In the aftermath of the deadly ambush shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump and others in his administration immediately blamed Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, for failing to vet the Afghan national accused of the attack. Here, we’ll answer some questions about what we know so far about the suspect and the vetting process.
The suspect, 29-year-old Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is alleged to have driven across the country from his home in Washington state and then shooting West Virginia National Guard members Sarah Beckstrom, 20, an Army specialist, and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24. Beckstrom died later from her injuries, and Wolfe remains in critical condition. They were serving as part of what Trump has called a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.
Despite Trump’s claims that Lakanwal and other Afghans were “unvetted” and “unchecked,” there are reports that Lakanwal was vetted several times, in Afghanistan and in the U.S., most recently as part of obtaining asylum status earlier this year. Trump officials say Lakanwal may have become radicalized while living in the U.S.
Details about the shooter’s history and possible motivations are still emerging.
Lakanwal is an Afghan national who is reported to have been a member of a paramilitary force that worked with the CIA during the two-decade war in Afghanistan.
Fox News Digital, citing unnamed intelligence sources, reported that Lakanwal “had a prior relationship with various entities in the U.S. government, including the CIA, due to his work as a member of a partner force in Kandahar.”
CBS News reported that in Afghanistan, Lakanwal was part of a so-called “Zero Unit,” an Afghan intelligence unit and paramilitary force that worked with the CIA.
“The units were exclusively composed of Afghan nationals and operated under the umbrella of the National Directorate of Security, or NDS, the intelligence agency established with CIA backing for Afghanistan’s previous, U.S.-backed government,” CBS News reported. “They were considered by the U.S. and its international partners to be among the most trusted domestic forces in Afghanistan.”
FBI Director Kash Patel and CIA Director John Ratcliffe both confirmed that Lakanwal worked with a “partner force” in Afghanistan that included work with the U.S. government, including the CIA.
When the country was overtaken by the Taliban after U.S. forces withdrew in 2021, Lakanwal was among the more than 190,000 Afghans who were resettled in the United States. Jeanine Pirro, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said Lakanwal was living in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and five children.
Fellow guardsmen who responded to the scene shot Lakanwal, who is “under heavy guard” at a local hospital, Pirro said on Nov. 27. On Dec. 2, he appeared before a judge via video from a hospital bed and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, assault with intent to kill and illegal possession of a firearm.
Lakanwal came to the country under Biden’s Operation Allies Welcome following the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Operation Allies Welcome was initiated via a memo from the Biden administration in August 2021 “to lead the coordination of ongoing efforts across the Federal Government to resettle vulnerable Afghans, including those who worked on behalf of the United States.”
According to a contemporaneous press release about the program from the Department of Homeland Security, those brought to the U.S. would undergo a “rigorous screening and vetting process.”
“The U.S. government is working around the clock to conduct the security screening and vetting of vulnerable Afghans before they are permitted entry into the United States, consistent with the dual goals of protecting national security and providing protection for our Afghan allies,” the press release stated. “As with any population entering the United States, DHS, in coordination with interagency vetting partners, takes multiple steps to ensure that those seeking entry do not pose a national security or public safety risk.”
DHS said it deployed 400 personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Transportation Security Administration, U.S. Coast Guard, and the Secret Service to so-called “lily pad” countries — Bahrain, Germany, Kuwait, Italy, Qatar, Spain and the United Arab Emirates — to process, screen and vet Afghan evacuees in conjunction with the Departments of Defense and State.
The “multi-layered” vetting process included “biometric and biographic screenings conducted by intelligence, law enforcement, and counterterrorism professionals from DHS and DOD, as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), and additional intelligence community partners,” the press release said. “This process includes reviewing fingerprints, photos, and other biometric and biographic data for every single Afghan before they are cleared to travel to the United States. As with other arrivals at U.S. ports of entry, Afghan nationals undergo a primary inspection when they arrive at a U.S. airport, and a secondary inspection is conducted as the circumstances require.”
“I can report tonight that based on the best available information, the Department of Homeland Security is confident that the suspect in custody is a foreigner who entered our country from Afghanistan, a hellhole on Earth,” Trump said in a video message on Nov. 26. “He was flown in by the Biden administration in September 2021 on those infamous flights that everybody was talking about. Nobody knew who was coming in.”
In a Thanksgiving call to military service members, Trump held up a photo of Afghans crowding onto a plane to flee their home country after its government fell to the Taliban in 2021.
Trump claimed all of the Afghan nationals brought to the U.S., including Lakanwal, were “unvetted.”
“They were unchecked,” Trump said. “There were many of them. And they came in on big planes and it was disgraceful. … They just walked in. Whoever the strongest people were physically … they got on the planes, there was no check-in. They just swamped the planes, they took off. We had no idea who they were.”
In a press conference about the shooting the same day, Pirro said, “This is what happens in this country when people are allowed in who are not properly vetted.”
“This individual is in this country for one reason and one reason alone, because of the disastrous withdrawal from the Biden administration and the failure to vet any way, in any way, shape or form this individual and countless others,” Patel said at the same press conference.
“The individual, and so many others, should have never been allowed to come here,” Ratcliffe told Fox News Digital. “Our citizens and service members deserve far better than to endure the ongoing fallout from the Biden administration’s catastrophic failures.”
Contrary to the claims of Trump and others in his administration, the Washington Post reported that Lakanwal “underwent thorough vetting by counterterrorism authorities before entering the United States, according to people with direct knowledge of the case.”
While critics have claimed many evacuees were able to enter the U.S. without proper vetting, “Lakanwal, however, would not have been among them, according to the individuals, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation,” the Post reported. “One of the individuals said Lakanwal was vetted years ago, before working with the CIA in Afghanistan, and then again before he arrived in the U.S. in 2021. Those examinations involved both the National Counterterrorism Center as well as the CIA, the person said.”
According to Rolling Stone, Lakanwal “underwent more vetting than most Afghans. No one just joined the CIA’s Zero Units. Soldiers had to be recommended by a close family member or friend. The CIA then vetted each member before even offering a probationary period. The vetting process was so successful that Zero Units never suffered an insider attack — when Afghan soldiers turned against U.S. advisers.”
In addition, the Rolling Stone story said that the roughly 10,000 Zero Unit veterans who resettled in the U.S. “were vetted again” after arriving in the country and “before receiving Special Immigrant Visas, meant for Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked for the U.S. government.”
Samantha Vinograd, a former top counterterrorism official at the Department of Homeland Security under Biden and now a national security contributor at CBS News, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Nov. 30 that Lakanwal’s first vetting would have been over a decade ago by the CIA prior to beginning work in the Zero Unit, “which was a paramilitary and intelligence force that partnered with the CIA incredibly closely on some very intense missions.”
“But, to be clear, Afghan evacuees have been re-vetted since coming to the United States,” Vinograd added. “They were re-vetted under the Biden administration.”
Lakanwal also would have been vetted as part of his application for asylum, which was initiated during the Biden administration but was approved in April under the Trump administration.
Asked about the Trump administration signing off on Lakanwal’s asylum application, Trump said, “When it comes to asylum, when they’re flown in, it’s very hard to get them out. No matter how you want to do it, it’s very hard to get them out. But we’re going to be getting them all out now.”
“The vetting process … happens when the person comes into the country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Nov. 30. “And Joe Biden completely did not vet any of these individuals, did not vet this individual. Waited until he got into the United States, and then that application for asylum was opened under the Joe Biden administration, when he was the president in the White House, and allowed that to go forward with the information that they provided. That’s the Biden administration’s responsibility. This is the consequences of the dangerous situation he put our country in when he allowed those people to infiltrate our country during that abandonment of Afghanistan.”
Noem said the Trump administration has since tightened the vetting process to include social media checks.
Asked if there was any vetting as part of the process to approve Lakanwal’s asylum request, Noem said, “The vetting process all happened under Joe Biden’s administration.”
On the same news program, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly dismissed the Trump administration’s blame of the Biden administration.
“Well, this administration, they’re going to blame Joe Biden on everything,” Kelly said. “I mean, it is almost getting comical, you know, at this point. It sounds like there was some vetting done in the last administration. It sounds like they did not do enough vetting before they gave him his asylum claim. She [Noem] talked about changing the vetting process. I think that’s a good idea. I mean, when you see an issue and a process that isn’t quite working, especially after we go through an investigation on this individual, if there are things that need to be changed, we should change them.”
A Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General report issued on Sept. 6, 2022, during the Biden administration, warned that vetting of Afghan evacuees was fraught.
“After meeting with more than 130 individuals from the Department of Homeland Security, we determined DHS encountered obstacles to screen, vet, and inspect all Afghan evacuees arriving as part of Operation Allies Refuge (OAR)/Operation Allies Welcome (OAW),” the report stated. “Specifically, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did not always have critical data to properly screen, vet, or inspect the evacuees. We determined some information used to vet evacuees through U.S. Government databases, such as name, date of birth, identification number, and travel document data, was inaccurate, incomplete, or missing. We also determined CBP admitted or paroled evacuees who were not fully vetted into the United States.”
“As a result,” the report said, “DHS may have admitted or paroled individuals into the United States who pose a risk to national security and the safety of local communities.”
DHS disputed the inspector general’s findings, saying that “the draft report does not adequately acknowledge, and account for, the interagency and multilayered vetting process that started overseas, continued at the U.S. Port of Entry (POE), and is currently ongoing with recurrent vetting.”
A subsequent Justice Department audit issued in June looked at the FBI’s role in vetting the national security risk posed by Afghan evacuees.
“According to the FBI, the need to immediately evacuate Afghans overtook the normal processes required to determine whether individuals attempting to enter the United States pose a threat to national security, which increased the risk that bad actors could try to exploit the expedited evacuation,” the audit said.
