Q: Is there an ad in Craigslist to hire people to riot in L.A.?
A: No, there has been no such ad on Craigslist. Some social media posts cited a Craigslist ad to falsely claim it showed that people protesting the immigration raids in Los Angeles were being paid for their actions. But a pair of podcasters told the Associated Press they placed the ad as a prank for their show, and it had nothing to do with the protests.
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An unfounded claim that people protesting immigration raids in Southern California and elsewhere are being paid for their participation has spread on social media, with posts sharing screenshots of a short-lived Craigslist ad as evidence. The strangely worded ad seeking “BRAVE MEN” for well-paid but unspecified duties makes no mention of protests — and was actually a prank ad placed by podcasters.
Several readers have asked us about the ad and the social media posts.
The posts were aimed at participants in protests that began June 6 in Los Angeles, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stepped up workplace raids and arrests of people in the U.S. illegally. The Trump administration has deployed National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles to support federal law enforcement and protect federal buildings during the demonstrations. The protests also have spread to other cities throughout the U.S.
Without providing evidence of his claim, President Donald Trump has called the protesters “Paid Insurrectionists!” and “paid troublemakers” in Truth Social posts. Speaking to reporters on June 10, Trump said of the protesters, “I believe many of them are paid,” adding later, “Let me tell you, when you watch these agitators break up concrete and hand it out to people as they stood on line to get it, these have to be paid troublemakers.”
Social media users seized on a Craigslist ad posted June 5 in the Los Angeles area, and with similar language in Austin, to support the claim that the protesters had been hired. “Looking for the toughest badasses in the city (los angeles),” the ad said. “SEEKING EXTREMELY TOUGH, BRAVE MEN FOR NEW CREW IM BUILDING,” it read, but never mentioned participation in protests or demonstrations — or any specific activity at all. The ad offered $6,500 to $12,500 a week.
One Threads post was captioned: “LA ‘protests’ Craigslist ad searching for members. Follow the money.” The accompanying video, which was shared by conservative commentator David J Harris Jr. on Facebook, tied the ad to the anti-Trump protest group No Kings. Another post on X said, “Craigslist ad hiring protesters in L.A.”
But the ad, which was removed from Craigslist in Los Angeles and Austin on June 9 and 10, according to the fact-checking website Snopes, was not placed by anyone who was “hiring protesters.”
The bogus ad was a prank placed by a pair of podcasters, Joey LaFleur and Logan Quiroz, the Associated Press reported on June 10. The ad was intended as part of their show, “Goofcon1,” and had nothing to do with the anti-ICE protests. “I literally had no idea it was ever going to be connected to the riots. It was a really weird coincidence,” LaFleur told the AP.
On June 6, the podcasters livestreamed their conversations with people who had answered the ad.
The No Kings organization had no ties to the Craigslist ad, contrary to some social media posts.
The No Kings “About” page says, “No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism — and show the world what democracy looks like.” The site mainly calls for protests around the country on June 14, the day of a military parade in Washington, D.C., marking the Army’s 250th birthday and the president’s 79th, but also provides dates for organizing sessions, “marshal training” and other preparation for protest events.
The website includes a note at the bottom saying, “A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. Weapons of any kind, including those legally permitted, should not be brought to events.”
The site does not mention financial support for the protests. There is a long list of partners listed on the website, but no information about any funding they might provide for the organization.
We reached out to the No Kings organization for comment on the social media posts and whether the organization funds protest activities, but did not receive a response. We also sought comment from Craigslist about the ads, but did not get a response.
Claims that protesters are paid actors is a familiar social media refrain. Baseless claims that counterprotesters were recruited through a Craigslist ad circulated after the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as we’ve written. Similar false claims about paid participants spread online in 2020 during the social justice protests following the death of George Floyd.
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President Donald Trump recently boasted that the nation’s murder rate has “plummeted by 28%” since he took office. Data supplied by local police departments do show the nation’s murder rate is dropping, as it has been for several years now.
Notably, Trump now seems comfortable with crime data that he criticized repeatedly during the campaign as “fake news.”
Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump insisted that violent crime and murders were on the rise under then President Joe Biden, despite FBI data and statistics from other sources showing that crime spiked in 2020 and had been trending downward since 2022.
But when Trump said at a roundtable with the Fraternal Order of Police on June 5 that “just a few months into office, the national murder rate has plummeted by 28%,” he was citing homicide data provided by law enforcement agencies.
FBI crime data is based on voluntary reporting from local police agencies. Although there is a lag in FBI reporting — the FBI won’t publish its national estimates for 2025 until the fall of 2026 — several groups aggregate data from law enforcement agencies, the same statistics that are reported to the FBI.
One group that compiles such data is AH Datalytics, a data consulting firm that produces its Real-Time Crime Index, an aggregation of crime data collected from 407 law enforcement agencies in the country.
The index shows a sharp spike in murders in 2020, a leveling off and then a steady decline starting in 2022 and continuing through March 2025.
Given the trend, Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics who was once a data analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in a Substack post that it is definitively “plausible” that the murder rate for 2025 could end up being the lowest rate ever recorded. According to AH Datalytics, the number of murders in the first three months of 2025 was 21.6% lower than the same period the year before.
Those statistics served as the basis for a June 3 article from the conservative news outlet the Daily Signal headlined “Murder Rates Plummet Under President Trump.”
The Daily Signal story included a quote from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, saying, “Since President Trump took office, murder rates have plummeted across the entire United States. American families were promised their communities would be safer and President Trump swiftly delivered by vocally being tough on crime, unequivocally backing law enforcement, and standing firm on violent criminals being held to the fullest extent of the law.”
That comment might leave the impression that the trend had reversed since Trump took office. But that’s not what the data show.
“Murder is on the same trajectory it has been on since early 2023,” Asher told us via email. “Murder fell 12% nationally in 2023, probably closer to 15% in 2024, and the early data for 2025 suggests a similarly large (or possibly even larger) drop this year.”
That trend has been echoed by data from other sources. In its data sampling, the Major Cities Chiefs Association showed a 10.4% decline in homicides between 2022 and 2023, and a 16.4% drop between 2023 and 2024. Its data, from nearly 70 law enforcement agencies nationwide, showed a 20.5% drop in homicides in the first three months of 2025 compared with the first three months of 2024.
Similarly, the Council on Criminal Justice found that homicides in 32 study cities dipped 10% between 2022 and 2023, and by another 16% between 2023 and 2024. In its 2024 report, released in January, CCJ reported, “Homicide rates in some high-homicide cities, including Baltimore, Detroit, and St. Louis, have dropped even further, returning to the levels of 2014, when national homicide rates were at historic lows. Rates in other cities have largely returned to pre-pandemic levels.”
According to information from the Gun Violence Archive, gun-related deaths (not including suicides) have been declining since 2021, with a 4.1% drop in 2022, a 6.7% drop in 2023, and a 12.6% drop in 2024. That trend appears to be continuing to accelerate in early 2025.
We reported on these downward trends when, during the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly insisted that violent crime, including murder, was rising under Biden and that FBI data indicating the opposite was fraudulent.
When a Time reporter in April 2024 presented the president with FBI statistics that showed a drop in homicides in 2023, Trump dismissed the data as “a lie” and “fake news.”
“There is no way that crime went down over the last year,” Trump said.
In other interviews and public speeches, Trump derided the FBI crime statistics as “phony” and “a fraud.”
During the campaign, Trump preferred to cite data from the government’s National Crime Victimization Survey, which estimates levels of various crimes based on a survey of about 240,000 people each year, asking whether they have been victims of various crimes. Those surveys — which notably do not, obviously, include interviews with the victims of homicide — showed an increase in the violent crime victimization rate between 2021 and 2022. However, NCVS data released in September showed the violent crime rate dipped by a percentage point in 2023, the latest year for which such data are available.
But now that he is in office, and the murder statistics are still showing a decline, Trump turned to citing the figures from law enforcement agencies.
“The only way to get current year data is to sample it from available agencies,” Asher said. “It is indeed the same source that showed a historic drop in murder in 2024 with smaller declines in both property and violent crime.”
This isn’t the first time that Trump has dismissed statistical sources that showed positive results under other presidents, but then embraced those same sources while in office. In his first term, he did the same with employment data.
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A viral graphic warns that if the House-passed reconciliation bill becomes law, “we won’t have another election.” But there is no evidence to support that or some of the graphic’s underlying claims about “what’s coming” if the Senate also approves the legislation without any changes. For other claims, it’s unclear what they are based on.
For starters, the bill does not allow President Donald Trump to “delay or cancel elections,” as the graphic falsely alleges. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress and states — not the president — the authority to set the dates for federal elections. That doesn’t change under the bill.
There also doesn’t appear to be anything in the bill that says “protests can be tracked and criminalized,” or that “your VPN,” short for virtual private network, will be “tracked.” And while there is a provision in the bill that would make it easier to fire some federal employees – it may not allow blatant firings for “political disloyalty,” as the graphic also says.
However, a number of legal experts have said that a section of the bill could make it more difficult for federal judges to “enforce their own orders” holding the Trump administration and others in contempt of court, as the graphic claims.
The graphic, which several readers have asked us about and has been circulating since at least late May, does not include any sources or citations to back up the claims it makes. But in this article, we’ll cover what evidence exists — or not — for its claims.
“If the Senate passes the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ and Trump signs it, that’s it,” the graphic says before outlining what the measure “really means” for the country. It goes on to list a number of things that will purportedly happen if the bill reaches Trump’s desk.
“He can delay or cancel elections – legally,” the graphic then says of Trump. That’s false. Nowhere in the bill does it say that the president can do that.
“The bill does not say anything about delaying or canceling elections,” said Eric Kashdan, senior legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, which reviewed the bill. In an interview, he told us that “Congress and the states are the ones who have power over elections, not the president.”
Indeed, as the Congressional Research Service has explained, the Constitution gives the ultimate power to set the general election date for presidential and congressional races to Congress, which, in 1845, established a law designating the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November as Election Day.
And “neither the Constitution nor Congress provides any … power to the President or other federal officials to change this date outside of Congress’s regular legislative process,” the CRS said in 2020, and again in 2024. In the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which was part of an appropriations bill that became law that year, Congress made clear that states have the option to push back the voting date in presidential elections — but only in the event of “force majeure events that are extraordinary and catastrophic,” and only if the date change is specified in advance through a state law.
The graphic’s claim that “judges can’t enforce their own orders” is almost certainly a reference to a bill provision that legal experts say would limit the power of judges to hold the Trump administration and others in contempt for violating court orders.
Section 70302 of the passed bill says: “No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”
A security is a bond or payment made by the party who requested the injunction or restraining order. The bond is a way of holding the petitioner liable for damages or costs if the injunction or restraining order is later found to have been wrongful.
