An ad campaign from the government of Ontario featured audio of former President Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs on foreign goods. The video rearranges what Reagan said in a 1987 radio address, and it ignores some of the context. But it does not alter the former president’s sentiments, contrary to President Donald Trump’s claim that Canada “lied.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced on Oct. 14 that $75 million would be spent to air the ad to “every Republican district there is” across the U.S.
“It’s not a nasty ad; it’s actually just very factual,” Ford said, adding that the TV spot uses the words of Reagan, “the best president the country’s ever seen, in my opinion.”
In a Truth Social post on Oct. 23, Trump denounced the ad as “FAKE” and said that it was intended to “interfere with the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court,” which is set to hear arguments on Nov. 5 in cases from businesses and states that have challenged some of Trump’s tariffs. As a result of the “egregious” ad, Trump said he terminated all trade negotiations with Canada.
In posts and comments to the media the following day, Trump said the ad was “a fraud” and claimed Canada “lied.”
Trump even suggested Reagan’s words had been created by artificial intelligence.
“They cheated on a commercial,” Trump said in remarks to reporters on Oct. 24. “Ronald Reagan loved tariffs and they said he didn’t. And I guess it was AI or something. They cheated badly. Canada got caught cheating on a commercial, can you believe it?”
On Oct. 24, Ford announced via X that the ad would be paused on Oct. 27 — after it had aired during the first two World Series baseball games — “so that trade talks can resume.”
“Our intention was always to initiate a conversation about the kind of economy that Americans want to build and the impact of tariffs on workers and businesses,” Ford stated. “We’ve achieved our goal, having reached U.S. audiences at the highest levels.”
In a Truth Social post the following day, Trump stated, “Because of their serious misrepresentation of the facts, and hostile act, I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.” As we’ve explained before, tariffs on foreign goods are paid by importers in the U.S., not the foreign countries.
The one-minute ad quotes Reagan as saying the following: “When someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while, it works. But only for a short time. But over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs. Throughout the world, there’s a growing realization that the way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition. America’s jobs and growth are at stake.”
On Oct. 23, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute posted a statement on X saying the government of Ontario “created an ad campaign using selective audio and video” of Reagan’s radio address on April 25, 1987.
“The ad misrepresents the Presidential Radio Address,” the group said, adding that the government of Ontario “did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks” and that the foundation was “reviewing its legal options in this matter.”
The foundation and institute invited readers to watch and listen to the full five-minute video.
As the video of the full remarks shows, the ad rearranged the order of several of Reagan’s comments, though it left sentences largely intact. With the exception of a “but” added at the beginning of one sentence, Reagan uttered the sentences in question, though at different parts of the address. The question, then, is whether the ad’s splicing of Reagan’s comments altered his meaning.
In this video, we show how the ad used different parts of Reagan’s address:
We reached out to the foundation for clarification about how it believes the ad “misrepresents” Reagan’s address, but we did not get a response.
There is some missing context from Reagan’s remarks. Reagan’s comments came as he was announcing “new duties on some Japanese products in response to Japan’s inability to enforce their trade agreement with us on electronic devices called semiconductors.” Reagan said that “imposing such tariffs or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind are steps that I am loath to take” but “the Japanese semiconductors were a special case.”
“We had clear evidence that Japanese companies were engaging in unfair trade practices that violated an agreement between Japan and the United States,” Reagan said.
“But you know, in imposing these tariffs, we were just trying to deal with a particular problem, not begin a trade war,” Reagan said, before launching into his thoughts on the benefits of free trade, the remarks that were used in the Canadian ad.
Those kinds of free trade comments were not a one-off. Reagan often spoke about the benefits of trade.
