In a June 27 ruling, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to partially halt nationwide injunctions blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for certain people born in the U.S. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee who wrote the majority opinion, said “universal injunctions” issued by district judges “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”
In the three prior cases addressed in the ruling, district courts issued the injunctions after siding with plaintiffs who argued that the executive order Trump issued on Jan. 20 violated the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says, in part, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The idea was to grant citizenship to recently freed slaves, but the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, also forms the basis of the country’s longstanding policy of granting birthright citizenship to anyone born on American soil.
Trump’s executive order says that the amendment’s citizenship clause does not apply to individuals born to parents who are in the U.S. illegally or on a temporary visa.
While the Supreme Court did not weigh in on whether the executive order is constitutional, the justices ruled, in a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, that the injunctions blocking its implementation across the country were “broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue.” The decision effectively means that federal district judges can no longer issue sweeping injunctions that shield everyone in the country from an administration policy rather than just the parties who challenged the government in court.
Trump hailed the ruling in a June 27 press conference from the White House briefing room.
“This morning, the Supreme Court has delivered a monumental victory for the Constitution, the separation of powers and the rule of law, in striking down the excessive use of nationwide injunctions to interfere with the normal functioning of the executive branch,” the president said. He argued that “a handful of radical left judges” had used universal injunctions “to overrule the rightful powers of the president” and “to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for.”
Over the years, such injunctions have been used to block the policies of Republican and Democratic presidents.
Barrett’s opinion said that Trump’s executive order, which would apply to children born on or after Feb. 19, 2025, could take effect 30 days from June 27, the date of the Supreme Court’s decision. Meanwhile, “lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate.”
The executive order originally gave “all executive departments and agencies” 30 days to devise and issue public guidance on how the order would be executed. Yet, at the June 27 press conference at the White House, Pam Bondi, the U.S. attorney general, would not say how Trump’s policy would be enforced.
In response to a reporter who asked, she called it “pending litigation” that would be decided by the Supreme Court in its next term that starts in October. She said that implementation would be discussed “after the litigation,” but it’s not clear when the court may address whether the executive order is constitutional.
In her opinion, Barrett wrote that the court did not address that question because the Trump administration did not ask the court to do so in the application requesting a partial stay of the injunctions. “Instead, the issue the Court decides is whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions,” the opinion says.
As we’ve written, many who argue that the issue has already been settled point to the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision upholding the birthright citizenship portion of the 14th Amendment in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The case involved a man, Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to parents who were citizens of China but legally living in the U.S. (There was no such thing as illegal immigration at the time.) Some argue that while that case settles the issue of whether the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to children born to noncitizen parents in the country legally, it doesn’t necessarily settle the issue regarding children born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally.
For now, the injunctions previously granted by district judges likely only provide relief from Trump’s executive order to the individuals, organizations and 22 states who were part of those cases against the government.
However, the Supreme Court left open the possibility that plaintiffs could pursue class-action lawsuits to more broadly block potentially unlawful federal policies. Class actions allow one or more plaintiffs to bring a case on behalf of a similarly affected group, or class, of people.
Not long after the court’s June 27 ruling, a group of plaintiffs, including two immigrant rights groups, refiled their lawsuit as a class-action case in Maryland, and another lawsuit seeking class-action certification was filed in New Hampshire by a group led by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Because plaintiffs still have time “to switch from universal injunctions to other avenues like class actions” challenging the administration’s policy, Samuel Bray, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, said he believes that the Supreme Court’s ruling will not result in a change to birthright citizenship.
“I expect the courts to continue to reject in case after case the government’s arguments for the birthright citizenship order,” Bray wrote in a June 28 opinion piece for the New York Times. “The likely result is that President Trump’s unconstitutional executive order on birthright citizenship will never go into effect.”
But if those attempts at class-action lawsuits are unsuccessful – because not all cases qualify for class-action status – it may mean that, at least temporarily, some children born in the U.S. are not automatically citizens at the time of birth.
“I mean, this creates a potential for patchwork citizenship,” Amanda Frost, a professor of law at the University of Virginia Law School, said on “PBS NewsHour” last Friday. “And, of course, Americans, all of us inhabiting the United States, are free to move from one state to the other. There’s no borders. There’s no passports. And now you’re a citizen if you’re born in one state or not the other potentially.”
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The location of some enriched uranium is still in question after the U.S. bombed three key nuclear facilities in Iran, according to the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and experts on arms control and global security.
At a press conference during the NATO summit in The Hague on June 25, President Donald Trump was asked whether there was any indication that Iran was able to move enriched nuclear material from its targeted sites before the U.S. airstrikes. Trump said, “No, just the opposite. We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move. … If you knew about the material, it’s very hard and dangerous to move. Many people, they call it dust. But it’s very, very heavy, very, very hard to move and they were way down. They were 30 stories down.”
Asked the same question at a June 26 press conference, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said, “I’m not aware of any intelligence that I’ve reviewed that says things were not where they were supposed to be, moved or otherwise.“
But IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said that Iran may have relocated some of its enriched uranium after Israel began its airstrikes and before the U.S. attack on June 21. Grossi said that Iran had sent a letter to the IAEA on June 13 warning that Iran would adopt “special measures” to protect its nuclear equipment and materials, the Guardian reported.
“They did not get into details as to what that meant but clearly that was the implicit meaning of that, so we can imagine that this material” is still somewhere in Iran, Grossi said.
Israeli officials said there was evidence that Iran had moved uranium and equipment from the Fordo site prior to the U.S. attack, the New York Times reported on June 22.
Satellite images released by Maxar Technologies “at the tunnels leading into the Fordo mountain, taken in the days before the American strike, show 16 cargo trucks positioned near an entrance,” according to the Times, which also noted it was “unclear” what might have been removed from the site.
Responding to the reports about those satellite images, Trump said in a June 26 Truth Social post, “The cars and small trucks at the site were those of concrete workers trying to cover up the top of the shafts. Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!”
The Financial Times reported on June 26 that preliminary assessments shared with European governments “indicate that Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile remains largely intact following US strikes on its main nuclear sites,” and that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium “was not concentrated” at the Fordo plant when the U.S. bombs hit the site. The intelligence assessments said the stockpile “had been distributed to various other locations,” the Financial Times also reported.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, previously told us it is “now quite clear that the Iranians, in anticipation of the U.S. attack, removed” a stockpile of nearly 900 pounds of uranium “enriched to 60%,” as well as other equipment from at least one of the nuclear sites. “This is the material that could be further enriched to bomb grade (90%) and provide enough raw material for about 10 nuclear devices; which would according to U.S. intel before the strikes take another 1-2 years to fashion into warheads small and light enough to be delivered via a ballistic missile.”
Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, told NPR on June 22, “Today, [Iran] still has that material and we still don’t know where it is.”
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, and Spencer Faragasso, a senior research fellow at the institute, posted an assessment on June 24 of the U.S. and Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities, saying they “have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program. It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack. That being said, there are residuals such as stocks of 60 percent, 20 percent, and 3-5 percent enriched uranium and the centrifuges manufactured but not yet installed at Natanz or Fordow. These non-destroyed parts pose a threat as they can be used in the future to produce weapon-grade uranium.”
We don’t know if Iran was actively working or planning to build a nuclear weapon. The U.S. Intelligence Community in late March assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” But Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, noted that “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
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The chair of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s newly constituted vaccine advisory committee announced in his first meeting that the panel will revisit the longstanding practice of vaccinating all babies against hepatitis B, questioning whether it was “wise” to administer shots “to every newborn before leaving the hospital.” Experts, however, say there are valid reasons to vaccinate babies against hepatitis B, and that it has proven to be safe and very effective.
“It’s virtually eliminated hepatitis B acquisition during childhood,” one infectious disease expert told us.
Martin Kulldorff, the chair and one of seven new members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is a former Harvard Medical School professor who became known for opposing various public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. ACIP has for more than 60 years advised the agency on who should get which Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccines, how often and when.