That section of the bill “really does tie the judge’s hands,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, told us in an interview. Olson has written that federal judges rarely set a security bond for government cases in the public interest.
Critics of the provision say this would be a way for the Trump administration to get around orders from judges who have issued rulings blocking the enforcement of some of the president’s policies.
“Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, wrote in a May 19 piece for Just Security. “There is no way to understand this except as a way to keep the Trump administration from being restrained when it violates the Constitution or otherwise breaks the law.”
The Trump administration has argued that such a requirement would protect against “frivolous suits” and “wrongly issued” injunctions.
If the bill became law, Olson said judges could start setting security bonds, even really small amounts, in future cases challenging the government. But they wouldn’t be able to do so for existing court orders.
“There are countless … injunctions out there that were issued last year, or 10 years ago, or 50 years ago, which are still in effect, and which, for the most part … no security was given, so none of them get saved by this clause, which means that … all the existing injunctions become unenforceable by contempt citation for failure to comply,” he said.
If Section 70302 is also the basis for the graphic’s claim that the bill would allow Trump to “ignore Supreme Court rulings for a year or more,” Olson said that it’s almost always the case that court orders holding officials in contempt are issued by a lower federal court — not the nation’s highest court. “Therefore the enforcement of it through contempt is done by a lower court rather than the Supreme Court,” he said.
But the fate of that section of the bill is up in the air. That’s because the rules of reconciliation, which is the process that Republicans are using to try to pass the bill with less than 60 Senate votes, require bill provisions to have a direct impact on the budget. A Congressional Budget Office analysis said that section “would have no budgetary effect.”
So, the Senate parliamentarian could rule that the provision doesn’t meet the standards of reconciliation and should be removed from the bill. But if Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune disagrees, he could call for a vote to overrule the parliamentarian, the Washington Post reported.
The graphic’s claim that the bill means that Trump “can fire government workers for political disloyalty” could be a reference to Section 90002 in the bill, which requires some new civilian federal employees to either elect to become at-will employees, or to contribute an additional 5% of their income to the federal pension program. The bill says that at-will employees “may be subject to an adverse action up to and including removal, without notice or right to appeal, by the head of the agency at which the individual is employed for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.”
But a termination for clear political reasons could be subject to litigation, said Michael Foreman, a clinical professor of law at Penn State Dickinson Law and the director of its Civil Rights Appellate Clinic.
“If enacted even with the at will language an individual fired for political beliefs would have valid first amendment claims for the government’s violation of their right to free speech,” he told us in an email. “Even in states that are ‘at will’ that standard does not allow employers to violate constitutional rights or other laws giving protections.”
“For example,” Foreman said, “even in states that allow employers to fire for any reason or no reason – that provision does not allow them to fire the employee for say race based reasons which would violate state and federal law or one that would violate the US constitution.”
The graphic claims that under the bill “protests can be tracked and criminalized,” but Kashdan told us that he had “not seen anything in the bill directly on that.”
After that, the graphic says: “LGBTQ+ rights, education, health care, and media? Gutted.”
It’s not clear why the graphic says that the bill guts media. The word “media” appears in the bill one time – in regard to “magnetic media” as an acceptable medium to satisfy electronic filing requirements for qualified opportunity funds and qualified rural opportunity funds.
As for LGBTQ+ rights, that could be a reference to provisions in the bill that restrict health services for transgender people. Section 44125 prohibits Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from using federal funds to cover “gender transition procedures.” Also, Section 44201 would remove, starting in 2027, gender transition procedures as an essential health benefit required under the Affordable Care Act.
The bill includes additional provisions that affect health care coverage for other people. As we’ve written, the bill is projected to save $344 billion alone by changing work requirements for individuals who receive Medicaid benefits. The CBO estimated that the work requirement changes could lead to 5.2 million people in 2034 losing Medicaid coverage, including 4.8 million who would become uninsured. Overall, the CBO said that all of the bill’s provisions influencing health care could cause 10.9 million more people to be without insurance in 2034.
On the subject of education, the graphic could be referring to parts of the bill that would affect higher education in the U.S. For instance, Section 30031 of the bill would change eligibility requirements for the federal Pell Grant program for low-income students, including an increase in the number of college credit hours students need to qualify. In a preliminary analysis, the CBO estimated that raising the number of required credits would result in more than half of students already enrolled receiving less grant money.
Meanwhile, another provision in the bill, Section 30011, eliminates federally subsidized loans for undergraduate students and ends Direct PLUS Loans for borrowers, starting in July 2026 — although the bill provides an exemption for students already receiving those loans prior to the enforcement date.
The last item on the graphic’s list says: “Your VPN? Tracked. Your vote? Suppressed. Your speech? Flagged.”
We did not find that the bill says that there will be tracking of virtual private networks, which encrypt users’ computer data when connecting to the internet. There do not appear to be provisions calling for the monitoring of speech, either. In addition, Kashdan told us that “the bill does not give the president power to suppress votes.”
But he said that it could be that the creator of the graphic was making a different argument.
“What I think they’re saying with this list of examples is that if they pass the provision that would restrict federal courts of power to enforce judicial rulings, then it would make it a lot harder for courts to hold the administration accountable if it breaks the law in any of these ways,” Kashdan said.
If that is the case, it certainly isn’t clear from the graphic, which suggests that this is a list of things in the bill. At least some of them are not.
If more information emerges about the basis for the claims, we’ll update the story.
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Republican and Democratic leaders have either downplayed or overstated the estimated impact of the House reconciliation bill on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that due to work requirements in the bill, 3.2 million people would lose all of their SNAP benefits, which provide financial help to low-income people for groceries.
About 42 million people receive SNAP benefits, according to the latest preliminary monthly figures.
In a May 25 interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed, “We are not cutting SNAP.” Johnson said the bill, dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, was addressing “elements of fraud, waste and abuse” in the federal program.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, meanwhile, at the California Democratic state convention on May 31, said that as a result of the bill, those who “rely on SNAP to put a little extra on the table, you and your kids and 11 million of our neighbors are going to be kicked off that vital lifeline.”
According to several independent analyses, there are indeed significant cuts to the SNAP program in the bill, contrary to Johnson’s statement. But Walz, the former Democratic vice presidential candidate, was incorrect when he said 11 million SNAP recipients would be “kicked off” the program. That figure comes from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which said as many as 11 million are in households “at risk” of losing some or all of their SNAP assistance under the bill’s work requirement provisions.
The bill reduces federal funding of the SNAP program by about $286 billion over a 10-year period, according to the CBO, and it shifts the responsibility for covering 5% of the benefit costs and 75% of SNAP’s administrative costs to the states. The states would have to cover more of the benefit costs if their payment error rates — a measurement that includes overpayments and underpayments of benefits — exceed 6%. The federal government currently funds all of the benefit costs, and states cover half of the administrative costs of the program.
“The states are not properly administering this, because they don’t have enough skin in the game,” Johnson said in the May 25 interview. “So what we’ve done in the bill is add some — just a modest state-sharing component, so that they’ll pay attention to that, so that we can reduce fraud.”
The bill also expands work requirements to qualify for SNAP benefits. Under current guidelines, “able bodied” adults ages 18 to 54 without dependent children can only continuously receive SNAP benefits if they work 20 hours a week or are eligible for an exemption. If those adults don’t meet the work requirements, they can’t get benefits for more than three months over three years.
The House bill extends the age range to 64 and includes parents of children who are age 7 and older, all of whom must prove they are working or are in an educational or training program to qualify for benefits. There are exemptions to the work requirement, including for homeless people and veterans, which are already scheduled to expire in 2030, as well as for pregnant people and those who can’t work due to a physical or mental limitation.
The bill also caps annual increases to what’s called the Thrifty Food Plan, which determines maximum SNAP benefits, and eliminates internet costs as a household expense deduction for benefit calculations.
The nonpartisan CBO has said that the work requirement provisions in the House bill “would reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 3.2 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period.”
The CBO also estimated that states “would reduce or eliminate benefits for about 1.3 million people in an average month” over the same period due to the increased cost-sharing for states. However, there may be overlap between that figure and those losing benefits under the work requirements.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said the bill is “by far the largest cut to SNAP in history.”
Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst on the CBPP’s food assistance team, told us in an email that the CBO’s 3.2 million estimate accounts for “how many people would actually be cut off SNAP and would lose their food assistance entirely under the expanded work requirement in a typical month.” (Emphasis is Bergh’s.)
“CBO did not estimate how many of these 3.2 million adults’ household members would also see a reduction in the food assistance they receive as a result,” she said.
According to CBPP’s analysis, 11 million people “are at risk of losing some or all of their food assistance under the expanded work requirement,” Bergh said. (Emphasis is hers.)
While CBPP said that 11 million were “at risk” of losing at least some benefits under the work requirements, the think tank also said that the number who would lose some or all assistance under the bill overall would be more than 7 million.
“Under the House bill, the work requirement would for the first time apply to adults up to age 65 and to parents and other caregivers in households where all children” are age 7 and older. “The bill would also essentially eliminate states’ ability to request temporary waivers of the work requirement for areas with higher unemployment or insufficient jobs,” Bergh said.
The CBPP estimate of 11 million includes everyone who would be subject to the bill’s new work requirements, plus other members of those households. But, of course, not all of those people are expected to lose all of their SNAP benefits.
The CBPP’s estimate includes “about 6 million adults who would be newly subject to SNAP’s existing work requirement and thus are at risk of being cut off SNAP entirely,” Bergh said.
When adults lose access to SNAP because of the work requirement, “it also dramatically reduces the food assistance for everyone who lives with them,” Bergh said. “As a result, the roughly 5 million people who live with those 6 million adults would also be at risk of seeing their food assistance cut substantially.”
Another analysis also concluded that the work requirements in the House bill would affect millions of people.
The Urban Institute said the expanded work requirements to receive SNAP benefits “would be a major change to the program.” The institute estimated that “5.4 million people would be affected” and of those, “1.5 million families with 1.8 million people would lose benefits entirely.”
While the analysts’ estimates differ, all found that the changes to the SNAP program in the House bill would affect millions of recipients, contrary to Johnson’s statement. But Walz’s claim that 11 million will be “kicked off” SNAP is an exaggeration of the bill’s estimated impact.
The CBO did estimate that the bill would affect more than those who would lose coverage entirely. The average monthly benefit overall by 2034 would be about $15 below the expected level under current law, due to the bill’s cap on how maximum benefits are calculated. But CBO said it didn’t expect that reduction to change SNAP enrollment. And about 65% of households receiving SNAP benefits would see a decline in monthly benefits of about $10 on average, beginning in 2026, due to the change in counting internet costs as household expenses.