However, the review found that while 55 Afghan evacuees who made it to the U.S. were on the terrorist watchlist, as of July 2024, just nine remain on the list and were “being tracked, as appropriate.” According to the report, “The remaining 46 were removed from the watchlist for a variety of reasons, which included a determination by the FBI that the individual was no longer considered a threat to the United States.” (According to the DOJ, “Watchlist nominations are based on derogatory information, which the TSC [Terrorist Screening Center] defines as intelligence or other information that serves to demonstrate the nature of an individual or group’s association with terrorism.”)
Vinograd, the former Biden administration official, acknowledged on “Face the Nation” that while there was pressure to expedite vetting “to help our Afghan partners and bring at-risk Afghans here … protecting national security and public safety was the foremost priority. And that’s why a process was designed that vetted individuals overseas, but it was never intended to be a one-and-done. It was a multistage process with various U.S. government agencies. Afghan evacuees were vetted overseas by graphic and biometric vetting. And then there were other stages of vetting that occurred once individuals were here. So we have to put this vetting process in context.”
In an appearance on CNN on Dec. 1, Andrew McCabe, the former deputy director of the FBI, said that while some Republicans are “trying to create the presumption that the mistakes were made under the prior administration,” Lakanwal was vetted repeatedly.
“Vetting is a very imprecise, imperfect science,” McCabe said. “Vetting depends exclusively on checking someone out by accessing information that we have in our own possession or can get from the country that that person’s coming from. … Essentially we’re left with a process where the absence of any negative information equals a positive result. And that is by definition, you know, not completely reliable.”
“There is no guarantee when you look into someone’s background to grant them entry, that they’ll come here and never make a mistake or commit a crime or do something violent,” McCabe said. “This appears to be one of those instances that obviously has gone horribly wrong.”
“At this point, we don’t have indications that the horrific tragedy was a result of a vetting failure,” Vinograd said. “Instead, the attorney general also said this morning it appears the individual was radicalized once here.
“And let’s be clear on what the vetting system is and what it isn’t,” Vinograd said. “The vetting system is a system in which an individual’s identifiers, their biographic information and biometric information, iris scans, fingerprints, facial images, are run against datasets of information about individuals with ties to terrorism and criminal history. The vetting system is not predictive of whether an individual with no derogatory information is or is not at some point going to become violent.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Nov. 30, Noem said, “We believe he [Lakanwal] was radicalized since he’s been here in this country. We do believe it was through connections in his home community and state, and we’re going to continue to talk to those who interacted with him, who were his family members, who talk to them.”
A more nuanced picture of Lakanwal has begun to emerge since the shooting. Rolling Stone quoted an Afghan veteran who fought alongside him saying Lakanwal was struggling with mental illness and an inability to financially provide for his family. The man said Lakanwal reached out to the CIA for help.
The former unit mate, who was not named in the story, said Lakanwal lost his job at a laundromat because he didn’t have a work authorization card — even though he was granted asylum. He said Lakanwal spoke of isolation and increasing desperation.
ABC News reported that the recent death of an Afghan commander revered by Lakanwal had deepened Lakanwal’s depression and compounded the stress of his financial burdens.
According to the New York Times, the units Lakanwal served with in Afghanistan “had been trained for nighttime raids targeting suspected Taliban members, and were accused by human rights groups of widespread killings of civilians.” The Times said, “The C.I.A. has denied the allegations of brutality among the units, saying they were the result of Taliban propaganda.”
CBS News obtained emails sent by a case worker who was working with Lakanwal’s family in Bellingham, Washington, which described a deterioration of Lakanwal’s mental health in the last two years.
One email described “manic episodes for one or two weeks at a time where he will take off in the family car” and other “interim” episodes in which he “tries to make amends.” According to CBS News, “The case worker, who is not a mental health professional, later said in the email that they believed Lakanwal is suffering ‘…PTSD from his work with the US military in Afghanistan.'”
“Rahmanulla was a man who was extremely proud and capable in the world he came from, who felt defeated in the world he came to,” the case worker said.
“The investigators haven’t revealed any indication that he was in touch with other radicals,” McCabe said on CNN. “But what is pretty clear is that this person, this Lakanwal, went down, really his life sort of devolved in the last year. We know that he was vetted before he was allowed to work with the CIA and our special forces folks. If there had been any indication at that time that he had contacts with known terrorists or with sympathetic to Taliban or other terrorist viewpoints, he never would have been approved to work with the U.S. military or the CIA.”
In his video message, Trump said, “We must now reexamine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here, or add benefit to our country.”
On X, Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, also blamed poor vetting by the Biden administration. “This is why the DC attack happened,” Kent wrote. “The solution is rounding up everyone Biden let in & deporting them immediately.”
In response, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced, “Effective immediately, processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely pending further review of security and vetting protocols.”
The State Department, meanwhile, announced on Nov. 28 that it had paused visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports.
Trump subsequently announced that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover.” On Dec. 2, USCIS announced in a memo it was pausing the review of all pending applications for green cards, citizenship or asylum from immigrants from 19 countries that were part of travel restrictions implemented in June.
The vaccine advisory committee of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is scheduled to meet Dec. 4 and 5. On the agenda: the hepatitis B vaccine, the overall childhood vaccine schedule and vaccine ingredients. We’ll summarize what we’ve written about these topics and what the committee has said about them in recent meetings.
The group, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, was reconstituted in June by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The committee has since departed from its normal evidence-based procedures and has made changes to its vaccine recommendations amid misleading claims about vaccine safety.
As we have written, the panel previously was scheduled to vote in September on a recommendation to delay the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine but tabled the vote at the last minute. The committee presented no clear rationale for why it was considering delaying the birth dose, and one member cited “trust,” and not safety, as the motivator. Since universal hepatitis B vaccination for infants was recommended in 1991, hepatitis B infections in children have fallen by 99%. Babies and young children who are infected with the hepatitis B virus are disproportionately likely to develop chronic infections, which can lead to liver failure and liver cancer.
Also on the bare-bones agenda are items related to the vaccine schedule, vaccine safety monitoring and a presentation titled “Adjuvants and Contaminants.” The committee also typically votes during its fall meeting to approve the next year’s vaccine schedule documents, Jason Schwartz, who studies vaccination policy at the Yale School of Public Health, told us in an email. These documents compile existing recommendations as a resource for health care providers and parents. Such votes are on the design and footnotes of the documents but do not affect “the underlying recommendations” and do not have “immediate consequences for vaccine access or affordability,” he explained.
The committee will meet this week under new leadership. On Dec. 1, HHS announced that biostatistician and epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff’s short tenure as chair of the committee was over and that he had been appointed to a leadership role in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. The committee’s new chair is pediatric cardiologist Dr. Kirk Milhoan, another Kennedy appointee, who has a history of promoting treatments for COVID-19 that are not evidence-based and making unfounded claims about COVID-19 vaccination.
Milhoan confirmed to the Washington Post that the group would vote on delaying the hepatitis B birth dose, although the extent of the delay is “still being finalized,” he said. He also said that the group would discuss the effects of the childhood vaccine schedule on chronic health conditions.
In October, the CDC staffers tasked with supporting the committee were let go, according to the Guardian.
Meanwhile at the Food and Drug Administration, a leaked Nov. 28 letter from vaccines regulatory division head Dr. Vinay Prasad announced a new, stricter framework for regulating vaccines. He justified this proposal by claiming, with little detail to back it up, that COVID-19 vaccines had killed at least 10 children. FDA senior adviser Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician, was involved in the investigation into the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, Prasad wrote. Høeg is an ex officio member of ACIP.
Hepatitis B vaccination takes up the majority of the agenda on the meeting’s first day, which includes an anticipated vote on whether to delay the birth dose. Kennedy long has misleadingly claimed that it’s unnecessary to give a dose of the hepatitis B vaccine at birth because the virus is spread via sexual contact and drug use. But an infected mother can transmit the virus to her baby during birth or after, and it also can be spread by other family members or close contacts through minute amounts of blood.
Getting a hepatitis B vaccine at birth provides a safety net for babies, in case an infection in a mother is missed or the baby is later exposed to another infected person. About half of people in the U.S. who have hepatitis B do not know it, according to data presented at the September meeting by a CDC staff scientist.
A Dec. 2 review by the Vaccine Integrity Project, conducted in advance of the anticipated hepatitis B vaccine vote, found “no evidence of any health benefit with delaying the birth dose and identified only risks related to changing current US recommendations for universal hepatitis B vaccination.” The Vaccine Integrity Project is an initiative of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy that provides evidence-based information on vaccination.
Opponents of the universal birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine have questioned why some countries have different hepatitis B vaccine strategies than the U.S., but the CDC presentation pointed out that many of these countries have a higher rate than the U.S. of successfully screening mothers for hepatitis B before they give birth and also have universal health care systems.
The move toward changing hepatitis B vaccine recommendations was introduced during an ACIP meeting in June, preceding the September meeting in which the group discussed but failed to vote on whether the birth dose should be delayed by one month.
The group did vote to recommend that all women be tested for hepatitis B during pregnancy. However, this is “already standard clinical practice and outside ACIP’s purview,” a review of the meeting by former ACIP members pointed out.
The member who made the motion to table the hepatitis B vaccine vote, Dr. Robert Malone, subsequently said he had done so because the proposed delay was “not sufficient.” Malone has for years spread false and misleading information about vaccines. Later in September, President Donald Trump suggested that the first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine should be delayed until 12 years of age.
