspected of being involved in the criminal activity.”
CNN national security correspondent Natasha Bertrand reported on Jan. 3 that “Trump administration officials are internally pointing to a 1989 legal opinion and the subsequent US invasion of Panama as precedent to justify the operation that was carried out in Venezuela.”
That opinion, written by Bill Barr, then an assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel — who later served as U.S. attorney general in Trump’s first term — argues that the president “has the inherent constitutional authority to deploy the FBI to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if those actions contravene customary international law.”
In an article for Just Security, Goodman, founding co-editor-in-chief of Just Security and a law professor at New York University School of Law, argued that the Barr memo is “flawed” and that it reaches “a radical conclusion that cannot withstand serious scrutiny.”
As for a comparison to the U.S. military action to capture General Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1989, the authors of the earlier Just Security article noted several significant differences in that case.
“The United States claimed to be acting by invitation of the rightful Head of State,” the authors wrote. And, they said, “the United States acted after the Panamanian National Assembly declared a state of war against the United States, and after forces under Noriega’s command” had — as noted by President George H.W. Bush at the time– “killed an unarmed American serviceman; wounded another; arrested and brutally beat a third American serviceman; and then brutally interrogated his wife, threatening her with sexual abuse.”
Regardless, experts told us the U.S. veto power would block any potential United Nations consequences, such as sanctions. There are, nonetheless, political implications.
“The United States was one of the principal drafters of the UN Charter and is one of five permanent members of the Security Council, entrusted with ensuring international peace and security,” Bellinger told us. “When the United States blatantly violates the UN Charter, it destroys the global respect it has built over many decades as a nation committed to the rule of law and a force for good and encourages other rogue states like Russia and China to ignore the UN Charter. The United States loses its global credibility to criticize the Russian invasion of Ukraine or a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan when it uses force in violation of the UN Charter based on false justifications.”
Several Democratic lawmakers have also claimed that the operation in Venezuela, without congressional approval, violated domestic law.
“Maduro is a horrible, horrible person, but you don’t treat lawlessness with other lawlessness, and that’s what’s happened here,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a Jan. 4 interview. “They went inside Venezuela, bombed civilian as well as military places, and it’s a violation of the law to do what they did without getting the authorization of Congress.”
Rep. James P. McGovern, the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, made essentially the same argument in a Jan. 3 statement.
“President Trump did not seek congressional authorization for this use of force, and Congress did not grant it. Under our Constitution and the law, that makes this action illegal,” he said.
Hathaway, the director of Yale’s Center for Global Legal Challenges, told the New Yorker that U.S. constitutional law “requires the President to go to Congress to seek authorization before using force against another country.”
Republicans in the Trump administration and in Congress have argued that no congressional authorization was needed.
“This is an operation that did not require prior consent of Congress, prior authorization of Congress,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a Jan. 5 press conference. “It required notification of Congress. It’s well within Article II” of the U.S. Constitution.
Johnson said that he spoke to the president and the secretaries of state and defense “within hours” after the mission commenced. “The first call was from Marco Rubio at about 4 a.m., so they’ve done everything that they were supposed to do. This was an appropriate action,” he said.
The day prior to Johnson’s press conference, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rubio himself defended acting without getting the go-ahead from Congress.
“This was not an action that required congressional approval,” Rubio said to the show’s host, Kristen Welker. “In fact, it couldn’t require congressional approval because this was not an invasion. This is not an extended military operation. This was a very precise operation that involved a couple of hours of action. It was a very delicate operation too. It was one that required all these conditions to be in place at the right time in the right place.”
Rubio said going to Congress beforehand could have led to “leaks” that “would have endangered the mission and gotten people killed.”
Going forward, he said, “we will seek congressional approval for actions that require congressional approval … otherwise they will get congressional notification.”
As we’ve written, Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution assigns the power “To declare War” to Congress. Meanwhile, Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces.
For our June story, which was about whether Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities was legal, Peter Shane, a constitutional law scholar and adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, told us that “there is so much disagreement about how the Constitution should be interpreted with regard to the unilateral presidential deployment of military force.”
He said in an email, “Under the most persuasive reading of the Founding era, the Constitution does not authorize Presidents to deploy military force abroad without advance congressional authorization.” Yet, he said, it has “long been the position” of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel “that history has ratified unilateral presidential deployments of military force as long as (1) the deployment serves ‘sufficiently important national interests,’ as judged by the President, and (2) the deployment does not portend a ‘prolonged and substantial military engagement, typically involving exposure of U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period.'”
Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, had a similar interpretation.
“The Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war, and the records of the Constitutional Convention are pretty clear that the drafters did not want to give one person the power to take the United States into war,” Roosevelt told us for the same story. “However, presidents have done things that count as acts of war under international law without congressional authorization, like the Libya bombings [under then-President Barack Obama], and no one has stopped them, so our practice has departed from the text and original understanding.”
As for notifying Congress of military action, the 1973 War Powers Resolution passed by Congress requires presidents within 48 hours “to report to Congress any introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities,” as the Congressional Research Service has explained.
Once the military action is reported, the resolution “requires that the use of forces must be terminated within 60 to 90 days unless Congress authorizes such use or extends the time period.” It also “requires that the ‘President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing’ U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.’”
Roosevelt previously told us that the resolution doesn’t mean the president “can do what he wants for 48 hours before notifying Congress, or for 60 days even if Congress doesn’t” give its approval. He said, “That’s not consistent with the Constitution and it’s not consistent with the purpose and policy section of the WPA, which says that the intent is to make sure that the President’s power to engage in military action is exercised ‘only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.'”
He explained 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.”
But the Trump administration says that the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela.
“As Secretary Rubio has said, there is no war against Venezuela or its people,” Waltz, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, said in a U.N. Security Council briefing on Jan. 5. “We are not occupying a country. This was a law enforcement operation in furtherance of lawful indictments that have existed for decades. The United States arrested a narcotrafficker who is now going to stand trial in the United States in accordance with the rule of law for the crimes he’s committed against our people for 15 years.”
However, Trump, who also has said “we’re not” at war with Venezuela, has not ruled out sending troops back into the country.
In the end, Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argued that the debate about the legality of unilateral presidential uses of force has little significance.
“Immediately after these operations happen, every time this happens – Libya, Kosovo, Iran, all of these unilateral uses of force without congressional authorization – we immediately jump to the law and commentators immediately say this is illegal, depending on whether they like the war or not, or they defend it as being lawful, and we have this debate about whether it’s lawful or not, and I frankly think it’s kind of a meaningless debate in almost every circumstance,” he said in a Jan. 5 discussion with Bob Bauer, a legal scholar and New York University School of Law professor of practice.
“The issue is, why has Congress given the president this massive military force without constraints? Why does it continue to acquiesce in the president’s use of force? Why isn’t Congress exercising its constitutional prerogatives and constitutional responsibilities to check these things?” Goldsmith asked. “The lawyers tend to flee to the legal arguments. I think the legal arguments in this context are not terribly meaningful and that the focus should be on the politics of this. And the politics are that Congress has let the president get away with it knowingly across administrations, left and right, Democrat and Republican. And the Democrats tend to complain about Republican uses of force and vice versa. But all of this stuff takes place in the rhetoric of law that I think is largely meaningless.”
He said that unilateral use of force by the president is not an issue that has been adjudicated by the courts and he doubts that it will be.
“So, there’s no judicial force to stop that,” he told Bauer. “Only Congress exercising its political prerogatives, perhaps making legal arguments, can check that.”
Schumer said that he and fellow Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Adam Schiff, as well as Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican, will force a Senate vote this week on a war powers resolution that would require congressional approval for further military action in Venezuela.
Many doctors agree with the Food and Drug Administration’s recent decision to remove the black box warnings on at least some forms of hormone therapy used to treat the symptoms of menopause. But in making the announcement, health officials misleadingly suggested that women could take the drugs for long-term benefits to the heart and brain. Menopausal hormone therapy is not currently recommended for those uses.
On Nov. 10, the FDA announced it would be removing the black box warnings for increased risk of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and probable dementia on all hormone treatments for menopause. Such products include a variety of formulations of estrogen, often with another hormone, that work to alleviate symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness, which can be severe in some women.
The warnings were first applied in 2003, following the results of a large randomized controlled trial that was part of the Women’s Health Initiative. This study, funded by the National Institutes of Health to better understand how to prevent disease in older women, was widely misinterpreted as finding that risks of menopausal hormone therapy, or MHT, outweighed benefits for managing menopause symptoms. Use of MHT plummeted.
In the intervening years, it has become clear that certain forms of MHT, such as oral pills that act systemically, or throughout the body, do have some risks, but can be safely used to treat symptoms in most women without risk factors when started within 10 years of menopause. This is when symptoms are most likely anyway. Other forms of MHT, such as vaginal estrogen, pose little if any risk. Menopause is when a woman stops menstruating; a woman is considered postmenopausal once she has gone a year without a period.
Medical groups such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have long recommended MHT after considering an individual’s risks and benefits and have petitioned the FDA to remove the black box warnings for low-dose vaginal estrogen. They do not, however, advocate the use of hormones for overall health when a woman does not have any symptoms, due to a lack of convincing evidence.
In making their black box announcement, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. misleadingly extolled the benefits of MHT in preventing cardiovascular disease and dementia.
“Hormone replacement therapy has been found to reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease and mortality by as much as 50%, Alzheimer’s disease by 35%,” Kennedy said near the beginning of the Nov. 10 press conference announcing the change.
“By a large body of evidence, there are now recognized to be profound long-term health benefits that few people, even physicians, know about,” Makary later said of hormone therapy, calling it “life-saving.”
“What are we doing not offering women this potentially powerful treatment? With few exceptions, there may be no other medication in the modern era that can improve the health outcomes of women on a population level than hormone replacement therapy,” he added.
Kennedy and Makary made similar claims in a variety of subsequent appearances, including Kennedy’s citation of the same figures in a Dec. 2 Cabinet meeting.
Experts told us their statements don’t reflect the full scientific literature on the topic.
“The totality of the data do not support a preventive benefit of hormone therapy for these diseases,” Dr. Nanette Santoro, a menopause researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz, told us. “One must selectively pull out specific numbers from specific studies to come up with a miraculous reduction in risks.”
No guidelines, neither from ACOG, the Menopause Society, the International Menopause Society nor the Endocrine Society, she noted, recommend hormone therapy to prevent cardiovascular disease or dementia.
Makary and Kennedy also downplayed risks of systemic MHT, implying that breast cancer risks are not borne out by the data. This is misleading and does not tell the full story.
“They’ve systematically cherry-picked things that show benefit and that diminish risk,” Dr. Martha Hickey, a menopause clinician and researcher at the University of Melbourne, told us.
“Providers should always have a nuanced conversation about the risks and benefits of systemic hormone therapy with their patients. Each woman is different, and this conversation needs to be tailored to the needs and priorities of each woman,” Rebecca Thurston, a menopause researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who focuses on cardiovascular and neurocognitive health, told us. She emphasized that MHT is highly effective for hot flashes and night sweats and can also prevent menopause-associated bone density declines but is not recommended for the prevention of heart disease and dementia “based on the highest quality science.”
The FDA did not respond to a request for comment.
In touting the benefits of MHT, Makary and Kennedy repeatedly claimed that hormone therapy has been found to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 35% and reduce cognitive decline by 64%. The numbers were also cited in an HHS fact sheet.
Both reflect findings in individual scientific studies, but they are cherry-picked and not representative of the overall literature.
Pauline Maki, a menopause and cognition researcher at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, explained in a series of social media posts that the 35% figure is “misleading and inaccurate in light of what we now understand.” It comes from a 1996 case control study of a single retirement community in Laguna Hills, California.
The study looked at how often women with an Alzheimer’s disease or dementia diagnosis on their death certificate had self-reported using hormone therapy, compared with those who did not have such diagnoses noted. It found that women with Alzheimer’s were less likely to have said they used hormones, with hormone use associated with a 35% lower risk of the disease.
While that might sound pretty good, Maki said, this doesn’t prove that it’s the hormones that made the difference, as other factors associated with hormone use could be driving the result instead.
There are also much larger and more recent case control studies that Makary and Kennedy did not mention. While the cited Laguna Hills study drew from a population of around 9,000 and involved fewer than 1,500 women who died 30 or more years ago, three population-wide case control studies have been published in the past six years, each with 60,000 or more participants.
“When you look at those studies, a very, very different result emerges,” Maki said in a video post. “Far from reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, those studies found zero evidence for a reduction, and in fact, found an elevated risk.”
Maki said that women should not be concerned about increasing their dementia risk if they are using hormones to alleviate menopause symptoms. “But if you use it for primary prevention, particularly long term, there’s no evidence of benefit,” and there could be potential harm, she said.