We asked Johnson’s office for information that supports his statement that the House bill is “not cutting SNAP,” and a spokesperson told us in an email: “Uncritically calling the [One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s] popular SNAP reforms … a ‘cut’ would be an incorrect characterization.”
The spokesperson also cited Johnson’s additional comments in the May 25 interview. “What we’re doing is strengthening Medicaid and SNAP so that they can exist, so that they’ll be there for the people that desperately need it the most, and it’s not being taken advantage of,” Johnson said. “In 2024, over $11 billion in SNAP payments were – were erroneous. I mean, that’s – that’s a number that everyone acknowledges is real.”
The Government Accountability Office reported that in fiscal year 2023, the Department of Agriculture “estimated 11.7% (or about $10.5 billion) of SNAP benefits that it paid were improper — meaning that payments were the wrong amount or otherwise should not have been made.”
But, as we said, the bill would reduce federal SNAP spending by $286 billion over 10 years.
We reached out to Walz’s office for information that supports his claim, but we didn’t get a response.
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Republicans say that able-bodied adults who don’t work would lose Medicaid coverage under the House tax-cuts-and-spending bill, while Democrats say the legislation would hurt vulnerable groups. The bill’s main target is those able-bodied adults, but other groups would lose coverage due to paperwork burdens and other provisions in the bill, health policy experts say.
The majority of coverage losses under the bill would come from those who became eligible for Medicaid due to an expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act — those enrollees would face new work requirements unless they were subject to an exemption.
“The challenge here is that these work requirements also become sort of a paperwork requirement,” Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the health policy research group KFF, told us in an interview. In order to keep their Medicaid coverage, people have to document that they’re working the required number of hours or meet the criteria for an exemption. It’s not yet known what kind of documents will be required, she said, but it’s “quite likely that there will be people … who have reported disabilities, who have other chronic conditions, and … who are caring for children or elderly parents, who may also lose coverage” because they aren’t able to provide the correct documents.
Overall, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would lead to 10.9 million more people being uninsured in 2034, with 7.8 million of those due to the bill’s Medicaid provisions and the rest due to changes concerning the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces. The House narrowly passed the bill on May 22, and the Senate is now considering it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican lawmakers have said that those losing insurance coverage would be people who shouldn’t have received it in the first place.
“The numbers of Americans who are affected are those that are entwined in our work to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse,” Johnson said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on May 25. He claimed that “pregnant women and young single mothers, the disabled, the elderly … are protected” under the bill.
The House speaker and other Republicans have said the bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, actually saves the Medicaid program, even though it cuts federal Medicaid spending. In a May 20 statement, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said the bill “stops the subsidization of competent adults who are just choosing to not work.”
KFF estimated that the bill would reduce federal Medicaid spending by a net $793 billion over 10 years, based on CBO’s analysis. That’s a 12% reduction in federal Medicaid funding. Yet, Johnson has claimed that the spending cuts aren’t cuts at all. “There are no Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill. We’re not cutting Medicaid,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 1. “What we’re doing is strengthening the program. We’re reducing fraud, waste and abuse that is rampant in Medicaid to ensure that that program is essential for so many people, ensure that it’s available for the most vulnerable.”
(Johnson has also cited “more than 1.4 million illegal aliens on Medicaid.” We’ve already written about that false claim. The CBO said those individuals would lose coverage from “state-only funded programs,” not from Medicaid. The bill would reduce federal Medicaid funding to states that continue their own health insurance programs for immigrants in the U.S. illegally.)
Democrats, meanwhile, have focused on potential impacts on “vulnerable” groups.
Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said on CNN on May 25 that Johnson’s comments about “able-bodied adults” and “illegal aliens” were “not true.” Bennet said the House bill would drive “a lot” of health care providers “out of business,” and suggested that kids and families in poverty would be affected by the Medicaid provisions.
The bill has financial implications for some providers, such as community health centers and hospitals, but it’s unclear to what extent they would close as a result. Tolbert said “it will be hard to say” if closures are directly related to the bill.
In a May 27 press conference, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that “every one” of the approximately 2 million people on Massachusetts’ Medicaid program “will be at risk of losing their health coverage” under the Republican bill.
Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us: “Basically every type of Medicaid enrollee could be at risk of coverage loss.”
But, of course, the vast majority of Medicaid enrollees wouldn’t be expected to lose coverage, even if many are “at risk,” as Warren put it. The health insurance program for low-income individuals covers about 83 million people and is jointly funded by the federal government and the states. Coverage losses would vary by state – and there’s uncertainty about how states would react to the bill’s changes. But KFF estimated that Massachusetts’ enrollment would drop by 11% in 2034 under the bill.
Nationwide, Medicaid projected enrollment would decline by 12% in 2034, KFF said.
We’ll go through what the bill would do and how it could affect Medicaid enrollees.
A large portion of the Medicaid savings in the bill come from new work requirements, or what the legislation calls “community engagement,” for adults who gained coverage under a Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. This aspect of the bill saves an estimated $344 billion over 10 years.
Forty states plus Washington, D.C., have implemented that Medicaid expansion. It broadened eligibility to adults under age 65 who earn up to 138% of the federal poverty level, and the federal government provides 90% of the funding for that population. The income eligibility threshold before that varied by state.
The expansion population was estimated at 21.3 million people in 2024, according to KFF.
The House bill would require those in the expansion group ages 19 to 64 to work, or participate in community service or job training, for a minimum of 80 hours per month. Attending an educational program at least half-time would also qualify, as would earning income equivalent to 80 hours’ worth of minimum-wage work.
States would be required to exempt certain groups, including pregnant people, parents and caretakers of dependent children and disabled family members, people with substance use disorders and some medical conditions, some people with disabilities, and those who had been in foster care as children, according to a breakdown of the bill by Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.
States would need to confirm that requirements were met for at least one month before someone applied for Medicaid or renewed their eligibility, and those renewals must happen at least twice a year. The work requirements would have to be instituted no later than Dec. 31, 2026.
The CBO estimated that Medicaid coverage would drop by 5.2 million people in 2034 because of the work requirement provision, with 4.8 million being uninsured. Its June 4 letter on these figures said that 18.5 million would be subject to the requirement, though “some” would be exempt.
It’s unclear how many are “able-bodied” and choosing not to work.
Studies have found a small percentage of Medicaid enrollees would fit that description. In an analysis of 2024 Census Bureau survey data, KFF determined that 8% of Medicaid recipients under age 65 and not also getting Social Security disability benefits weren’t working because they were retired, unable to find work or another reason. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that half of that group was retired.
Nearly two-thirds – 64% – were working full-time or part-time, and the rest weren’t working due to a disability or illness, caregiving responsibilities, or being a student.
Johnson has referred to “about 4.8 million able-bodied workers, young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working. They are choosing not to work when they can,” calling this “fraud.” But the 4.8 million figure is the CBO estimate of the number who would become uninsured due to the work requirements. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a post on X, said these were all “able bodied adults choosing not to work.”
It’s unknown how many of those individuals fit Johnson’s description. We contacted the House speaker’s office about this figure and his other claims, but we haven’t received a response.
Tolbert told us she didn’t know if a CBO breakdown would be able to provide details of what types of Medicaid enrollees will lose coverage under the work requirements, such as single adults, parents or those with disabilities.
“It is patently false that the impact is only going to be on able-bodied individuals,” Cuello said, adding that many people with disabilities aren’t enrolled with an official disability determination and instead are in the expansion population.
Michael Karpman, a principal research associate in the health policy division at the Urban Institute, told us that if there’s a group of enrollees in the expansion population that should be working but choose not to “it’s small.” The think tank has found that at least 90% of the adults in the expansion population “are working … are in fair or poor health or have a disability, likely have some caregiving responsibilities, or are looking for work. And so most people, the vast majority of people, are participating in the activities prescribed by the policy, or could potentially meet the exemption criteria from the work requirement.”
But “in practice,” he said, “a lot of people who are likely to qualify for an exemption are not going to actually get that exemption” because they’ll have trouble with the reporting requirements. “That’s what we saw in states that previously implemented work requirements. Some people were automatically exempted by the state; most of those who weren’t had difficulty with the reporting bureaucracy in terms of showing that they were exempt or meeting the work requirement.”
Two states have tried such requirements.
In Arkansas, which implemented work requirements for Medicaid in 2018, more than 18,000 adults were disenrolled that year. A federal court ruling stopped the program in 2019, after a group of Medicaid enrollees in the state sued. The case provided anecdotal evidence of the problems people had with the reporting requirements. One man in his 40s, who worked at a poultry business, successfully filed documentation at first but then lost coverage when he was unaware that he needed to keep doing so monthly.
An Urban Institute study found that the work requirement was associated with an increase in the uninsured among the target group for the policy, 30- to 49-year-olds with low incomes. But researchers didn’t find changes in employment.
And in Georgia, which, like the House bill, requires proof of work before enrolling applicants, “very few people who are eligible for the program have been able to enroll,” Karpman said.
As of April 30, the state had enrolled about 7,400 low-income adults since the program launched in July 2023, but the state had expected to enroll 47,000 in the first two years. The Georgia Budget & Policy Institute has said 240,000 people in the state are “potentially eligible.”
Jennifer Haley, also a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, told us that states won’t have perfect information on enrollees’ health conditions that would be subject to an exemption. There’s not ”a database of whether someone’s, quote, able bodied or not.”
Workers who are self-employed or gig workers also might have a hard time producing documents showing hours worked, these experts said.
Karpman and Haley were co-authors on a March report from the Urban Institute that analyzed a more limited 2023 congressional proposal for work requirements. “Our findings suggest states will disenroll significantly more expansion adults who should be exempt or are already engaged in work activities relative to the disenrollment of adults who are not engaged in work activities and do not meet the exemption criteria,” the report said.
Under the current bill, the expansion population has to renew eligibility at least twice a year, instead of once a year, which could lead to more people losing coverage because they miss notices or don’t file the correct paperwork — or what’s known as procedural disenrollment — not because they aren’t eligible.
This can have a ripple effect, where some children who are eligible could lose coverage when their parents are dropped from Medicaid for failing to complete the renewal process. If parents enroll, they are more likely to get their kids enrolled, and the reverse impact also occurs. “We know that when parents lose coverage, often their children still lose coverage as well,” Tolbert said.
The CBO estimated an increase in the uninsured of 700,000 people in 2034 due to the eligibility redeterminations.
There are a lot of unknowns with how the work requirements could play out, Tolbert said. States have the option to require more frequent eligibility renewals or proof of more than one prior month of work. “State choices here could have significant implications in terms of who is able to meet the requirements or not,” she said.
And federal guidance will come later on specific medical conditions that qualify for an exemption or what documents states will accept.
While the work requirements are expected to have the largest impact on enrollment, there are other provisions that could lead to lost or reduced coverage.