Earlier this month, Kennedy, the Health and Human Services secretary, removed all 17 existing members of the panel, alleging conflicts of interest issues and inadequate scrutiny of vaccines. As we’ve written, there isn’t evidence for those claims. Kennedy is a longtime anti-vaccine advocate.
Two days after dismissing the committee, Kennedy announced eight new members, including several with a history of spreading false and misleading information about vaccines and others with little or no expertise in vaccines. (The night before the group’s first meeting, HHS told the New York Times that one of the named panelists decided to withdraw “during the financial holdings review.”) Some remaining panelists have past ties to vaccine-related litigation, including Kulldorff, who served as an expert witness for plaintiffs alleging harm from HPV vaccination.
Near the beginning of the group’s first meeting, Kulldorff announced that two new work groups, or ACIP subgroups, would be formed: one that will look at the “cumulative effect” of the childhood and adolescent vaccination schedules, and another that would look at vaccines that have not been reviewed “in more than seven years.”
The latter work group, Kuldorff suggested, would revisit hepatitis B vaccination, which has been recommended for babies since 1991.
“Among other topics, this new vaccine group may look at the universally recommended hepatitis B vaccine at the day of birth,” Kulldorff said. “Is it wise to administer a birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine to every newborn before leaving the hospital? That’s the question. Unless the mother is hepatitis B positive, an argument could be made to delay the vaccine for this infection, which is primarily spread by sexual activity and intravenous drug use.”
It’s true that sex and intravenous drug use are major transmission pathways for hepatitis B in adults. But as we’ve explained before, when Kennedy similarly questioned why newborns would need to be vaccinated, infected mothers can spread the virus to babies during birth and infants or older children can pick up the virus from caregivers who may not even know they are infected.
While pregnant mothers are usually tested for HBV, results can be delayed or incorrect. As a result, vaccinating all infants at birth “acts as a safety net,” an archived CDC FAQ explains. Starting the vaccine series at birth also increases the chance that a child will complete the three-shot series. Claims appealing to the youth of babies and pointing to adult risk factors are common techniques used by activists to argue against hepatitis B vaccination.
Preventing infection in childhood is particularly important, since babies and young children are far more likely than adults to be unable to clear the virus from their bodies and develop a chronic hepatitis B infection. These infections can cause serious problems, such as liver cancer or liver failure.
Kulldorff’s line of inquiry also ignores the history of hepatitis B vaccination in the U.S.
When the vaccine was first approved in the 1980s, the U.S. tried a risk-based vaccination approach that included infants born to mothers with the virus.
“It didn’t work,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told us.
It was only after 1991, when the U.S. switched to a universal recommendation, that hepatitis B infections in children began to dramatically decline.
“The safety and impact of the birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine has been well studied, is well established, and is very, very effective,” Schaffner said. “It’s virtually eliminated hepatitis B acquisition during childhood.”
Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us that in 1991, there were about 18,000 cases of hepatitis B diagnosed in children below the age of 10 every year. About half of those cases were in babies infected by their mothers. The other half, he said, were infected through “relatively casual contact.”
In 2018, following recommendations from ACIP, the CDC changed its guidance to say that infants should be vaccinated within 24 hours of birth, rather than being vaccinated “preferably” before hospital discharge and no later than 2 months of age. While Kulldorff suggested there might be an advantage to waiting, there is no safety reason to delay the dose. The 24-hour recommendation is what the World Health Organization advises.
“Hepatitis B can be passed from parent to baby at birth – and when that happens, the consequences can be deadly. It is unscientific and dangerous to intentionally ignore the success of U.S. vaccination programs or argue that the U.S. should not vaccinate babies for hepatitis B at birth,” the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a post on social media shortly after Kulldorff’s remarks.
The group announced in a video earlier in the day that following Kennedy’s disbanding of the former ACIP members, the panel’s immunization policy setting “is no longer a credible process,” and that AAP would continue to issue its own vaccine recommendations, now separately from ACIP.
It’s worth noting that while Kulldorff said the work group would look at vaccines that haven’t been reviewed in the past seven years, ACIP has discussed the hepatitis B vaccine as recently as 2024, although those recommendations were specific to adults. The 2018 pediatric recommendation is also barely more than seven years old.
Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at University of California Law San Francisco, told us that the latest discussions have been about adults “because there has not been new evidence about babies,” adding that ACIP reviews vaccines on a rolling basis but generally “does not go in depth without new questions or new data.”
As for the idea that the cumulative effects of multiple vaccines have not been sufficiently studied, that has also long been used to raise doubts about vaccine safety. Citing the number of vaccinations American children receive, Kulldorff announced a new work group to look at “the cumulative effect of the recommended vaccine schedule,” including “interaction effects between different vaccines, the total number of vaccines, cumulative amounts of vaccine ingredients, and the relative timing of different vaccines.”
But new vaccines are routinely studied in the context of the standard vaccine schedule, and the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule is well-established. Although often cast as a negative, the addition of more vaccines over time means children today are protected against more diseases than their grandparents or even parents were.
“The basic, frequent immunization of infants has been studied up, down and around” in countries around the world, Schaffner told us.
Offit explained that a new vaccine undergoes a large, randomized controlled trial to determine whether it is safe and effective. These trials are by definition looking at the cumulative impact of vaccination, since participants will also have received age-appropriate, standard vaccines.
Before adding a new safe and effective vaccine to the schedule, Offit said, it’s then required to test whether giving it at the same time as other vaccines interferes with safety or the body’s immune response to one or more of the vaccines. The results of these studies help determine which vaccines are given together at the same appointment.
It is “a well-hewn schedule,” Offit said. “It’s built on a mountain of scientific evidence.”
Offit questioned what sort of further study would be feasible to understand the cumulative effects of the vaccine schedule. “Would you just take children who got all the vaccines and compare them to children who got some of the vaccines and see whether or not they did better if they only got a few of the vaccines?” he said. “I don’t see how you would do that.”
One common concern that is not borne out by the evidence is that getting a large number of vaccines relatively quickly might have some negative effect on a child’s immune system. This misunderstands how the immune system works. Children are exposed to far more immune challenges in everyday life from viruses and bacteria than they ever receive from vaccines. And Offit said that vaccines today each have fewer antigens, or microbial components used to produce an immune response, than vaccines of the past.
“I would argue you had a greater immunological challenge from the one vaccine we got 100 years ago than the 14 different vaccines to prevent 14 different diseases that we give to children today,” Offit said.
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In the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three of Iran’s nuclear facilities, numerous Democrats claimed the president’s actions were unconstitutional and a violation of the War Powers Resolution.
It is a contentious and hotly debated issue not only in Congress but also in academia. Constitutional experts told us those who are claiming the president’s decision was unconstitutional may be correct according to an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. But Congresses over the last several decades have allowed presidents some latitude to engage militarily without prior consent from lawmakers.
“A lot of people over the next few days are going to argue with confidence that President Trump violated, or didn’t violate, the Constitution when he bombed Iran over the weekend without congressional authorization,” Jack Landman Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law School and nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a June 23 op-ed headlined, “Was the Iran Strike Constitutional?”
“You might think that the Constitution would provide a clear answer to such a momentous question. But it doesn’t,” Goldsmith wrote.
Although the military hostilities involving Iran, Israel and the U.S. have ended, numerous Democrats have continued to press the issue, and have proposed legislation to try to rein in the president’s military reach.
Allegations that the president’s decision was unconstitutional began almost immediately after Trump made an announcement via Truth Social on June 21 that the U.S. had bombed the Iranian nuclear sites.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, stated in a press release on June 21 — after Trump had announced the bombings — that “the Constitution makes clear that the power to authorize war lies with Congress.”
Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat member of the House Intelligence Committee, also stated in a press release the same day that “Donald Trump’s decision to launch direct military action against Iran without Congressional approval is a clear violation of the Constitution, which grants the power to declare war explicitly to Congress.”
“This was not constitutional, it was not lawful in the absence of a declaration by Congress,” Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on June 22. “And so the administration should have come to Congress. We will have a vote on a war powers resolution. But there’s a reason to bring this to Congress. And it is, you want the Congress bought in, you want the American people bought in on an action this substantial that could lead to a major outbreak of war.”
Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went one step further, stating on X that Trump’s actions were “a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers” and are “absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”
A day after Trump announced a ceasefire between Iran and Israel on June 23, Ocasio-Cortez continued to post about Trump “illegally bombing Iran.”
“None of this [related to the ceasefire] changes my deep belief that the Constitution gives the Congress – not the President – the power to decide whether or not we send Americans into the hell of war,” Democratic Rep. Chris Deluzio wrote on X on June 24.
Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler also posted a statement saying that he “remain[s] resolute that, regardless of the outcome, the Trump Administration’s military action against Iran was unconstitutional, as only Congress has the power to authorize the use of military force.”
It wasn’t just Democrats who raised the constitutional issue. In a response to Trump’s post about the airstrikes, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie said simply, “This is not Constitutional.”
Last week, Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna teamed up on a resolution calling on Trump to “terminate the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”
After the announced ceasefire, Massie said he told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he “wouldn’t push” the resolution “if the ceasefire holds.” Khanna added, in an MSNBC interview, “If there’s a ceasefire, that’s great. And let’s see if it holds. If it doesn’t hold, then we’re ready to have a vote on the War Power resolution.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 22, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham pushed back on members of Congress alleging that Trump violated the Constitution by acting without congressional approval.
Graham said Trump acted “within his Article II authority. Congress can declare war or cut off funding. We can’t be the commander in chief. You can’t have 535 commander in chiefs. If you don’t like what the president does, in terms of war, you can cut off the funding. But declaring war is left to the Congress. We’ve declared war five times in the history of America. All of these other military operations were lawful. He had all the authority he needs under the Constitution. They are wrong.”
Johnson also defended the president in a post on X. “The President made the right call, and did what he needed to do. Leaders in Congress were aware of the urgency of this situation and the Commander-in-Chief evaluated that the imminent danger outweighed the time it would take for Congress to act. The world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, which chants ‘Death to America,’ simply could not be allowed the opportunity to obtain and use nuclear weapons.
“The President fully respects the Article I power of Congress, and tonight’s necessary, limited, and targeted strike follows the history and tradition of similar military actions under presidents of both parties,” Johnson wrote.
Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution states that Congress holds the power “To declare War.” Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution establishes the president as the commander in chief of the armed forces. So, at what point and under what circumstances would the president need congressional approval before launching military activity?
“I think this is a tough question because practice has strayed so far from the text and original understanding of the Constitution,” Kermit Roosevelt, a professor and constitutional expert at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, told us via email. “The Constitution says that Congress has the power to declare war, and the records of the Constitutional Convention are pretty clear that the drafters did not want to give one person the power to take the United States into war. (Presidents are supposed to be able to respond to attacks by using the military, but that’s not relevant to this situation because obviously we were not attacked.) So the president was not supposed to be able to start a war without Congressional authorization. That’s pretty clear. (An authorization for the use of military force is effectively the same thing as a declaration of war, so the fact that Congress has used authorizations rather than declarations after WWII does not matter.) However, presidents have done things that count as acts of war under international law without congressional authorization, like the Libya bombings [under then-President Barack Obama], and no one has stopped them, so our practice has departed from the text and original understanding.”
Peter Shane, a leading scholar in U.S. constitutional law and adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, told us via email that it is “difficult to give a definitive answer on constitutionality because there is so much disagreement about how the Constitution should be interpreted with regard to the unilateral presidential deployment of military force. For originalists, the answer would seem a straightforward, ‘No.’ Under the most persuasive reading of the Founding era, the Constitution does not authorize Presidents to deploy military force abroad without advance congressional authorization. As to Iran, there was none.
“However,” Shane told us, “presidents of both parties have operated for decades under a Justice Department framework that ‘reflects not only the express assignment of powers and responsibilities to the President and Congress in the Constitution, but also . . . the ‘historical gloss’ placed on the Constitution by two centuries of practice.’ It has thus long been the position of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel that history has ratified unilateral presidential deployments of military force as long as (1) the deployment serves ‘sufficiently important national interests,’ as judged by the President, and (2) the deployment does not portend a ‘prolonged and substantial military engagement, typically involving exposure of U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period.’ Trump’s letter to Congress reporting on the bombing relies on this framework.”
Seeking to claw back some of its power, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 on a bipartisan basis, and over the veto of then-President Richard Nixon. As the Congressional Research Service explains, the War Powers Resolution requires presidents within 48 hours “to report to Congress any introduction of U.S. forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.”
Once reported, the resolution “requires that the use of forces must be terminated within 60 to 90 days unless Congress authorizes such use or extends the time period.” Section 3 of the resolution “requires that the ‘President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing’ U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or imminent hostilities.”
“The War Powers Act is often interpreted as saying that the President can do what he wants for 48 hours before notifying Congress, or for 60 days even if Congress doesn’t approve, so that it means the President can actually start a war and then put Congress in the position of authorizing it or not,” Roosevelt said. “That’s not consistent with the Constitution and it’s not consistent with the purpose and policy section of the WPA, which says that the intent is to make sure that the President’s power to engage in military action is exercised ‘only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.’
“So I think that the 48 hour and 60 day windows are supposed to be relevant to presidential responses to attacks, and the President is not supposed to be able to initiate wars at all. I think that if the WPA does mean that the President can start a war, it’s an unconstitutional delegation of the power to declare war,” Roosevelt said. (Emphasis is his.)
“The WPA does clearly require that the president ‘in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities’ so it seems pretty clear that Trump violated that, at least,” Roosevelt said.
Whether Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear sites was an act of war is also a matter of debate.
An opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel in April 2011 — after Obama began military strikes against Libya without seeking congressional approval — argued that the scope and duration of the military strikes determine whether a military action constitutes a war.
“In our view, determining whether a particular planned engagement constitutes a ‘war’ for constitutional purposes instead requires a fact-specific assessment of the ‘anticipated nature, scope, and duration’ of the planned military operations,” the opinion states, citing a prior OLC opinion from 1994. “This standard generally will be satisfied only by prolonged and substantial military engagements, typically involving exposure of U.S. military personnel to significant risk over a substantial period.”
On “Meet the Press” on Jun 22, Vice President JD Vance insisted, “We’re not at war with Iran, we’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
“We have no interest in a protracted conflict. We have no interest in boots on the ground,” Vance said, adding that the bombings were “a very precise, a very surgical strike tailored to an American national interest.”
Indeed, Trump appealed for immediate peace in the same post in which he made the bombing announcement. Two days later, Trump announced the ceasefire, saying it put an end to what Trump said should be called “THE 12 DAY WAR.”
“Given past practice and the language of the WPR, I don’t think that the single strike by itself violated either the Constitution or the WPR,” Stephen Griffin, professor of constitutional law at Tulane Law School, told us via email. “At the same time, it would have been better under the Constitution for President Trump to obtain congressional authorization in advance.”
Nonetheless, said Griffin, author of “Long Wars and the Constitution,” if hostilities between Iran and the U.S. extend beyond the WPR’s 60-day limit, “President Trump may well be in violation of the WPR, just as Republicans argued when the same circumstances occurred in the Clinton and Obama presidencies.”
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The bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21 by American B-2 aircraft damaged the sites and set back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, but didn’t completely destroy the sites or Iran’s nuclear capabilities, according to experts we spoke with and a classified U.S. intelligence report.
But in a televised address on the night of the U.S. attack, President Donald Trump said, “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
The president claimed in a June 23 Truth Social post, “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!”
At a June 22 press conference at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth echoed Trump’s assessment of the strike, saying, “Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been obliterated.”
Trump went further in a Truth Social post on June 24, claiming the U.S. attack ended Iran’s nuclear weapons capability: “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!”