“The record is clear that when America’s total trade has increased, American jobs have also increased, and when our total trade has declined, so have the number of jobs,” Reagan said in one of his final radio addresses as president on Nov. 26, 1988. “Part of the difficulty in accepting the good news about trade is in our words. We too often talk about trade while using the vocabulary of war. In war for one side to win, the other must lose. But commerce is not warfare. Trade is an economic alliance that benefits both countries. There are no losers, only winners, and trade helps strengthen the free world. Yet today, protectionism is being used by some American politicians as a cheap form of nationalism, a fig leaf for those unwilling to maintain America’s military strength and who lack the resolve to stand up to real enemies, countries that would use violence against us or our allies. Our peaceful trading partners are not our enemies. They are our allies. We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends, weakening our economy, our national security and the entire free world, all while cynically waving the American flag.”
But historians and economists say Reagan’s rhetoric on trade did not always match his actions.
“Like most post-war presidents, Reagan championed free trade while selectively deviating from it,” Daniel Griswold, then of the Cato Institute, wrote in 2004.
“Critics of trade note correctly that Reagan negotiated ‘voluntary’ import quotas for steel and Japanese cars and imposed Section 201 tariffs on imported motorcycles to protect Harley-Davidson. All true,” Griswold wrote. “But those were the exceptions and not the rule. They were tactical retreats designed to defuse rising protectionists pressures in Congress.”
Steve Hanke, a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University who served as a senior economist on Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, noted some of the tariffs Reagan placed on Japanese goods and quotas set on imported Japanese cars, and acknowledged in a 2024 ABC News story, “There was a huge gap between rhetoric and reality.”
In a 1985 interview, a Washington Post reporter said that for a long time Reagan had been “theoretically strongly committed to the idea of free trade,” but asked Reagan if he would actively oppose “the protectionist legislation that now appears to be building in the Congress.”
Reagan said he would, citing the negative effect of tariffs that he said extended and worsened the Great Depression. But Reagan said he also would not tolerate unfair trade practices from U.S. trading partners.
“What we’re trying to cure is unfair competition, to see that the markets are free to each other, both ways; that we’re not competing with subsidized products, government subsidized and so forth. And all of these things we’re doing our best to change,” Reagan said.
Trump has argued repeatedly that his tariffs are in response to unfair treatment by other countries on trade for decades.
However, Hanke told ABC News that the contrast between Reagan’s and Trump’s positions on tariffs is significant. Trump has repeatedly claimed tariffs would make the U.S. “a very rich country,” and he has touted tariffs as one of his favorite words. “I made it my fourth favorite word as you know, because love, religion, wife, family, et cetera,” Trump said on Sept. 18.
“Trump is not talking about free trade,” Hanke said. “Trump’s rhetoric is completely different.”
Asked this week about Trump’s comments that Reagan loved tariffs, Hanke told Canada’s CTV News, Trump “doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”
On Oct. 24, Hanke posted a clip of Reagan’s radio address on X and commented, “Watch my old boss, Pres. Reagan, DESTROY TARIFFS with clarity and conviction. Trump is no Reagan.”
In a Sept. 30 address to military leaders and an Oct. 9 Cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump made false claims about military pay raises and recruitment.
During Sept. 30 remarks addressing military leadership, Trump announced “a hard-earned pay raise of 3.8% to every soldier, sailor, airman, Coast Guardsman, Space Guardsmen and Marines,” falsely claiming such a raise was “something you weren’t getting from the past administration.” Trump added: “They did not treat you with respect.”
Despite Trump’s claim, the 2026 pay raise falls short of recent years, as military pay increased by 4.6%, 5.2% and 4.5% in 2023, 2024 and 2025, respectively. Military raises are automatically determined by a formula set by law. The president can propose a different figure, which Congress can agree to or override.
The 3.8% pay raise for 2026 is included in both the Senate and House versions of the National Defense Authorization Act. The NDAA serves as the basis for the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, which is stalled in the Senate amid the government shutdown.
As we have written before, federal law mandates that military pay raises be equal to the change in the Labor Department’s annual Employment Cost Index, or ECI, that measures the increase in private sector wages. However, as the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service explains, the president can propose a higher or lower pay raise, and Congress can set the figure in legislation, overriding the automatic increase or a presidential proposal if the legislation becomes law.