The second study Kennedy and Makary have cited is a 2005 Danish follow-up study of 343 women who had previously been in a randomized controlled trial and had received hormone therapy or placebo years earlier. Researchers administered a cognitive screening test and found that while there was no difference in the average scores among those who ever took hormones versus those who never did, the subset of women who took hormone therapy for two to three years had a 64% lower risk of testing positive for cognitive impairment.
Maki told us that the study had a better design in terms of exposure to hormone therapy, but was “weak in its measure of cognitive impairment and is weak methodologically as only a subset of women in the original study participated in this follow-up.” She said it was odd to highlight either this paper or the Laguna Hills paper given all the other studies that have been conducted on the subject over the past 20 years.
When randomized controlled studies have been done, they have failed to find that hormone therapy has cognitive benefits in recently postmenopausal women. Four such trials have found no effects — good or bad — on cognition.
One randomized controlled trial — the WHI Memory Study — found that at 18 years of follow-up, women were 26% less likely to die of dementia if they had taken one type of an oral estrogen-only therapy. These women had all had hysterectomies, allowing them to take systemic estrogen without progesterone. (In women with intact uteruses, progesterone or a synthetic form called progestin needs to be added because estrogen on its own can increase the risk of uterine cancer.)
But the absolute benefit was very small, and the authors said the result should be interpreted with “particular caution.” The same trial found earlier that a combined estrogen and progestin therapy more than doubled the risk of probable dementia in postmenopausal women 65 years and older.
Some scientists have hypothesized that the timing of MHT matters, such that hormone therapy might benefit the brain if given early in the menopause transition or before disease sets in — and then shift to being neutral or harmful later. But as the Menopause Society’s 2022 position statement on MHT explains, the concept has not “been definitively supported” in randomized controlled trials.
Based on “good and consistent scientific evidence” — the highest graded recommendations — the society concluded that “[i]n the absence of more definitive findings, hormone therapy is not recommended at any age to prevent or treat a decline in cognitive function or dementia.”
Makary and Kennedy have frequently claimed that hormone therapy dramatically cuts the risk of heart disease, casting it as a clear and definitive finding.
While there is some evidence of a cardiovascular benefit when MHT is started within 10 years of menopause or before the age of 60, this remains a hypothesis that has not yet been confirmed in trials.
“Until we have that next trial that would answer these questions, we can’t make these very large sweeping claims,” Dr. Chrisandra Shufelt, a women’s health internist at the Mayo Clinic in Florida who has studied the impact of hormones on cardiovascular disease, told us.
Both health officials have specifically said that hormone therapy slashes cardiovascular disease risk by 50%. HHS has used the same statistic in its press release and fact sheet.
The study often cited for this, however, is a 1991 review that specified that those findings pertained to oral estrogen-only hormone therapy — the kind given to women without uteruses — and needed to be confirmed in a randomized controlled trial.
Indeed, the review predates findings from the 2002 and 2004 WHI studies, which were specifically done to test whether hormone therapy actually did prevent cardiovascular disease in primarily healthy postmenopausal women.
“There’s observational data and there’s lots of it,” Marcia Stefanick, a WHI investigator and chronic disease prevention researcher at Stanford University, told us, noting that’s why the WHI study was done in the first place. “We know that the women who are using menopausal hormones were very different from the women who weren’t,” she explained, adding that they were “less obese, less likely to smoke, more physically active, more highly educated, less likely to eat high fat diets and have salt in their diet.”
At the time, hormones were commonly prescribed for prevention and were recommended by medical societies for that purpose.
“What piqued our interest in the late 80s and early 90s was that hormone therapy was increasingly being used for other indications — that is, prevention of cardiovascular disease in particular,” Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the study from its inception until his retirement in 2014, told us. He emphasized that he was speaking to us in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the WHI investigators nor his former employer, the NIH.
Surprising many, when the WHI study testing MHT with oral estrogen and progestin was stopped after five years in 2002, it did not identify cardioprotective effects — and in fact the medications appeared to increase risk for the group as a whole. Nor did the oral estrogen-only part of the study find heart benefits when it halted in 2004. (A separate trial known as HERS similarly found no cardiovascular benefit with MHT in women with existing coronary disease, with an increased risk of blood clots, contrary to earlier observational studies.)
When later stratified by age, and after longer follow-up, the WHI results suggested that the cardiovascular risks of hormone therapy are generally lower in younger women closer to menopause and higher in older women starting therapy 10 years or more after menopause. These risks dissipated over time, and were more evident in women taking combined therapy. For younger women 50 through 59 years of age taking estrogen alone after 13 years of follow-up, the study pointed to a reduced risk of heart attack and coronary heart disease.
“If you look at the estrogen and progestin trial, there’s no benefit for younger women at any point for anything,” Stefanick noted. “It’s only in the estrogen-only trial, and those are women who had a hysterectomy.”
In trying to understand why the observational studies diverged from the trial data, these subanalyses, combined with other studies, including in monkeys, led to the so-called “timing hypothesis.” It proposes that estrogen has beneficial effects on the heart if given early and before plaques have formed in arteries, but is neutral or can be harmful later in life when women have established plaques.
As several guidelines document, there is wide agreement that timing affects the cardiovascular risk of hormone therapy — and that oral MHT is safe in most younger postmenopausal women who have bothersome symptoms. But there is far less agreement that this means MHT is preventing cardiovascular events in these women and that hormones should be given for the purpose of preventing heart disease.
Yet another WHI subanalysis published this year found that among the subset of younger women with moderate or severe hot flashes and night sweats in the trials, both estrogen-alone and combined MHT reduced symptoms without changing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk. But for postmenopausal women age 70 and older with these symptoms, that risk was increased in both cases.
The WHI studies tested just one dosage of a particular oral estrogen and progestin, and it is unclear if the results apply to other dosages, types or modes of delivery. While Makary and others have emphasized that newer products may have reduced risk, by the same token, it hasn’t been shown that they would necessarily show any cardiovascular disease benefit.
“Most of us do believe it’s safer, but being safe is not the same as being beneficial,” Stefanick said, speaking of transdermal estrogen, a systemic product that is widely considered safer for the heart than oral formulations since it bypasses the liver. She added that she was not aware of any evidence of transdermal formulations showing heart disease benefits.
Makary has also referenced a 48% decline in fatal heart attacks with MHT, pointing in the press conference to a review published in Circulation. The 2023 review, which Shufelt co-wrote, was describing a subgroup finding in a 2015 Cochrane systematic review. It notably did not back the use of hormones to prevent heart attacks, and stated that it is “appropriate that no medical societies” recommend MHT for that purpose.
While the overall finding of the Cochrane review was that MHT did not protect against mortality or cardiovascular disease, when broken down by timing of therapy, a subanalysis found there was a 30% risk reduction of death from any cause and a 48% reduced risk of coronary heart disease (defined as cardiovascular deaths and nonfatal heart attacks) in women starting hormone therapy less than 10 years after menopause.
These results were largely driven by the three largest trials, Shufelt told us, and were only possible because the analysis pooled results from studies using different types of MHT, including both oral estrogen alone and combined therapy. One of the included trials is a 2012 Danish study of around 1,000 participants that was not blinded and did not use a placebo. The Cochrane review itself notes that if the Danish study is not included, the findings would not be statistically significant (see table 3). Moreover, the review found an increased risk of blood clots in veins in the younger subgroup — a fact Makary and Kennedy never mention.
The authors of the Cochrane review said in a commentary that their analysis of younger participants “should be interpreted with caution due to its post hoc nature and is therefore not adequate to make recommendations for its use to prevent cardiovascular disease in this population.”
In addition to studies looking at health outcomes, there are two smaller randomized controlled trials that have assessed whether there might be cardiovascular benefits of MHT when given to younger postmenopausal women. A 2014 study using a lower dose of estrogen failed to find any beneficial effect on atherosclerosis progression after four years.
A 2016 trial of around 650 participants found that in women within six years of menopause, MHT did appear to stall the thickening of the carotid artery. However, there was no impact on two other secondary measures of coronary atherosclerosis.
Shufelt said that it is not clear that the observed slowing of artery thickening is indicative of a cardioprotective effect. Typically, the thickness is only concerning for preclinical heart disease if it reaches a certain level, and the women still had normal thicknesses, she said. She likened the study results to slightly lowering a person’s blood pressure from an already normal pressure.
Shufelt said the studies were important because they showed that hormone therapy doesn’t increase risk in these populations, but “we’re not there yet to say that it prevents disease.”
Kennedy and Makary both have emphasized that the WHI results were misinterpreted, and use of MHT subsequently fell. This narrative is broadly correct, but the officials misled on exactly how the study was misinterpreted, downplaying statistically significant findings on breast cancer risk.
The 2002 WHI study was “not statistically significant, but it triggered a media frenzy and led to the FDA applying unscientific black box warnings to all hormone replacement therapy products in 2003,” Kennedy said during the Nov. 10 press conference.
Makary also emphasized that the WHI breast cancer results were not statistically significant. “If we don’t have statistics, then we don’t have science,” he said.
Rossouw, the former WHI project officer, called this portrayal of breast cancer risk and WHI “just dead wrong.”
The WHI was stopped around three years early in 2002 after an independent board of researchers saw that breast cancer risk had reached a level that they had decided in advance would be unacceptable. Clinical trials are required to have such a board of safety monitors. The data also showed risks of blood clots and strokes, while failing, as we’ve said, to substantiate the idea that hormone therapy could prevent cardiovascular disease. The WHI researchers concluded that, given its overall balance of risks and benefits, MHT could not be recommended to prevent chronic disease and that it would not be ethical to continue the trial.
Rossouw was the first author of the 2002 WHI paper released in conjunction with the termination of the study. This is the publication Makary and Kennedy were referring to when they cited breast cancer results that were not statistically significant. But Rossouw explained that these data were preliminary. The women stopped their treatments under the study protocol after a median of 5.6 years. The researchers published their 2002 paper based on the 5.2 years of data available at the time. “There’s a lag,” he explained. “When you stop a trial early, there’s some data that are in process that you have not yet analyzed.”
The researchers were subsequently able to analyze the data collected in the final months of the trial. “When we did the full analysis and published those data, the breast cancer risk in the estrogen-progestin trial was statistically significant,” he said. The researchers wrote in a 2003 study that they had found a 24% increase in breast cancer cases in women who were randomly assigned to receive the combined hormonal therapy.
Furthermore, as the researchers continued to follow the women for years after the trial ended, they repeatedly found a statistically significant increased risk of breast cancer for combined MHT, both at 13 years and 20 years of follow-up. The WHI ultimately showed a decreased risk of breast cancer in women who took estrogen-only therapy.
The WHI investigators wrote in a Nov. 12 response to the FDA that “combination estrogen plus progestin increased the risk of breast cancer irrespective of age and this risk became more significant over time in the trial and with longer duration of follow-up.”
Some observational studies also have found an increased risk of breast cancer associated with use of MHT. One meta-analysis published in 2019 found that taking MHT was associated with increased risk of breast cancer even among people who took it between one and four years, with increasing risk the longer people took the therapy.
Hickey called the evidence showing an increased risk for breast cancer from combined MHT “strong and consistent.” She added that it makes mechanistic sense that hormone therapy might have some impact on breast cancer. “I think with breast cancer, there’s a very strong biological mechanism by which menopausal hormone therapy increases the growth of existing breast cancers and possibly the initiation of new breast cancers,” she said.
In general, practice guidelines support the use of MHT for troublesome menopausal symptoms while urging doctors to inform patients about possible risks and benefits.
“Women should be counseled about the risk of breast cancer with hormone therapy, putting the data into perspective, with risk similar to that of modifiable risk factors such as two daily alcoholic beverages, obesity, and low physical activity,” the Menopause Society advises doctors, for example.
“Hormone therapy does confer some risk, and so what we don’t want to do is overgeneralize or underestimate that risk, because it potentially could be harmful to some people,” Dr. Monica Christmas, director of the menopause program at University of Chicago Medicine and associate medical director of the Menopause Society, told us.
People who have already been diagnosed with breast cancer are typically recommended to avoid systemic MHT, according to the group’s guidelines, although it may be an option in specific cases. Vaginal estrogen, which is applied topically, is an option for those experiencing vaginal symptoms.
What some people arguably misinterpreted were the implications of the WHI results for treating menopausal symptoms.
The 2002 study notably did not say that the trial showed that the risks of MHT outweighed its benefits when used to treat troublesome hot flashes and night sweats that come with menopause. Investigators, including Rossouw, stated this at the time.