But the key nuclear sites — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan– were not “obliterated,” nor was damage done “to all Nuclear sites in Iran.” And Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability is still viable, experts say. (We don’t know if Iran was actively constructing or seeking to construct a nuclear weapon — the U.S. Intelligence Community in late March assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” However, when presenting that assessment, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, also noted that “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”)
A five-page, preliminary, classified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, said the U.S. bombing of Iran’s three sites sealed off entrances of two facilities but didn’t destroy their underground buildings and set back Iran’s nuclear program by just a few months, CNN and the New York Times reported on June 24.
People familiar with the report told CNN the facilities’ centrifuges, which enrich uranium, remained largely “intact.”
Also, in anticipation of the attack, Iran moved equipment and a large amount of enriched, nearly bomb-grade uranium to an unknown location, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and Israeli officials, the Times reported.
Officials told the Times the classified report was an initial assessment and others will follow. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the preliminary report was “flat-out wrong.”
Update, June 26: CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a statement on June 25 regarding the agency’s intelligence on the U.S. attack, saying, in part: “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes. This includes new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
In addition, the Israel Atomic Energy Commission issued a statement on June 25: “The devastating US strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable. We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years. The achievement can continue indefinitely if Iran does not get access to nuclear material.”
Some leaders in Trump’s administration took a more cautious approach in describing the results of the U.S. attack on the day after. Asked by NBC News’ Kristen Welker on June 22 if he was confident Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites were destroyed, Vice President JD Vance said, “I’m not going to get into sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground there in Iran. But we’ve seen a lot, and I feel very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon.”
At the June 22 Pentagon press conference, asked by a reporter about Iran’s nuclear capability after the U.S. strike, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “it would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”
“The early indications confirm that even U.S. heavy bombing” of Fordo and the other key sites has “only ‘severely damaged’ not ‘destroyed’ these facilities, let alone the Iranian nuclear program and the regime’s determination, for now, to keep it going,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us in an email.
“It is also now quite clear that the Iranians, in anticipation of the U.S. attack, removed” a stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of uranium “enriched to 60%,” as well as other equipment from at least one of the nuclear sites, Kimball said. “This is the material that could be further enriched to bomb grade (90%) and provide enough raw material for about 10 nuclear devices; which would according to U.S. intel before the strikes take another 1-2 years to fashion into warheads small and light enough to be delivered via a ballistic missile.”
No one, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, knows where that material is now, he said.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told NPR, “I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means.”
Albright also said Iran may have thousands of other uranium-enriching centrifuges, and the uranium stockpiles at the sites targeted by the U.S. may have been moved to another facility where it could be enriched for a nuclear weapon in a short period of time.
“Iran also retains a centrifuge manufacturing capability that can help it reconstitute machines [to] enable further enrichment activities, and it likely has another site for enrichment that does not appear to have been affected so far by U.S. or Israeli bombardment,” Kimball said.
John Erath, senior policy director of the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us that if the U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Iran and Israel is sustained, “it should be used as an opportunity for negotiation for a durable peace agreement.”
“And as part of that negotiation, that should be one of the things the international community is demanding to know — just how much of this stuff there is and where it is,” Erath said, referring to Iran’s enriched uranium.
Kimball also addressed next steps in monitoring Iran’s nuclear program. “It will take time, a return to real diplomacy, and the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to Iran, to fully assess the status of Iran’s nuclear activities and to try to account for its nuclear material, including the highly-enriched uranium it had already accumulated before the war and to re-establish verifiable limits on its nuclear weapons potential, which remains,” he said.
“The bottom line is that the combined Israeli and U.S. strikes have set Iran’s program back some months, but at the cost of obliterating trust between the key parties, strengthening Tehran’s resolve to reconstitute its sensitive nuclear activities, possibly prompting it to consider withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and possibly proceeding to weaponization,” Kimball said.
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Treasury Department data show that revenue from tariffs on imported foreign goods increased substantially in April and May, setting monthly records. But the total is less than half the figure President Donald Trump has cited. At least twice this month, the president has wrongly claimed that the U.S. “brought in $88 billion” from tariffs in “two months.”
We asked the White House for the source of the president’s claim, but we didn’t receive a response. Trump’s figure is close to the tariff collections from October to May, which totaled more than $81 billion, but included about three and a half months under Trump’s predecessor.
Trump first made the claim while speaking to reporters at a June 11 event at the Kennedy Center. “We took $88 billion in tariffs in two months, far beyond what anybody expected,” the president said.
The following day, during a bill signing ceremony at the White House, Trump again said: “We’ve taken in $88 billion in tariffs in two months. $88 billion with no inflation.” As we’ll explain, there’s more to the story on inflation, with economists expecting that the higher tariffs will cause inflation to rise in the coming months.
On other occasions since, he has cited the figure without including a time frame.
As we said, from October to May, which includes more than three months when Joe Biden was president, the federal government received $81.4 billion from tariffs, formally known as customs duties, that are paid by U.S. importers. That’s according to data for fiscal year 2025 that the Treasury Department released earlier this month. (The $81.4 billion was about 65% more than the $49.3 billion received in the same period in fiscal year 2024.)
In addition, as of June 18, the U.S. had collected $5.4 billion in customs duties and excise taxes in June, according to Treasury’s latest daily statement of cash and debt operations. That puts the U.S. closer to $88 billion in tariff revenue for the current fiscal year – but not for any two-month period in that time, as Trump initially claimed.
The U.S. got $22.2 billion from tariffs in May, a record amount in one month, the Treasury figures show. That was up almost 42% from $15.6 billion in tariff revenue in April, and the April total, the previous record, had increased more than 90% from $8.2 billion in March. The most revenue the U.S. has raised from tariffs in a calendar year was $102.3 billion in 2022.
Tariff revenue took off in April, which is when Trump implemented a minimum 10% tariff on U.S. imports of foreign goods. He had announced higher tariff rates on goods imported from dozens of countries, rates that he later paused for 90 days, he said, to negotiate better trade terms with those nations.
Prior to that, in March, Trump put in place a 25% tariff on certain goods imported from Canada and Mexico, and he increased from 10% to 20% a tariff on goods coming from China – a tariff rate on Chinese goods that he would later increase to 145% in April before lowering it to 30% in May. Trump’s administration also has levied new 25% tariffs on imported steel, aluminum, automobiles and auto parts.
More than $28 billion of the revenue from tariffs in the 2025 fiscal cycle was collected in October, November, December and January – a four-month period in which Trump was president for about 11 and a half days.
Also, Trump’s claim of $88 billion in tariff revenue with “no inflation” is not the whole story.
Based on the Consumer Price Index, the inflation rate was 2.4% for the 12 months ending in May – which is down from the 3% annualized inflation rate when Trump took office in January. The rate as of May was also only up 0.1 percentage points from the rate of 2.3% in April, suggesting that tariffs have had little impact on inflation and the price of most goods.
(Trump also said on June 18 that there was “a lot of inflation” when he took office, saying there were “four years of the highest inflation in the history of our country” under Biden. Annualized inflation hit 9.1% in June 2022, which wasn’t the “highest” ever, but it had declined considerably before Trump was inaugurated.)
However, some economists still predict that Trump’s second-term tariffs will increase inflation.
“Price increases are coming,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Santander U.S. Capital Markets, told the New York Times for a June 13 story about the tariffs and inflation. He said that consumers “have lucked out a bit, in that retailers have shown restraint” so far in not passing their higher costs from tariffs on to shoppers.
The Times reported that a “buildup in inventories that retailers amassed earlier this year … created a buffer for sellers to offer discounts, such as around Memorial Day, and generally hold off on raising prices until those stockpiles run out.”
In a June 16 opinion piece for MSNBC, Jared Bernstein, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Biden administration, said once the “temporary factors” that are “for now, holding back price passthrough” are no longer an option, “we should see more of a tariff bump in the inflation data.” Bernstein predicted that an inflation increase could happen in three to six months.
The Federal Reserve also declined to lower interest rates last week, with its chairman, Jerome Powell, citing “uncertainty” over “tariff inflation.” “Everyone that I know is forecasting a meaningful increase in inflation in coming months from tariffs because someone has to pay for the tariffs,” Powell said during a June 18 press conference.
In his own remarks on June 18, Trump criticized Powell for the Fed not lowering interest rates, claiming that Powell “maybe … was a Democrat.”