According to the Office of Military Compensation and Financial Readiness, the September ECI figures, which are released in October, are “used to determine the pay raise for the next fiscal year.” The federal government’s fiscal year is from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. This means that when the September ECI figure comes out later this month, it will determine the 2027 military pay raise. The pay raises take effect on Jan. 1 each year.
Trump followed the legal formula in his FY 2026 discretionary budget request, which proposed a 3.8% military pay raise. The budget request appendix notes that the figure “is equal to the increase in the Employment Cost Index.”
During President Joe Biden’s term, he proposed military wage increases of 2.7%, 4.6%, 5.2% and 4.5% for 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. These raises exactly corresponded to the September ECI figures in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, and weren’t changed by Congress.
Similarly, during Trump’s first term, he proposed military wage increases of 2.6%, 3.1% and 3% for 2019, 2020 and 2021, which matched the ECI figures and weren’t changed by Congress. However, for 2018, Trump requested a 2.1% raise even though the ECI would have automatically set the raise at 2.4%. Despite Trump’s request, Congress approved a 2.4% raise in the FY 2018 NDAA.
During a Cabinet meeting on Oct. 9, Trump repeated a claim we’ve written about before regarding military recruitment.
Trump touted “record numbers of recruitment” in fiscal year 2025 and falsely claimed that “one year ago, there were stories, front page stories that we couldn’t get anybody to join” the military, calling it “embarrassing.” Trump also said that he thought the increase in recruitment “all started on Nov. 5,” when he was elected president.
It remains to be seen whether FY 2025 will set a “record” for military recruitment, as we only have data through August and the fiscal year runs through September. But the figures for active-duty armed forces recruits were slightly higher over the same period in FY 2019.
Regardless, FY 2025 recruitment has been robust and has recovered following shortfalls caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Space Force reached their recruiting goals at least three months early, while the Marines met its recruitment goal by the end of the fiscal year, on Sept. 30. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll attributed the Army’s impressive recruiting numbers to “a resurgence of pride in our country” and a generation “inspired by purpose and patriotism.”
But the recruitment turnaround started before the election. Every military branch, except for the Navy, which improved its recruiting rate, also reached recruiting goals for FY 2024. The Defense Department announced at the end of October last year that it had recruited 12.5% more people in fiscal 2024 than it had in 2023.
Contrary to Trump’s claim that front page stories a year ago stated that “we couldn’t get anybody to join” the military, one news story from October 2024 reported that “after years of shortfalls, nearly all of the U.S. military’s active-duty components met their recruiting goals this year—and plan to increase those goals in 2025.” While other articles noted “tough challenges” to recruiting in the future, they said that nearly all military branches reached their FY 2024 recruiting goals.
According to the Department of Defense, FY 2023 “was without a doubt the toughest recruitment year for the Military Services since the inception of the All-volunteer Force.” That year, only the Marines and Space Force were able to meet their recruitment goals, while the Army, Navy and Air Force were only able to recruit about 77%, 80% and 89% of their annual goals, respectively.
The Center for Naval Analyses explains that military recruiting was hampered by the pandemic, as recruiters typically “maximize the chances of meeting their monthly targets” by going to “high-traffic locations such as malls or organized events at schools.” As pandemic restrictions closed these venues, it became harder for the military to meet prospective recruits.
Also, the Hoover Institution describes how several factors, including a strong economy and reduced enthusiasm for military service among American youth, have increasingly hindered military recruitment. The Department of Defense’s Office of People Analytics found in May 2023 that only 23% of American youth aged 17-24 are eligible to enlist in the military without a waiver due to a variety of reasons, including being overweight, medical/physical issues or drug abuse.