The September presentations leading up to the tabled hepatitis B vote offered little detail on topics that would ordinarily be discussed before changing vaccine recommendations, including whether there could be practical ramifications from changing the vaccine schedule. However, the nonprofit Vaccinate Your Family and others have expressed concerns that changing the timing of a child’s first dose of the hepatitis B vaccine could affect subsequent doses, making it more difficult to use certain commonly used combination vaccines. The childhood vaccine schedule recommends three hepatitis B vaccine doses.
“Changes to recommendations for any component within a combination vaccine risk reducing options for families and could disrupt vaccine supply and limit access for years,” the pharmaceutical company Sanofi wrote in a Nov. 25 public comment posted in advance of the ACIP meeting. “These supply challenges would extend beyond combination vaccines to include stand-alone vaccines that prevent diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and polio.” Sanofi makes Vaxelis, a combination vaccine protecting against hepatitis B along with these other listed diseases.
The second day of the meeting will focus on a wide variety of topics related to vaccine safety, “Adjuvants and Contaminants,” and the vaccine schedule overall, per the agenda. No votes are listed on the agenda for this day.
It is unclear precisely what the presentations will cover, but the topics overlap with interests of a new ACIP work group established under Kennedy. This group will review “the safety and effectiveness” of the childhood and adolescent vaccine schedule, per a document posted in October.
In this document, the work group suggested it would revisit when and in what order vaccines are given and which vaccines should be given together, for example. As we have written previously, new vaccines are studied in the context of the current vaccine schedule and are approved if shown to be safe and effective. A Dec. 2 post on the Substack Unbiased Science explained that the vaccine schedule has been built over time based on multiple considerations, related to ideal timing to get the best protection, established safety of giving immunizations at the same time, and practicality.
ACIP chair Milhoan also told the Washington Post that the committee is beginning a discussion of aluminum adjuvants, an interest also noted in the new work group document.
Adjuvants are substances added to vaccines in small amounts to improve a person’s immune response to the vaccines’ main ingredients. The most commonly used vaccine adjuvants are aluminum salts, which were discovered to work for this purpose nearly 100 years ago.
In recent months, Kennedy has made incorrect and misleading statements about aluminum adjuvants, cherry-picking and misusing data from a July 15 Danish study to claim that aluminum in vaccines has been linked to autism. In fact, this large study found no association between aluminum in vaccines and 50 chronic conditions, including autism.
Kennedy also ordered a Nov. 19 update to a CDC webpage on vaccines and autism, which repeated these claims about the Danish study. The webpage also cited evidence of “a positive association between vaccine-related aluminum exposure and persistent asthma,” based on a 2022 CDC-funded study.
However, the new CDC webpage failed to note that the Danish researchers, who originally set out to replicate the 2022 study, did not find an association between aluminum content in vaccines and asthma. The first author of the 2022 study, pediatrician Dr. Matthew Daley of Kaiser Permanente Colorado’s Institute for Health Research, in July told STAT that the new Danish study was “well done” and “reassuring.”
The ACIP agenda does not specify what “contaminants” will be discussed. At the group’s September meeting, presenters discussed alleged “DNA contamination” in mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. However, claims of higher-than-expected levels of DNA in COVID-19 vaccines are based on flawed analyses that have been contradicted by other assessments. Moreover, as we have written before, the small quantity of DNA left over in vaccines from the manufacturing process is expected and is not considered contamination.
The House voted nearly unanimously on Nov. 18 to force the Department of Justice to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” related to the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein. After resisting the release for months, President Donald Trump threw his late support to the bill, which he signed shortly after the Senate also passed it by unanimous consent.
Epstein, a financier, was arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors in July 2019 and died in prison a month later. His death was ruled a suicide by the Department of Justice. Federal prosecutors alleged Epstein had “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls” from 2002 to 2005.
A week before the vote, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released several emails that they said called into question Trump’s relationship with Epstein and whether he had knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. The same day, Republicans on the committee released 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate.
In the days before and after the bill passed, lawmakers from both parties hurled accusations against political opponents related to Epstein and the contents of some of the released documents. Here, we’ll sort out what’s behind some of those claims.
Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury claimed during a Nov. 17 appearance on CNN that the recently released Epstein documents “name multiple cases involving sexual assault conversations Epstein had that involved the president and his time at his house, and the evidence that Donald Trump absolutely knew that Ghislaine Maxwell was recruiting and grooming young women from Mar-a-Lago and bringing them to Epstein’s house.”
Both parts of that claim overstate what the documents have revealed so far. Stansbury’s comments leave the false impression that evidence has been released showing that Trump “absolutely knew” about recruitment and sexual abuse of underage girls. Her office referred us to emails that only show Epstein making comments that could be interpreted that way but don’t show evidence of Trump knowing about criminal acts. Maxwell was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in jail in 2022 for helping Epstein to recruit and groom victims under 18 years of age.
When we asked Stansbury’s office for the evidence to support the claim, a spokeswoman provided four email exchanges from the recent release.
Some of them show that Epstein had said that Trump knew about his recruitment of girls from Mar-a-Lago through Maxwell. The messages don’t specify if Epstein was talking about underage girls.
Some of them show that Epstein had said that Trump had been at his house with girls, although they don’t explicitly say anything about sexual assault.
First, we’ll assess the claim that “Donald Trump absolutely knew that Ghislaine Maxwell was recruiting and grooming young women from Mar-a-Lago.”
On Nov. 12, Democrats released three emails from a total of about 23,000 documents belonging to Epstein. One of those emails, from Epstein to the author Michael Wolff, referred to Mar-a-Lago and Trump and said, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
When a reporter asked Trump two days later, on Nov. 14, “what did Jeffrey Epstein mean in his emails when he said you knew about the girls?” Trump responded, “I know nothing about that.”
Over the summer, Trump said he knew that Epstein had been hiring female employees from Mar-a-Lago, but the president’s comments didn’t pertain to any knowledge of Epstein abusing girls. The president was receiving questions at the time about a birthday message to Epstein that featured a drawing of a naked woman and appeared to have Trump’s signature — although Trump has denied that he wrote the message.
“I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago and people were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone. And other people would come and complain this guy is taking people from the spa. I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people,” Trump said on July 29, referring to Epstein. “Whether it was spa or not spa, I don’t want them taking people and he was fine and then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, ‘out of here.’”
In a follow-up question, a reporter asked if one of the workers recruited from Mar-a-Lago was Virginia Giuffre, who was one of the women who came forward to publicly accuse Epstein of abusing her while she was underage. She died by suicide in April. Giuffre has explained that Maxwell first approached her when she was working at Mar-a-Lago at the age of 16.
“I think that was one of the people. Yeah. He stole her,” Trump said.
Second, we’ll assess the claim that the documents show “multiple cases involving sexual assault conversations Epstein had that involved the president and his time at his house.”
The emails highlighted by Stansbury show that, in 2015, Epstein had corresponded with Landon Thomas, who wrote the 2002 New York Magazine story famously quoting Trump saying of Epstein, “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
In one email to Thomas, Epstein wrote, “would you like photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” although it’s unclear whether or not he had such photos.
Another email exchange highlighted by Stansbury was between Epstein and Maxwell in 2011. There, Epstein wrote, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [victim’s name was redacted] spent hours at my house with him.”
In an email that Epstein had sent to himself in 2019, he recounted parts of the 2008 plea agreement under which he admitted to soliciting minors for prostitution, which was a state charge in Florida. He wrote in that email that Trump “came to my house many times during that period.”
There have been various accounts over the years about when Trump stopped socializing with Epstein — most of them put the time frame in the early 2000s, before Epstein’s first arrest in 2006. Recently Trump has characterized the time he spent with Epstein as minimal, saying on Nov. 18, while he hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, “I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I threw him out of my club many years ago because I thought he was a sick pervert.”
When asked about the emails at a Nov. 12 briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.”
In the released files, Virgin Islands Delegate to the House of Representatives Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, was confirmed to have had text exchanges with Epstein. On Nov. 18, House Republicans introduced a resolution to censure Plaskett for “colluding with convicted felony sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a congressional hearing.” The censure attempt failed, but a few days later, Republican Rep. James Comer claimed during a Fox News interview that Plaskett was colluding with Epstein to take Trump “down.”
“A few months after that communication between Plaskett and Epstein, Jamie Raskin named Stacey Plaskett as an impeachment manager,” Comer said. “So she was an impeachment manager in Congress, and she was communicating and colluding with Jeffrey Epstein to try to take Donald Trump down.”
Colluding is a subjective word, but we’ll break down the communication between Plaskett and Epstein. (As a delegate, Plaskett can participate in House debates, but she does not get a vote in House floor sessions.)
The text messages, which were first reported by the Washington Post, show Plaskett and Epstein exchanging several texts before and during a congressional hearing in February 2019 involving Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen — 11 years after Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and to solicitation of prostitution with a minor under the age of 18 in 2008. (A few months after the hearing, in early July 2019, Epstein was arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors.)
Cohen was testifying about Trump’s alleged misconduct in falsifying business records in order to pay “hush money” to silence a porn star shortly before the 2016 election. Trump was found guilty in a New York court in 2024 of falsifying business records as part of an illegal scheme to influence the 2016 election; he recently appealed the conviction.
The Washington Post reported that Plaskett exchanged several texts before and during the hearing, with Epstein appearing to have influenced Plaskett’s line of questioning with Cohen.
At 12:25 p.m., Epstein texted Plaskett, “Hes opened the door to questions re who are the other hechmen at trump org.”
Plaskett responded, “Yup. Very aware and waiting my turn.”
Later in the hearing, Plaskett asked Cohen about other associates in the Trump Organization whom the House “should be meeting with.”