Powell served in the Treasury Department under President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, and he was appointed Fed chairman by Trump in 2018 before being reappointed to that post by Biden in 2022. In a June 18 story, the Hill newspaper described Powell as a “lifelong Republican.”
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A document the Department of Health and Human Services distributed to members of Congress to justify recent changes to COVID-19 vaccine recommendations misrepresented scientific research to make unfounded claims about vaccine safety for pregnant people and children.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly announced May 27 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had stopped recommending COVID-19 vaccination for healthy pregnant women or healthy children. He did not work through regular channels for updating the CDC’s vaccine schedule, which normally would include a presentation of the relevant evidence at a meeting open to the public and input from expert advisers.
Rather, Politico reported, in the days before Kennedy’s announcement, HHS circulated a document to lawmakers titled “COVID Recommendation FAQ,” citing seven studies as evidence justifying Kennedy in repealing the recommendations. (The CDC did remove its recommendation that pregnant adults get vaccinated. While Kennedy has said the vaccines are no longer recommended for healthy children, the CDC vaccine schedule now lists them as vaccines that may be given under shared clinical decision-making. There’s a full recommendation only for kids who are moderately to severely immunocompromised.)
A closer look at the citations shows that the authors of the document misrepresented the studies’ findings and cited research that itself misused data.
For instance, one study the document claimed showed higher rates of miscarriage in pregnant women who got COVID-19 vaccinations in fact concluded that there was no increased risk after adjusting for other factors that could influence the risk of miscarriage. Another study cited as showing placental blood clots after vaccination did not look at this outcome at all.
Yet another cited study misused data from a vaccine safety surveillance system to exaggerate the risk of myocarditis, a real but rare side effect of COVID-19 vaccination that can also occur following COVID-19. The study, co-authored by people with a history of spreading false and misleading information on vaccines, now carries an “expression of concern” that states the publisher is investigating “potential issues with the research methodology and conclusions and author conflicts of interest.”
The distortion of data is part of a larger pattern. Since taking the helm at HHS, Kennedy has repeatedly misrepresented scientific data on topics ranging from measles to chronic disease, as have HHS spokespeople and reports.
In fact, the safety and effectiveness of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy “have been established in studies undertaken independently by scientists working for governments, healthcare systems and universities all over the world, including in the USA,” Victoria Male, a senior lecturer in reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, told us via email.
And while there have been legitimate differences of opinion on whether or how often healthy children need COVID-19 vaccines, the HHS document omits evidence showing safety and effectiveness in this group while overstating risks.
The document “ignores the overwhelming real-world data on vaccine safety and benefit in children and pregnant women,” vaccinologist Helen Petousis-Harris of the University of Auckland told us in an email. She added that it misuses safety surveillance data and “cherry-picks quotes and studies while ignoring the broader scientific consensus and context.” She subsequently posted a version of her comments in a blog post.
Studies have found COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy is safe and protects both the mother from severe disease and the baby from hospitalization from COVID-19 during the early months of life.
“The data remain clear: getting vaccinated against COVID-19 is still the best way for pregnant people to protect themselves and their pregnancies,” Dr. Steven J. Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement reacting to the FAQ. “It is alarming that HHS is propagating misinformation.”
Going against this extensive record, the HHS document raised unfounded concerns about COVID-19 vaccines and pregnancy outcomes.
As we’ve said, the document misrepresented a paper showing no increased risk of miscarriage after COVID-19 vaccination, using it to support the claim that studies “showed higher rates of fetal loss if vaccination was received before 20 weeks of pregnancy.”
Dr. Maria Velez, a reproductive epidemiologist at McGill University who was the lead author of the study, told Politico that her work had been “misinterpreted” and did not find an association between COVID-19 vaccination and miscarriage after adjusting for a variety of factors that could impact both miscarriage risk and the likelihood of getting vaccinated. Adjustment for such factors is necessary before concluding that there may be an association.
Citing the study “as evidence for harm is a clear misrepresentation,” Petousis-Harris said.
We asked HHS if it stood behind its claims or could further explain this and other citations.
“The study cited showed a higher percentage of fetal loss before 20 weeks among pregnant women who received the COVID-19 vaccine compared to those who did not,” Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told us via email. “The underlying data speaks for itself—and it raises legitimate safety concerns. HHS will not ignore that evidence or downplay early pregnancy loss.”
Hilliard went on to call it “disturbing that FactCheck.org appears to dismiss the significance of the underlying data. Every miscarriage is a tragedy. Suggesting otherwise is offensive to the families who have experienced that loss.”
But Male called it “inappropriate” to calculate miscarriage rates without accounting for risk factors, pointing out that “the vaccinated groups were more likely to have comorbidities that put them at risk of miscarriage than the unvaccinated group.”
Furthermore, the larger body of research also has not found an association between COVID-19 vaccination and miscarriage.
This body of work includes a second study the HHS document cited to justify its unfounded claim on fetal loss. The study, which looked at outcomes for patients who underwent in vitro fertilization, again found that getting COVID-19 vaccines was not associated with pregnancy loss.
The HHS document also misleadingly cited a study it said “showed statistically significant increases in preterm birth.” One of the paper’s sub-analyses that looked just at the second trimester did find a statistically significant association between vaccination and increased preterm birth. But overall, there wasn’t an association between vaccination and preterm birth. And another sub-analysis, of the third trimester, found the opposite — an association between vaccination and a reduced risk of preterm birth.
Male pointed out that the study authors themselves said that some factor they did not take into account may have influenced both the preterm birth rate and whether someone got vaccinated in the second trimester.
Preterm births occurred on average 14.3 weeks after the first vaccination, and there were no preterm births within two weeks of vaccination. If the vaccines were in fact causing preterm births, at least some would be expected to occur more quickly after vaccination and at a greater variety of points in pregnancy, Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist and mathematician at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, wrote in a June 18 blog post responding to the HHS document.
The scientific literature in general indicates that COVID-19 vaccines do not cause preterm birth. Male said that “three other studies published almost simultaneously with this one confirmed no increased risk of preterm birth associated with COVID vaccination in the second trimester.”
Kucharski also wrote that studies that do many comparisons are liable to find some associations simply by chance.
“Just like a roulette player having another spin, the more times we compare things in a dataset, the bigger the chance that we might mistake a random coincidence for a genuine, consistent effect,” he said.
Another citation appears unrelated to the point the HHS document was trying to make. The document states that a study “showed an increase in placental blood clotting in pregnant mothers who took the vaccine.” But the cited study looked at a subset of COVID-19 vaccine side effects and did not address placental blood clotting at all.
“Our study does not show an increase in placental blood clotting,” said Petousis-Harris, who was a co-author of the cited study. “This study did not even assess this outcome.”
The study also “did not find safety concerns warranting the removal of vaccine recommendations,” she said. Rather, the study concluded that “the findings support ongoing vaccine safety,” she added.
Male said that three studies did analyze 181 placentas of vaccinated people following delivery. “None of these found any evidence of placental pathology (which would include clotting) associated with COVID vaccination,” she said.
The HHS document also adopted the old anti-vaccine tactic of using context-free language in vaccine prescribing information to stoke fear about vaccines.
The document cited a line from the Pfizer and Moderna package inserts saying that available data on the vaccines “are insufficient to inform vaccine-associated risks in pregnancy.”
“It’s true that the safety and efficacy of mRNA
COVID vaccines in pregnancy has not been established by the manufacturers,” Male said. Pregnant people were excluded from the original clinical trials. But subsequent studies from scientists around the world show COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective for pregnant people, Male added.
By contrast, package leaflets in the U.K. and Europe do include independent research findings, she said. These conclude that the available data have not shown an increased risk of miscarriage during the first trimester, although data from this trimester is “limited.” They also say that a “large amount” of data on women vaccinated later in pregnancy does not show “negative effects on the pregnancy or the newborn baby.”
The document took a similar tack in justifying the change in COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for children, citing statements in prescribing information that safety and efficacy in children under age 12 “have not been established by manufacturers.”