In an April commentary piece, Beth J. Asch, a senior principal economist at RAND, said that the military turned to “new marketing and advertising campaigns,” “programs aimed at increasing enlistment eligibility, such as the Future Soldier Prep Courses,” and the increased use of waivers. The Future Soldier Prep Courses expanded the pool of qualified recruits by training potential soldiers to improve their physical and academic skills before entering basic training.
Asch noted that while “some have speculated that the improvement in recruiting is linked to the election … no rigorous statistical analysis has yet been conducted to assess the impact of the election or other factors on recruiting outcomes.”
We asked the White House about both of the president’s military claims, but we did not get a response.
Q: Is President Donald Trump paying in full for the new ballroom at the White House, and what is the cost?
A: The White House said Trump and “other patriot donors” would pay for the ballroom, which the president estimated would cost $300 million. So far, $200 million has been pledged, according to the White House, which did not say how much the president would donate. Democratic leaders and ethics experts have questioned the project and what influence donors would have on federal policies.
The White House announced on July 31 that a 90,000-square-foot ballroom to serve as an “event space” for state dinners and special occasions would be built at a cost of $200 million, and that Trump and “other patriot donors” would pay for the structure. The president has said repeatedly that he would pay for the ballroom. In mid-September, he also increased the estimate of its cost, telling reporters, “I’m paying for it. The country is not – and that’s an expensive ballroom. I think it’ll cost $250 million.”
On Oct. 22, Trump increased the estimated cost of the ballroom to $300 million.
We’ve received many emails from readers asking about the cost and the source of funding for the ballroom being constructed as part of the White House complex.
On Oct. 15, the president hosted a dinner at the White House to raise funds for building the ballroom. Among those attending the affair were representatives from Amazon, Apple, Caterpillar, Coinbase Global, Comcast, Google, Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Palantir Technologies and T-Mobile, as well as “wealthy supporters” of Trump’s presidential campaign, the New York Times reported.
The day after demolition began on the East Wing where the ballroom will be located, a White House spokesperson told us in an Oct. 21 email that “nearly $200 million has so far been pledged to fund the new ballroom.” The spokesperson did not answer a question regarding how much Trump himself had pledged.
The defense technology firm Lockheed Martin has pledged $10 million to the project, CBS News reported, citing anonymous sources. A legal settlement by YouTube with Trump — who sued the platform for removing his account following the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot — will direct $22 million toward the ballroom, the Hill reported. Google will reportedly donate at least $5 million.
On Oct. 23, the White House released the list of 37 companies and individuals who have donated so far, but did not reveal how much each has donated or pledged.
The ballroom project and the fundraising process have come under criticism from Democrats and experts in government ethics.
“The project at the White House is a gigantic boondoggle,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told Fox News. “The important question is not only the damage that it could do to the architecture of the White House, but also what contributors would have over Trump if they are giving to this project.”
Rep. Darren Soto of Florida said on X, “Trump is building a fancy White House Ballroom for his rich buddies.”
Ethics and legal experts raised other concerns about the ballroom project. Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Axios that the White House fundraising dinner could affect public trust in government. “All of this money that they’re giving for something that’s important to the president could influence his decision making, and he could be thinking about that instead of thinking about what’s best for the American people,” Bookbinder said.
Richard W. Painter, a professor at Minnesota Law who served as the chief ethics lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office under President George W. Bush, told us that Trump’s ballroom fundraising crosses several ethical lines.
“First,” Painter said in an email, “this is use of public office for private gain in violation of federal ethics rules.” He cited the Code of Federal Regulations, which says government employees “may not use or permit the use of their Government position or title, or any authority associated with their public office, in a manner that is intended to coerce or induce another person, including a subordinate, to provide any benefit, financial or otherwise, to the employee.”
Painter also said the ballroom project raises a “problem under the Antideficiency Act.” The act “prohibits federal agencies from receiving voluntary services or other gifts from outside sources to ‘top off’ funds appropriated by Congress,” Painter explained.
“Of course the White House will argue that it is not an ‘agency’ subject to this law, but in the past the White House abided by this law. We did during the Bush Administration. The White House did not have authority to receive gifts,” he said.