In another exchange, the Washington Post reported that Epstein texted Plaskett that “Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets.”
Plaskett responded: “RONA?? Quick I’m up next is that an acronym?”
Epstein was referring to Rhona Graff, a former personal assistant to Trump and senior vice president of the Trump Organization. Following this exchange, Plaskett asked about Graff later in her questioning of Cohen.
Epstein and Plaskett also exchanged personal messages, according to the Post. Earlier in the hearing, Epstein texted Plaskett: “Great outfit” and “You look great” to which Plaskett responded, “Thanks!”
Plaskett has since denied any wrongdoing. After the Washington Post article was published on Nov. 14, Plaskett’s office released a statement distancing the congresswoman from Epstein.
“During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein,” her office wrote. “As a former prosecutor she welcomes information that helps her get at the truth and took on the GOP that was trying to bury the truth. The congresswoman has previously made clear her long record combating sexual assault and human trafficking, her disgust over Epstein’s deviant behavior and her support for his victims.”
Five days later during a Nov. 19 CNN interview, in response to a question asking about her relationship with Epstein, Plaskett responded, “Jeffrey Epstein was a constituent.” (Epstein owned a pair of islands in the Virgin Islands.)
In response to another question asking why she was in contact with Epstein despite his known status as a sex offender, Plaskett responded, “I’ve been a prosecutor for many years. And there are a lot of people who have information that are not your friends that you use to get information for to get at the truth.” She later went on to say, “As a prosecutor, you get information from people where you can. I’ve interviewed confidential informants. I’ve interviewed narcotics, drug traffickers and others, and that doesn’t mean that I’m their friend. … It means that they have information that I need. And that I’m trying to get at the truth, and that’s what I did.”
Plaskett has previously been involved in other controversies surrounding political donations from Epstein. An ABC News report found that in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, Plaskett received $8,100 from Epstein, which she later pledged to donate to organizations working with women and children.
Defending Plaskett from the House floor on Nov. 18, Rep. Jasmine Crockett said Republicans could spare her “with your moral high grounds.”
“Folks who also took money from somebody named Jeffrey Epstein, as I had my team dig in very quickly: Mitt Romney, the NRCC, Lee Zeldin, George Bush, Win Red, McCain-Palin, Rick Lazio,” Crockett said. “I just want to be clear, if this is the standard we are going to make, just know, we’re going to expose it all. And just know, that the FEC filings, they are there for everybody to review.”
But as Zeldin, now the EPA administrator, later pointed out on X, the Jeffrey Epstein who contributed to his House reelection campaign is not THE Jeffrey Epstein. As the Federal Election Commission records note, the Jeffrey Epstein who contributed a total of $1,000 to Zeldin in 2020 is a Long Island, New York, physician. Another Jeffrey Epstein from New Jersey who contributed $500 to Zeldin in February 2020 is the owner of a beverage company, FEC records indicate.
Moreover, all of the contributions were made in 2020, and Epstein, the convicted sex offender, died in August 2019.
“Yes Crockett, a physician named Dr. Jeffrey Epstein (who is a totally different person than the other Jeffrey Epstein) donated to a prior campaign of mine,” Zeldin posted on X. “NO FREAKIN RELATION YOU GENIUS!!!”
Three $250 contributions to Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 were also made by a Jeffrey Epstein who is listed as a physician living in Long Island, the same physician who donated $500 in 2008 to the McCain-Palin campaign.
In an interview on Nov. 19, CNN anchor Kaitlin Collins asked Crockett if she wanted to set the record straight.
“Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein,” Crockett said. “Just so that people understand, when you make a donation, your picture is not there. And because they decided to spring this on us, in real-time, I wanted the Republicans to think about what could potentially happen, because I knew that they didn’t even try to go through the FEC. So my team, what they did is they Googled, and that is specifically why I said a Jeffrey Epstein. Unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies. Because it was not the same one? That’s fine. But when Lee Zeldin had something to say, all he had to say was, it was a different Jeffrey Epstein. He admitted that he did receive donations from a Jeffrey Epstein. So, at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people.”
Zeldin posted a video of Crockett’s comments and responded, via X: “When you find yourself in a hole, it’s best to stop digging.”
In another X post, Zeldin wrote, “It’s such a foolish bet to double down on stupid. I’ll always be ready to push back with receipts. … [T]he right move for Crockett would have been to just confess her mistake, and ditch the spin job.”
Business Insider, citing the Center for Responsive Politics, reported that Epstein, the convicted sex abuser, made a single $1,000 donation to George H.W. Bush’s unsuccessful 1992 reelection campaign. Former Rep. Rick Lazio, a Republican who represented New York’s 2nd district, got $2,000 worth of donations from Epstein in 1996.
But as the Center for Responsive Politics reported in 2018, while Epstein donated to various Republican candidates and groups over the years, the vast majority of his donations were to Democratic candidates and groups, including former President Bill Clinton and Sens. John Kerry and Chris Dodd.
Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, also linked campaign fundraising efforts on behalf of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to Epstein, citing a solicitation email sent to Epstein in 2013 seeking his support. Jeffries denied any knowledge of the email and called Comer “a stone cold liar.”
Speaking on the House floor on Nov. 18, Comer said the email “shows Democrat fundraisers invited Epstein to an event or to meet privately with Hakeem Jeffries as part of their 2013 effort to win a majority. Hakeem Jeffries’ campaign solicited money from Jeffrey Epstein. That is what we found in the last document batch.”
Documents released by Republicans on the Oversight Committee include a May 7, 2013, campaign solicitation to Epstein distributed by the fundraising firm Dynamic SRG, seeking participation in a Democratic fundraising dinner and offering “an opportunity to get to know Hakeem better.”
Comer shared the email from Dynamic SRG in a post on X. The email reads, in part: “Dear Jeffrey — We are thrilled to announce that we are working with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, one of the rising stars in the New York Congressional delegation. Sometimes referred to as ‘Brooklyn’s Barack’, he is a staunch supporter of President Obama and a progressive voice for the people of New York City. … Hakeem is committed to electing a Democratic majority in 2014 and is encouraging his friends to participate in the DCCC/DSCC fundraising dinner with President Obama this coming Monday night. Shoot us an email or give us a call … if you would like to get involved with the dinner, or would like to get an opportunity to get to know Hakeem better.”
Jeffries responded to Comer at a press briefing on Nov. 20, saying, “I have no idea what James Comer is talking about in terms of anything that any prior consultant may have sent. I had no idea about that either, but James Comer apparently made the representation on the floor of the House that I sat down with Jeffrey Epstein, had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein, have contributions from Jeffrey Epstein. He’s a stone cold liar, and James Comer knows it.”
Jeffries also told CNN, “I have no recollection of the email” referred to by Comer. “I’ve never had a conversation with [Epstein], never met him, know nothing about him other than the extreme things that he’s been convicted of doing,” Jeffries said, and added that he had never received a political donation from Epstein.
Comer responded to Jeffries’ “liar” comment by posting the email, which Comer’s office has said “speaks for itself.”
We reached out to Dynamic SRG for comment on Jeffries’ knowledge of the email solicitation and to whom it was sent, but we did not receive a response.
We could find no record of political donations from Epstein to Jeffries.
After six congressional Democrats released a video advising members of the U.S. military and national security community to “refuse illegal orders,” President Donald Trump said the lawmakers should be tried in court for “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” But legal experts told us this was not sedition and that the legislators were restating the law that only lawful orders must be followed.
“Sedition is trying to overthrow the government with force or violence,” Eric R. Carpenter, a professor of law at Florida International University College of Law, said in an email to us. “In the video, the elected officials are just telling service members to follow the law. They are not telling service members to overthrow the government.”
The White House later said that Trump didn’t mean the Democrats should face the death penalty, but the press secretary argued that the video encouraged troops to defy the president.
Here, we cover what the lawmakers said, how Trump responded, and what legal experts have said about the video and the president’s claims.
The 90-second video was posted on social media and online on Nov. 18 and features Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, and Reps. Chris Deluzio and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania. All are either military veterans or former intelligence officials.
In the video, the lawmakers state their credentials and remind members of the military and national security community that they swore to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.
“Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” Deluzio, a former Navy officer, and Crow, a former Army ranger and paratrooper, say, in turn.
Kelly, a former Navy captain, then says, “Our laws are clear: You can refuse illegal orders,” which Slotkin, once a CIA officer, repeats for emphasis. Crow then adds that military members “must refuse illegal orders,” before the other lawmakers say “no one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our Constitution.”
The ad concludes with the members of Congress saying, “Don’t give up the ship,” a reference to a last command attributed to James Lawrence, a Navy captain, during the War of 1812.
The senators and representatives never mention a specific unlawful order they believe was given. But the New York Times reported on Nov. 18 that Slotkin, who organized the video, “said that she had heard from active-duty troops who were concerned about the legality of strikes that have targeted people accused by the Trump administration of trafficking narcotics by sea.”
“Some wondered whether they could be held personally liable for the deaths, she said,” according to the Times. (We have written that some legal experts have said the U.S. strikes on boats off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia were “not lawful.”)
In an ABC News interview on Nov. 23, Slotkin said she was “not aware of things that are illegal” that Trump has ordered the military to do. But she said “certainly there are some legal gymnastics that are going on with these Caribbean strikes.” She also said she has concerns about “the use of U.S. military on American shores,” and she noted that “we’ve seen now the courts overturn” Trump’s “deployment of U.S. military into our streets,” including in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
The video “was basically a warning to say, like, if you’re asked to do something, particularly against American citizens, you have the ability to go to your JAG officer and push back,” she said, referring to military lawyers known as judge advocates general.