Petousis-Harris said that such cherry-picking of regulatory language is a “common tactic used by people trying to discredit vaccines” and said the language “does not mean the vaccines are unsafe or ineffective.”
An opinion piece by the Vaccine Integrity Project staff and advisers explained that the prescribing information says this because the vaccines in children under 12 are still available under an emergency use authorization rather than full licensure. FDA documents supporting the EUA do have information on the shots’ safety and efficacy. The Vaccine Integrity Project is an initiative “dedicated to safeguarding vaccine use in the U.S.” and is led by volunteer public health and policy experts.
The Vaccine Integrity Project article additionally cited a large meta-analysis that found COVID-19 vaccination in children 5 to 11 years old was associated with reduced rates of infection and severe disease — and that severe side effects were rare.
The HHS document also followed a familiar pattern of exaggerating the risk of myocarditis following vaccination while leaving out key context.
Petousis-Harris said that there is a “known signal for myocarditis, particularly after the second mRNA dose in adolescent males.” However, this side effect is very rare and is “typically mild and self-resolving,” she said.
And, as we have written before, myocarditis can occur following COVID-19 and is generally more severe after infection than after vaccination. Furthermore, “concerns about post-vaccination myocarditis are now largely in the rear-view mirror,” the Vaccine Integrity Project piece said. This side effect tended to occur in adolescent and young adult males getting a primary series of two COVID-19 vaccines close together. “Almost no one other than infants is receiving primary vaccine series doses anymore,” the authors wrote.
The HHS document leaves out this context.
One study in the HHS document — the one authored by researchers with a history of misleading on vaccination — misused safety monitoring data. The HHS document cited this study to claim that data from the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System showed that myocarditis reports in 2021 were “223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years.”
But as we have explained many times, the VAERS database cannot be used to compare vaccines and any sort of derived math from it is invalid. The early warning system collects reports of health problems following vaccination from anyone, regardless of whether the symptoms were caused by a vaccine.
Because VAERS is largely voluntary, the number of reports is highly dependent on awareness. Given the scale and unprecedented nature of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, along with increased reporting requirements at the time, there was a huge surge of reports to VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines. But that by itself does not mean the vaccines are dangerous. In this case, VAERS successfully flagged myocarditis as a possible concern, which was then confirmed in other systems to be a rare side effect.
“The cited claim that ‘myocarditis reports were 223x higher’ ignores the lack of a denominator and the influence of reporting bias following media attention,” Petousis-Harris said.
The HHS document went on to claim that a preprint looking at COVID-19 vaccination in adolescents and children found that “cases of myo and pericarditis were found exclusively in those that received the COVID-19 vaccine.” But Petousis-Harris called this a “misreading” of the study, pointing out that other studies show myocarditis can occur in unvaccinated children after getting COVID-19.
The same study previously had been misused on social media to make the false claim that only vaccination — and not COVID-19 — causes myocarditis. At the time, an author of the study told USA Today that this was a misinterpretation, as the study compared vaccinated versus unvaccinated people and not vaccinated versus infected people.
Finally, the HHS document correctly described a study using a Japanese adverse events database, which found elevated rates of myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination, particularly in younger males. Petousis-Harris said that the findings were in keeping with other global surveillance data on the vaccines and added that “the study does not argue against vaccination.”
Q: Has President Donald Trump issued a rule that VA doctors can refuse treatment to Democrats?
A: No. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs changed the wording in its bylaws to comply with recent executive orders. In making the changes, words including “national origin, politics, marital status” were removed from language prohibiting discrimination. But existing federal law already prohibits discrimination on those grounds, the VA says.
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The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs updated its bylaws in order to comply with recent executive orders, a department spokesperson told us in an email. “These updates will have no impact whatsoever on who VA treats or employs,” he said.
For instance, a copy of the bylaws for the VA’s Palo Alto Health Care System published in April shows changes compared with an archived 2023 version. In the section describing “acceptable behavior” from VA medical staff, the older document said staff should not discriminate “on the basis of race, age, color, sex, religion, national origin, politics, marital status, or disability in any employment matter or in providing benefits under any law administered by VA.” The new version of the document shows that several of those characteristics were removed, including “national origin, politics, marital status,” as well as “age” and “disability,” and instead language about “any legally protected status” was added.
The bylaws now say medical staff should not discriminate “on the basis of any legally protected status, including legally protected status such as race, color, religion, sex, or prior protected activity in any employment matter or in providing benefits under any law administered by VA.” MedPage Today reported on the Palo Alto bylaw changes, noting similar differences in a section on medical staff membership.
We received several questions from readers asking about the changes after the Guardian published a story that initially said, “new rules allow VA doctors to refuse to treat Democrats, unmarried veterans.” The story has since been amended to focus instead on the wording change. “After publication, the VA contacted the Guardian citing a 2013 policy directive that it says will continue to protect patients from discrimination despite the redactions in its bylaws; the VA also cited federal law protecting staff from discrimination,” the publication wrote.
The VA spokesman who told us that the change was made to comply with recent executive orders specifically cited the Jan. 20 order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government.” The VA also cited that order in March when it rescinded its directive specifying “respectful delivery of health care” for transgender veterans, a policy that was last updated in 2018, during the first Trump administration.
“Under no circumstances whatsoever would VA ever deny appropriate care to any eligible Veterans or appropriate employment to any qualified potential employees,” the spokesman said in his email. “Under no circumstances whatsoever would VA ever allow any employees to refuse to provide appropriate care to any eligible Veterans or appropriate employment to any qualified potential employees.”
We asked if there were laws or rules beyond the bylaws that would prohibit the VA from denying care to patients based on their national origin, politics or marital status, and the spokesman cited two sections of federal law that govern veterans’ benefits — Title 38 of the U.S. Code, sections 1705 and 1710, which detail the eligibility and enrollment priority for veterans seeking health care through the VA. The priorities are based largely on the patient’s level of service-connected disabilities.
The spokesman also cited a 2013 VA directive titled “Nondiscrimination in Federally-Conducted and Federally-Assisted (External) Programs,” which prohibits discrimination “in federally-conducted and federally-assisted programs and activities based on race, color, religion, national origin, Limited English Proficiency (LEP), age, sex (includes gender identity and transgender status), sexual orientation, pregnancy, marital and parental status, political affiliation, disability, genetic information, harassment, or retaliation.”
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President Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, appeared to be at odds over whether Iran was close to having a nuclear weapon, but Gabbard said the two leaders were saying “the same thing.” We’ll lay out the facts.
In her opening statement to a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on March 25 about the Intelligence Community’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, Gabbard stated, “The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”
In an interview with reporters aboard Air Force One on June 17, Trump said he believed Iran was “very close” to obtaining a nuclear weapon. Asked about Gabbard’s statement on the IC assessment in March, Trump responded, “I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.”
Nonetheless, Gabbard subsequently told a CNN reporter that she and the president are “on the same page.”
Trump “was saying the same thing that I said in my annual threat assessment back in March,” Gabbard said. “Unfortunately too many people in the media don’t care to actually read what I said.”
Here’s the entirety of Gabbard’s comments related specifically to Iran on March 25 (we bolded the text highlighted above as well as parts of her testimony that Office of the Director of National Intelligence officials say have been ignored by the media):
Gabbard, March 25: Iran continues to seek expansion of its influence in the Middle East, despite the degradation to its proxies and defenses during the Gaza conflict. Iran has developed and maintains ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and UAVs, including systems capable of striking U.S. targets and allies in the region. Tehran has shown a willingness to use these weapons, including during a 2020 attack on U.S. forces in Iraq and in attacks against Israel in April and October 2024. Iran’s cyber operations and capabilities also present a serious threat to U.S. networks and data.
The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003. The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program. In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.
Iran will likely continue efforts to counter Israel and press for a U.S. military withdrawal from the region by aiding, arming, and helping to reconstitute its loose consortium of like-minded terrorist and militant actors, which it refers to as its “Axis of Resistance.” Although weakened, this collection of actors still presents a wide range of threats, including to Israel’s population, U.S. forces deployed in Iraq and Syria, and to U.S. and international military and commercial shipping and transit.