According to the Government Accountability Office, the Antideficiency Act “requires agencies to generally stop their operations” during a government shutdown. “This protects Congress’s power over federal spending by preventing the executive branch from operating without funding. This act prohibits agencies from incurring obligations or making payments in advance or in excess of an appropriation.”
“Bottom line is,” the companies making donations for the ballroom construction “want something from the government and they are paying 1) for access to the President and other high ranking officials, and 2) Hoping it will buy them what they want. Many such as Lockheed Martin want big defense department contracts, so our now trillion dollar defense budget … will grow even more, all so we can save taxpayers $200 million building a ballroom the White House doesn’t need,” Painter said.
“Finally the ballroom will be used to entertain big campaign donors by this and future presidents, perpetuating White House pay to play,” he said.
Claire Finkelstein, a University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor and director of the school’s Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, said she has “a lot of concerns” about the ballroom project.
She noted that donations for the ballroom are being coordinated through a nonprofit charitable organization, the Trust for the National Mall, which then will fund the project. “But I don’t see how adding a ballroom to the White House grounds benefits the public. So it’s not clear to me how a 501(c)(3) should be funding this. That’s one serious problem I have with it,” Finkelstein told us in a phone interview.
“There is also a potential violation of the Emoluments Clause, depending on what Trump would use” the ballroom for, Finkelstein said. The Constitution’s foreign and domestic Emoluments Clauses “exist to prevent U.S. officials from selling influence or favors,” the Brennan Center for Justice explains on its website.
“Is he really going to use it for the duties of his office, or will he entertain a lot of individuals trying to curry favor with the administration or him personally?” Finkelstein asked, adding, this could be “a misuse of public real estate.”
The White House ballroom is not the first structure funded, at least partly, through private donations in Washington, D.C.
For example, the $8.4 million needed for the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, completed in 1984, was donated by more than 250,000 individuals and corporations. The Martin Luther King Memorial, completed in 2011, was funded with $110 million in private donations and $10 million in federal funding. Other monuments were funded through the efforts of independent commissions and advisory boards, according to the Trust for the National Mall.
The trust has worked with the National Park Service to provide various improvements to the National Mall, Finkelstein said. “But it’s very important that those projects are publicly oriented. A White House ballroom is not open to the public,” she said, “so it’s not of any obvious public benefit.”
Update, Oct. 23: We updated this article to include Trump’s latest estimated cost of the ballroom of “about $300 million.”
Update, Oct. 23: We updated this story to add that on Oct. 23 the White House released the list of those who have made or pledged donations so far.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. further added to the Trump administration’s problematic claims about Tylenol and autism on Oct. 9, alleging during a Cabinet meeting that circumcision-related studies provide evidence that the drug causes the condition when given to children. The studies, however, do no such thing.
Weeks earlier, as part of a promised announcement on the causes of autism on Sept. 22, President Donald Trump had repeatedly admonished pregnant women not to take Tylenol, also known as acetaminophen. He also recommended that children avoid the medicine, saying, “Don’t give Tylenol to the baby after the baby’s born.”
As we’ve written previously, some studies show an association between using acetaminophen during pregnancy and an increased likelihood of having a child with autism. However, this does not mean that use of the drug — which can be necessary for treating fever or pain during pregnancy — causes autism. Research has increasingly shown there are likely other explanations for the findings, and expert groups continue to recommend that pregnant people take acetaminophen when needed in consultation with their doctors.
There is even less of a basis for the idea that giving children Tylenol causes autism. But at the Cabinet meeting, Kennedy elaborated on the justification for this claim. “There’s two studies that show children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism, and it’s highly likely because they’re given Tylenol,” he said.
He doubled down the next day with a post on X, saying an Aug. 1 preprint, which was posted without peer review, provided a “rigorous scientific framework” substantiating his claim. Kennedy also complained that some had represented him as arguing that circumcision rather than Tylenol caused autism, accusing mainstream media of choosing “to character assassinate me instead of educating Americans by digging into the science.”