Two days after the video was posted, Trump responded on social media, calling the Democratic lawmakers traitors guilty of sedition.
“It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand – We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.”
In another post, he labeled it, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
He also amplified a post from another user, who wrote, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”
His comments elicited a response from the six Democrats, who issued a joint statement the same day.
“What’s most telling is that the President considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law. Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty,” they said.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified in a Nov. 20 press briefing that Trump doesn’t think the lawmakers should be executed. She said he only responded that way because members of Congress “conspired together to orchestrate a video message” encouraging members of the military and national security apparatus “to defy the president’s lawful orders.”
“The sanctity of our military rests on the chain of command and if that chain of command is broken, it can lead to people getting killed. It can lead to chaos. And that’s what these members of Congress who swore an oath to abide by the Constitution are essentially encouraging,” she said.
But the Democrats said to “refuse illegal orders” — not “lawful” ones. It’s a crime to disobey “any lawful general order or regulation,” according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Carpenter told us there is a “strong presumption” that military orders are lawful and must be followed by members of the military. “They refuse orders at their own risk,” he cautioned.
He said that service members have a legal defense for any actions taken while they are following legal orders, but that defense doesn’t apply if they are following unlawful orders. “So, the basic rule is, follow orders unless they are obviously unlawful.”
As for Trump’s sedition claim, generally, federal law says that “seditious conspiracy” occurs when multiple people conspire to “overthrow,” “put down,” “destroy by force,” “levy war against” or “oppose by force” the U.S. government.
The penalty for seditious conspiracy is a maximum of 20 years in prison, a fine or both – but not death. (Active-duty and certain retired members of the armed forces who commit “sedition,” as defined by the UCMJ, may be punished by death, the military code says.)
But legal experts in addition to Carpenter told us that the message in the Democrats’ video does not amount to sedition.
“Trump’s efforts to cast this legal speech as seditious is nonsense,” Victor M. Hansen, a professor of law at New England Law in Boston, said in an email.
“These statements are not seditious or any evidence of a conspiracy,” the former Army JAG officer said. “Simply reminding service members of their legal rights and obligations is not criminal in any way.”
“It is so far from seditious behavior,” Berit Berger, a former federal prosecutor, said in a Nov. 20 CNN interview, noting that sedition “is a specific crime” that “requires advocating” or “planning to overthrow the government through force.”
For example, several people who plotted and participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the transfer of presidential power were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
Berger said sedition is rarely prosecuted and “it’s very hard to charge somebody with sedition based just on something they say” since “people have a right to criticize their government, to say things, even inflammatory things, that the government might not like.”
Brenner M. Fissell, a professor of law at Villanova University and vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice, told us that current law prevents the seditious conspiracy statute from being applied as “broadly” as it was written. He pointed to the Supreme Court’s 1969 ruling in the First Amendment case Brandenburg v. Ohio.
“Under the Brandenburg test, speech would have to be intended to produce imminent lawlessness, and also likely to produce imminent lawlessness,” he said. “The lawmakers’ video would fail the imminence requirement, but it also does not advocate lawlessness — it is merely re-stating the military law” that “only lawful orders require obedience.”
“So, the video is not sedition or seditious conspiracy,” Fissell said.
Carpenter said that if an elected official “is retired and an officer, then they could be prosecuted for conduct unbecoming an officer.” But even that would be a “stretch” in this case, he argued, because “they were just telling service members to follow the basic legal structure.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Nov. 24 that Kelly, the Arizona senator who retired as a high-ranking Navy official, is now under investigation for his participation in the video.
Addressing a meeting of McDonald’s restaurant owners, President Donald Trump distorted his predecessor’s record on employment, falsely claiming that government jobs were increasing while “real jobs” were declining. The number of private-sector jobs increased every year under former President Joe Biden’s term and was up about 12% by the time he left office.
At the McDonald’s Impact Summit on Nov. 17 in Washington, D.C., Trump told the franchise owners and operators, “Government jobs were going up, real jobs were going down. … You are so damn lucky that I won that election.”
The president also claimed later, “In nine months, we’ve lifted over 600,000 Americans off of food stamp[s], and that’s a record.” Enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly called food stamps, declined more than that in the final months of Biden’s presidency.
When Trump said that “government jobs were going up, real jobs were going down” under Biden, we assume he meant private-sector jobs when referring to “real” jobs. But the number of private-sector jobs grew every year of Biden’s term.
The White House didn’t respond to our question about Trump’s claim.
The number of private-sector jobs increased by 14.3 million under Biden, an 11.8% increase, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Government jobs also increased by 1.8 million, or 8.3%, a slower rate than private-sector jobs.
Some of Biden’s gains, as we’ve noted, were due to recovery following the COVID-19 pandemic. So, the job gains were larger earlier in his presidency.
Under Trump, between January and September, the last month for which data are available, the number of private-sector jobs increased by 567,000, a 0.42% increase. That was slower private-sector job growth than the same time period during Biden’s last year in office, when private-sector jobs increased by 956,000 jobs, a 0.71% increase.
Previously, Trump has accurately said that during Biden’s last two years in office, about 26% of the jobs added were government jobs. But as we’ve written, about 90% of those jobs were positions in state and local government, where Biden would have no direct influence.
Trump did cut about 97,000 federal government jobs as of September, according to preliminary BLS data, while 31,000 federal government jobs were added in the same period during Biden’s last year in office. The decline during Trump’s first nine months was due partly to the efforts of his new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, purportedly to reduce government costs and increase efficiency. However, hundreds of employees who were fired have been rehired in recent months, according to reports from NPR and the Associated Press, and some government departments, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, have seen a surge in hiring.
Overall, government jobs — including federal, state and local positions — increased by 6,000 jobs from January to September.
Touting his other economic policies, Trump also said in his address to McDonald’s owners, “in nine months, we’ve lifted over 600,000 Americans off of food stamp[s], and that’s a record.”
According to U.S. Department of Agriculture data, 41.7 million people in 22.4 million households, or nearly 1 in every 8 Americans, received benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, in May, the most recent month for which data is available.
As Trump said, more than 645,000 people stopped receiving SNAP assistance between January and May, according to the USDA.
But Kate Bauer, an associate professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, told us that the decline in SNAP recipients since January is not “a record.”
Between October 2024 and January 2025, the month the Trump administration began, SNAP enrollment declined by 870,304, Bauer said in an email. “Based just on this, 600,000 wouldn’t be a record decline. In general, participation has been bouncing around” between 43 million and 41 million over the past few years, she said.
From September 2024 to January 2025, SNAP enrollment did increase by 63,939 individuals, and during Biden’s entire time in office, SNAP participation went up by about 0.6%, or 255,368 people.
We asked the White House about the president’s claim that 600,000 was “a record” decrease in SNAP participants. White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told us in an email, “President Trump’s proven economic formula of tax cuts, deregulation, and unleashing American energy has cooled inflation, raised real wages, and promoted growth. As a result,” Kelly said, “Americans have been lifted off of SNAP thanks to this President’s successful policies.”
Sara Bleich, a professor of public health policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told us, “By design, SNAP is countercyclical, meaning that enrollment is designed to increase during economic downturns and decrease as the economy improves. During the second quarter of 2025, the economy was a bit stronger and monthly SNAP enrollment numbers are lower in May/June 2025 compared to January 2025. All that is perfectly normal and expected.”
Bleich said “several intentional actions by the Trump Administration during that period may have dampened enrollment.” She cited Trump’s executive order in February that “directed federal agencies to block undocumented people from accessing public benefits (who by the way were already ineligible for SNAP but this may have discouraged participation among immigrants who are eligible).”
Bleich also said that stricter work requirements for SNAP applicants included in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will result in “more declines in SNAP participation going forward.”
“Bottom line, it is not really accurate to say that people are being ‘lifted out of the program,'” Bleich said. “SNAP is operating as normal (with people rolling off as the economy improves) and participation has simultaneously been discouraged by deliberate actions to dampen participation.”
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Under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine advocate who is now Health and Human Services secretary, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its website to say that its previous statement that “vaccines do not cause autism” is “not an evidence-based claim.” But it’s the revised website that misleads about vaccines.
On Nov. 19, the CDC replaced its webpage on autism and vaccines with a new one that leans into the discredited idea that vaccines might cause autism. Numerous rigorous studies have repeatedly failed to identify any link between vaccination and autism.
“The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism,” the webpage reads. “Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities.”
A prominent website subheading still reads “Vaccines do not cause Autism” but now includes an asterisk. A footnote explains that the phrase was not removed due to an agreement with Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. A physician who is a strong supporter of vaccines, Cassidy decided to back Kennedy’s nomination as HHS secretary only after Kennedy promised not to take down CDC statements that say vaccines do not cause autism, among other concessions to protect vaccination. Cassidy’s vote in a Senate committee was needed to move Kennedy’s nomination to the full Senate.
The webpage begins by noting the increasing number of vaccinations given to infants since 1986 and notes a correlation to the rising prevalence of autism. Although it acknowledges that correlation is not causation, the page cites a 2014 study by a researcher with ties to anti-vaccine groups that claimed to have found a correlation between aluminum in vaccines and autism. Other, stronger research — which the revised CDC webpage misinterprets — contradicts the idea that aluminum in vaccines is associated with autism.
The webpage goes on to argue that there are “no studies” that show that seven vaccines given before the age of 1 do not cause autism. It also alleges that the very robust evidence that the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine doesn’t cause autism is weak, emphasizing that the studies are all retrospective epidemiological studies, which, unlike randomized controlled trials, “cannot prove causation.”
As we’ll explain, these arguments are misleading.