An ODNI official highlighted to us Gabbard’s comments in that statement about more open discussions in Iran about nuclear weapons and that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
“Just because Iran is not building a nuclear weapon right now, doesn’t mean they aren’t ‘very close’ as President Trump said on Air Force One,” the ODNI official said, adding that Trump’s and Gabbard’s statements are “congruent.”
“All the points DNI Gabbard made during the ATA hearing outside of the singular statement that ‘Iran is not building’ a nuclear weapon, point to the country being very close to building one,” the official said. “The difference between the two statements is apples to oranges when you take into account her full ATA statement, which many in the media are refusing to acknowledge.”
On X, Vice President JD Vance pushed back when asked if Gabbard’s assessment in March was wrong.
“First off, Tulsi’s testimony was in March, and a lot has changed since then,” Vance wrote.
Vance also argued that Gabbard’s point about enriched uranium was consistent with his comments that Iran has “enriched uranium far above the level necessary for any civilian purpose.”
“It’s one thing to want civilian nuclear energy. It’s another thing to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And it’s still another to cling to enrichment while simultaneously violating basic non-proliferation obligations and enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium,” Vance wrote.
Trump’s statement that Iran is “very close” to a nuclear weapon is vague, and depends on how this is measured. Experts told us it would take Iran a week or so to produce weapons-grade uranium, if it chose to do so, but it would take several months or more to turn that uranium into a nuclear weapon.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, explained to us in a phone interview that there are “two or three ways to define how close to a nuclear weapon a country is.”
One is what’s known as the “breakout” time. “There’s broad consensus among experts that Iran’s breakout time — defined as the time needed to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb — is currently at roughly one week or less given its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and advanced centrifuge capacity,” Shawn Rostker, research analyst at the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us in an email, noting that there’s uncertainty now about what impact Israel’s attacks have had on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
At the breakout point, Iran wouldn’t yet have a nuclear weapon. “They would have the raw materials,” Kimball said.
U.S. officials have put the breakout time at about one to two weeks since at least July 2024, when then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave that time frame. In a June 10 unclassified statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of U.S. Central Command, cited the International Atomic Energy Agency in giving a minimum one-week estimate.
“The IAEA uses 90% enrichment as the benchmark for weapons-grade uranium, and it considers 25 kg of 90% enriched uranium enough to construct a simple nuclear weapon,” Kurilla’s statement said. “The IAEA estimates current Iranian stockpiles to include over 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium – almost double of what it was just six months ago. This is mere steps from reaching the 90% threshold for weaponization. Should the Regime decide to sprint to a nuclear weapon, it is estimated that current stockpiles and the available centrifuges across several enrichment plants are sufficient to produce its first 25 kg of weapons-grade material in roughly one week and enough for up to ten nuclear weapons in three weeks.”
It would take more time before Iran would have a nuclear weapon.
Kimball said the Intelligence Community and independent experts like his group “generally estimate it would still take Iran several more months to craft a crude nuclear device. It would take longer to assemble a smaller, lighter nuclear device that would be delivered on a ballistic missile.”
Rostker, also drawing from IAEA and other non-proliferation assessments, said that converting the uranium into a “deliverable nuclear device” was “complex” and “could take several months to over a year or longer, depending on Iran’s capabilities, decisions, and whether it chooses to test.”
Kimball noted that the U.S. intelligence assessment, as of last week, has continued to be that Iran “had not made a decision to weaponize its nuclear programs.” Trump was speaking “extremely casually,” and Iran is “very close” in vague terms, he said. But “there was not an immediate threat … that Iran was racing to build nuclear devices,” Kimball said, especially one that could be delivered on missiles.
In a May 31 report released last week, IAEA said it “has no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear programme” to develop nuclear weapons in Iran, and it noted high officials in the country have said that using nuclear weapons was “incompatible with Islamic Law.” But the IAEA said it had concerns about “repeated statements by former high-level officials in Iran related to Iran having all capabilities to manufacture nuclear weapons.”
The agency said, “[T]he fact that Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon State in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60% remains a matter of serious concern, which has drawn international attention given the potential proliferation implications.”
Update, June 23: On June 20, a reporter asked Trump: “What intelligence do you have that Iran is building a nuclear weapon? Your Intelligence Community has said they have no evidence that they are at this point.” Trump responded, “Well then my Intelligence Community is wrong,” and he said that Gabbard was “wrong.”
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ousted all 17 members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel, claiming it “has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interest and has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.” But there’s no evidence of problematic conflicts of interest or that the group inadequately scrutinizes vaccines.
Kennedy announced the removals in a June 9 Wall Street Journal commentary. In a press release from the same day, Kennedy said that the move was necessary to restore public trust in vaccines. “A clean sweep is necessary to reestablish public confidence in vaccine science,” he said. “The Committee will no longer function as a rubber stamp for industry profit-taking agendas.”
The few examples of conflicts of interest that Kennedy provided are either misconstrued or many decades old.
“Allegations of conflicts of interest have no basis in fact,” Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, said in a video posted to X the day after the announcement.
Dr. Tina Tan, the president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, also called the allegations about the advisory panel’s integrity “completely unfounded” in a statement.
“Wholesale dismissal of the committee is unprecedented, and without justification,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine law expert at University of California Law San Francisco, told us.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, as it’s formally known, is a panel of independent medical and public health professionals with expertise in vaccines that provides guidance on who should get which vaccines, how often and when. Its recommendations are highly influential and determine which vaccines are free to low-income children via the Vaccines for Children program and which vaccines most insurance companies must cover for no additional charge.
Kennedy’s dismissal of the entire panel follows two major policy changes at HHS that work to limit access to COVID-19 vaccines. In both cases, Kennedy circumvented the advisory panels that normally would have weighed in on such issues. Around the same time as the ouster of ACIP members, HHS also removed the career CDC officials that vet potential members and help plan and organize the meetings, according to reporting by CBS News.
On June 11, Kennedy, who is a longtime anti-vaccine activist, announced the names of eight new ACIP members in a post on X. At least two are well-known spreaders of vaccine misinformation, including one who is affiliated with an anti-vaccine group and believes her son was harmed by vaccines. Another has published dubious research suggesting COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe. Three have filed statements in court against vaccine manufacturers, including two who were paid to do so. An analysis by Science has also found that the new members, on average, have significantly less experience in vaccine science, as measured by publications, than the previous roster.
The new roster is set to participate in its first meeting on June 25.
Much of Kennedy’s justification for the removal of the sitting ACIP members rests on his contention that ACIP members have problematic conflicts of interest.
But as we’ve explained before, only those without significant conflicts are eligible, and panelists must file a financial disclosure report, update it annually and declare any conflicts at the beginning of each ACIP meeting.
According to the latest rules, updated in 2022, for example, neither ACIP members nor their immediate family members can be directly employed by a vaccine manufacturer. Members can only hold small amounts of stock in vaccine companies and cannot purchase stock while serving on the panel. Committee members also cannot hold a patent for a vaccine or be eligible for royalties for a vaccine that is expected to come before the panel, and generally cannot consult for or be paid for travel or speaking engagements by vaccine makers, among other requirements.
This does not mean that ACIP members cannot have any ties whatsoever to vaccine companies. Some experts test vaccines by running clinical trials or serve on the independent boards that monitor a trial’s progress and are compensated by vaccine manufacturers for their time. In these cases, an ACIP member would not be allowed to participate in discussions or vote on issues related to that vaccine. With a waiver, they would be able to discuss — but still not vote — on other vaccines made by the same company.
Dr. Sean O’Leary, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases, told us that as someone who hasn’t worked on a clinical trial, he doesn’t always have the knowledge to ask the right questions when the companies are presenting their data to the committee.
“It is actually valuable to have people that have that expertise on the committee,” he said, adding that those individuals know where mistakes can be made and know how the safety data are collected.