The bill delays the implementation of some Biden-era rules until 2035. One of those made it easier for seniors or people with disabilities with Medicare coverage who are also eligible for Medicaid to enroll in the latter. In these cases, Medicaid pays for supplemental benefits and Medicare cost-sharing. A preliminary CBO report estimated that 1.3 million in 2034 would lose their Medicaid coverage due to this provision but retain Medicare.
That Biden-era rule also streamlined enrollment and renewals for children and eliminated waiting periods for kids to enroll in the Children’s Health Insurance Program. “The eligibility enrollment rule would fix those problems, and they are repealing that rule,” Cuello said. “So again, that is absolutely going to impact the eligibility of children. Less children will have coverage under the Children’s Health Insurance Program because of those policies.”
The CBO estimated that this provision would increase the number of uninsured by 600,000 in 2034.
Cuello’s center also wrote that the bill prohibits Medicaid payments from going to Planned Parenthood clinics for 10 years, limiting at least some people’s access to care.
And there are the 1.4 million immigrants in the country illegally who CBO estimated would lose coverage through state-only programs. These aren’t Medicaid or CHIP enrollees, but the bill uses Medicaid to pressure states to drop those programs. As we’ve explained, the bill proposes reducing the federal Medicaid match for states’ ACA expansion populations from 90% to 80% if they provide health coverage to people living in the country illegally, regardless of how that program is funded.
According to KFF, there are 14 states, plus Washington, D.C., that have such programs to cover children regardless of immigration status, including seven states and D.C. that also cover some adults.
In addition, the bill increases cost-sharing for expansion enrollees with income above the federal poverty level, adding a $35 co-pay for services, but exempting primary care, and services for mental health or substance use disorders.
Democrats have said that the bill would force health care providers, such as nursing homes, community health centers or rural hospitals, to close. On CNN, Bennet said the legislation would drive “a lot” of health care providers “out of business,” while Warren, in her press conference, said that “hospitals and community health centers” would be “forced to close.” The bill could hurt the finances of these providers, but how many would close their doors as a result is unknown.
Tolbert told us that “it will be hard to say that any hospital closures or other providers going out of business … is directly related to these Medicaid changes.” But there will be financial implications, she said.
Community health centers, for example, are required to provide care regardless of someone’s ability to pay, she said. So centers that see a decrease in their patients’ Medicaid coverage would face increased financial pressure.
Rural hospitals also could be at risk. The bill would prohibit states from increasing or instituting new provider taxes, which states have used to supplement payments to hospitals to cover uncompensated care, Tolbert explained.
Cuello said that some rural hospitals will go bankrupt because of the bill’s provisions. “I can say with a good degree of comfort that if you have, at current level of funding, a lot of hospitals at risk of closure, and you massively decrease funding … we can safely assume that there will be some greater number of hospitals that closes.”
Cuello pointed us to a June report from the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform that said about a third of rural hospitals in the U.S. “are at risk of closing because of the serious financial problems they are experiencing,” and 14%, or 314 rural hospitals, are “at immediate risk of closing.”
Similarly, Bennet’s and Warren’s offices pointed to the financial frailty of rural hospitals and health centers and how a reduction in Medicaid payments and increased uncompensated care costs would hurt them.
For instance, Warren’s office cited a report from the Urban Institute that estimated that spending for health care services would decline by $771 billion over 10 years due to the bill and uncompensated care costs for the uninsured would go up $198 billion.
The senator’s office also cited comments by Shade Cronan with the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, who said the average community health center gets about a third of its revenue from Medicaid. Cronan told New England Public Media in April that the state probably wouldn’t be able to cover a cut in that revenue stream. “And then health centers will have to make really difficult decisions, potentially to reduce services, to close sites, to lay off staff.”
About 19% of hospital care spending in 2023 came from Medicaid, KFF reported, and half of rural hospitals in non-ACA-expansion states and 41% in expansion states had negative margins that year.
All of that shows that a reduction in Medicaid revenue would have a financial impact. But it’s unclear to what extent health care providers would be forced to close because of it and, as Tolbert said, difficult to determine later.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
In the past two weeks, U.S. public health authorities have skirted normal procedures and announced two major policy changes that will likely reduce access to COVID-19 vaccines and restrict use to higher-risk populations.
On May 20, the Food and Drug Administration announced a new regulatory framework that suggests that without new placebo-controlled trials, the agency will only approve updated COVID-19 vaccines in the future for people 65 and older and those with at least one risk factor for severe COVID-19.
On May 27, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a video posted on X that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was no longer recommending a COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children or healthy pregnant women. Previously, the CDC recommended COVID-19 vaccines for everyone 6 months of age and older.
In both cases, officials skipped the regular process for such decision-making, which typically includes guidance from advisory committees and input from vaccine makers, scientists and regular people during meetings that are livestreamed and open to the public.
“These were announcements, not actual discussions,” Dorit Reiss, a professor of law at University of California Law San Francisco who specializes in vaccine law and policy, told us. “They both can have the effect of making it harder for people who want COVID vaccines to get them.”
Both decisions also leave many outstanding questions that the agencies have not yet clarified. Here, we explain what we know — and don’t — about these new COVID-19 vaccine policies.
FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and Dr. Vinay Prasad, director of the agency’s division that regulates vaccines, announced the new framework for COVID-19 vaccines in a livestreamed video and commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine on May 20.
Citing COVID-19 vaccine recommendations from other high-income countries — none of which has a universal recommendation — along with what they described as uncertainty about whether healthy, younger people benefit from the vaccines, the two officials indicated that future COVID-19 vaccines would only be approved for people 65 years and older and those with at least one risk factor for severe COVID-19.
Those approvals, they explained, would be based on immunogenicity data, or evidence that the vaccine generates an antibody response in people. That’s a slightly higher bar than the evidence required for last year’s updated shots, which relied on antibody data in animals in addition to other accumulated evidence. (With earlier updates, companies have sometimes submitted clinical antibody data, but given that the change to the vaccine is so minor, the FDA did not require clinical data, similar to how the agency handles seasonal influenza vaccines.)
For everyone else, the officials wrote in their commentary, the “FDA anticipates the need for randomized, controlled trial data evaluating clinical outcomes” before approval.
The regulatory change is similar to the FDA’s recent, more limited approval of Novavax’s protein-based COVID-19 vaccine for people 65 and older or those with at least one underlying health condition. According to reporting by Politico and the Wall Street Journal, political appointees delayed and intervened in the approval.
The new framework does not apply to the COVID-19 vaccines currently on the market. It only applies to updates or new formulations of the vaccines. For the 2025-2026 season, the FDA is advising that vaccines continue to target the JN.1 lineage, but says that it prefers an update to a specific subvariant. Last year, the FDA authorized and approved updated vaccines in late August.
A week later, in a 58-second video also featuring Makary and National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Kennedy made another announcement.
“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID-19 vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said.
“It’s common sense and it’s good science,” Bhattacharya added, even though no evidence was provided.
Notably, Kennedy’s announcement is at odds with the new FDA framework, which includes pregnancy as a high-risk condition for which updated vaccines would be approved without new trials.
Kennedy’s announcement also does not entirely match with how the CDC ultimately updated its childhood immunization schedule. The schedule is a timetable for when recommended vaccines should be given and dictates which vaccines insurance providers are required to cover without a copay under the Affordable Care Act.
Although Kennedy said in the video that the policy was effective on May 27, the CDC did not update the schedule until the evening of May 29. Instead of removing the COVID-19 vaccines for “healthy” children, however, the schedule changed the recommendation for all children without compromised immune systems to one of shared clinical decision-making, meaning such children “may” receive a vaccine after consultation with their health care providers. For children who are moderately to severely immunocompromised, the full recommendation to receive a vaccine remains.
Kennedy never said what he meant by “healthy” children, but previously, Makary and Prasad have suggested that the FDA views them as children without a risk factor for severe COVID-19. Many children have one or more risk factors but are not necessarily immunocompromised.
For pregnant adults, the CDC schedule now lists the vaccine as “no guidance/not applicable.”
HHS did not respond to a detailed list of our questions trying to clarify various aspects of the different policies.
“The old COVID-19 vaccine recommendations for healthy children under 18 and for pregnant women have been removed from the CDC vaccine schedule,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is restoring the doctor-patient relationship. If a parent desires their healthy child to be vaccinated, their decision should be based on informed consent through the clinical judgement of their healthcare provider.”
Reiss told us the HHS statement was “pretty disingenuous,” noting that “the decision to vaccinate is always a personal one, and most people do it through their doctor.”
Following news coverage that the CDC schedule retains a modified recommendation for children, HHS has since insisted in a post on X that the media are wrong and that the schedule is “very clear” that the vaccine “is not recommended” for pregnant women or healthy children.
However, as we said, the recommendation for now is one of shared clinical decision-making for kids who are not immunocompromised.
Immediately, there may not be a large change. But soon, some kids (or their parents) and pregnant people may have to pay out of pocket for a vaccine, and some providers may be more hesitant to recommend the shots to patients. And in the fall, if the vaccines are updated under the new framework, that is likely to be the case for even larger swaths of the population.
The reason for the intense focus on the language of the policy — and whether the vaccines are truly removed from the CDC’s immunization schedule or not — is because removal from the schedule would mean that insurers are no longer required to cover the vaccines with no cost-sharing under the Affordable Care Act.
People without a recommendation could still get them, Reiss said, but they would need to pay out of pocket if their insurer decided to drop coverage of the vaccine. CVS currently charges around $200 for a single dose.
Some insurance companies might still cover the shots if it’s cost-effective for them. “But that would be up to the insurance company,” Reiss said.
Under the current language used in the amended CDC schedules, Reiss said, insurance companies are no longer required to cover the shots for pregnant adults. Insurers are still required to cover vaccines recommended under shared clinical decision-making, although she said that in practice, that doesn’t always happen.
Come fall, the FDA appears poised to approve updated vaccines only for higher-risk groups, since it’s not possible for any new trials with younger, healthier people to have been completed, even if companies decide to start them.
Prasad and Makary have emphasized that the list of medical conditions the CDC uses to define high risk — which includes pregnancy, obesity, depression, physical inactivity and being a current or past smoker — is “vast” and estimated to include around 100 million to 200 million Americans.
“This is a tremendously broad category,” Prasad said in the livestreamed video. “At-risk Americans can be reassured that they will be covered by such approvals.”
Experts told us updated vaccines could still be prescribed off-label for younger people who aren’t high risk, but if there isn’t a CDC recommendation, then insurance coverage won’t be required. And if the vaccines are both not licensed and not recommended, Reiss said, “more doctors may hesitate to prescribe” them. The vaccines may also be harder to find, and pharmacies, for example, may not be willing to administer them.