“This is absolute insanity and a bizarre moving of the goalposts,” David S. Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health, told us via email. “As any scientist knows, you can’t ‘prove’ the lack of association. You conduct related studies, over and over, until the bulk of evidence finds no association.”
He added: The “CDC page is the equivalent of ‘you haven’t proven that ghosts don’t exist’ or perhaps more to the point, ‘you haven’t proven that driving during pregnancy doesn’t cause autism, so pregnant women should stop driving.’”
As Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit told us in a phone interview and has explained in a Substack post, scientists can’t ever prove a negative. In this way, he said, the webpage is taking advantage of a technicality of the scientific method, even though overwhelming evidence shows no link between vaccines and autism.
We emailed the CDC asking for more detail on the webpage’s claims about vaccines and autism, as well as what prompted the revision. HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon replied, “This is a common-sense update that brings CDC’s website in line with our commitment to transparency and gold standard science.” He went on to reiterate the claims made on the webpage before adding that the updates are part of a “broader effort to ensure all public-facing information reflects ongoing scientific inquiry.”
In a post on X on Nov. 20, Cassidy addressed the website change. “What parents need to hear right now is vaccines for measles, polio, hepatitis B and other childhood diseases are safe and effective and will not cause autism. Any statement to the contrary is wrong, irresponsible, and actively makes Americans sicker,” he wrote, noting several recent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. “Redirecting attention to factors we definitely know DO NOT cause autism denies families the answers they deserve,” he added (emphasis is his).
Former CDC leaders and current agency officials have said that career staff were not involved in or aware of the CDC update, according to reporting by the Washington Post and STAT.
A core claim of the new webpage is that it hasn’t been shown that seven infant vaccines (DTaP, hepatitis B, polio, pneumococcus, Hib, rotavirus and influenza) do not cause autism. This is misleading, as most of these vaccines have been studied before in some way for autism — just not necessarily on their own.
“This is a reversal of the burden of proof. This is not how science works,” Anders Hviid, the head of the epidemiology research department at the Statens Serum Institut in Denmark, told us in an email.
He noted that claims about infant vaccines and autism have focused on the presence of small amounts of aluminum, which is added to boost the immune response. Aluminum adjuvants are present in vaccines that protect against hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib), pneumococcus (PCV), and diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (DTaP). Studies, including those by Hviid, have tested this idea, and have not found a link between the aluminum in vaccines and autism.
Indeed, as we’ve explained before, childhood vaccines have been investigated for autism links based on specific hypotheses. First, the claim was that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine might cause autism. Then, attention moved to thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative, triggering studies involving vaccines such as hepatitis B, Hib, influenza, and diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. After that, it was aluminum adjuvants and the notion that there were too many vaccines.
Time and again, studies failed to identify an association with autism. This includes a 2013 study that covered a variety of vaccines given in the first two years of life, as it looked for a link between autism and an increasing number of proteins and sugars present in vaccines. Not every vaccine has been tested individually, but the evidence against each of these hypotheses is overwhelmingly consistent.
“Since 1998, independent researchers across seven countries have conducted more than 40 high-quality studies involving over 5.6 million people. The conclusion is clear and unambiguous: There’s no link between vaccines and autism. Anyone repeating this harmful myth is misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead parents,” Dr. Susan J. Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said in a statement in response to the CDC’s website change.
Studies have repeatedly failed to find a link between MMR vaccines and autism.
“This is the most studied vaccine,” Mandell said. “No other potential environmental cause of autism has been studied as much as this specific vaccine.”
So much attention has been focused on the MMR vaccine because it was the subject of the initial claims of a link between autism and vaccines, perpetuated by a fraudulent study by British researcher Andrew Wakefield that was later retracted. Studies were conducted in the wake of this work to assess whether the purported connection between the vaccine and autism was real.
The new CDC webpage correctly says that reviews have found “with a high strength of evidence that there is no association with autism spectrum disorders” and MMR vaccination, but it specifies that this is based on “observational evidence only,” and not on randomized trials.
The available studies are observational out of necessity, since MMR vaccines were long ago shown to be safe and effective.
A randomized trial comparing MMR vaccination to no MMR vaccination would not be conducted anymore “because it’s unethical to purposefully withhold the vaccine,” Mandell said. “Therefore, we apply very rigorous causal methods to observational data. We don’t conduct randomized trials of parachutes either for exactly the same reason.”
“You can’t ethically not give vaccines to children knowing that diseases are out there that could cause them to suffer or die,” Offit said.
The CDC webpage also casts doubt on the existing research for various other reasons. For example, it dismisses Danish data finding no association between MMR vaccines and autism by saying the data “may be unreliable for the U.S. population.” But Hviid, who co-authored the referenced 2002 Danish study as well as a 2019 study finding no link, told us, “I see no reason why this does not generalise to the US.”
Moreover, studies on children in the U.S. and other countries around the world have also failed to substantiate a link between autism and MMR vaccination.
The new CDC webpage tries to advance the idea that aluminum in vaccines may be linked to autism, despite research to the contrary.
The 2014 study cited as showing this link looked at data on autism cases over time in a group of children referred for services and compared it to trends in the amount of aluminum in vaccines on the CDC’s childhood schedule.
This form of study, which relies on comparing broad trends rather than looking at individual-level data, is called an ecological study. “This is the weakest form of epidemiological evidence, and we only do these kinds of studies if we have no other forms of evidence,” Mandell said.
“At best such a comparison could be hypothesis generating, and the best available evidence does not support the hypothesis,” said Hviid.
Hviid co-authored a July 15 study using individual-level records on aluminum exposure from vaccines and health outcomes in more than 1.2 million Danish children, finding no association between the vaccines and autism or other conditions.
“Our results do not support an association” between autism and the aluminum content of infant vaccines, Hviid reaffirmed in an email responding to the new CDC webpage. He added that a relationship between autism and aluminum in vaccines “is not supported by the best available evidence.”
But rather than citing this as the reassuring evidence it is, the CDC webpage goes on to cherry-pick data from two of the paper’s 15 supplementary figures and tables to cast doubt on its conclusions. This directly echoes Kennedy’s prior misuse of the study, which we have written about in detail.
One cited supplementary figure showed an increased risk of one specific autism-related diagnosis during just part of the time period studied, based on a small number of cases of that particular diagnosis. The main results of the paper, as well as other figures making other comparisons, found no such relationship.
The likelihood of finding a statistically significant result by chance alone increases the more comparisons one makes. “Secondary analyses explored over 540 comparisons, so it is expected that some are likely to be statistically significant by chance alone,” the editor-in-chief of the journal that published the Danish study wrote in an Aug. 11 response.
“You can’t just go through pages and pages and pages of tables and pick one little one out that you like and ignore all the others,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us at the time.
Experts also told us that a second cited supplementary figure, on top of being cherry-picked, should not have been used to try to infer whether aluminum in vaccines caused autism in the first place because it violated statistical rules on how to properly compare groups of people.
“This is a giant fishing expedition to see if they can find anywhere where there appears to be even a slight correlation between aluminum and autism,” Mandell told us in response to the new CDC webpage claims.
President Donald Trump brushed aside a reporter’s question to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about the 2018 killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, saying the crown prince “knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that.” But Trump’s claim is at odds with a CIA assessment.
U.S. intelligence assessments — leaked to reporters in 2018 and later released in a declassified report in early 2021 — concluded the crown prince “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
Trump’s comments came during a state visit by Crown Prince Mohammed on Nov. 18 in the Oval Office. A reporter from ABC News posed a question to the crown prince, noting that “the US intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist.”
“You’re mentioning somebody [Khashoggi] that was extremely controversial,” Trump replied. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him things happened, but he [Crown Prince Mohammed] knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”
Crown Prince Mohammed later addressed the question, saying, “About the journalist, it’s really painful to hear, you know, anyone that been losing his life for, you know, no real purpose or nothing illegal … and it’s been painful for us in Saudi Arabia. We did all the right steps of investigation, etc. in Saudi Arabia and we’ve improved our system to be sure that nothing happened like that, and it’s painful and it’s a huge mistake and we are doing our best that this doesn’t happen again.”
Khashoggi, who had become a prominent critic of the crown prince and in 2017 went into a self-imposed exile from Saudi Arabia, was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. In the immediate aftermath, Saudi officials provided conflicting explanations of what happened, at first claiming Khashoggi — who had become a Washington Post Global Opinions contributing columnist in 2017 — left the consulate alive through a back entrance. Later, the narrative was that Khashoggi died during the course of a brawl at the consulate, before Saudi officials later that month acknowledged — relying on information they said was provided by Turkey — that Khashoggi’s killing was premeditated.
The following month, the Washington Post reported — based on anonymous officials “familiar with the matter” — that a CIA assessment concluded with high confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed ordered the assassination of Khashoggi. According to the Post, “A team of 15 Saudi agents flew to Istanbul on government aircraft in October and killed Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate, where he had gone to pick up documents that he needed for his planned marriage to a Turkish woman.”
The Post’s sources said the CIA relied on intelligence that included a phone call intercepted by U.S. intelligence from the crown prince’s brother to Khashoggi encouraging the journalist to retrieve the documents at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and assuring him “that it would be safe to do so.”
During a teleconference on Nov. 22, 2018, when a reporter asked Trump, who was in his first term as president, about the CIA assessment, Trump said the CIA “did not come to a conclusion. They have feelings certain ways, but they didn’t have the report. … Nobody has concluded. I don’t know if anybody is going to be able to conclude that the Crown Prince did it.”
“They said he might have done it. That’s a big difference,” Trump said, adding that Saudi officials “have vehemently denied it. The CIA points it both ways. You know, it’s — as I said, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But I will say very strongly that it’s a very important ally.”