As the policy itself notes, “it is critical that individuals chosen for membership on ACIP have significant vaccine and immunization expertise, including crosscutting knowledge and experience in the various aspects of the immunization field. Some expertise important to the committee can only be developed through working relationships with vaccine manufacturers.”
Dr. Kathryn Edwards, a Vanderbilt University vaccinologist who is now retired, told us that prohibiting scientists who have ever received any funding from pharma to study vaccines from serving on ACIP is “really seriously flawed,” since those individuals are the “most skilled” in evaluating vaccines.
In his Wall Street Journal editorial, Kennedy pointed to a 2009 HHS inspector general report to support his concerns about conflicts of interest. “Few committee members completed full conflict-of-interest forms—97% of them had omissions,” he said of the report’s findings. “The CDC took no significant action to remedy the omissions.”
The nearly 16-year-old report analyzed forms for 17 different CDC advisory committees — not just ACIP — for the single year of 2007. It found that the CDC had certified forms with at least one omission for 97% of individuals. But as an NPR investigation reported, the form is notoriously difficult to fill out, and the omissions are largely paperwork errors — not serious ethics violations.
According to the report’s Appendix D, for example, disclosures were often made but did not fully follow the form’s instructions, with items not listed in all the appropriate sections. Some information was only included on CVs or other included documents. In other cases, CDC reviewers did not date or initial changes.
For seven of the 246 individuals, or 3% of cases, members voted when they should not have. All of these cases occurred on the same, unnamed committee.
Contrary to Kennedy’s claim that the CDC took “no significant action,” a CDC response included at the end of the report, written by then-CDC Director Frieden, said the agency had already implemented changes. It also said that the inspector general report “failed to address the severity of the individual filings” and noted that the agency, for example, found it “impractical” to verify form items already included and “made obvious” on supplementary documents the CDC was already reviewing.
On two occasions since the publication of the editorial, Kennedy has gone even further, incorrectly claiming that the report, which he attributed to other groups, found that 97% of ACIP members had undisclosed conflicts or that 97% had conflicts of interest — a false claim he also made during his confirmation testimony.
“Congress said that 97% of the people on ACIP have had undisclosed conflicts,” Kennedy said in a press conference on June 10, misattributing the report. “People have known about this for years.”
O’Leary said Kennedy’s distortion of the 97% statistic is a classic case of him “cherry picking and manipulating data to suit his political agenda.”
Kennedy’s other main support for his conflict of interest claims comes from a 2000 House committee staff majority report. At the time, the committee was led by Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton, who pushed the incorrect notion that vaccines cause autism.
“Four out of eight ACIP members who voted in 1997 on guidelines for the Rotashield vaccine, subsequently withdrawn because of severe adverse events, had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies developing other rotavirus vaccines,” Kennedy said of the committee report in his Wall Street Journal editorial.
The majority staff report did say that of a June 1998 ACIP vote, and a Democratic congressman said in a hearing that his staff had identified the four individuals. But the ACIP rules at that time pertained to licensed vaccines, not those in development. According to the House hearing, it’s not clear whether each ACIP member even knew that the companies were working on a rotavirus vaccine. And as some critics have noted, if ACIP members were truly voting according to their financial interests, it’s not obvious that they would want to vote to recommend a competing product.
In other appearances, Kennedy has also recited this finding, although he has botched it, using the figure of four out of five. He has also incorrectly said Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, voted to recommend RotaShield, but Offit told us he was not yet a member of ACIP.
Jason Schwartz, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health who has studied the history of ACIP, said that much of what Kennedy highlights is drawn from reports “that were 15, 20, 25 years ago, where admittedly those policies have evolved and strengthened, but don’t reflect today.”
Schwartz also said that the RotaShield example that Kennedy features is actually held up in public health circles as “a case study for how the vaccine safety system works — how it’s rigorous even after a vaccine is approved — and how these expert advisors responded quickly.”
The vaccine was approved and recommended in 1998. As we’ve explained before, in less than a year, the CDC identified in a vaccine safety monitoring system 10 reports of intussusception, a type of intestinal blockage, in infants who had received RotaShield. After further investigation, the agency temporarily suspended use of the vaccine, the manufacturer voluntarily recalled the vaccine, and ACIP withdrew its recommendation.
Although Kennedy suggests that the committee should have known not to recommend the vaccine in the first place, the serious side effect was so rare that it wasn’t clear there was an issue prior to a larger rollout.
“The signal did not emerge conclusively at the time the vaccine was approved and introduced,” Schwartz said, since not enough children had been vaccinated. Knowing of the potential risk, the Food and Drug Administration required that the trials for other rotavirus vaccines be significantly larger.
Kennedy also stated in his editorial that the conflicts of interest “persist.” But at the last ACIP meeting in April, most members had no conflicts to disclose; two members recused themselves from voting due to past participation in vaccine studies. And according to the CDC’s own online inventory of conflicts announced at each meeting from 2000 through 2024, which Kennedy’s HHS debuted on a website in March, only one person still serving on the committee had conflicts, again due to participation in trials.
Edwards, who is a former ACIP member and has also nominated people and written letters in support of ACIP applications, said the review process to add a new member, which can take a year or even longer, is “very rigorous.”
“There’s a lot of attention to conflicts,” she said, “and those have been thoroughly vetted.”
An investigation by Science of the 13 physician ACIP members Kennedy dismissed found “minimal” recent industry payments and “no sign” that members were compromised.
Edwards said the expelled ACIP members were “top-of-the-line … Cadillacs of vaccinology,” and noted that several did not have any current or past conflicts of any kind with vaccine makers, as they worked in public health. We asked HHS to state the problematic conflicts of interest for the dismissed panel, but did not receive a reply.
In his editorial, Kennedy stated that ACIP is “little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine. It has never recommended against a vaccine—even those later withdrawn for safety reasons.”
Numerous experts, however, objected to this description.
“No, ‘rubber stamping’ is not a fair characterization and a comment that belittles the time, expertise and integrity of the members and their work. The ACIP has recommended against several vaccines, as a matter of fact,” Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a public health researcher at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, told us.
Klausner had been working with Kennedy to identify new ACIP members, but told us he stopped at the end of March and was not involved in selecting the eight newly announced members.
“It is not true that ACIP is a rubber stamp, and not true that it was a rubber stamp when I was on ACIP back in 2007-11,” Dr. Janet A Englund, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Seattle Children’s Hospital, told us in an email, speaking in a personal capacity and not for her institution. “ACIP has often worked to limit or expand vaccine recommendations beyond that licensed by the FDA.”
Given concerns about effectiveness, ACIP said that in both the 2016-2017 and 2017-2018 influenza seasons, the live attenuated flu vaccine, FluMist, should not be used. Due to successful immunization programs, ACIP also rescinded its routine smallpox vaccine recommendation in 1971 and removed its recommendation for a live polio vaccine in 1999.
Of course, the group also voted to remove its recommendation for RotaShield after safety issues came to light. As we said, there wasn’t sufficient evidence beforehand for the group to recommend against the vaccine.
In many other instances, usually after lengthy deliberations, the panel has decided to limit a vaccine to a particular population, or offer a more conditional recommendation that falls short of saying someone “should” get a vaccine, as it has done over the years with vaccines against pertussis, meningitis, HPV, RSV and Lyme disease, several experts told us.
Kennedy’s underlying premise is also misleading. ACIP does very often recommend vaccines because the vaccines have typically already undergone significant vetting by the FDA. The primary role of the committee is not to upvote or downvote the entire vaccine, but to advise on which groups of people should or could get the vaccine, based on which populations will benefit.
“It’s a really high bar to get a vaccine all the way through FDA licensure,” O’Leary said. “And so once that happens, that vaccine has already gone through a lot of hurdles. And so it is to be expected that most of the vaccines that FDA licenses would get some kind of a recommendation.”
Schwartz noted that ACIP has “remarkably rigorous, well-defined, formalized” processes that are transparent and show how the panel interpreted the available evidence to arrive at a decision.
“Folks might disagree with outcomes, but with respect to the process that informed their decision,” he said, “it was formal and rigorous and well structured.”
Staff Writer Kate Yandell contributed to this story.