However, this nuance sometimes was lost as study authors, communications officers, journalists, doctors and the lay public interpreted and communicated the WHI results. Many left with the impression that the researchers had found that the risks of MHT outweighed the benefits in general, and not just for preventing chronic disease. In 2001-2002, nearly 39% of women between ages 52 and 65 used MHT. As of 2017-2020, fewer than 5% did.
Makary also dismissed the WHI data by saying that it only applied to an older progestin. “Today, hormone therapy is available in formulations that do not appear to carry the same increased risk of blood clots or breast cancer that was seen in earlier studies,” he wrote in a Nov. 10 viewpoint published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There is some support for this idea, but this conclusion is not certain.
The Menopause Society guidelines say that some “but not all” of the available data suggest a lower breast cancer risk from certain hormones compared with the type tested in the WHI study. There are no data from randomized trials to tease apart whether breast cancer risks vary by hormone type.
For months, President Donald Trump or members of his administration have used federal data showing a large increase in employment for U.S.-born workers and a decrease in employment among foreign-born workers to claim that “all net job creation” in his second term has been for citizens. And for months, multiple economists and labor experts have said that officials should not do that because these specific figures are misleading.
The figures can mislead because the reported levels of native- and foreign-born workers are influenced by predetermined population estimates for 2025 that the Census Bureau calculated in 2024.
In an August post on Substack, Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote that “the apparent boom” in employment of workers born in America “is just a statistical artifact” attributable to the way the population and employment estimates are determined.
“If someone is reporting the increased native-born employment, they are ignoring warnings by the Census Bureau not to do that,” he told us in an interview.
But that’s exactly what Trump and administration officials have done repeatedly.
“Before I entered office, 100% of all new net jobs were going to migrant workers,” Trump said during Dec. 9 remarks in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, for example. “Think of that, 100% of new jobs were going to migrants. These are government numbers, by the way. These are not Trump numbers. These are government numbers because they say, ‘Well, did Trump come up with these numbers?’ No, I didn’t … Migrant workers and illegal aliens got 100%. But since I took office, 100% of all net job creation has gone to American citizens.”
He then repeated a version of the claim about net job growth for only U.S. citizens in his prime-time address to the nation on Dec. 17.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics — touted in a Dec. 16 post on the White House website — do show that this year native-born employment increased by almost 2.7 million from January to November. On the other hand, employment for foreign-born individuals decreased by 972,000 in that period.
Trump is wrong to use foreign-born employment to mean “migrant workers and illegal aliens.” BLS says the foreign-born category includes “legally-admitted immigrants,” some of whom may have since become citizens, “refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants.”
In addition, during Joe Biden’s presidency, the data show an increase of 7.5 million in native-born employment, more than the 6.5 million increase in foreign-born employment.
BLS publishes this employment data, which is based in part on its Current Population Survey, or CPS, a monthly survey of 60,000 households conducted by the Census Bureau for BLS. But the figures shouldn’t be used to make such comparisons, some experts have said.
One of those experts, Kolko, who is also a former undersecretary for economic affairs at the Department of Commerce during the Biden administration, explained the reasons why the data are questionable in his August post. He said that Trump administration officials and others who had pointed to the BLS data to claim that there had been a massive increase in native-born employment were guilty of committing a “multiple-count data felony.”
At the time, the official figures showed that native-born employment was up 2.5 million through Trump’s first six months back in office.
“The statistical agencies explicitly warn that these data” from the CPS “are not suitable for sizing and trending the foreign-born and native-born populations,” Kolko said. He pointed to a September 2024 working paper by Census Bureau staff that said the bureau, because of the survey’s small sample size, “routinely cautions against using the CPS to estimate the size and the geographic distribution of the foreign-born population when other data are available.”
“In fact,” Kolko wrote, “the apparent boom in native-born employment is just a statistical artifact, arising from arcane rules about how the data are constructed and population levels are determined.”
Those arcane rules, he told us in an interview, involve the household survey and predetermined population estimates for 2025 that the Census Bureau calculated in 2024. Those “population controls,” as he referred to them, significantly influence the reported totals for native- and foreign-born workers.
“The way the CPS works, the foreign-born and native-born population add up to a predetermined forecast that was made last year,” he said by phone. “So, a big decline in the reported foreign-born population” based on the survey “is going to be offset by a reported increase in the native-born population.”
As an extreme example, Kolko wrote in August that if the entire foreign-born population vanished from the U.S., the CPS would automatically report that the native-born population increased by millions of people to equal the predetermined estimate of the total population.
And when the estimated native-born population increases, so does the estimated number of U.S.-born workers, as Ben Zipperer, senior economist for the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, explained in a September article.
Dean Baker, the founder and senior economist for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, another left of center group, said in a Dec. 1 analysis that there are “three obvious reasons why the CPS would show fewer foreign-born workers” in 2025.
One reason, he wrote, “is that some number of immigrants have actually left the country,” either leaving on their own or being deported. Another reason is that more immigrants, even ones in the country legally, may be reluctant and not respond to the survey. Finally, “immigrants may not answer the survey accurately,” meaning that some foreign-born residents may say they were born in the U.S. when they were not, he said.
Baker noted that BLS data show that while the reported foreign-born population 16 and older has declined since last year, the native-born population has increased by more than 5 million — a figure that he suggested is not believable. That is how the Trump administration gets “the explosion in employment for the native-born they are boasting about,” he said.
Kolko also said the reported increase in the native-born population is not realistic.
“The rate of immigration is slower this year, and it’s possible that the foreign-born population has declined,” he told us. “Immigration policy can cause the foreign-born population to grow faster or more slowly than forecast. But, in contrast, the native-born population typically grows at a predictable rate, because that’s based on fertility rates, the age distribution and mortality rates. So, aside from something like a pandemic, the native-born population typically doesn’t grow faster or slower than expected.”
“That’s why it is not plausible for the native-born population to jump the way it was reported in the CPS, and the way the CPS is constructed explains why we see this increase,” Kolko said.
Notably, data from a different monthly BLS survey of businesses, called the Current Employment Statistics, or CES, show that total U.S. employment increased by just 499,000 workers, on net, from January to November. That’s more than 1 million fewer net jobs added than the estimated increase of almost 1.7 million according to the CPS, which is the only survey of the two that breaks down native-born and foreign-born employment.
“We might expect a difference, since these are from different surveys (native/foreign from the CPS, total jobs from CES), but a difference of 1 million jobs in just 10 months is pretty big!” Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, wrote in a Dec. 17 blog post.
We reached out to the White House about Trump’s claims, but didn’t receive a response.
Rather than employment levels, Kolko told us to look at the reported unemployment rates, as he also suggested in his August piece.
“The unemployment rate is the best information the CPS offers about the native born and the foreign born. Ignore the levels of population and employment: they mislead,” he wrote.
David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, also told us to focus on the unemployment rate, because he said that is what the CPS was really designed to determine.
“The survey is meant not to establish how many people are in the United States, or how many people are in any subcategory. It’s meant to figure out what the people in the United States are doing,” he said. “Are they working? Are they not? Are they retired? Are they in school? That’s what the survey is supposed to do, and it’s supposed to look at the rate at which these things are happening. … That’s where the survey data is useful.”
The most recent BLS data show that the unemployment rate for the native-born population has not improved; it was 4.3% in November, the same as it was in January. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for the foreign-born population was 4.4% last month, down from 4.6% at the beginning of the year.
Bier said the unemployment rate is a more reliable statistic because it’s not dependent on the number of people in the country.
“It’s really dependent on the number of people surveyed. And if you survey enough people, you’re going to get pretty close to the actual distribution of what those people are doing,” he said.
Kolko told us that the BLS only publishes the native-born and foreign-born employment levels to be transparent about the data that underlie the calculation of the unemployment rate. But the rates ultimately are not affected by the population controls in the CPS, he said, “so it is fine to look at the native-born unemployment rate and the foreign-born unemployment rate.”
In a Dec. 17 post on X, Kolko again advised the public: “Do not look at native-born LEVELS of anything — employment, unemployment, labor force, or population. These stats may be official but they are meaningless.”
President Donald Trump and former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg have sparred over the condition of the air traffic control system, which is complex and carries a history of planned upgrades and overhauls that stretches back decades.
Trump has promised since he took office to update the system and, in December, awarded a contract with an initial $12.5 billion payment to Peraton to deliver on the Brand New Air Traffic Control System plan that he announced in May.
As he has touted his plan, Trump has also cast blame on the Biden administration for letting the system deteriorate. For example, the president referred to Buttigieg on Nov. 10, saying, “he spent billions of dollars trying to patch together our air traffic control system, which was a conglomeration of all different systems in all different cities. He spent — they had hundreds of companies working on it and they were spending billions of dollars. And when they turned it on, it didn’t work, it didn’t even work a little bit. That’s why you had a helicopter crashing into an airplane.”
Trump has made some version of this claim multiple times this year.
Buttigieg responded on Nov. 10 that the president’s claim was “false and confusing” and that the Biden administration had begun “a long-term communications fix that is still underway that he is now passing off as his idea.”
Neither one of their claims is quite right.
It’s true that the Trump administration has devoted more funding to upgrading the system than the Biden administration did, but experts also told us that much of Trump’s plan is an extension of a project that began in 2003 and continued under Biden.
We’ll explain what the state of the air traffic control system is and what each administration proposed to do about it.
As for Trump’s suggestion that Biden-era projects were responsible for the midair collision between a U.S. Army helicopter and a passenger plane on Jan. 29, that’s not supported by the National Transportation Safety Board investigation so far. The investigation is still ongoing, but the initial report published on March 7 cited a yearslong problem with helicopters and planes being too close to each other. “Existing separation distances between helicopter traffic operating on Route 4 and aircraft landing on runway 33 are insufficient and pose an intolerable risk to aviation safety by increasing the chances of a midair collision,” the report said.
The U.S. air traffic control system is comprised of more than 400 towers across the country that shuttle millions of passengers to and from the nation’s airports every day.
“This is an incredibly complex system,” Lance Sherry, director of the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research at the College of Engineering and Computing at George Mason University, told us in a phone interview.
“You can’t turn this off and start over,” he said of updating the system. “You’ve got to change the tires while it’s going 100 miles per hour on the highway.”
The system is a network that broadly involves communications from the ground to aircraft in the sky — which requires each airline to equip planes with compatible technology — and management of air traffic flow. Communications and navigation are done by both radio and satellite-based technology.
“[M]odernization has long been plagued by delays, cost overruns and under-delivery of promised benefits,” John Strong, a professor at the College of William & Mary who serves on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on air traffic control, told us.
He gave an overview of efforts starting in 1984, when IBM led the implementation of the Advanced Automation System, which had originally been proposed to cost $2.5 billion but ended up costing more than twice that when it was restructured and largely cancelled 10 years later without having been completed.
Then, in 2003, the Federal Aviation Administration began what Strong called “[t]he most ambitious recent project” — the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen. Among its many components was the goal of shifting from radar-based to satellite-based technology by 2025. “This included important applications in approach control to airports (for example, curved merging approaches rather than stacking up in a line in the sky) and moving from towers using paper flight data strips to electronic ones,” Strong said. “The technologies were rolled out to a limited number of airports.”
A September report by the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General said that the FAA had spent about $15 billion by the end of 2024 to deliver “new capabilities and benefits,” but ultimately fell short, concluding that “FAA’s efforts have not delivered the vision of a transformed and modernized air traffic system.”
“So the FAA has a long history of problems that extended from the George W. Bush administration, through Obama, Trump I, and Biden,” Strong said.
But technology, alone, is only one part of the picture, Sherry said. “The way to improve the system is to better manage the flow,” he said.
The flow of air traffic can be managed by changing the number or direction of runways at an airport or by adjusting the flight paths into the airport.
“For sure, you don’t want the sector controller using an old system, but, at the end of the day, that’s not where the bottlenecks are,” Sherry said, the bottlenecks are in the flow.
There are other factors, too, such as staffing shortages. While the number of flights has increased by about 10% over the last decade, the number of air traffic controllers has decreased by about 6%, according to a December report from the Government Accountability Office.
As we said, in May, the Trump administration issued a proposal “to build a brand new, state-of-the-art air traffic control system that will be the envy of the world,” according to a press release. The initial contract for that project was awarded in December to Peraton, a security and technology company.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that passed in July provided $12.5 billion for the project, which Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said is expected to total $31.5 billion and be finished by the end of 2028.
But experts have characterized the plan as more of an extension of NextGen than a completely unique plan to overhaul the air traffic control system.
“FAA will continue to deploy NextGen systems beyond 2025 and other key capabilities beyond 2030,” the GAO said in its September report reviewing its oversight of the NextGen program. “Furthermore, the Secretary of Transportation recently announced a $31.5 billion plan for FAA to build the Brand New Air Traffic Control System, a state-of-the-art system that will replace core infrastructure including automation, communication, surveillance, and facilities. These plans include accelerating deployment of several key NextGen programs to be complete by 2028.”