Digging into the science does not support Kennedy’s claim about Tylenol. The preprint was a review paper that mentioned two studies involving circumcision and autism, neither of which provided any direct evidence linking acetaminophen to autism. The authors of one of the studies, done in Denmark, explicitly wrote in their paper that they did not measure acetaminophen use and were “unable to address the [acetaminophen] hypothesis directly.”
The Danish study, which was published in 2015, did find an association between circumcision and autism, speculating on pain as a cause. But as we will discuss, researchers have argued that the study based its conclusions on a very small number of circumcised boys with autism and that other factors, and not circumcision or pain, explain the study’s results.
We asked HHS which two studies Kennedy was referring to in his comments at the Cabinet meeting, and a spokesperson sent us a link to the X post.
“I don’t think either study provides any substantial evidence that [acetaminophen] use increases risk of autism,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the biostatistics division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us in an email, referring to the two papers on autism and circumcision cited in the preprint.
The Aug. 1 manuscript Kennedy cited, published on a preprint server, has not been peer reviewed or published in a journal, nor does it provide new data on Tylenol and autism. A preprint is simply an unpublished document that a researcher posts online. Preprints vary widely in quality and may or may not ever go on to be published in a scientific journal.
The senior author of the preprint, William Parker, is an immunologist and biochemist who has long argued that acetaminophen is behind rising autism rates, despite a lack of good evidence for this claim. Parker spoke repeatedly with Kennedy leading up to the autism announcement in September, according to reporting from the Atlantic.
Parker and his co-authors started by taking as fact a sweeping conclusion not supported by the scientific literature. “Overwhelming evidence shows that exposure of susceptible babies and children to acetaminophen … triggers many if not most cases of autism spectrum disorder,” the authors wrote. The review then set out to “understand why the conclusions have not been widely accepted.”
That is to say, the preprint did not look into whether autism and acetaminophen are causally linked, but rather why other scientists had not accepted the authors’ beliefs.
The researchers classified statements other scientists made in papers about autism and acetaminophen as “helpful,” “futile” or “harmful” depending on whether they endorsed a change in acetaminophen use, expressed possible concern without recommending change, or “reduced or assuaged” concerns about the drug, respectively.
“Sec. Kennedy holds up this non-peer-reviewed preprint as a ‘rigorous scientific framework that substantiates’ his interpretation,” Morris said in a post on X. “But it is not a mechanistic paper, but an explicitly biased narrative review that evaluates studies primarily by agreement with its hypothesis and the extent to which they endorse sweeping changes in acetaminophen use, rather than by established, transparent criteria for study quality.”
“This is not science,” David S. Mandell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and director of the Penn Center for Mental Health, told us in an email when asked about the preprint.
A scientific paper, he said, would provide further information about its methods. And rather than setting out to prove a point, it would ask a question, “like ‘what is the evidence for and against the role of acetaminophen in causing autism’ or ‘is there systematic bias that may lead to inaccurate conclusions about this association?'”
In his X post, Kennedy referenced a 2015 Danish study, saying the preprint had called it “the most compelling ‘standalone’ evidence that acetaminophen triggers autism in susceptible babies and children.” (The preprint in fact called out the study as one of three studies meeting that description; another was a study in mice, and the third was a 2008 study on acetaminophen use after vaccination, whose flaws we have written about previously.)
The Danish study does not support Kennedy’s claim. “This study didn’t examine use of acetaminophen at all,” Mandell said. “Their hypothesis is that the pain associated with ritual circumcision causes autism. RFK is making a leap unsupported by their analysis.”
Looking at Danish health records for boys born between 1994 and 2003, the researchers found that boys circumcised in the hospital or clinics using public funding were 46% more likely to be diagnosed with autism before age 10 than uncircumcised boys, and around twice as likely to be diagnosed with a form of autism called infantile autism by age 5. This latter statistic may be the source for Kennedy’s statement that studies show “children who are circumcised early have double the rate of autism.” Kids who were circumcised were not more likely to get an autism diagnosis between ages 5 and 9.