Charlotte Moser, co-director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Vaccine Education Center and a member of the CDC’s outside Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, told us in an email that it’s “possible that the ACIP would vote to have the vaccines used ‘off-label,’ which would mean using them differently than the way the FDA licensed them.”
But the ACIP recommendations would need to be accepted by the director of the CDC, and currently, there doesn’t appear to be an acting director. The recommendations ACIP made in its last meeting in April went directly to Kennedy, and so far, he has only accepted one of three recommendations, Moser said.
Even if the vaccines aren’t updated to target a new variant, the CDC recommendations could still shift.
“I don’t quite know what CDC will do and how this will go,” Reiss said. “It’s a mess.”
Typically, the FDA is in charge of licensing vaccines and giving general indications for their use, and the CDC’s job is to make tailored recommendations about who should use them, when and how. And as we’ve mentioned, both the FDA and the CDC have panels of independent, outside experts that inform those decisions.
But in this case, both policy changes were made without the input of the agencies’ advisory committees, even though both ACIP and the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee were scheduled to meet to discuss COVID-19 vaccine recommendations in the near future — on May 22 for VRBPAC and late June for ACIP.
Dr. Kathryn M. Edwards, a retired vaccinologist and pediatrician and former member of the VRBPAC and ACIP, wrote in a STAT opinion piece that the way in which the FDA changed its regulatory framework “is in stark contrast” with the standard process.
“The usual practice is to provide Draft Guidance Documents, comprehensively outlining specific requirements in the Federal Register, and inviting a period of public comment so experts in a broad range of fields, including immunology, biostatistics, and clinical care, can add their perspectives. Then the FDA finalizes the document and posts it to the FDA website,” she wrote.
“The FDA guidance presented in the NEJM was not released in the Federal Register, did not invite comment, and provided only a general outline for Covid-19 vaccine licensure. The report lacked detail, and a clear blueprint was not provided,” she continued.
The decision to change the CDC vaccine schedules also circumvented the way in which vaccine recommendations are typically made. As Reiss told us when we reported on Kennedy’s intention to remove the COVID-19 vaccines from the childhood vaccination schedule, the decision should have been made after discussion with ACIP.
“This decision bypasses a long-established, evidence-based process used to ensure vaccine safety and ignores the expertise of independent medical experts, including members of CDC committees who are examining the evidence regarding the vaccine to make recommendations for the fall,” said 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, in a statement sent to us by the AAP.
By not following the established procedures, the HHS agencies are vulnerable to legal challenges, Reiss told us.
“This is really bad administrative procedure, even before we talk about circumventing ACIP,” she wrote on social media. Under administrative law, she said, agency decisions have to meet certain criteria. For instance, they must include explanations of the agency’s fact-finding and how the facts support the decisions.
On June 3, Reuters and CBS News reported that a pediatric infectious disease expert at the CDC who had helped lead ACIP’s working group resigned from her position. “My career in public health and vaccinology started with a deep-seated desire to help the most vulnerable members of our population,” she wrote in an email to colleagues, “and that is not something I am able to continue doing in this role.”
Physicians’ and other experts’ confusion and frustration have been followed by relief after the CDC did not go through with Kennedy’s stated plan of removing the COVID-19 vaccine from the childhood immunization schedule for healthy children, which would have removed the requirement that the vaccine be covered by insurance.
While the guidance “allows families to continue to choose the Covid vaccine, how we got here is troubling,” the AAP said in a post on X.
As we’ve reported, and as the AAP noted in a statement, ACIP was already leaning toward shifting from a universal recommendation to a risk-based recommendation for certain populations, recognizing that the vaccine is significantly more beneficial to older people and those with conditions that put them at higher risk.
Children are typically at much lower risk of getting severely ill from COVID-19 than older adults, and some doctors do not think healthy kids need to receive annual doses. At the same time, data presented at the last ACIP meeting in April shows COVID-19 does still kill and hospitalize children, including those without any risk factors. There is also evidence that the vaccine protects children and adolescents from long COVID.
At the last ACIP meeting, nearly 90% of ACIP work group members who supported a risk-based recommendation also supported allowing anyone who wanted protection from vaccination to receive a vaccine.
Experts have pushed back on changing the recommendation for pregnant people and have also been particularly concerned about babies and other young children receiving an initial series of shots, given evidence that very young children are among the most affected by COVID-19.
In a LinkedIn post, Moser pointed out that in practice, the shared clinical decision-making recommendation “often does not translate into a focus on individual benefits” and is “particularly troublesome” for high-risk children, “who now have a weaker recommendation than adults with similar conditions,” and for unvaccinated children.
“Every year in this country, 3 to 4 million children are born and don’t have any immunity to this virus,” she told us in an interview.
In the past, experts have argued that shared clinical decision-making recommendations are confusing and hard to implement, and can ultimately create an access barrier for vaccination.
Women who get vaccinated during pregnancy can pass on protective antibodies to their babies, as we have reported and as a CDC webpage on the issue still said, as of June 4. Maternal vaccination during pregnancy is associated with a reduced risk of infection and hospitalization from COVID-19 during the first six months of a baby’s life, and particularly during the newborn period, according to multiple studies.
“[G]rowing evidence shows just how much vaccination during pregnancy protects the infant after birth, with the vast majority of hospitalized infants less than six months of age—those who are not yet eligible for vaccination—born to unvaccinated mothers,” Dr. Steven J. Fleischman, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement following Kennedy’s announcement.
Evidence shows that vaccination also protects the pregnant person from severe COVID-19.
“Removing pregnant women from the vaccine schedule is neither common sense nor good science,” Dr. Robert T. Schooley, a distinguished professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego and former VRBPAC member, told us, referencing Bhattacharya’s comments in the announcement video. “This is an example of decision-making that is wrong on both process and outcome.”
In an interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on June 1, Makary misleadingly claimed, as he did previously in an interview with NBC News, that the data on the COVID-19 vaccine during pregnancy is “mixed.”
“Those 67 studies are mixed. The data in pregnant women is different for healthy versus women with a – a co-morbid condition. So, it’s a very mixed bag,” he said, when presented with a 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of 67 studies evaluating the safety and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy. “So, we’re saying, your obstetrician, your primary care doctor and the pregnant woman should together decide whether or not to get it.”
Victoria Male, a senior lecturer in reproductive immunology at Imperial College London, told us that studies have included pregnant people regardless of underlying health conditions, so in that sense they are “mixed.” But the results themselves have not been mixed.
“It is unequivocal that COVID vaccination during pregnancy does not increase the risk of any problems during the pregnancy or with the baby, and is effective at preventing severe disease, which can cause problems,” she said.
It’s also misleading for Makary to have presented the policy change for pregnant people as simply one of discussing the option with a doctor, since by removing the CDC’s recommendation, insurance companies are no longer required to cover the vaccine.
“ACOG is concerned that as a result of the new CDC recommendations, payers may be less likely to cover the COVID-19 vaccines, leaving patients to pay out of pocket or unable to get vaccinated at all,” an ACOG spokesperson told us in an email.
Many experts are skeptical of the framework’s call for new randomized, placebo-controlled trials before approving COVID-19 vaccines for healthy people below the age of 65.
In the NEJM commentary, Makary and Prasad said that the FDA considers the healthy 50- to 64-year-old population an “ideal population for future trials,” but that vaccine companies can also choose to conduct trials for other younger, healthy groups. They noted that very young children — those below the age of 4 — are at higher risk of severe COVID-19 than older children, but the risks “remain lower than those for adults 65 years or older and on par with those for adults 50 to 64 years old.”
The two officials indicated that the FDA would want the trials to demonstrate a significant reduction in the risk of symptomatic infection — 95% confidence that the vaccine’s efficacy is above 30% — with follow-up of at least six months, in a population that includes participants who have had COVID-19 in the past year. The trials should also assess outcomes of severe COVID-19, hospitalization and death, they said.
It’s not clear whether vaccine makers will want to conduct those trials, as they are likely to take time and be very expensive. Makary said in a Senate hearing on May 22 that he anticipated the trials would take “roughly a year” to complete. As staffers and advisers with the Vaccine Integrity Project, an initiative with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, wrote in a viewpoint article, it is unclear how that timeline fits with a vaccine that would need to be rolled out within the same season to target the primary variants in circulation.
Experts have also noted that conducting placebo-controlled trials is ethically questionable, given that there is now a vaccine available. Typically, investigators can only ethically conduct a trial when there is genuine uncertainty over whether a vaccine is beneficial. Otherwise, a trial would be denying a protective vaccine from one group. And ultimately, experts question the benefit of doing new trials, when an abundance of safety and effectiveness data already exists.
In their video, Prasad and Makary pointed to former FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, who served under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, endorsing the idea of performing such trials.
“In the case of COVID-19 I believe it would now be quite reasonable, and even advisable, to conduct placebo-controlled trials for ‘boosters’ using updated versions of the vaccine in people who are not high-risk,” Califf wrote in a May 9 Substack post, echoing a viewpoint he published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Other experts, however, disagree.
“I can’t imagine an institutional review board would approve that kind of study,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who’s a current member of VRBPAC and a former member of ACIP, told us in an interview, citing consistent CDC data that annual updated shots provide a benefit, regardless of age or risk factors, even in the background of high immunity. “I think it’s a wholly unethical prospect.”
In the May 22 VRBPAC meeting, Dr. Eric J. Rubin, an adjunct professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and editor-in-chief of the NEJM, also questioned the proposal, noting that the CDC had just presented a lot of “very reassuring” effectiveness data on the vaccine, which could mean there is not enough uncertainty to ethically conduct such trials.
Even though he’s “a believer” when it comes to randomized controlled trials, Rubin said, “observational data has a lot more richness in the case of a very varied population with all kinds of different exposures. So I think this is a case where we learn a lot more out of observational data than we would out of an RCT and I don’t think the RCT is feasible.”
In the CBS interview, Makary also insisted that pregnant people could not rely on observational data and need a randomized controlled trial before continuing to receive COVID-19 vaccines. “A randomized controlled trial was set up and it was closed without any explanation,” he said.
Male, however, said that for that trial, there was “so much epidemiological data showing that COVID vaccination in pregnancy is safe and effective, that it was unethical to continue recruiting to the unvaccinated group.” She also noted that there is some data on the COVID-19 vaccines during pregnancy from the original trials, as 102 people in the Pfizer and Moderna trials became pregnant unintentionally. There was no increased risk of pregnancy problems in those who received the vaccines, she said.
Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.
The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that, on average, Americans’ taxes would rise about 7.5% if the 2017 tax cuts are allowed to fully expire at the end of the year. But President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that if the Republican budget bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, doesn’t pass, Americans “will get a 68% tax increase.”