A list of projects for the initial contract issued by the FAA on Dec. 4 shows technology and hardware upgrades, such as new radios, some updated radar systems, and additional weather-related systems.
“Everything listed there is some equipment located at some facility in the air traffic control system,” Sherry said. “It’s not to say those things aren’t necessary, but it’s a bottom up approach — it looks like a list of things people have wanted.”
The existing equipment has some limitations — some of it is old and unreliable, he said. “So, all of that needs to be upgraded. And that’s what’s been released by the FAA. But it would be nice to take this opportunity to update the principles, not just the technology,” Sherry said.
Strong told us something similar. “What is being promoted now [is] quite a step change and well beyond the incrementalism in recent years. That said, I think it mainly is modernization of facilities and equipment, but not a fundamental rethinking of how the ATC system might operate, how it should be governed, operated, and funded,” he said. “I do think the current Trump admin proposal will be a major improvement – if it can be completed on time and on budget. But both the timeline and past experience makes me withhold judgment at this point.”
The Brand New Air Traffic Control System, or BNACTS, is going to finish off what NextGen never got to do, Sherry said.
For example, as described in the GAO report, the NextGen plan had envisioned installing a tool that would help to more efficiently move planes between gates and runways called a Terminal Flight Data Manager program, or TFDM, at 89 airports. The first one was deployed in 2025, but the plan reduced the total number of airports to 49 and delayed the rollout for those airports to 2030.
“However, as part of the Brand New Air Traffic Control System, FAA now plans to deploy TFDM to all 89 planned sites,” the report said, and, indeed, the TFDM system is included in the BNACTS plan.
“It’s an extension of NextGen,” Sherry concluded of BNACTS.
The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provided $5 billion specifically for air traffic control improvements — $1 billion per year for five years.
Of the funding for air traffic control, $3 billion was spent by the end of fiscal year 2024, Strong said. About a third of that was spent on tower replacements and upgrades, largely in secondary places, such as Grand Junction, Colorado; Missoula, Montana; Wheeling, West Virginia.
“The remaining $1.9b was allocated across updating power and communications systems (such as the one at Newark and Philadelphia which caused all the problems in 2024 and earlier this year), navigation/weather/tracking equipment, tower approach and departure facilities, long range radar and enroute flight centers,” Strong said.
Another $284 million was used to fund a surge in controller hiring to begin to address the shortfall in the number of controllers, Strong said. “This was an important down payment on staffing shortages.”
Katie Thomson, who served as deputy administrator for the FAA during the Biden administration, noted the $5 billion included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, too, when we asked her about the competing claims from Trump and Buttigieg.
She also noted a 15-year contract that was given to Verizon in 2023 to provide faster and more secure communications called the FAA Enterprise Network Services Program, or FENS, and the budget proposal for fiscal year 2025 for facility replacement and modernization, or FRRM, that would have spent $9 billion over five years to replace some facilities and modernize radar systems, although Congress didn’t allocate those funds during the Biden administration.
“The current efforts to build a ‘Brand New Air Traffic Control System’ are derivative of the FENS contract and the FRRM proposal – both initiated by the Biden Administration,” Thomson told us in an email.
We reached out to Buttigieg to ask what he was referring to when he said that Trump was “passing off as his idea” a Biden era plan, but we didn’t hear back.
“My assessment is that the failure of [air traffic control] modernization predates the Biden administration,” Strong said. “However, the funding during the Biden administration was mostly carrying on with plans that were inadequate in both scope and funding. The Infrastructure bill provided very little funding for [air traffic control] (in relative terms) and much of it was to deal with immediate problems (staffing, equipment breakdowns, etc.)”
One of Trump’s frequently repeated claims is about the use of copper wire, as compared to fiber optic cable, for air traffic communications systems.
For example, Trump said while visiting Qatar in May, “They wasted billions of dollars on trying to hook up air systems to copper and they tried to hook up copper to glass.”
The White House didn’t respond to specific questions about several of the president’s claims, but a spokesperson did point to the highly publicized issue at the Newark Liberty International Airport this spring, when there were at least three outages of air traffic communications equipment for up to 90 seconds. Some lawmakers said outages were due to a “fried” copper wire.
“The FAA has multiple communications systems including copper wire and fiber, as well as some wireless,” Strong told us, and those systems are patched into one another.
Sherry considers references to copper wire as a euphemism for old infrastructure, like a landline phone. Part of the NextGen plan was to upgrade air traffic control systems to optical cable, which has better speed, accuracy and reliability, he said.
We asked the FAA how much of the older wire had been replaced across the system, but we didn’t get a response.
Echoing a longstanding anti-vaccine trope, President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the American vaccine schedule “long required” babies to get “far more” vaccines than are given in “any other” country, and he directed health officials to better “align” practices with those of other countries. The recommended schedule in the U.S. is quite similar to that of other high-income nations, and it isn’t a federal mandate.
Moreover, there are important country-specific differences, such as health care systems, that can explain why vaccine schedules differ around the world. There is no evidence that the existing U.S. vaccine schedule is harmful to children.
Trump’s directive came in a Dec. 5 memo, which told the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to “review best practices from peer, developed countries” and consider updating the childhood vaccine schedule to “align” it with countries that give fewer vaccinations.
Indeed, multiple news outlets have recently reported that the Department of Health and Human Services is considering changing the U.S. vaccine schedule to match or nearly match that of Denmark, which recommends vaccination against an unusually low number of diseases. Some outlets reported that a canceled Dec. 19 press conference was set to announce this news. (An HHS spokesperson told reporters that the accounts about the topic of the press conference and planned changes were “pure speculation.”)
Update, Jan. 6, 2026: On Jan. 5, Acting Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Jim O’Neill signed a memorandum that reduced the number of diseases targeted in the childhood vaccine schedule for all children to 11, just one more than Denmark’s schedule. A year ago, the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule had universal recommendations targeting 17 diseases. Officials justified the decision — which circumvented the normal process for changing vaccine recommendations — by comparing the U.S. vaccine schedule to those of other nations.
Explaining the rationale for his directive in a Dec. 5 post on Truth Social, Trump exaggerated the number of vaccines given to American babies.
“The American Childhood Vaccine Schedule long required 72 ‘jabs,’ for perfectly healthy babies, far more than any other Country in the World, and far more than is necessary,” Trump said in the post. In the past, he has incorrectly claimed that babies get “80 different vaccines” all at once.
It is difficult to give a single number for how many shots children receive in the U.S., but babies do not get 72 vaccines. As of early 2025, a child by age 2 was routinely recommended to get around 30 vaccine doses that protected against 15 diseases. Many of the doses are given in combination vaccines, however, so the number of shots given is typically lower. By age 18, the total number of doses could reach into the 70s, but only if including seasonal influenza and COVID-19 vaccines for every year.
“Getting to an exact number is difficult, given the flexibility in how vaccine doses are administered, but by any measure, any number that reaches the 50s or 60s, let alone 70s, invariably includes annual influenza vaccines and COVID-19 vaccines from birth through age 18,” Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health with expertise in vaccine policy, told us.
The CDC recommends, but doesn’t require, vaccines on the schedule, which influences what insurance policies and federal vaccination programs will cover. Vaccine mandates for school or day-care attendance are set by states, and there are exemptions.
Trump’s claim is similar to one made in a Food and Drug Administration presentation given earlier on Dec. 5 during the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ meeting. Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, the new chief of the FDA’s drug division and ex-officio ACIP member for the agency, said that as of early 2025, the U.S. was “really an international outlier in giving 72 doses of vaccines.” She contrasted the total with those of four other countries, including Denmark. Høeg’s counting choices, however, served to inflate U.S. numbers while minimizing those of other nations.
Since June, when HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed all the committee members and installed new ones, ACIP has departed from its normal evidence-based processes and weakened some vaccine recommendations.
Exaggerations notwithstanding, these claims assume that recommending more vaccines for children is a bad thing. In fact, vaccines were added over time to the U.S schedule through an evidence-based process, with the goal of protecting children against more diseases. And even as the schedule has grown, the total number of antigens — the proteins or sugars in vaccines that stimulate an immune response — remains lower today than a century ago.
“More vaccines is actually a good thing,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at the University of Colorado Anschutz, told us, adding that vaccines on the schedule are studied for safety and effectiveness and “the actual number is not an issue.” O’Leary is chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases. The AAP is a nonprofit membership group representing pediatricians. This year, for the first time in decades, the AAP issued different vaccine recommendations than the CDC.
Høeg and Trump are not alone in giving high estimates of U.S. childhood vaccine totals. This is a common strategy long used by anti-vaccine advocates to imply that the U.S. vaccine schedule has grown at an alarming pace.
It is challenging to come up with a single number of vaccines universally recommended in each country, as children can get protection against the same diseases using different combinations of vaccines. The reality, however, is that countries’ vaccine schedules are fairly similar, which becomes more apparent when looking at the number of diseases targeted.
“The core set of diseases for which vaccines are used is very similar across high income countries,” Dr. Andrew Pollard, a pediatrician and director of the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, told us. “However, there is some variation based on differences in disease burden and the way in which the health system works.” For example, he said, some countries place more emphasis on cost-effectiveness than others.
As of early 2025, the U.S. had universal recommendations targeting 17 diseases in childhood and adolescence, including the 15 targeted in early childhood plus meningococcal and human papillomavirus vaccines recommended at older ages. Again, there is some ambiguity in counting how many diseases a vaccine schedule targets and in deciding which nations are “peer, developed countries.” But looking at data on the 31 nations that are both members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and classified by the International Monetary Fund as “advanced economies,” 17 is just a few more diseases targeted than the median of 14, according to our analysis. (We did not count infant immunizations with antibody products that protect against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, in our totals, as these are not vaccines. Countries vary in whether they have adopted maternal vaccination, infant immunization or — as in the case of the U.S. — flexibility in choosing either.)
In recent months, the U.S. has walked back universal recommendations for hepatitis B and COVID-19 vaccination for children. That brings the current U.S. total down to 15.
Trump’s memo and Høeg’s presentation did include comparisons of the number of diseases targeted by Japan, Denmark, Germany and, in Høeg’s case, the U.K. But they did not place these countries in a larger context of high-income nations.
“The U.S. has a robust set of vaccine recommendations, and that reflects the priority on using the tools that are available to prevent illness and death, particularly in children, but the differences between the U.S. and peer countries have been overstated,” Schwartz said.
“The real outlier in this conversation appears to be Denmark,” he added.
Denmark is one of just three OECD advanced economy nations to not universally recommend the hepatitis B vaccine. It is also in the minority in not recommending vaccines against rotavirus, meningococcal disease or chickenpox. The U.S., on the other hand, is one of the few high-income nations to recommend vaccination against hepatitis A or to continue recommending universal COVID-19 vaccination until recently.
There is some truth to the idea that the U.S. vaccine schedule recommends a relatively high number of doses. However, anti-vaccine advocates often justify dramatically high numbers of doses compared with other countries by using misleading methods of counting.
In reality, a person could complete the U.S. childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule as of early 2025 while receiving less than two dozen shots and oral vaccines, not including flu and COVID-19 vaccines.
Høeg acknowledged during her presentation that in arriving at a count of 72 doses, she had counted “the yearly influenza vaccine,” but she omitted context on other countries’ flu vaccine recommendations.
The U.S. does stand out somewhat in having a longstanding universal recommendation for seasonal flu shots, including for children age 6 months and older. The universal childhood flu vaccine recommendations were progressively adopted in the U.S. in the 2000s, expanding to cover kids up through age 18 before the 2008-2009 flu season.
However, the U.S. is not alone in recommending childhood flu vaccination. In Europe, for example, flu vaccination recommendations for children have become more common in recent years, according to a November 2025 report from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. During last year’s flu season, six of the 30 European countries analyzed had universal recommendations throughout childhood beginning at 6 months, and another 13 countries had universal recommendations for certain age groups. (The remaining countries — including Denmark and Germany — recommended the vaccines to children with certain risk factors.) In our analysis of OECD countries with advanced economies, 22 out of 31 nations recommended universal flu vaccination for at least some portion of childhood.
In her dose comparisons, Høeg did not highlight vaccine recommendations from any countries that universally recommend these annual vaccines throughout childhood. Examples of these countries include Austria, New Zealand and Canada.
In her dose count for the U.K., which she reported as 17, Høeg appeared to omit annual flu vaccines, which are recommended every year from age 2 until around age 15.
The conclusion that the U.S. vaccine schedule ever included 72 doses also relies on counting yearly COVID-19 vaccines through age 18. But this relies on a counterfactual scenario in which annual shots were recommended for kids over an entire childhood. In the end, the annual doses were universally recommended starting at age 6 months for just over three years.