Out of nearly 343,000 boys born in Denmark during the study period, just 3,347 were circumcised in medical settings and around 5,000 were diagnosed with autism before age 10. There were just 57 circumcised boys diagnosed with autism before age 10.
In the discussion section of their paper, the authors of the Danish study said that it was “questionable” to assume all boys getting circumcised would be given Tylenol. Their study lacked information on whether babies were given acetaminophen and therefore could not be used to address whether Tylenol causes autism, they added.
Various expert groups over the years have recommended acetaminophen or mentioned it as an option for helping with circumcision pain. However, acetaminophen on its own is not effective for managing pain during circumcision, and it’s recommended that babies get local anesthesia, typically in the form of an injected anesthetic or numbing cream, as the main source of pain management.
In discussing acetaminophen, the Danish authors were responding to another study, published in 2013 by U.S. researchers, which attempted to link acetaminophen and autism by comparing male autism and circumcision rates in eight countries, as well as among 14 U.S. states. The preprint Kennedy relied on also cited the 2013 study. However, experts we spoke to again did not find the evidence compelling, and the paper itself only concluded that research into acetaminophen and autism was warranted.
The researchers in the 2013 study found that regions with higher autism rates also tended to have higher circumcision rates. They said higher rates of circumcision were a proxy for acetaminophen exposure. This was based on the assumption that some children getting circumcised got acetaminophen following a 1994 study, which showed giving acetaminophen possibly helped with pain during the recovery period but did not ease pain during the procedure or immediately after it.
Studies that compare data on populations — such as data on entire countries or states — rather than data at the individual level are called ecological studies. This sort of study “is considered the weakest form of scientific evidence,” Mandell said. He said that there are many reasons other than acetaminophen use that autism rates and circumcision rates could be correlated in a region, “the way that ice cream eating and shark attacks are correlated” even though one does not cause the other.
Brian Lee, a professor of epidemiology at Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health, pointed out via email that the study authors were not always even able to find circumcision rates for the regions being studied. Instead, they relied on the percentage of Jewish and Muslim populations as a proxy. “If well-done [randomized controlled trials] are the gold standard, even well-done ecological studies are on the other end of the scale,” he said. “And this ecological paper can’t really be seriously discussed.”
Kennedy is likely correct to dismiss circumcision itself as an autism cause, and there are possible alternate explanations for the Danish study result that do not involve Tylenol.
Circumcision in Denmark is rare and is mainly chosen for sons by immigrants from Muslim countries, Lee said. Past research has shown an association between migration from a low-income country or being a child of an immigrant from one of these countries and a diagnosis of autism combined with intellectual disability, which Lee called the “most visible kind of autism.” These cases are more likely to be caught early in life, he said, possibly explaining the Danish study’s finding that circumcision is associated with early-life autism diagnoses but not with diagnoses in older children.
The researchers attempted to take cultural background into account in their analysis, but experts said that confounding factors remained.
Mandell explained that studying only circumcisions done in medical settings also likely influenced the results. Most Muslim and Jewish circumcisions occur in the community, he said. The babies in the study who got circumcised in the hospital likely had medical problems, such as being premature or having experienced obstetric complications, he said, and these factors are known to increase the likelihood of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism.
In addition, “people who seek health care to get a circumcision in a hospital (as opposed to a private/religious setting) are also very likely to seek health care for their children,” Lee said. These parents might also be more likely to get their children evaluated for autism.
A federal grand jury in Maryland on Oct. 16 returned an indictment against former National Security Adviser John Bolton for mishandling classified national defense information obtained during his tenure in the first Trump administration. He became the third prominent critic, and perceived opponent, of President Donald Trump to be indicted in the last month.