On Dec. 4, 2018, then-CIA Director Gina Haspel held a closed-door, classified briefing with a bipartisan group of senior senators on the agency’s intelligence related to Khashoggi’s murder. Afterward, several senators told the media they left convinced that Crown Prince Mohammed was responsible for Khashoggi’s death.
“I went into the briefing believing it was virtually impossible for an operation like this to be carried out without the Crown Prince’s knowledge,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said to the press at the time. “I left the briefing with high confidence that my initial assessment of the situation is correct.”
“The Crown Prince is a wrecking ball,” Graham said. “I think he’s complicit in the murder of Mr. Khashoggi to the highest level possible. I think the behavior before the Khashoggi murder was beyond disturbing, and I cannot see him being a reliable partner to the United States.”
“There’s not a smoking gun, there’s a smoking saw,” Graham said, referring to allegations from Turkish officials that a bone saw was used to dismember Khashoggi in order to sneak his remains out of the Saudi Consulate. “You have to be willfully blind not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organized by people under the command of MBS [Crown Prince Mohammed], and that he was intricately involved in the demise of Mr. Khashoggi. Open Source reports show that he [the crown prince] had been focusing on Mr. Khashoggi for a very long time. It is zero chance, zero, that this happened in such an organized fashion without the crown prince.”
“I would really question somebody’s judgment if they couldn’t figure this out. It is there to be figured out,” Graham said. “And I think the reason they [some in the Trump administration] don’t draw the conclusion that he’s complicit is because the administration doesn’t want to go down that road, not because there’s not evidence to suggest he’s complicit.”
In his own press statement, Republican Sen. Bob Corker, then chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “I have zero question in my mind that the Crown Prince MBS ordered the killing, monitored the killing, knew exactly what was happening, planned it in advance. If he was in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes, guilty.”
“This has got to be strongly condemned by the administration, strongly condemned, and then there’s got to be a price to pay for what has happened,” Corker added. “I know that they have to have exactly the same intelligence that we have, and there’s no way that anybody with a straight face could say there’s any question about what has happened.”
“It would be really easy for the president to walk out into the press room today and just state that MBS killed a journalist,” Corker said. “We know he killed a journalist. We know he ordered it.”
On June 19, 2019, after a six-month investigation, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings — Agnes Callamard — issued a 100-page report that concluded, “Mr. Khashoggi’s killing constituted an extrajudicial killing for which the State of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is responsible.”
The report determined that there “is credible evidence, warranting further investigation of high-level Saudi Officials’ individual liability, including the Crown Prince,” but the report stopped short of directly implicating the crown prince. The U.N. report also did not render a decision about whether Khashoggi was ordered to be killed or that the Saudi state “ordered a kidnapping that was botched and then became an accidental killing.”
“Various explanations and accusations have been offered on the circumstances of Mr. Khashoggi’s death, but none alters State responsibility,” the report said. “It is legally irrelevant to State responsibility which high level officials actually ordered Mr. Khashoggi’s death, or whether one or all of them ordered a kidnapping that was botched with an accidental killing, or whether the officers acted on their own initiative to render Mr. Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and killed him in the process, or whether the officers acted ultra vires (the so-called rogue state agents theory) and killed him intentionally.”
The U.N. investigation concluded, “Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr. Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances” and “every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the Crown Prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.”
Among other evidence cited in the report was that nine of the people implicated in the attack on Khashoggi “flew into Turkey on a private jet with diplomatic clearance,” two of them had diplomatic passports, and “[s]tate security agency officials arranged for all travel, including the private jets and accommodations.”
“High level officers planned, supervised and thus authorised the mission, exhorted the team members about the importance of the mission to national security, and expected the team to report back to headquarters,” the report said.
Although Congress passed legislation in 2019 seeking the public release of U.S. intelligence related to who was responsible for Khashoggi’s killing, the Trump administration never declassified it. When Joe Biden was elected president in 2020, his incoming director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, vowed during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 19, 2021, that she would.
On Feb. 25, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified version of its report, “Assessing the Saudi Government’s Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”
According to the document’s executive summary, “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
“We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decisionmaking in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi,” the report states. “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”
In addition, the report said, “The 15-member Saudi team that arrived in Istanbul on 2 October 2018 included officials who worked for, or were associated with, the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs (CSMARC) at the Royal Court. At the time of the operation, CSMARC was led by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser of Muhammad bin Salman, who claimed publicly in mid-2018 that he did not make decisions without the Crown Prince’s approval.”
“The team also included seven members of Muhammad bin Salman’s elite personal protective detail, known as the Rapid Intervention Force (RIF). The RIF–a subset of the Saudi Royal Guard–exists to defend the Crown Prince, answers only to him, and had directly participated in earlier dissident suppression operations in the Kingdom and abroad at the Crown Prince’s direction,” the report said. “We judge that members of the RIF would not have participated in the operation against Khashoggi without Muhammad bin Salman’s approval.”
Finally, the report concluded, “The Crown Prince viewed Khashoggi as a threat to the Kingdom and broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him.”
The State Department’s “2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” — released in March 2019 — stated that “government agents” carried out Khashoggi’s killing that year. The report also cited the Saudi government’s changing explanations, noting: “The government initially claimed he had left the consulate in good health but changed its story as facts came to light.”
For his part, Crown Prince Mohammed has maintained that he had nothing to do with Khashoggi’s murder.
In a PBS interview two months after the killing (released in September 2019), Crown Prince Mohammed accepted responsibility for the killing, “because it happened under my watch,” but denied he had any prior knowledge of the attack.
Asked how members of the team that attacked Khashoggi flew to and from Istanbul on planes owned by the Saudi government, he responded, “I have officials, ministers to follow things, and they’re responsible, they have the authority to do that.”
Crown Prince Mohammed gave a similar response to “60 Minutes” in September 2019 when he was asked directly, “Did you order the murder of Jamal Khashoggi?”
“Absolutely not,” the crown prince responded. “This was a heinous crime. But I take full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia, especially since it was committed by individuals working for the Saudi government. … This was a mistake, and I must take all actions to avoid such a thing in the future.”
In December 2019, Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor announced that five people were sentenced to death for the killing of Khashoggi, and three others were given prison sentences. Sky News reported that the trials were carried out “in near total secrecy.” In May 2020, Khashoggi’s children, citing Ramadan and Allah’s call for reconciliation, pardoned the five men sentenced to death.
Callamard, who led the United Nations investigation into Khashoggi’s death, called the pardon the “latest act in a parody of justice.”
In September 2020, a spokesperson for Saudi Arabia’s public prosecution bureau announced that final verdicts were delivered related to Khashoggi’s murder and eight people received prison sentences ranging from seven to 20 years.
Responding to the announcement, Callamard wrote on X that “these verdicts carry no legal or moral legitimacy. They came at the end of a process which was neither fair, nor just, or transparent.”
“As for the individual responsibility of the person on top of the State, the Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, he has remained well protected against any kind of meaningful scrutiny in his country,” Callamard wrote.
In a social media post, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson criticized Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, for wrongly saying that Affordable Care Act premiums would at least double for “over 20 million Americans” if enhanced subsidies expire. They would more than double on average, not for all of those 20 million people. Johnson glossed over the higher out-of-pocket premiums, saying that the “subsidies will likely increase, not decrease.”
The Wisconsin senator essentially invited us to weigh in on this, writing, “Calling all fact checkers!” in his Nov. 11 post on X. We’ll explain what Sanders got wrong and what Johnson left out about the enhanced tax credits, which are due to expire at the end of the year.
Democrats wanted an extension of the subsidies to be part of legislation to continue funding the federal government, but Republicans rejected that. As part of a Senate deal that ended the government shutdown this month, the Senate will hold a vote in December on those boosted subsidies.
As we’ve explained before, the ACA provided subsidies for people buying their own insurance on the ACA marketplaces if they earn between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level (the starting point is 138% in states that adopted the Medicaid expansion). The poverty level for this year is $15,650 for an individual or $32,150 for a family of four. In 2021, the subsidies were expanded as part of pandemic relief legislation and later extended through the end of 2025.
The enhancement increased financial help by changing the percentage of income people have to pay toward premiums before the subsidies kick in, and it eliminated the 400% income cap. Those earning above that can get subsidies if premiums cost more than 8.5% of their income. The vast majority, 92%, of the 24.3 million ACA enrollees receive subsidies, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Sanders has repeatedly said that premiums would “double” for “more than 20 million Americans” if the enhanced ACA subsidies expire. Johnson highlighted Sanders saying on the Senate floor on Nov. 10, “Are you prepared, I say to my Republican friends, to sit back and allow over 20 million Americans to see a doubling of their health care premiums?” Johnson said that Sanders “is simply wrong.”
The Vermont senator is wrong to say that all 20+ million would see a doubling. The out-of-pocket premiums for those getting ACA subsidies would more than double on average, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan health policy organization KFF. The average increase is 114%, or $1,016, in 2026.
“On average, 22 million people will see their premium payments double. Some will see them more than double. Some will see them less than double, because that is the nature of an average,” Cynthia Cox, a KFF vice president and director of the Program on the ACA, told us in a phone interview. “The vast majority of people, whether they get a tax credit or not, are going to see their costs go up next year to keep the same plan.”
Sanders’ office referred us to the KFF analysis and acknowledged that he meant that the doubling was an average.
As we’ve explained before, the potential impact of losing the enhanced subsidies can vary greatly, depending on an enrollee’s age, income, family size and location.