The U.S. was relatively slow among nations to drop its universal recommendation for COVID-19 vaccination in children. But even before Kennedy reconstituted the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, the group had been moving toward a risk- and age-based approach to COVID-19 vaccinations.
This year, the AAP adopted recommendations similar to what the former advisory committee had been considering, urging kids under 2 to get vaccinated but backing away from a universal recommendation for all children. Under Kennedy, the CDC decided to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for all Americans 6 months and older under shared clinical decision-making. This means that people can discuss whether they need the vaccines with health care providers and get coverage for them if desired, but the vaccines are no longer universally advised.
Another way anti-vaccine advocates inflate U.S. dose counts is by individually counting vaccines commonly given as a combination shot. The relative flexibility of the U.S. schedule and the availability of a variety of vaccines allows people to construct theoretical scenarios involving high numbers of doses.
In arriving at her count of 72 vaccine doses in the U.S. schedule, Høeg said on a slide in her ACIP presentation that she had counted vaccines against polio, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), and diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP) separately. These individual vaccines are available, but most babies get some doses in combination shots, experts told us.
“It would be highly unusual, if not unheard of, for a child to receive each vaccine separately,” Dr. Michelle Fiscus, a pediatrician and chief medical officer of the Association of Immunization Managers, told us, referring to the combination vaccines.
Meanwhile, countries like Denmark and the U.K. have less flexible schedules that include specific combination shots. In calculating her low totals of 11 and 17 doses in these countries, respectively, Høeg appeared to count combination shots as only single doses, despite not always doing this in the U.S. tally.
She justified this by saying that “part of the difference” between the U.S. and other countries is that the U.S. can give individual vaccines, “whereas Europe tends to give combination vaccines in those circumstances.”
The FDA did not reply to a request for more information on how Høeg calculated her figures.
Trump’s directive to consider emulating vaccine schedules from other nations also glosses over major differences between countries that shape their recommendations.
Countries are, of course, more likely to recommend vaccinations against diseases if they are common in the area. For example, the U.S. does not vaccinate routinely against “tuberculosis, typhoid, yellow fever, malaria, meningococcal disease (for infants), or dengue, while these are routinely recommended in other countries,” an AAP fact sheet said.
Other factors include those related to a country’s health system, such as availability of specific vaccines or combination vaccines, the timing of routine health visits and cost-effectiveness analyses, the fact sheet said.
“We’re the most well resourced country in the world, and so sometimes we adopt things earlier, because some other countries are more cost-conscious,” O’Leary said. “But it’s not that they’re concerned about safety issues.”
In some cases, the difference between the U.S. and other countries is not in whether vaccination is recommended at all, but in whether it is recommended universally.
For example, as we have previously written, Denmark takes a risk-based approach to hepatitis B vaccination that relies on testing pregnant women for the disease and tracking at-risk babies. ACIP members cited policies in other countries to justify recently changing the U.S. approach to a risk-based one, despite objections from experts who said that the U.S. had an inferior rate of screening and follow-up.
“What we know, at least in the U.S., is that risk-based approaches don’t work,” O’Leary said. “That’s been shown over and over again.” These risk-based approaches might work better in countries with universal health care systems and electronic health records that track people across their entire course of life, he said.
Høeg did mention cost and other practical considerations as a factor on some slides, but she also held up Denmark’s evidence-based practices as an example while sharing safety concerns about vaccines.
Denmark has a “research culture where they really rely on randomized control trials, extensive documentation about the decision-making, about which vaccines they do and don’t recommend,” she said. But experts rejected the implication that the U.S. recommendations vary from those in Denmark due to differences in transparency and rigor of decision-making.
“Certainly in the U.S., we have decades of evidence of careful deliberation regarding how to use our vaccines optimally, very transparent advisory committee processes that have functioned for decades, the very active vaccine surveillance programs that have existed for decades designed to respond to rare adverse events,” Schwartz said.
“Their decision-making is not any higher quality than ours,” O’Leary said of Denmark. It is only recently, with the appointment of Kennedy and the new ACIP panel, that the vaccine decision-making process has departed from the “normal process that has been built over decades in the U.S.,” he added.
“We consider the vaccines that are used in the US but not in Denmark to be safe and effective,” Anders Hviid, who studies vaccination and epidemiology at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, told us in an email. “Every country is different, and every country’s national responsible authorities must make their own decisions based on a careful evaluation of national epidemiology, cost, logistics, ethics etc.”
Trump also was incorrect in claiming that the vaccine schedule “required” 72 shots for “babies.” There are no national vaccine mandates in the U.S., unlike in some other countries, including in Europe, although the U.S. does rely on school vaccine requirements that are set by states.
The vaccine schedule is made up of CDC recommendations on how vaccines should be used at the population level, guided by the recommendations of ACIP. “While the ACIP recommendations are closely watched, they’re influential, they’re important in how we think and talk about vaccines in the United States, nothing ACIP does directly connects to whether a vaccine is required for a particular child,” Schwartz said.
States set vaccine requirements children must meet to attend schools and licensed day care, he said. Discussions about these requirements “often begin with ACIP recommendations as a starting point for whether to consider a particular vaccine requirement, but those decisions by no means derive automatically from ACIP’s action,” he added.
For example, while a few states recommend yearly flu shots for young children in day care, states do not recommend annual flu shots for school-age children, even though these are on the vaccine schedule. No states currently require COVID-19 vaccines in schools.
“The U.S. has certainly featured vaccine requirements more prominently than many of our peer countries,” Schwartz said, referring to the state-level school requirements favored in the U.S. to reach high vaccination rates. But that “has been changing in recent years, precisely because of declining vaccination rates, in western Europe in particular,” he added.
For example, Germany — highlighted as a peer nation by Trump and Høeg — in 2020 passed the Measles Protection Act, a national measles vaccine requirement for people being cared for in certain communal facilities, such as schools or day care, as well as those working in these and other facilities, such as hospitals. Since 2018, France has required childhood vaccination against a total of 11 diseases, an increase from a previous requirement for just the DTaP vaccine. The law is also enforced by barring children who have not met the requirements from attending schools or other settings where children gather.
One 2024 analysis of vaccination policy in Europe and the U.S. found that 12 out of 32 countries had at least one nationally required vaccine. A 2020 paper analyzing mandatory vaccination policies in Europe found that mandates were associated with a greater rate of people getting vaccinated and a lower rate of measles in countries that adopted them.
Correction, Dec. 23: In counting the number of OECD countries with advanced economies that recommended universal flu vaccination for at least some portion of childhood, we inadvertently included the wrong figure. The correct number is 22, not 21.
President Donald Trump blitzed through a prime-time address to the nation on Dec. 17, but while short, Trump’s speech contained a number of inaccurate or misleading claims, many of which he has repeated in public speeches for months.
In his prime-time address, Trump spoke quickly, at twice the rate of his State of the Union address pace, according to a PBS News correspondent. The focus was mainly on the economy and “affordability.”
The president blamed his predecessor for “driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before,” but Trump said he is “bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.”
“Under the Biden administration,” he said, “car prices rose 22%,” “gasoline rose 30 to 50%,” “hotel rates rose 37%,” and “airfares rose 31%.” He continued, “Now under our leadership, they’re all coming down and coming down fast.” He went on to say that “Democrat politicians also sent the cost of groceries soaring, but we are solving that too.” He added that “the price of a Thanksgiving turkey was down 33% compared to the Biden last year,” and claimed that “the price of eggs is down 82% since March.”
We found support for some of his figures, but none for others.
The White House told us that the price data for cars, hotels, airfares and gasoline came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but was not more specific. We checked the bureau’s Consumer Price Index data, the seasonally adjusted numbers, which did show price increases under Biden and mostly price decreases so far under Trump.
The CPI for new vehicles increased about 19% during Biden’s four-year term but has increased only slightly, by 0.2%, under Trump from January to November, according to the most recent BLS figures. Meanwhile, the CPI for airline fares went up almost 32% under Biden and has declined more than 9% under Trump. Also, the CPI for lodging away from home, including hotels and motels, rose over 33% under Biden and has dropped roughly 5% under Trump. Lastly, the CPI for gasoline, including all types, grew by 34.5% under Biden and has decreased about 4.6% under Trump.
The BLS also publishes average monthly price data for unleaded, regular gas and the most recent numbers, which are not seasonally adjusted, show an increase of 38% under Biden (from about $2.33 to $3.21) and a much smaller increase, about 0.6%, under Trump (from $3.21 to nearly $3.23). But those figures are different from the most recent weekly data published by the Energy Information Administration that show the average price of regular grade gas rising almost 31% under Biden (from $2.38 to $3.11 per gallon) and declining almost 7% under Trump (from $3.11 to $2.90, as of Dec. 15).
The source of Trump’s claim that turkey prices were down 33% for Thanksgiving is even less clear, as the White House provided no indication where the president got his figure. In a Nov. 19 news release, the American Farm Bureau Federation said that the average price of a 16-pound frozen turkey was down from the previous year, but only by 16%. The nonprofit advocacy group attributed the price decline to grocery stores offering special Thanksgiving deals, “attempting to draw consumer demand back to turkey, leading to lower retail prices for a holiday bird.” The wholesale prices that retailers paid for fresh turkeys were up from the year prior, the American Farm Bureau Federation said.
As for eggs, as of November, the average retail price for a dozen grade A white eggs was $2.86, down about 42% from $4.95 in January, according to the latest BLS data. Trump was likely referring to wholesale egg prices as of Dec. 12 being down 82% from the high of $8.17 in March, but wholesale prices are not what consumers pay at grocery stores. Egg prices spiked in 2024 after an avian influenza outbreak led to an egg shortage. When bird flu cases began to decline, so did wholesale egg prices, which eventually led to lower retail prices.
Overall, grocery prices, according to the CPI for “food-at-home items,” were up about 1.17% from January to November, and up about 1.9% since November 2024.
“Real,” meaning inflation-adjusted, wages have gone up since Trump took office in January, and they went down over the entirety of Biden’s tenure. But Trump made the misleading claim that “for the first time in years, wages are rising much faster than inflation.”
Year-over-year wages have been rising faster than inflation since June 2023, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures.
As we’ve written before, the average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers rose 16.7% over Biden’s four years, but inflation increased by more. “Real” weekly earnings fell 4%; for rank-and-file production and nonsupervisory workers, the decline was 2%. Inflation hit wage gains the hardest in the first half of Biden’s presidency, particularly in calendar year 2022. For the 12 months ending January 2025, Biden’s last year in office, real average weekly earnings went up 0.6%.
Under Trump, since January, those real average earnings have risen faster; they’re up 1.6%.
“It remains the case that both at the tail end of the Biden administration and the beginning of this Trump administration, real wages have been rising. That is to say, inflation has been rising more slowly than wages have been,” Gary Burtless, a senior fellow emeritus in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told us in a phone interview. Burtless said that his reading of various wage measures is that “the changes have not been terribly abrupt from the turnover of the Biden administration to the Trump administration.”
Trump referred to a real wage loss under Biden and wage gains in certain industries since January. A White House spokesperson told us that such figures refer to “annualized growth” using BLS real wage data, but we were unable to replicate the figures. For the industries Trump mentioned, since January, real average weekly earnings for the manufacturing and construction industries have both gone up 1.7%; mining and logging saw a 1% increase.
At the top of his remarks, Trump said, “11 months ago, I inherited a mess and I’m fixing it. When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years and some would say in the history of our country.” He later said, “inflation is stopped.”
Inflation wasn’t “the worst … in the history of our country” when Trump returned to the White House in January. As we previously wrote, during Biden’s term there was a 9.1% increase in the Consumer Price Index in the 12 months ending in June 2022, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics said was the biggest increase in over 40 years. But annual inflation growth moderated to just below 3% in the last six months of 2024. The U.S. suffered its worst inflation increase year-to-year following World War I, when there was a 23.7% rise from June 1919 to June 1920, and it was higher than the peak of Biden’s term during other periods of U.S. history.
Inflation hasn’t “stopped,” as Trump also claimed. The BLS reported on Dec. 18, the morning after Trump’s speech, that the CPI rose 2.7% over the 12-month period ending in November. (BLS didn’t collect data for October during the government shutdown, and didn’t start collecting November’s data until the 14th of that month.)
Returning to one of his favorite measures of economic success, Trump claimed, “Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon, and in much of the country, in some states, it by the way just hit $1.99 a gallon.” Retail gasoline prices are lower than the national average of $3.11 for a gallon of regular gasoline when Trump took office, as we’ve written. But Trump exaggerated the average price now. It was $2.90 a gallon the week of Dec. 15, according to the Energy Information Administration.