The White House did not respond to our request for information about where the president’s number came from, but it appears he may be referring to the percentage of Americans who would see a tax increase of some amount if the tax cuts expire. Some independent analyses put that percentage at close to the president’s number. But that’s not the way the president has repeatedly presented the figure.
For instance, speaking to reporters on May 25, Trump said, “If the Democrats don’t vote, it’s a 68% tax increase.”
In another press conference on May 30, Trump said if the bill doesn’t get approved, “you’ll have a 68% tax increase. You’re going to go up 68%. That’s a number that nobody’s ever heard of before. You’ll have a massive tax increase.”
The bill extends provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that would expire at the end of this year. So, without an extension, individual income tax rates would revert to 2017 levels.
As we said, it is possible the president may have meant that 68% of Americans would see a tax increase if the bill fails.
That’s how Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky, framed the statistic in an interview with CNN on May 21. “Anyone who votes against this bill, whether you’re a grandstander or a Democrat who votes against this bill, is voting for a $4 trillion tax increase, a tax increase on 68% of Americans,” Barr said.
That’s roughly in line with the conclusions of a Tax Policy Center analysis.
“We estimate 64.2 percent of households would pay more taxes in 2026 if the law expires,” John Buhl, spokesman for the Tax Policy Center, told us in an email, referring to a March analysis of the effect of extending certain provisions of the TCJA.
Similarly, the Tax Foundation estimates 62% of tax filers would experience a tax increase if the TCJA provisions are allowed to expire. And Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, told us that based on a Penn Wharton Budget Model analysis, “it is true that a bit more than half of households would see their tax bill increase relative to” before the TCJA “if no bill were passed.”
In other words, the way Barr framed the statistic is defensible.
But we could find no analysis that concluded taxes would rise 68% on average, relative to current policy, if the bill didn’t pass. To the contrary, the Tax Policy Center put the figure at closer to 7.5%.
“Overall, taxes would increase by an average of about $2,100, reducing after-tax income by 2.1 percent,” Joseph Rosenberg, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who researches federal tax issues at the TPC, explained in an email, referring to the estimated impact in 2026. “That corresponds to roughly a 7.5 percent increase in taxes, on average.”
A Tax Foundation analysis of the bill considered its effect on after-tax income — which is not the same as the effect on taxes paid. Nonetheless, in its “dynamic” model that considered the economic benefits of the tax cuts, those in the bottom 40% of incomes — making less than $37,364 — would see a 2.8% to 3.3% increase in after-tax income. Middle-income earners — those making between $37,364 and $71,067 — would have 2.5% more in after-tax income in 2026 if the bill passes. The top 20% of earners — those making more than $125,315 — would see a 3.8% increase.
It’s true that Democrats in the House unanimously opposed the budget package, which includes many other provisions in addition to extending the 2017 tax cuts. Two Republicans also voted against it, though it narrowly passed the House 215-214. The president’s comments ignore that Democrats have advocated extending the tax cuts for the vast majority of Americans, but not those earning above certain income levels.
Robert Farley contributed to this story.
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Multiple independent analyses say the recently passed House reconciliation bill — even with its deep spending cuts in some areas — would add trillions of dollars to the federal deficit over 10 years. Those analyses contradict Republican lawmakers who have downplayed the net cost of the bill and White House claims that it wouldn’t increase the deficit at all.
The House passed H.R. 1, dubbed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” on May 22 after an all-night session. The vote was 215 to 214, with two Republicans voting against it. The bill would extend the 2017 tax cuts, make other tax cuts, boost border security funding and cut Medicaid spending, among other provisions. It now goes to the Senate, where it faces some Republican opposition to the bill’s effect on the national debt.
The Trump administration has tried to cast the House bill in the rosiest light. At a May 19 press briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “This bill does not add to the deficit.” On the morning of May 22, Leavitt celebrated its passage in the House with a post on X claiming, in part, “Largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years, securing $1.6 trillion in mandatory savings.”
That same morning, Republican Rep. John Rutherford of Florida, said on Facebook, “Contrary to what you are hearing about the One Big Beautiful Bill, it will NOT be a huge deficit bill.”
Rutherford was responding to a Congressional Budget Office report on the bill that said for the years 2026 to 2034, there would be “an increase in the federal deficit of $3.8 trillion attributable to tax changes, including extending provisions of the 2017 tax act.” Update, June 6: The CBO estimated on June 4 that overall the bill would increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion, on net, over 10 years.
In an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on May 25, House Speaker Mike Johnson, also addressing the nonpartisan budget office’s report, said the CBO doesn’t do “dynamic scoring. What that means is, they don’t account for the growth that will be fostered by all the policies that are in this big piece of legislation. … Just remember the last Trump administration. After the first two years, we brought about the greatest economy in the history of the world, not just the U.S.”
On CBS’ “Face the Nation” the same day, Johnson agreed with host Margaret Brennan that the bill would cost between $4 trillion and $5 trillion over the next 10 years. “That’s about the right estimate,” Johnson said. “But, at the same time, we have historic savings for the American people, cuts to government to make it more efficient and effective and – and work better for the people,” he continued.
“So, in the calculation here, there’s more than $1.5 trillion in savings, Margaret, for the people. And that’s – that’s the largest amount – biggest cut in government really in at least 30 years and, if you adjust for inflation, probably the largest in the history of government,” Johnson said.
As we’ve written before, the U.S. didn’t have “the greatest economy” during President Donald Trump’s first term, as Johnson claimed. Economists examine inflation-adjusted gross domestic product growth to measure economic health, and that figure exceeded Trump’s peak year of 3% growth more than a dozen times before he took office. (Also, as we’ve written, economists disagree with Trump’s assertion that the 2017 tax cuts resulted in a net increase in federal revenue.)
And while Johnson claimed the CBO doesn’t account for “dynamic” growth in its report on the House bill, other organizations that do include growth in their assessments estimate the bill would add $1.7 trillion or $3.2 trillion to the deficit over 10 years.
“The bill is certainly not the largest deficit reduction in nearly 30 years – it’s not deficit reduction at all,” Marc Goldwein, senior vice president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told us in response to Leavitt’s claim. The increase to the deficit over 10 years will be $3.1 trillion with interest, according to CRFB’s breakdown.
“And the bill isn’t the largest spending cut in 30 years … I don’t even think it’s the largest spending cut in 30 months,” Goldwein said, referring to Johnson’s claim. “In June of 2023, President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act – which reduced non-interest spending by $1.34 trillion and reduced total spending with interest by $1.53 trillion.”
“What’s important to know about the $1.5 or $1.6 trillion of spending cuts is that it doesn’t count spending increases in other parts of the bill – such as for defense and homeland security,” Goldwein said in an email. (Emphasis is his.) CRFB’s breakdown of the bill on May 21 showed $144 billion in additional spending for defense and $67 billion extra directed to homeland security for immigration enforcement.
Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, told us in an email that the House bill “not only is not the largest deficit reduction in 30 years, it would add trillions of dollars to the deficit by any reasonable estimate. It is one of the biggest peacetime increases in the debt in history.” (Emphasis is his.)
“The biggest reason, by far, is the tax cut,” Gleckman said, referring to the extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the bill’s other measures, including no tax on tips or overtime, a tax deduction for those 65 and older, and a deduction for interest on loans for cars made in the U.S.
The nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model arrived at a similar figure as CRFB for the deficit increase in its review of the House bill. “We estimate the House-passed reconciliation bill increases primary deficits by $2.8 trillion over 10 years. GDP rises slightly, as labor supply and savings respond to a reduced safety net, but the dynamic score is larger ($3.2 trillion) than the conventional,” PWBM reported. (Emphasis is PWBM’s.)
“So, the claim of a deficit reduction is wrong,” Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said. But Johnson’s estimate of $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years is “a reasonable statement,” Smetters, faculty director of the PWBM, also told us in an email.
However, PWBM’s analysis contradicts Johnson’s suggestion in his CNN interview that “dynamic scoring” that accounted for economic effects would bring down the reported cost of the legislation. PWBM’s dynamic score increased the estimated cost over 10 years.
“Including dynamic effects does not reduce the legislative costs despite small, positive increases in GDP over the first decade,” the report said. The savings from economic growth won’t occur until 2033 and won’t be enough to counterbalance higher costs that come in earlier years, according to the PWBM. But after 2033, “the dynamic costs fall relative to conventional, a difference which persists until 2054.”
The Penn Wharton report found that “[o]n a dynamic lifetime basis, lower-income households and some in the middle class are worse off, despite positive economic effects,” largely due to the cut in safety net programs and higher federal debt. Under dynamic scoring, some households reduce their number of hours worked and gain Medicaid coverage (whereas they would lose it under conventional scoring), and some higher-income households work fewer hours, and therefore contribute less in tax revenue, among other economic effects, causing the dynamic cost to be higher.
Another analysis found that dynamic scoring would lower the net cost of the legislation, though it would still be a deficit-increaser. The Tax Foundation estimated the bill would add $2.6 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, but the figure would drop to $1.7 trillion on a dynamic basis.
The Tax Foundation’s model “does not incorporate any economic impact from more federal debt,” Smetters said of the difference in that group’s estimate.
We reached out to the White House and Johnson’s office for comment on the findings of the independent analyses, but we didn’t receive a response.
As we noted, the bill moves next to the Senate, which is expected to debate various changes through July. Both chambers must approve identical legislation before it goes to the president for his signature.
Correction, May 30: We clarified that the CBO’s $3.8 trillion figure pertains only to the tax changes in the bill. We originally described that as a “net” figure.
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Under the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services has canceled or frozen billions of dollars in scientific research grants and attempted to cull around 20,000 agency employees, including some scientists. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however, has minimized the effects of the cuts to the scientific enterprise, misleadingly claiming that there have been no cuts to “life-saving” research or “working scientists.”
Echoing previous statements, Kennedy’s claims came before Congress in recent hearings that were held to discuss the large proposed cuts to HHS for the next fiscal year, but also focused on reductions that have already occurred or are in motion. President Donald Trump’s budget proposal calls for reducing HHS funding by about $33 billion, or 26%.
“Whose decision is it to withhold thousands of grants and billions in funding for life-saving medical research at [the National Institutes of Health] that we approved on a bipartisan basis in this subcommittee?” Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat from Wisconsin, asked Kennedy during a May 20 Senate appropriations subcommittee hearing, referring to funding for the current fiscal year.
“We are not abandoning any life-saving research,” Kennedy replied, going on to claim that cuts were targeting administrators, waste and duplicative programs.
But funding for a wide range of research on potentially lethal or life-altering conditions has been cut, as documented in a list of terminated grants posted by HHS, as well as a scientist-run project to track cuts to grants that documents some terminations not included on the HHS site. It’s hard to predict with certainty which individual research projects will be life-saving, but NIH grants have been cut on topics ranging from COVID-19 to cancer and HIV to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. There also has been a significant slowdown in new grants being awarded, according to an analysis by STAT.