In his Nov. 10 remarks, Sanders added that some would see “a tripling or a quadrupling,” and that’s correct. KFF’s analysis shows some out-of-pocket premium costs could triple, and those who are in their 60s and earning just over the 400% threshold could see a quadrupling. Those earning above 400% of poverty would lose any subsidies they’re receiving now if the enhancement expires.
In his X post, Johnson went on to say: “The TRUTH is that 22 of the 24 million Americans on Obamacare exchanges will continue receiving Obamacare subsidies as originally designed. The dollar amount of those subsidies will likely increase, not decrease, since they are tied to Obamacare’s skyrocketing premiums.” (Emphasis is his.)
The dollar amount of subsidies could increase, as Johnson said, since premiums are going up and enrollees’ required contribution is capped at a percentage of income. However, Johnson’s statement could leave a misleading impression, since he leaves out that the amount people have to pay out-of-pocket still would go up if the enhanced subsidies expire, because they’ll be required to pay a higher percentage of their income.
The enhanced subsidies reduced the percentage of income people have to pay toward premiums. These required contributions are on a sliding scale. Those at 200% to 250% of poverty used to pay around 6% to 8% of income; the enhanced subsidies lowered that to 4% to 6%. Those at 300% to 400% of poverty used to pay 9.5% of their income; the enhanced subsidies lowered that to 6% to 8.5%. (See Figure 4 in this report from the Bipartisan Policy Center.)
With the expiration of the enhanced subsidies, “it’s possible to both get a larger tax credit and still pay more out of your own pocket, much more out of your own pocket,” Cox told us. “Pretty much everyone who gets their own insurance, who buys their own insurance, will see an increase in what they have to pay.”
When we asked Johnson’s office about his statement, Press Secretary Grace Carnathan told us in an email: “The senator is pointing out how the original ACA subsidy formula functions. The federal tax credit is tied to the benchmark premium, so when premiums rise, the dollar value of the subsidy also rises. According to CMS, in 2026 subsidies will cover about 91 percent of the lowest-cost plan’s premium for eligible enrollees, meaning enrollees pay only a small share of the total cost.” (Here’s the CMS report.)
“Gross premiums are the most relevant metric to use in evaluating the failure of Obamacare to restrain insurance costs,” Carnathan said.
Under the enhancement, many of those earning between 100% and 150% of the poverty level got insurance for $0, but they’ll pay up to about 4% of their income if the boosted subsidies expire. The KFF analysis shows that an individual earning $22,000 would pay $794 in 2026 and a family of four earning $45,000 would pay $1,607, both up from $0 with the enhanced subsidies.
Johnson noted that premiums can’t double for those paying zero dollars. “For people who paid nothing under the enhanced subsidy, asking them to pay a small amount is an infinite increase — but you can’t double zero,” he said. “Fewer than 2 million Americans with incomes above 400% of the Federal Poverty Line will lose the temporary COVID relief subsidies that Democrats set to expire. I’m happy to work with Democrats to ensure that those people have affordable health care insurance options, but first they need to stop lying and admit that Obamacare is a miserable failure.”
Nearly 6.7 million enrollees in 2025 selected plans that cost them nothing in premiums. That’s 39% of the 17.1 million who got a plan through the federal HealthCare.gov, according to CMS. We don’t have a breakdown for the 7.2 million on state-based exchanges, though zero-dollar plans are less common there, Cox said.
Johnson is correct to say that fewer than 2 million people with incomes above 400% of poverty (it’s 1.6 million) will lose any ACA subsidies they receive, since they’re only eligible for financial assistance under the enhancement. (There’s another 1 million enrollees who haven’t provided income information, “but it is likely they have higher incomes and have not applied for tax credits,” KFF says.)
The total premium charged by insurers for ACA plans for 2026 is going up by 26% on average, according to KFF. That’s for the benchmark silver-level plan used to determine tax subsidies. In an Oct. 28 post, Cox explained the several reasons for the increase — “increasing hospital costs, the rising popularity of expensive GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, and the threat of tariffs,” factors also affecting employer-based premiums. The expiration of the enhanced subsidies is another factor. “In their 2026 filings to state regulators describing their requested premium increases, ACA Marketplace insurers said they would charge about 4 percentage points more, on average, than they otherwise would have because they expected healthier people to drop Marketplace coverage if enhanced premiums tax credit expire.”
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that 4.2 million more people will lack health insurance in 2034 due to the expiration of the enhanced subsidies. The Urban Institute estimated that 4.8 million more would lack insurance next year.
Q: Will U.S. citizens receive stimulus or tariff-based checks of $2,000 in November?
A: No checks are being issued. President Donald Trump said he wants to use tariff revenue to give “dividend” payments of “at least $2,000” to “middle-income people and lower-income people.” But no formal plan has been finalized and approved by Congress. Fiscal policy experts say there’s not enough tariff revenue for that.
A bogus online post falsely claims that this month the federal government will issue “a $2,000 direct deposit payment for eligible U.S. citizens” in three phases from Nov. 10 through Nov. 30.
There are no such direct deposits scheduled and no checks in the mail.
President Donald Trump has only talked about using revenue collected from tariffs, or customs duties, on imported foreign goods to reduce the federal debt and make “rebate” or “dividend” payments to Americans. He reiterated his wishes on Nov. 9.
“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social that day. “We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion. Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
He made his pitch again the next day while taking press questions in the Oval Office.
“Without tariffs, we would be — this country would be in such trouble, as they were for many years,” he said. “That’s why we owe $38 trillion. And one of the things we’re going to do, we’re going to issue a dividend to our middle-income people and lower-income people of about $2,000. And we’re going to use the remaining tariffs to lower our debt.
However, the U.S. has not made “trillions of dollars” from tariffs, as the president’s remarks may suggest. He appears to get to “trillions” by counting unspecified financial investments in the U.S. that companies or countries have pledged to make, which isn’t the same thing as “trillions” in revenue for the federal government. We asked the White House for an accounting of Trump’s “trillions” calculation, but we did not get a response.
Multiple experts on fiscal policy have pointed out that, based on tariff revenue alone, the math for Trump’s proposed dividend and debt payment plan doesn’t quite work.
“The President just proposed a $2,000 tariff ‘dividend’ for each person, excluding high-income earners,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy for the pro-business Tax Foundation, wrote in an X thread that began on Nov. 9. “If the cutoff is $100,000, 150M adults would qualify, for a cost near $300 billion. If kids qualify, that grows.”
“Only problem,” York said, “new tariffs have raised $120 billion so far,” although she noted that the Tax Foundation estimates that net revenue from Trump’s tariffs would equal about $216 billion in fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1. (Including preexisting tariffs, the government, according to Treasury Department data, collected nearly $195 billion total in customs duties in fiscal year 2025, which ended Sept. 30.)
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that tariffs will bring in a bit more revenue: about $300 billion per year, starting in 2026. But the nonpartisan group said that still may not be enough depending on who qualified for Trump’s payments.
“Assuming these dividends are designed like the COVID-era Economic Impact Payments, which went to both adults and children, we estimate each round of payments would cost about $600 billion,” CRFB said.
The full pandemic payments, which were made at three different times between 2020 and 2021, went to single tax filers with less than $75,000 in gross income and jointly filing married couples who made less than $150,000. The payments began to phase out, or were reduced, for individuals and couples earning more than those thresholds.
CRFB said that, on a revenue neutral basis, the dividend payments could be made “every other year, starting in early 2027,” if Trump planned to issue them on a recurring basis. But if the Supreme Court agrees with lower courts and rules that the majority of the tariffs that Trump unilaterally imposed this year are illegal, the remaining tariffs on imports would only raise enough money to make payments after seven years, CRFB said.
In addition, using all of the tariff revenue for rebates or dividends would mean that there would be no money left over to pay down the federal debt, as Trump also said he wants to do. In fact, issuing such rebates would increase the debt (which now totals $38 trillion, as Trump said, including money the government owes to itself).
“Using all the tariff revenue for rebates would push debt to 127% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2035 instead of 120% under current law; if $2,000 dividends are paid annually, debt would reach 134% GDP,” CRFB said.
Furthermore, while the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center also estimates that tariffs Trump had announced through Oct. 23 will raise close to $300 billion in 2026 ($299 billion), it said those same policies “will impose an average burden of about $2,600 per tax unit in calendar year 2026,” reducing the economic impact of any dividend payments to individuals.
That burden on households is because the tariffs are mostly paid by U.S. importers – not foreign countries, as Trump has said – who often pass at least some of their costs onto American consumers through higher prices on goods.
The Tax Foundation estimates a lower average tariff burden on households, but it would still be $1,600 in 2026, the organization says.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Nov. 12 press briefing that the Trump administration is serious about trying to make the dividend payments a reality.
“The White House is committed to making that happen, yes, and we are currently exploring all legal options to get that done,” she said when a reporter asked about Trump’s recent comments. “I don’t have a timeline for you or any further details, but I can confirm for you that the president made it clear he wants to make it happen.”
The president’s “team of economic advisers are looking into it,” she said.
In an interview on Fox News on Nov. 12, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there are “a lot of options here that the president’s talking about,” including $2,000 rebates for “families making less than, say, $100,000,” and those options are “in discussion” among White House officials.
Bessent also suggested the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act should be counted as rebates to working families.
“What we did with the tax bill is actually financing the president’s no tax on tips, overtime, Social Security, and the big refunds you’re going to see are a result of that,” Bessent said. “So that’s another payment to the American people.” In addition, he said, starting next year, the law will provide $1,000 for investment accounts — so-called “Trump accounts” — for newborns. “So, that’s another $1,000 for working families,” Bessent said.
We’d note that any dividend payments, like the three rounds of stimulus payments issued during the pandemic, would have to be authorized by Congress.