He also exaggerated when he said “in some states” the price “just hit $1.99 a gallon.” According to data published by AAA, there were no states where the average price was $1.99 a gallon as of Dec. 18. The lowest statewide average was $2.34 in Oklahoma. (We found some individual stations in some states selling gasoline for $1.99 or less using GasBuddy, a site that provides information about prices at more than 150,000 stations.)
Trump called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act he signed in July “perhaps the most sweeping legislation ever passed in Congress” and touted provisions that include “no tax on tips, no tax on overtime and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.” (As we have said, fewer seniors would pay taxes on Social Security benefits, but millions of Americans would still have to pay.)
Trump claimed that because of the tax cuts in the law, “many families will be saving between $11,000 and $20,000 a year, and next spring is projected to be the largest tax refund season of all time.” An analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that the average 2025 tax cut from the legislation is $800.
“I don’t know what Trump means by ‘many’ but the only income group that gets an average tax cut that exceeds even $9k are those in the top 1 percent, who make $1.1 million a year or more,” Howard Gleckman, a nonresident fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us via email.
When the White House’s own Council of Economic Advisers analyzed a Senate-proposed version of the bill in June, it estimated that within four years, the potential increase in take-home pay for a typical family with two children would be between $7,600 and $10,900. But as we wrote then, the CEA estimate was 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 bill. 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.
Trump repeated several inflated, unsupported or misleading claims about immigrants who came to the U.S. during Biden’s presidency.
“Our border was open and because of this, our country was being invaded by an army of 25 million people, many who came from prisons and jails and mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump said. “They were drug dealers, gang members, and even 11,888 murderers, more than 50% of whom killed more than one person. This is what the Biden administration allowed to happen to our country and it can never be allowed to happen again.”
Trump’s estimate of 25 million unauthorized immigrants coming into the U.S. during Biden’s presidency is far too high. We calculated in June 2024 that the figure would be about a third of that, including an estimated 2 million “gotaways” who evaded capture by Border Patrol and about 3 million people released with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.
The Pew Research Center estimates that as of 2023 there were 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” residing in the U.S. in total, which includes those with some protection from deportation, such as parole or having applied for asylum. That’s nearly 4 million more than the 10.2 million estimate from the Pew Research Center for 2019.
Trump also repeated — as he does in virtually every speech — his unsupported claim that many of the immigrants who came to the U.S. during the Biden administration were released from “prisons and jails and mental institutions and insane asylums.” Trump has never provided any credible evidence of that.
Finally, Trump’s claim that “11,888 murderers” were “allowed” into the country during the Biden administration is misleading. As we have written, there were about that many noncitizens who had been convicted of murder but were not in ICE custody as of September 2024 — a list known as the agency’s non-detained docket.
But the “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security told us in September 2024, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders. Some of them may also have been deported. We don’t know the source of Trump’s claim that “more than 50%” or those on the list “killed more than one person.”
Trump made the mathematically impossible claim that he was able “to slash prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400, 500 and even 600%,” by negotiating “with the drug companies and foreign nations, which were taking advantage of our country for many decades.” Of course, such reductions would suggest that drug companies were paying consumers to take their products, instead of the other way around.
In a May press conference on drug prices, Trump made comparisons similar to his 400% to 600% price-drop claims. Then, Trump cherry-picked in saying that drug prices were higher in the U.S. than in other countries sometimes by “a factor of five, six, seven, eight times. … There are even cases of 10 times higher.”
Andrew W. Mulcahy, a senior health economist at RAND, a global policy research organization based in California, told us at the time that it was “broadly correct” to say the U.S. has higher drug prices than other countries, and “you can find examples of 5, 6, 7 or 8 times, or more, higher” for individual drugs. But on average, prices in the U.S. were 2.78 times higher compared with 33 other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, according to a RAND report based on 2022 data. The average price was 4.22 times higher for brand-name drugs, which account for 10% of the prescriptions filled in the U.S.
Eight ‘settled’ wars. As he often does, Trump claimed to have “settled eight wars in 10 months.” As we have written, international relations experts said the president has had a significant role in ending fighting in five conflicts, though officials in one country (India) refute Trump’s claim. But some of the international disagreements Trump cites have not been wars, and some clashes have not ended.
Housing. Touting his housing reform plans and criticizing Biden’s immigration policies, Trump also said, “A major factor in driving up housing costs was the colossal border invasion.” Vice President JD Vance made a similar misleading claim about the cause of housing prices rising during Biden’s term, as we’ve written. Immigration does affect housing prices by increasing demand, but economists told us the main causes of higher prices in recent years were low mortgage interest rates that fueled demand, a subsequent rise in interest rates, and a low housing supply dating to the Great Recession in 2007 to 2009. Immigrants in the country illegally are more likely to rent than buy, experts also said.
Electricity. The president said, “Electricity costs surged 30 to 100% under Biden. … On Day One, I declared a national energy emergency.” The cost of electricity did increase by 30% — not 100% — during Biden’s presidency, according to the CPI for electricity. But the cost of electricity continued to tick up under Trump from January to November, rising 6.8%, the BLS data show.
Jobs. Trump again made the claim that “there are more people working today than at any time in American history.” It’s correct, but it doesn’t mean much, as we’ve written. The BLS reported there were nearly 160 million total nonfarm employees as of November, the highest number of workers in history. But the U.S. also has its largest population in history.
“In November, both the labor force participation rate (62.5 percent) and the employment-population ratio (59.6 percent) were little changed from September. These measures showed little or no change over the year,” the BLS reported on Dec. 16. (The labor force participation rate is the percentage of the total population over age 16 that is either employed or actively seeking work.)
Investments. In his prime-time address, Trump said, “Already, I’ve secured a record breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States” through his tariffs policy. But a White House webpage that purportedly tabulates “Total U.S. and Foreign Investments” made since Trump returned to office reports about half that, $9.6 trillion, taken in so far.
Experts say that even that number is questionable because it includes pledges and planned investments that may not come to fruition.“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April analysis of Trump’s investment claims.
Since he entered politics, President Donald Trump has been a regular on our end-of-year list of the most egregious and noteworthy falsehoods and distortions. With Trump back in the White House in 2025, it’s no surprise that he dominates this year’s whoppers.
Trump is known for rhetoric that uses inaccurate and exaggerated claims, which he repeats again and again. In his second term, several such claims were used to justify a whirlwind of policy changes and announcements. Using a method economists said wasn’t legitimate, he calculated “reciprocal tariffs” for goods imported from other countries. In firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he claimed without evidence that low job growth figures were “phony” or “rigged.” In supporting a freeze on foreign aid, Trump said $50 million was being used to buy condoms for Hamas in Gaza, a claim refuted by the contractor identified by the State Department.
In a falsehood-filled press conference, Trump, along with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., touted an unproven link between autism and taking Tylenol during pregnancy. Kennedy, long known for spreading inaccurate information about vaccines, also features prominently in this year’s compilation. In his efforts to change the nation’s vaccine and public health recommendations, he pushed unproven therapeutics for treating measles and made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines.
There are other politicians on our full list below, which is in no particular order.
Tylenol and autism. Trump said a late September press conference would reveal “one of the biggest [medical] announcements … in the history of our country,” but instead the headline news was an unproven link between autism and the use of Tylenol, or acetaminophen, during pregnancy. Trump repeatedly told pregnant women, “don’t take Tylenol,” and offered the unsound medical advice to “tough it out.”
The administration didn’t point to any new original research on the topic, which has been studied. Some studies have shown an association between using acetaminophen during pregnancy and an increased likelihood of having a child with autism, but no causal link has been established. Recent research indicates there likely isn’t a link. As for Trump’s medical advice, untreated pain or fever during pregnancy can be harmful to both mother and child, and medical groups have long recommended prudent use of the drug — taking acetaminophen when needed in consultation with a doctor.
HHS Secretary Kennedy later falsely claimed that two circumcision-related studies provided evidence that acetaminophen causes autism when given to children. That’s not what the studies found. In November, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed a webpage to say that its previous statement that “vaccines do not cause autism” is “not an evidence-based claim,” echoing Kennedy’s prior misrepresentations of science.
Inflation has not “stopped.” As cost-of-living issues continue to be a top concern for voters, Trump has repeatedly claimed that inflation is “stopped,” “dead” or at a lower rate than it actually is, falsely saying the country saw “the worst inflation” in history (or “probably” did so) under former President Joe Biden. That’s not the case. This month, in a speech about the economy in Pennsylvania, Trump wrongly said he “inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.”
The annualized inflation rate was 3% when Trump took office in January, and it was 3% again for the 12 months ending in September, the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Inflation did rise considerably in the first half of Biden’s term, but it then cooled substantially. From July to December 2024, the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index was below 3%.
Update, Dec. 18: The CPI went up 2.7% for the 12 months ending in November, BLS said today, noting that data collection for the month began Nov. 14 due to the government shutdown.
The worst inflation increase year-to-year occurred after World War I, a 23.7% rise from June 1919 to June 1920. There have been numerous other times with inflation higher than the peak point under Biden.
As we head into the midterms, we’d caution voters that politicians often blame their opponents for rising prices, but the causes of inflation are usually more complicated than that. For instance, Labor Day claims from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee blamed House Republicans for “driving up the price of burgers.” But drought conditions in recent years, among other factors, drove up the cost of ground beef.
Russia, not Ukraine, started the war. After U.S. and Russian officials met in Saudi Arabia in February to discuss an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine, Trump falsely reprimanded Ukraine, saying, “You should have never started it.” He said Ukraine “could have made a deal.” As we wrote, the war started on Feb. 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion, two days after Russia recognized two separatist territories in eastern Ukraine as independent states and sent Russian troops into Ukraine’s Donbas region. While Russian President Vladimir Putin gave “a long list of grievances” to justify the attack, Jeffrey Mankoff, a senior associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an April 2022 report that the “fundamental issue” was “the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and statehood.”
Throughout the year, Trump also repeatedly and wrongly claimed that the U.S. has provided more money in aid to Ukraine than Europe has. The opposite is true.
“Twisted and manipulated” report that wasn’t. When the Washington Post reported via anonymous sources that a government intelligence assessment concluded the Venezuelan government was not directing the migration of members of the Tren de Aragua gang to the U.S., Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, dismissed the report. She said those “behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence” had “twisted and manipulated [the information] to convey the exact opposite finding.” But when a redacted copy of the intelligence memo was publicly released the following month, it corroborated the Washington Post’s account. According to the intelligence memo, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
A few months later, Gabbard wrongly claimed 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.”
RFK Jr.’s dubious measles therapeutics. In March, during a measles outbreak in Texas, Kennedy claimed there were “very good results” from treating patients with a certain steroid and antibiotic, as well as cod liver oil, saying “those therapeutics have really been ignored” by the CDC “for a long, long time.” Neither the steroid nor antibiotic is a specific treatment for measles, experts said, and cod liver oil, which contains vitamin A, also isn’t recommended.
Vitamin A itself is recommended around the world for measles, as a couple high-dose bursts of the vitamin have been shown to reduce measles mortality in lower-income countries where deficiencies exist. But the benefit is unclear in the U.S. and countries without such deficiencies. Cod liver oil would need to be consumed in a potentially dangerous amount to get the vitamin A dosage used for measles.
In other comments, Kennedy downplayed the outbreak, which ultimately killed two children, and made unsupported and misleading claims about the measles vaccine, which is safe and effective in preventing the highly contagious disease.
No evidence of “phony” Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. After a BLS report showed less-than-stellar job growth, Trump lashed out at the BLS commissioner, saying “her numbers were wrong,” “phony” and “rigged,” and firing her. There’s no evidence anyone manipulated the data. William Beach, the BLS commissioner during Trump’s first term, wrote on X that the firing of Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee who had worked in the federal government for more than 20 years, was “totally groundless” and “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.”
Trump also wrongly claimed that “days before the election,” McEntarfer “came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected” and then reduced the employment estimates “right after the election.” That’s not what happened. On Nov. 1, 2024, just before the election, the BLS report showed growth of just 12,000 jobs in October and downward revisions for the prior two months.
Signalgate: Not “total exoneration.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that he received “total exoneration” in an investigative report by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General regarding a Signal group chat about a military attack in Yemen. But the report contradicted that assessment, concluding that Hegseth’s messages “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.” The report also faulted Hegseth for using a personal cell phone to relay sensitive DoD information and for not retaining the Signal conversations as official records, as required by federal law and Pentagon policy.
Trump’s chart on “reciprocal” tariffs. In a Rose Garden announcement in April of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” Trump held aloft a chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. would as a result impose against those countries. But it turned out the values assigned to other countries were not, in fact, the tariff rates other countries were placing on imports of U.S. goods, but rather a calculation of what the administration deemed would be necessary to balance trade with various countries. Economists told us that was not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries.