In a May 14 Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing, Kennedy shifted the conversation away from the cuts to grants and toward the question of whether “working scientists” have been fired, while attempting to narrowly define scientists.
Sen. Bill Cassidy asked Kennedy about cuts to the NIH, including those affecting scientists at Louisiana universities. “The cuts we have made to date are administrative cuts,” Kennedy told the Louisiana Republican, after stating that cuts have been made to studies on DEI — otherwise known as diversity, equity and inclusion — gain-of-function research and grants to “foreign scientists from adversarial countries.” He continued, “As far as I know, we have not fired any working scientists, the working scientists, the people who are actually doing science. There are some people who are scientists that were doing IT or administration … who did lose their jobs. But in terms of working scientists, our policy was to make sure none of them were lost and that that research continues.”
Later in the hearing, Kennedy made a similar claim to Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, a Democrat from Maryland. “I didn’t fire any working scientist, senator,” he said. He later repeated, “As I said, there were no working scientists fired during the RIF,” referring to the April 1 reduction in force of HHS employees, which aimed to lay off 10,000 HHS employees, half of the agency’s goal. We reached out to HHS to ask if Kennedy was referring to NIH scientists specifically or HHS scientists in general, and to further clarify his definition of working scientists, but we did not receive a reply.
The reduction in force has been paused, after a U.S. District Court judge concluded on May 22 that “agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates, and a President may not initiate large-scale executive branch reorganization without partnering with Congress.” Employees remain on administrative leave.
Scientists across multiple HHS agencies, including the NIH, were told they were being let go during the reduction in force, although some scientists were subsequently reinstated. Scientists were also dismissed or forced out of HHS via other mechanisms, such as the firing of probationary employees in February. HHS has not provided detailed data on what roles have been affected by cuts. This story is based on various news reports as well as our interviews with former and current HHS employees and grant recipients.
Alsobrooks told the HuffPost following the hearing that she had heard from fired federal scientists, and her office sent us links to various news reports of scientists who received reduction in force letters or were let go from HHS via other mechanisms.
“Yes, by the usual definition of scientists, a number of them were fired,” Dr. Robert Califf, former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, told us via email, speaking of cuts at his former agency. “I heard there was some quibbling over the definition at the budget hearing, but I think most people would agree that plenty of people who were fired had PhD’s or masters degrees or MDs and were doing scientific work.”
Many Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists were also part of the April 1 cuts, according to a union representing CDC employees, including people studying sexually transmitted infections, environmental health, smoking and tobacco control, and more.
At the NIH, some lab heads received notice April 1 they were being let go, according to the Transmitter, although they were later told it was an error and were reinstated May 20. Scientists serving as contract workers for the NIH also have been dismissed, STAT reported.
Cuts at the NIH and other agencies already reportedly have affected the abilities of those still employed to carry out their work, which includes not only doing scientific research, but funding, supporting and implementing research.
“With respect to NIH, much of the scientific work is conducted under government grants, which are being terminated on an unprecedented scale,” Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told us via email. Nature has reported that more than 1,500 NIH grants have been cut, often based on directives from the new Department of Government Efficiency. “It’s misleading to say you are not firing ‘scientists’ at the same time you are terminating federal grants for science on a mass scale,” Sorscher said.
Complicating matters, Kennedy on April 3 said that 20% of the personnel cut “are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.” But our reporting and other news reports indicate scientists have been let go across multiple HHS agencies since the beginning of the Trump administration, during multiple rounds of cuts.
Some scientists have been reinstated. FDA employees who were initially told they had been cut during the April reduction in force included scientists working in labs that monitored food and drug safety. After FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary repeatedly told news outlets that no scientists had been cut from his agency, chemists and microbiologists monitoring food safety told CBS News that they, along with their colleagues, had in fact been cut.
The scientists had been working on such projects as testing pet food for bird flu and baby formula for contaminants. Food scientists were reinstated, as were scientists doing drug testing.
Some FDA scientists who lost their jobs have not returned, said Califf, who served as FDA commissioner during the Obama and Biden administrations.
“All of the people who were terminated from the probationary cuts have been removed from federal service,” epidemiologist Brian King, former director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, told us of the February cuts to his center, which included scientific reviewers. “And so, those people are gone. And that included scientists, which can have an adverse impact on the agency’s ability to effectively do its job.”
King, who was himself forced out of the FDA in April before taking a job as an executive at the nonprofit Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, explained that reviewing any given tobacco product requires “dozens of scientists,” including toxicologists, physicians, epidemiologists, social scientists, engineers and others. He added that the Center for Tobacco Products is entirely funded by fees from companies, so cuts to scientists and other staff are “not saving the taxpayers a dime.”
Dr. Janet Woodcock, former principal deputy commissioner at the FDA, also pointed out during an April 7 conference that cuts to support staff and leadership matter, comparing these cuts to letting go all of a hospital’s employees except for doctors.
“Doctors can’t just walk in and perform surgery all by themselves,” she said, according to Fierce Biotech. “The reviewer is the same.”
A similar roller coaster ride of cuts and reinstatements played out at the NIH. Five days after Kennedy’s May 14 hearing, CBS News reported that 11 lab heads were still in limbo, despite having been told more than a month earlier that they had been accidentally let go. The day after the CBS News report, the employees received a letter officially stating they were being reinstated, the Transmitter reported.
The NIH also let go and then reinstated some early-career scientists in an earlier round of cuts to probationary employees, according to Science. And as we’ve said, scientists working at the NIH as contract workers were let go, according to STAT.
The NIH also employs scientists who might not meet Kennedy’s narrow definition of a “working scientist” but nonetheless apply specialized knowledge in their roles.
In a May 21 forum held by Democratic senators, chemist Jeremy Berg, former director of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, said that the NIH “lost institute directors, experienced PhD scientists who serve as program officers and scientific review officers, and … grants management specialists.” Berg departed the NIH in 2011 and is now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
Program and scientific review officers, who help give out and oversee NIH grants, may not be doing experiments in the lab anymore, Berg said, but they are still “PhD-trained people” who play an important role. Berg told us via email that “quite a number” of program officers and scientific review officers were terminated.
“These individuals are key to the careful stewardship of 80% of the NIH appropriation that is distributed to universities, academic medical centers and research institutes across the country,” Berg said at the Senate forum, referring to the research grants distributed by the NIH that make up the majority of the agency’s budget.
Other employees in roles like communications might be helping to save lives. For example, STAT and the Medill News Service reported that staff at the NIH who worked on a longstanding campaign to promote safe infant sleep were part of the reduction in force at the agency.
Berg also said during the forum that firing support staff hinders the ability of those scientists who remain at the NIH to do their jobs. For instance, the NIH Clinical Center runs clinical trials, but STAT and the Cancer Letter reported that reductions in force have delayed some studies. “For some trials, even delay of a month or two has the potential to invalidate the entire trial,” Berg said, and delays can be “heartbreaking” for cancer patients hoping to start a trial after they have “exhausted all other treatments.”
Many scientists in leadership positions have also left HHS. In some cases, leaders were reassigned to other positions in faraway locations or otherwise forced out. While it’s standard for there to be changes in some top roles at agencies with new administrations, many people who left have previously served across multiple administrations.
One fired scientist in a leadership position at the National Cancer Institute publicly objected to Kennedy’s claims that no “working scientists” were fired. Erin Lavik, former deputy director and chief technology officer of the NCI Division of Cancer Prevention, told the Cancer Letter that many “probationary employees who were fired at the NCI were working scientists dedicated to identifying and supporting programs in cancer research.” Lavik wrote on LinkedIn that she herself continued to be a working scientist even as she took on a leadership role, including serving as the project scientist for the International Skin Imaging Collaboration consortium, a project to improve skin cancer screening and diagnosis.
Scientists are also leaving the NIH in response to a combination of incentives to leave and worsening conditions at the agency. For instance, Science spoke with a researcher who said that 25 of around 320 physician-scientists at the NIH Clinical Center were departing. An eminent nutrition researcher, Kevin Hall, left the NIH after he said officials censored his ability to communicate about his work. Hall was asked to come back but recently told STAT he likely would not return.
At the May 20 Senate hearing, Kennedy said the CDC would “return to core missions tracking diseases, investigating outbreaks and sustaining public health infrastructure while cutting waste.”
But as we’ve said, many scientists at the CDC were part of the April 1 reduction in force. Kennedy has said that programs will be moved to the new Administration for a Healthy America, but details are lacking on when this new administration will be formed and what programs will in fact be funded.
“Very little information has been released about Kennedy’s plans for AHA,” CSPI’s Sorscher said. Trump’s proposed budget does list one increase of $500 million to HHS for the “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, which she said “may be intended to support the new AHA as there are no other lines in the budget for such an agency.” But the increase does not make up for the proposed cuts of about $33 billion to HHS overall, including reductions of $3.5 billion to the CDC and nearly $18 billion to the NIH.
The CDC lost more than 1,500 “scientists, medical professionals, veterinary professionals, engineers, and other STEM leaders,” representing more than half of those cut at the agency during the reduction in force, according to a webpage from the chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees that represents CDC workers. The union stated that the numbers are estimates based on reports from union members and “from our understanding of the workforce at CDC.”
News outlets have reported that those fired at CDC include scientists focused on injuries, sexually transmitted disease, tobacco and hepatitis, for example. A large number of scientists who assist with worker safety programs were also let go, although some have been reinstated.
“If your grandmother was recently exposed to hepatitis when she visited a pain clinic in Florida, she won’t be able to get the specialized screening test she needs because the CDC lab that was going to aid Florida in this outbreak already got shut down,” Dr. Anne Schuchat, former principal deputy director of the CDC, said during the May 21 Senate forum on research cuts, referring to a recent breach in infection control protocol at a Melbourne, Florida, pain clinic that exposed patients to hepatitis C.
When asked about program losses at CDC, Kennedy has often said that the programs would continue but has not offered any details.
For instance, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, asked Kennedy about the elimination of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health during a May 14 House Appropriations Committee hearing on the HHS budget. “I will just say broadly, many of the programs that the Democrats are now saying were cut at CDC were not cut at all,” Kennedy said, stating that he had been advised not to talk about the reorganization. “Those programs were transferred to the Administration for Healthy America.”
King, who worked at the Office on Smoking and Health before starting his former position at the FDA, said that if there are plans to continue the role of the office as part of AHA, they have not been “tangibly relayed to the American public.” Right now, “the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health has been completely removed, and they are responsible for a variety of life-saving activities, including monitoring tobacco use, educating the public about the risks of tobacco use, and also importantly funding state tobacco control programs and quit lines,” King said.
The Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, which included the CDC’s lead poisoning team, also has been cut.