The misleading “reciprocal tariffs” chart, which informed the tariff rates he then set, was just one of the president’s false and misleading talking points on tariffs. Among them, Trump repeatedly, and wrongly, claimed that the tariffs he imposed would be paid by other countries and not, at least partly, by American consumers in the form of higher prices.
mRNA vaccine misinformation. Kennedy, and HHS, made a series of false statements about mRNA vaccines, the technology behind the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. In announcing the termination of half a billion dollars of funding for mRNA vaccine projects, Kennedy said: “We reviewed the science, listened to the experts, and acted,” claiming that “the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu.”
The science — peer-reviewed scientific literature — and many experts refute that. Studies repeatedly demonstrated the vaccines’ effectiveness and safety, with some estimates of millions of lives saved during the pandemic, and the technology has shown encouraging results against the flu. HHS later released a 181-page list of papers that claimed to show vaccine harms, a document that wasn’t peer-reviewed and was written by people who have spread unsupported claims about COVID-19 vaccination and treatment.
Kennedy also claimed the COVID-19 vaccines posed a “profound risk” to children, even though serious side effects are rare. In ending funding to Moderna for developing mRNA vaccines against influenza viruses, HHS spokespeople wrongly said the mRNA technology is “under-tested.”
DOGE distortions, $50 million not for condoms for Gaza. Before taking office, Trump said entrepreneur Elon Musk would head his new Department of Government Efficiency. Musk had initially promised to cut “at least $2 trillion” in wasteful government spending. Foreign aid was one of the first targets, with Trump setting the tone for questionable information that would plague the program by claiming, “We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.” The contractor identified by the State Department said it provides hospital services in Gaza and has not used U.S. funds “to procure or distribute condoms.”
In his address to Congress in March, Trump made the inflated claim that DOGE had “found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud.” However, the DOGE website at the time stated that the department had only generated $105 billion in savings and only purported to provide evidence to support $19.8 billion of that total. (The website currently claims DOGE created $214 billion in savings, providing information on about $61 billion. It’s unclear how much, if any, of that is related to fraud.)
Trump also claimed DOGE had identified millions of dead individuals who were incorrectly labeled as alive in the Social Security database, and misleadingly claimed that “money is being paid to many of them.” Social Security Administration internal audits showed that the number of dead recipients still being sent benefits is likely in the thousands, not the millions.
Crime claims behind National Guard deployments. In making claims about high crime or lawlessness in cities as justification for the deployment of National Guard troops, Trump at times exaggerated or got the facts wrong. In early October, he claimed that Portland, Oregon, “is burning to the ground” or has “fires all over the place.” But Portland Fire & Rescue reported few calls about potential fires near a federal building, the site of protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Portland Police told us the protests “are nowhere near city-wide.”
Trump’s statements about the need for National Guard troops in Portland and Chicago focused on overall crime. “These are unsafe places,” he said. But in court filings and other correspondence, the administration said troops were needed to protect ICE officials and federal property.
In Washington, D.C., where the president is the commander in chief of the National Guard, Trump wrongly said that “murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever.” Murders had been declining since 2023, when the rate was less than half the rate in 1991. After a federal takeover of the city’s law enforcement, Trump falsely said an 11-day period with no murders was the “first time that’s taken place in years.” There was a 16-day period earlier this year.
For more, read our full stories on these claims:
Trump Administration’s Problematic Claims on Tylenol and Autism, Sept. 23
RFK Jr.’s Inaccurate Claims About Tylenol, Circumcision and Autism, Oct. 21
Revised CDC Website About Autism and Vaccines Is Not Evidence-Based, Nov. 20
FactChecking Trump’s Economic Speech, Dec. 11
DCCC Serves up Spin for the Labor Day Cookout, Aug. 29
Trump’s False and Misleading Ukraine Claims, Feb. 20
Trump Repeats False Ukraine Aid Claim, Aug. 20
Intelligence Memo Undercuts Trump’s Immigration Argument, May 9
Gabbard’s Misleading ‘Coup’ Claim, July 23
RFK Jr. Misleads on Vitamin A, Unsupported Therapies for Measles, March 7
No Sign of Texas Measles Outbreak Slowing, Contrary to RFK Jr.’s Claims, April 11
RFK Jr. Minimizes Measles Outbreak in Texas, Feb. 27
No Evidence for Trump’s Claims of ‘Rigged’ or ‘Phony’ Job Numbers, Aug. 4
Pentagon Inspector General Report Not ‘Total Exoneration’ for Hegseth, Dec. 5
Trump’s Misleading Tariff Chart, April 3
Recapping Trump’s Deceptive Tariff Claims, Aug. 13
RFK Jr. Justifies Cuts to mRNA Vaccine Projects With Falsehoods, Aug. 7
RFK Jr. Misleads About Safety of COVID-19 Vaccine in Children, May 7
HHS Misleads on mRNA Vaccine Safety After Pulling Moderna Funding, June 13
Trump Administration Makes Unsupported Claim About $50 Million for Condoms to Gaza, Jan. 30
FactChecking Trump’s Address to Congress, March 5
Q&A on Trump’s Attempt to Deploy National Guard to Portland and Chicago, Oct. 17
Trump Distorts Violent Crime Statistics in Ordering Takeover and Troops to D.C., Aug. 12
D.C. Homicide-Free Streak Not First in ‘Years,’ Aug. 27
In a campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania on Dec. 9, President Donald Trump honed a message of “lower prices, bigger paychecks” ahead of next year’s midterm elections. Some of his talking points on the economy missed the mark.
Trump said during his remarks in Pennsylvania that his administration “inherited the highest prices ever and we’re bringing them down. We inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.” He later claimed that “inflation is stopped.”
He has made similar claims many times before — but they’re still false.
Trump did not inherit “the worst inflation” in American history. The worst inflation occurred after World War I, when the largest 12-month price increase was 23.7% from June 1919 to June 1920. Also, from March 1979 to March 1980, overall inflation rose 14.8%.
Inflation had climbed substantially during the first half of former President Joe Biden’s term, mainly due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we’ve written before. For the 12-month period ending in June 2022, the Consumer Price Index increased 9.1%. That was “the largest 12-month increase since the period ending November 1981,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.
In the six months before Trump began his second term, however, the annual CPI was below 3%. For the 12 months ending in January, it was 3%.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, not all prices are now “down” and inflation hasn’t “stopped.”
Based on the CPI, the inflation rate ticked up 3% for the 12 months ending in September — the last month for which data are available because of the 43-day government shutdown — and was up 1.7% from January to September. Core inflation, which doesn’t include the categories of food and energy, also rose 3% from September 2024. From January to September, core inflation was up 1.8%.
While announcing the year’s third interest rate cut on Dec. 10, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell also noted that “inflation remains somewhat elevated,” contradicting the president’s claim that “inflation is stopped.”
“Although important federal government data for the past couple of months have yet to be released, available public and private-sector data suggests that the outlook for employment and inflation has not changed as much since our meeting in October. Conditions in the labor market appear to be gradually cooling and inflation remains somewhat elevated,” Powell said.
The president correctly said that oil prices had come down since he took office, but “energy prices” are mixed. He exaggerated in saying that the price of gasoline was at $1.99 in three or four states.
“Our oil prices are coming down very substantially, energy prices,” Trump said.
The price for West Texas Intermediate crude, which is the U.S. oil benchmark, was $59.04 per barrel as of Dec. 8, according to the Energy Information Administration. That’s down 24.8% from $78.56 on Jan. 17, the most up-to-date price before Trump’s inauguration.
As for energy overall, the picture isn’t so clear. BLS’ measure for energy inflation shows a decrease of 0.5% from January to September, the latest data available. BLS’ measure for household energy, which considers the overall cost of services used for heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, and running appliances and household equipment, shows an increase of 4.3%.
The president attributed lower oil prices to more drilling, saying “the greatest amount of drilling, the greatest amount of fuel being produced right now in our country than ever before by far. It’s not even a contest.” Monthly production of crude oil in the U.S. in September was up 5.4% from January, according to EIA. The annual per day average is certain to be higher this year than last, when the U.S. hit a record of 13.2 million barrels on average per day. However, the EIA has said that a decrease in crude oil prices has been “driven by increasing global crude oil supply,” not only oil produced in the U.S.
Retail gasoline prices have remained low since January. The national average for a regular gallon of gasoline was $3.11 when Trump took office, and it was $2.94 as of Dec. 8, according to EIA. It dipped below $3 this month for the first time since May 2021.
But Trump exaggerated in saying that three or four states had it at “$1.99 a gallon.” No statewide average is that low, according to figures published by AAA. The lowest statewide average was Oklahoma, $2.37 per gallon. It is possible to find some individual gas stations in some states charging that amount. In looking at the 10 states with the lowest average price, we found gas stations in four states advertising a price of $1.99 or lower, using GasBuddy, a site that lists prices for more than 150,000 stations.
Trump also told his audience in Pennsylvania, “In four years under Biden, Democrats secured less than $1 trillion in new investments in our country.” Trump said he had brought in “right around $18 trillion” in investments to the U.S. If Biden had been reelected, he said, “it would have been negative because companies were pouring out of our country.”
The president’s estimate of how much new investment he has attracted to the U.S. has grown dramatically over the course of the year and is exaggerated, according to experts and a White House webpage.
On the day after his inauguration, Trump said, “Before the end of my first full business day in Washington in the White House, we’ve already secured nearly $3 trillion of new investments in the United States.” The number grew by trillions in the months that followed, according to Trump, and by May he said, “I think we can say that we’ll be close to $10 trillion of investment” because of his policies on trade and tariffs. On Dec. 9, Trump’s estimate had grown to “around $18 trillion.”
Yet a webpage curated by the White House that keeps a running tab of “Total U.S. and Foreign Investments” shows a total of $9.6 trillion as of Dec. 10.
Even that number is questionable because it includes pledges and plans for investment that may not be realized, experts have said, as we reported in May.
“There’s no guarantee that any of the investments that are announced actually come to fruition,” Adam Hersh, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said. Economists “wouldn’t count them until they’re actually in the ground,” Hersh said about the listed projects.
“[T]hey’re just promises — and often vague ones at that,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian Cato Institute, said in an April analysis of Trump’s claims.
Trump’s claim that “companies were pouring out of our country” during Biden’s presidency also lacks evidence to support it.
Harry C. Moser, the founder and president of Reshoring Initiative, which works to bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., told us in an email that his nonprofit organization measures reshoring and foreign direct investment in the U.S. “‘Pouring out’ sounds like offshoring, which no one measures,” Moser said.
According to BLS data, the U.S. added 610,000 manufacturing jobs during Biden’s presidency, a 5% increase. (The total jobs added under Biden will be adjusted in February, when BLS completes its benchmarking process, as we’ve written.)
The Biden administration announced in November 2024 that “datapoints show” that private-sector investments in the U.S. during Biden’s term “now total over $1 trillion.”
Biden “‘bought’ most of the increase in his term via grants,” Moser said, referring to the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, Biden’s initiatives aimed at creating jobs in clean energy and the manufacturing of semiconductors, among other incentives.
Trump “is using tariffs to motivate companies. So far 2025 is just slightly below 2024 [in reshoring jobs and foreign investment] due to delays in tariff agreements,” Moser said. Trump “claims about $20 trillion in [manufacturing] project announcements. Bloomberg reduced that to $7T. Much of that amount is still not firm, waiting for tariffs to become solid and long-term. When/if the tariffs are solidified, we expect a surge way above the level under” Biden, he said.
We reached out to the White House for data to support Trump’s claims regarding the amount of investment he has attracted to the U.S. so far and the loss of companies during Biden’s term, but we didn’t receive a response.
Regarding manufacturing jobs, Trump also said, “Since my inauguration, we’ve created nearly 60,000 new Pennsylvania jobs, including 4,000 Pennsylvania manufacturing jobs that the Democrats gave up on.”
Since Trump took office in January, the number of new manufacturing jobs in Pennsylvania had grown by 4,000 jobs by August, according to BLS data.
But manufacturing jobs in the U.S. overall declined by 49,000 jobs, or 0.4%, from January to September, BLS data show.
The president also said, “More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country.”
Trump has made such statements before. In 2018, he said the same thing at a rally in Elko, Nevada. It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t mean much.
According to the BLS, there were nearly 160 million total nonfarm employees as of September, the last month for which data are available, and the United States reached the highest total number of workers in history in that month. But the nation also has its largest population in history.
Considering population growth, the president’s claim doesn’t carry much weight.
“The labor force participation rate, at 62.4 percent, changed little … over the year,” the BLS reported on Nov. 20. It was 62.6% in January. (The labor force participation rate is the number of people age 16 and older who are working or seeking work, as a share of the working-age population.)
“The employment-population ratio, at 59.7 percent, also changed little in September,” the BLS reported. In fact, the employment-population ratio — the portion of the population that was employed — was “down by 0.4 percentage point over the year,” according to the BLS. It was 60.1% in January, when Trump took office.
Nearly eight years ago, President Donald Trump denied using the word “shitholes” to describe African countries during an Oval Office meeting on immigration.
But now he has fessed up.
In a speech Tuesday night in Pennsylvania, Trump boasted about pausing migration from what he called “Third World” countries, when he was interrupted by an audience member who yelled out “shithole.” That triggered Trump to recall a White House meeting during his first term that caused a stir over whether the president used a vulgar term to describe African countries.
Trump, Dec. 9: I’ve also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.
Audience member: Shithole.
Trump: I didn’t say shithole, you did. [Laughter.] Remember, I said that to the senators. They came in, the Democrats. They wanted to be bipartisan. So, they came in, and they said this is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We wanted to be honest, because our country was going to hell, and we had a meeting and I say, “why is it we only take people from shithole countries,” right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden — just a few — let us have a few, from Denmark. Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.
Trump’s new account of the Jan. 11, 2018, meeting confirms what Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said at the time.
A day after the meeting, Durbin – who was at that meeting — said the president was commenting on immigration from Africa when he said, “‘Those shitholes send us the people that they don’t want.’” Durbin added, “He repeated that. He didn’t say that just one time.”
Durbin also quoted Trump as saying, “‘We don’t need more Haitians.’”
As we wrote at the time, Trump repeatedly denied Durbin’s account.
In social media posts on Jan. 12, 2018, Trump said his words at the meeting were “tough,” but “this was not the language used,” and he claimed that he “[n]ever said anything derogatory about Haitians.” Two days later, the president told reporters that the remarks attributed to him “weren’t made,” and he tweeted that Durbin “totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting,” referring to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
(DACA prevents the deportation of more than 500,000 U.S. residents who were illegally brought to the United States as children. At the 2018 meeting, Durbin and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham met with Trump to discuss their bipartisan plan to save DACA, which Trump was trying to phase out.)
In our Jan. 16, 2018, article, we were unable to definitively state what was said at the immigration meeting. There was no recording of the private meeting. Instead, we provided firsthand accounts from some of those who attended.
There were at least seven members of Congress at the meeting and then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. In addition to Durbin, four other members of Congress and Nielsen made public statements about the meeting, which we included in our 2018 article and summarize here:
As fact-checkers, we must rely on irrefutable evidence, such as memos, emails and recordings, to render a judgment when trying to settle a dispute like this between two parties. All we can do – and what we did in this case – is lay out what we know and let readers draw their own views of what may have happened.
But now there is no disagreement. Trump admitted that he said, “why is it we only take people from shithole countries?”
Asked for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Jackson told us the controversy over Trump’s language at the 2018 meeting is “another Fake News narrative peddled by Democrats.”
“Instead of digging up another Fake News narrative peddled by Democrats almost 10 years ago, the media should focus on the substance of what President Trump correctly pointed out: Aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here,” Jackson said in an email.
But based on Trump’s own account, this wasn’t “another Fake News narrative.” Instead, his denials at the time were false.
In a disparaging attack on Somalia in which he said he didn’t want people of Somali descent in the United States, President Donald Trump said Somalis “ripped off” Minnesota “every year” for “billions of dollars,” an apparent reference to a fraud investigation, and suggested that “like 88%” of Somalis receive “welfare” benefits. But the White House didn’t provide us with evidence for either of those figures.
Update, Dec. 10: We updated this article to include information the Center for Immigration Studies published on Dec. 10 about 81% of Somali immigrant households in Minnesota receiving “some form of welfare.” We had reached out to CIS for such information prior to the publication of our article but did not receive a response.
Update, Dec. 17: We updated this article to include additional information that Minnesota’s state demographer provided to us showing 84% of individuals reporting Somali ancestry in Minnesota — not just Somali immigrants — benefited from specific public assistance programs, mostly Medicaid.
Trump was at least partly referring to a recent news report that said the vast majority of people federal prosecutors have charged since 2022 with committing three fraud schemes targeting social service programs in Minnesota are members of the state’s Somali community.
Joseph H. Thompson, then the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, told a local Minnesota news station in July that the amount of fraud could total over $1 billion when government investigations are complete. He then told another local outlet in September that the amount is “in the billions of dollars,” when counting fraud in other state programs that are under investigation.
However, when we asked that U.S. Attorney’s Office how Thompson came up with his figures, we didn’t receive a response.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported in a Dec. 7 story that its review of court documents “shows the alleged fraud uncovered to date is closer to $152 million,” although the newspaper said that figure “is expected to grow” as federal and state investigations continue.
In this story, we’ll explain what happened in the fraud cases and what we know about Somalis and welfare.
Trump went on a rant against people of Somali heritage at the end of a Dec. 2 Cabinet meeting at the White House, calling them “garbage” and accusing them of stealing large sums of money from Minnesota taxpayers.
“I hear they ripped off, Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions,” Trump said. “Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%.”
“I don’t want them in our country,” the president said, adding that he didn’t care that some people would call his remarks “not politically correct.”
There are at least three separate fraud cases in Minnesota that are being investigated by federal and state authorities, and there is a connection to the state’s Somali population.
In a Nov. 29 story, the New York Times reported that 78 of the 86 people charged so far for defrauding Minnesota programs are of Somali descent.
First, the Department of Justice began charging dozens of people in 2022 for their roles in a plot exploiting a federally funded nutrition program for children during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to a DOJ press release about the charges, employees of Feeding Our Future, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization, enlisted individuals and entities in the scheme to defraud the Department of Agriculture’s Federal Child Nutrition Program, which was administered in the state by the Minnesota Department of Education.
Federal prosecutors said Feeding Our Future was a sponsor participating in the nutrition program when it recruited others to open shell companies to act as program sites feeding children throughout the state. Those fake food sites allegedly produced fabricated paperwork, including invoices and attendance logs, showing millions of meals provided to kids, and Feeding Our Future submitted bogus claims for reimbursement through the federal program.
The Justice Department said that Feeding Our Future opened more than 250 sites statewide and “fraudulently obtained and disbursed more than $240 million” in program funds, some of which officials said was used for personal purchases, such as cars, jewelry and property. (The Star Tribune said that prosecutors “have not produced evidence indicating all of that money was fraudulent.”)
As of November, prosecutors said that 78 individuals had been charged in the scheme, including Feeding Our Future’s founder, Aimee Bock, who denied any wrongdoing but was convicted on wire fraud and bribery charges by a federal jury in March.
Then, in September, federal prosecutors brought wire fraud charges against eight individuals for a scheme to defraud Minnesota’s federally funded Housing Stabilization Services Program, which began in 2020 to help seniors and other people with disabilities find and maintain housing. State officials ended the program in October because of fraud concerns.
Prosecutors said the perpetrators enrolled in the program, which was financed through Medicaid, as providers of various housing services. “Rather than provide such help, the defendants obtained and misappropriated millions of dollars in program funds that were intended as reimbursements for services provided to those people,” prosecutors said in a press release about the charges.
The program’s cost, initially expected to be about $2.6 million annually, ballooned from $21 million in 2021 to $104 million in 2024 — much of it attributed to fraud, according to a federal investigation. Prosecutors said the program’s “low barriers to entry and minimal records requirements for reimbursement” made it “susceptible to fraud.”
Also in September, one person, Asha Farhan Hassan, who is reportedly of Somali ancestry, was federally charged for her alleged participation in a five-year scheme that cheated a Minnesota health care program out of at least $14 million, prosecutors said. That program, the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention Benefit, is also funded through Medicaid, and provides medically necessary services to children and some young adults with autism spectrum disorder or related conditions.
Prosecutors said that through that program a company formed by Hassan, Smart Therapy, filed claims for Medicaid reimbursement that “were fraudulently inflated, were billed without providers’ knowledge, and were for services that were not actually provided.” Hassan allegedly then split the money her company received with her partners, including payments to parents who received kickbacks of up to $1,500 per month for each child they allowed to be enrolled in Smart Therapy for services as part of the scheme.
Hassan, who was also charged in the Feeding Our Future fraud plot, recruited Somali parents and their children for participation, prosecutors said.
As we said, in addition to not providing support for the claim that Somali people stole “billions” from Minnesota “every year,” the White House also did not provide evidence that “like 88%” of Somalis receive “welfare,” as Trump suggested.
Instead, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, said: “President Trump is absolutely right to highlight the problems caused by the radical Somali migrants that the Democrats let invade our country and steal from American taxpayers. For example, Tim Walz has allowed Somali refugees to turn Minnesota into a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity to fund lavish lifestyles overseas at the expense of American taxpayers. While the media feigns outrage, Americans who have suffered at the hands of these schemes will celebrate the President’s comments and strong support for AMERICAN citizens.”
We originally were not able to find information showing the percentage of Somali residents in Minnesota, or the U.S., who benefit from social programs that might be considered “welfare,” which has no universal definition. In 2024, there were nearly 260,000 people of Somali descent living in the U.S. and more than 108,000 of them resided in Minnesota, according to the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey estimates.
On Dec. 10, the day after our article was published, the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that favors low immigration levels, released a report saying that 81% of Somali immigrant households in Minnesota overall, and 89% of Somali immigrant households in the state with children, consume “some form of welfare,” including state or federal cash assistance, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and Medicaid. CIS said its report was based on “the most recent 10 years of data from the American Community Survey, 2014-2023.”
Susan Brower, Minnesota’s state demographer, told us in an email that, while not representative of all types of welfare, from 2019 to 2023, an estimated 8% of people with Somali ancestry living in Minnesota reported receiving certain forms of “public assistance income,” according to the 2019-2023 American Community Survey conducted by the Census Bureau.
She said the public assistance category specifically includes payments from state and federal programs like the Minnesota Family Investment Program, formerly known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children; General Assistance, for low-income individuals and married couples without children; and Supplemental Security Income, which is paid to elderly, blind or disabled persons with low incomes.
Benefits from other programs, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps, were not included.
Due to sampling error, Brower said, the actual percentage of Somali people receiving those forms of income assistance could range from 6.3% to 10.1%. The CIS report said 27% of Somali immigrant households in Minnesota “receive cash welfare,” based on the 2014 to 2023 period, “including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplement Security Income, and general assistance.”
Brower said because Somalis do have a higher poverty rate than other groups, “it would make sense that they are eligible for more public programs.” She noted that an upcoming report from the Minnesota State Demographic Center estimates that 38% of Somalis in the state live in poverty. A 2023 state report showed that the median income of Somali households in Minnesota was $28,500, in 2020 dollars, the lowest of any cultural group.
After CIS published its report, Brower, at our request, provided to us American Community Survey data showing that, between 2019 and 2023, 84% of the roughly 60,000 estimated individuals reporting Somali ancestry in Minnesota – including people born in and outside the U.S. – received either state or federal assistance income, SNAP, Medicaid, or a combination of those benefits.
She said 8% of people aged 15 or older reporting Somali ancestry reported getting public assistance income, 60% reported receiving SNAP in the previous 12 months and 78% reported having Medicaid as their health insurance. For the latter category, 69% of adults of Somali ancestry reported having Medicaid and 90% of Somali children had such insurance. Brower noted that one limitation of this data is that it “only identifies about 70% of Somali Minnesotans which is a considerable undercount.”
In total, 77.3 million Americans had Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage as of August, the latest data available from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Trump suggested last month that, in general, most immigrants in the U.S. rely on public assistance, writing in a Nov. 27 Truth Social post, “The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.”
A 2023 report from CIS did find that, in 2022, 54% of households headed by immigrants — including naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents and people without legal status — “used one or more major welfare program.”
CIS said it counted the following “means-tested anti-poverty programs” as welfare: the Earned Income Tax Credit; Supplemental Security Income; Temporary Assistance to Needy Families; free or reduced-price school meals; the Women, Infants, and Children nutrition program; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; Medicaid; and subsidized and public housing.
Meanwhile, a February report from the libertarian Cato Institute, using a different methodology, found that “immigrants consumed 21 percent less welfare and entitlement benefits than native-born Americans on a per capita basis in 2022.” That report looked at the percentage of the total dollar amount of spending on benefits for immigrants and U.S.-born residents, and it counted fewer means-tested programs as welfare and also included Social Security and Medicare, which are considered entitlement programs.
But it’s worth noting, Brower said, that 95% of Somalis in Minnesota are citizens of the U.S. and 58% of them were born in the U.S.
Correction, Dec. 9: We originally referred to the Minnesota Star Tribune as the Minneapolis Star Tribune.