But when pressed on the elimination of this team and the failure of the CDC to respond to a school lead crisis in Milwaukee, Kennedy has said the CDC’s lead program would be reinstated and cutting it had been a mistake. An HHS official denied that the program was being reinstated but told ABC News that the “work will continue elsewhere at HHS.” As recently as May 20, Kennedy told Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, that “we are continuing to fund the program” and that “we have a team in Milwaukee.”
But a spokesperson for the Milwaukee Health Department told CNN that the city’s “formal Epi Aid request was denied by the CDC” — a type of request to the CDC for decision-making help that has in the past been granted. The department did recently receive a visit from a CDC staffer from a different part of the agency who helped calibrate a machine, a preexisting request that was independent from the school lead crisis.
“None of us have been rehired. Not even the lead branch,” environmental epidemiologist and exposure scientist Erik Svendsen, who is on administrative leave from his position as director of the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, told us in a written message. His division, which houses the lead program and has been behind investigations into problems such as illness on cruise ships and lead-tainted children’s food, was entirely eliminated. “The majority of our staff are scientists and front line public health professionals. The rest support us in critical ways,” Svendsen said.
“We have repeatedly heard from HHS leadership that they are ‘streamlining’ and ‘prioritizing’ important topics,” the AFGE union webpage says. “However, staff in each of these ‘priority’ units have simply been eliminated, without any ability to transfer programs or ensure that work continues.”
As we have said, Kennedy claimed on May 20 that HHS isn’t abandoning “life-saving” research, despite widespread cuts to NIH grants, including research into cancer, HIV and neurodegenerative disease. He also said during the May 14 House hearing that “we are not withholding any funding for life-saving research.”
Berg, the former National Institute of General Medical Sciences director, told us via email that “life-saving research” has “almost certainly” been halted, given the large number of grant terminations.
Of course, Berg said, the answer depends on how “life-saving research” is defined. If it “requires a specific death that has already occurred that was connected to stoppage of a research grant, then I cannot provide examples,” he said. But if the question is whether “research has been halted that would lead to life-saving advances in the longer term, then this seems extremely likely to be true,” he said
At the May 20 Senate hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, asked Kennedy “why you’ve canceled ALS grants at institutions across this country.”
“Senator, I don’t know about those cuts,” Kennedy said.
Durbin referred to some specific ALS grants, including one to a Harvard researcher terminated “last week.” A Durbin aide told us that the Harvard researcher in question was David Sinclair, a professor of genetics who studies aging.
“We were using [artificial intelligence] to find drugs – old and new – that could treat ALS by reversing the aging process at the epigenetic level,” Sinclair told us via email, referring to the chemical modifications that affect how a person’s genes are expressed. He said that his lab had lost a grant for $438,000 over six years, which covers a lab member’s salary “plus a supplemental amount for a research technician to assist in her work studying motor neuron diseases such as ALS.” He also lost a grant for $1.5 million over five years that “provides the lab’s financial foundation,” he said.
We also heard from a second Harvard researcher, David R. Walt, who said he lost a contract from an NIH lab to his lab to develop a method for testing to determine the progression of a person’s ALS.
“[C]ancelling these types of grants will unquestionably delay the development of new diagnostic tests that can detect disease early, enabling treatments to be administered before the disease progresses to the point where patients suffer debilitating symptoms,” Walt told us via email. “The cancellations will also delay the discovery and introduction of these new drugs that can help delay or prevent disease progression.”
Kennedy said in the Senate hearing that HHS would “fund cutting-edge research at the NIH while cutting risky or nonessential studies,” such as “research based upon radical gender ideology.” But what he called “nonessential” could also be life-saving.
Many canceled grants around the country, for instance, have dealt with LGBTQ+ health. Two groups, including researchers in the field, have now sued HHS and Kennedy for terminating grants focused on LGBTQ+ populations, on topics including risk of cardiovascular problems, HIV, tobacco use, and alcohol use and dating violence.
Epidemiologist Brittany Charlton, founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, wrote in STAT that she is part of a lawsuit objecting to cancelation of her grants looking into stillbirth in lesbians and the effects of anti-LGBTQ+ laws on mental health. “Both projects had the potential to save lives — and both were abruptly shut down,” she wrote.
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A TV ad from a group supportive of President Donald Trump makes misleading claims, and uses outdated data, to argue that he is “fixing” an economy “ruined” by Democrats.
For example, the ad says that “inflation and gas prices” are now “at four-year lows,” based on data from March. National average gasoline prices have increased since then and are several cents higher than when Trump took office. And economists have warned that inflation also may soon increase again because of Trump’s tariff policies.
The ad also says that “Trump’s plan” is to provide “middle-class tax cuts.” The Republican budget bill would benefit middle-income taxpayers by extending the 2017 tax cuts — on average, every income group would get some tax relief. However, a nonpartisan tax policy organization has found that the majority of the tax cut benefits would go to the wealthiest 20% of households.
According to Axios, Securing American Greatness, the nonprofit group behind the 30-second ad, paid in the “high seven figures” to run the commercial for two weeks in 20 targeted congressional districts nationwide, on cable TV and online. Axios said the ad started airing May 12.
We’ll address the ad’s questionable claims in order.
The ad begins with a narrator saying that “they’ve ruined our economy,” as photos of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and former President Joe Biden, all Democrats, are shown on screen. “President Trump is fixing it,” the narrator later says. That claim distorts the facts.
The economy wasn’t the best it’s ever been when Trump took office again in January – but it also wasn’t in ruin.
We’ve said before that Trump inherited an economy experiencing significant annual growth, monthly job and stock market gains, plus much lower inflation than in 2022.
Even the director of the White House National Economic Council during Trump’s first term, Gary Cohn, said in a December interview on “Face the Nation” that Trump was inheriting from Biden a “very stable economy.”
While talking about “Trump’s plan” for the country, the ad’s narrator mentions “middle-class tax cuts.”
It’s true that the House-passed budget reconciliation bill would reduce taxes for middle-income households compared with what they would pay if the individual income tax cuts in a 2017 tax law are allowed to expire at the end of the year.
“Middle-income households would receive an average tax cut of about $1,800, or about 2.4 percent of their after-tax income,” according to Tax Policy Center estimates. Those households have incomes between about $66,800 and $119,200.
However, the TPC also found that “60 percent of the tax cuts would go to the top 20 percent of households and more than one-third would go to those making $460,000 or more.” The “biggest beneficiaries,” the TPC said, would be households making between $460,000 and $1.1 million, whose taxes would be reduced by an average of nearly $21,000, or 4.3% of their after-tax income.
Meanwhile, the bottom 20% of households, who make about $35,000 or less, would get a tax cut of less than 1%, or about $160 on average.
To be clear, most people won’t experience this as a new tax cut. Rather, it’s an extension of the status quo and the absence of a tax increase at year’s end.
An analysis of the budget bill by the Penn Wharton Budget Model says that the benefits disparity is even larger when factoring in the bill’s cuts to safety net programs like Medicaid and supplemental food assistance. According to PWBM, even when considering the bill’s tax relief, in the long-term “lower-income households and some in the middle class are worse off, despite positive economic effects.” Meanwhile, PWBM said, “The top 10% of the income distribution receives about 70 percent of the total value of the legislation.”
The narrator of the ad goes on to claim that “we’re already seeing results” from Trump’s economic plan, as text on screen says “Trump’s Tariffs … Delivered Results.” Before that, the ad lists some of the purported economic benefits from Trump’s second-term tariffs.
But the quote attributed to the New York Times isn’t about results for the economy. The March 5 story highlighted in the ad was about tariffs that Trump announced this year on imports of Mexican goods that got Mexico to produce results for the U.S. on illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling. The quote used in the ad is a truncated version of the article’s headline and subhead.
“Trump’s Tariffs Stun Mexico,” the headline says in part, followed by the subhead: “President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government made major concessions — and delivered results — to avert President Trump’s 25 percent tariffs. He imposed them anyway.”
The Times reported that “Sheinbaum dispatched thousands of National Guard troops to the state of Sinaloa, the hub of fentanyl trafficking, where they seized vast amounts of the synthetic opioid and busted hundreds of laboratories.” Then she “sent thousands more” troops to the U.S. border, “contributing to a plunge in the number of illegal crossings,” the story said.
In addition, the Times noted, Mexico had “agreed to send more than two dozen alleged cartel heads to be tried in the United States,” reversing the Mexican government’s position on extraditions.
From there, the ad’s narrator says that “the cost of living is coming down,” adding that “inflation and gas prices [are] at four-year lows.”
The ad refers to core inflation, which is a measure of the change in the price of goods excluding food and energy items. The April 10 Forbes article cited in the ad reported that the annual rate of core inflation was 2.8% in March, the lowest since March 2021. Core CPI was also 2.8% in April, the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But the same Forbes article noted that tariffs that Trump implemented in early April, and ones that are currently on a 90-day pause, could end up increasing inflation again. It said that “Goldman forecasted the core CPI rate,” influenced by Trump’s tariffs, “would jump to 3.7% by the end of 2025, which would be a level not seen since March 2024.”
Furthermore, average prices for regular gasoline are not at a four-year low. The claim appears to be based on a March 13 Inc article – not one from April 13, as the on-screen text says. Inc reported that average retail gasoline prices in early March “slid to a multi-year low, according to GasBuddy data.” At the time, GasBuddy, which tracks fuel prices, said that the national average cost had fallen to about $3.03 per gallon, “the lowest March level since the pandemic.”
But, as of the week ending May 19, the average price of gasoline nationally was about $3.17 per gallon, according to the Energy Information Administration. That was up from about $3.11 when Trump took office, according to EIA figures.
Next, the ad’s narrator says “wages are up” while viewers see the words “hourly earnings increased,” which is a quote from the April 4 CNBC article cited in the ad.
While CNBC reported that the one-month increase in average hourly earnings for private workers was 0.3% in March, the news outlet said that the annualized growth rate of 3.8% was the lowest level since July 2024. Then average hourly earnings increased 0.2% month over month in April, and, again, the year-over-year increase was 3.8%, according to the BLS.
As of April, average hourly earnings had increased 0.6% since Trump took office again.
Finally, the narrator says “we’re creating American jobs,” as the text “451,000 jobs” is shown.
But that figure is from an April 22 Fox Business article, which said that roughly $5.2 trillion in announced investments in U.S. business since Jan. 20 is “estimated to generate at least 451,000 new jobs for Americans.” As we’ve written, there’s no guarantee that all of those investments will happen, or that those jobs will materialize.
BLS data show that total employment increased by 464,000 between January and April. That’s lower than a 586,000 increase in employment during the same period in 2024.
But as we’ve written, job gains and losses are often tied to economic factors beyond a president’s control.