Following his indictment, Bolton, whom Trump let go in September 2019 after 17 months as his national security adviser, said in a statement that he is the “latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those” Trump “deems to be his enemies.”
But some legal analysts have said that the government appears to have a strong case against Bolton – more so than it does against two other Trump rivals who were indicted by federal grand juries recently: former FBI Director James Comey, who was charged with lying to Congress, and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who was charged with committing mortgage fraud.
Here, we’ll provide information about what’s in the indictment and Bolton’s response.
The 26-page indictment alleges that Bolton “abused his position” as national security adviser “by sharing more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities,” including national defense and classified information, with two unauthorized individuals.
And after he was no longer permitted to do so, “Bolton also unlawfully retained documents, writings, and notes relating to the national defense, including information classified up to the TOP SECRET/SCI level, in his home in Montgomery County, Maryland,” the indictment says. SCI is an abbreviation for “sensitive compartmented information,” which only people with proper security clearances can access.
For the alleged conduct, Bolton faces 18 criminal charges, including 10 counts of unlawful retention of classified defense information and eight counts of transmitting it.
Although not named in the indictment, the people with whom he supposedly shared the classified material are reportedly his wife and daughter, who may have been helping Bolton with his 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened,” about his time as Trump’s national security adviser. The indictment accuses Bolton of using personal, non-governmental email accounts and messaging applications to send his relatives “diary-like entries” that included top secret or sensitive details, which he was not allowed to do.
In addition, some entries with classified information “were printed and stored” at Bolton’s home, and digital copies of some entries “were also stored on personal electronic devices” belonging to Bolton and others at that residence, the indictment says. The FBI recovered some of those materials when conducting a court-ordered search of his home on Aug. 22.
Also, according to the indictment, Bolton’s personal email was hacked by someone “believed to be associated with” Iran who “gained unauthorized access to the classified and national defense information in that account.” While a representative for Bolton informed the FBI of the hack in July 2021, the indictment says his representative did not tell authorities that same email account had been used to transmit classified defense material.
After he was charged, Bolton called his indictment political.
In a statement to reporters, he said, referring to Trump, “Now, I have become the latest target in weaponizing the Justice Department to charge those he deems to be his enemies with charges that were declined before or distort the facts.”
Bolton noted that the FBI was previously made aware that his email account was hacked and that no charges were filed against him during the Biden administration. He also said that federal officials had reviewed in advance his 2020 memoir.
However, the indictment says that none of the classified material that is the basis for the charges against Bolton was featured in that book.
Trump had repeatedly claimed that there was classified information in Bolton’s book and that “he should go to jail for that for many, many years.” Trump’s Justice Department also sued Bolton in June 2020 to delay the book’s publication and collect any profits Bolton had received.
The DOJ under Trump later opened a criminal investigation into whether classified material had been published, but the investigation was dropped in June 2021, during Joe Biden’s presidency.
CNN reported that it was the email hack investigation that was initiated in 2022, also under Biden, that ultimately led to Bolton being indicted this year.
A team of career prosecutors at the Justice Department, led by Thomas Sullivan, an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland, presented the case against Bolton to the grand jury. That’s a key difference from the cases against Comey and James, in which the indictments were obtained by Lindsey Halligan, a former personal attorney for Trump whom Trump named interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia after Erik Siebert was forced out of that position. Halligan, who had no prior experience as a prosecutor, obtained the Comey and James indictments in her first three weeks on the job.
“This indictment stands in stark contrast to the indictments against James Comey and Letitia James in its detailed recitation of the allegations and the serious nature of the charges,” Barbara McQuade, a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School, and a former U.S. attorney, told us in an email about the Bolton indictment. “The 26-page indictment quotes from email messages and Bolton’s ‘diary,’ which allegedly contain classified information. If these allegations are true, this is a serious breach of public trust.”
In an Oct. 20 Substack post, McQuade said that the charges against Bolton “appear to be based on strong evidence.”
Andrew Weissmann, a professor of practice at New York University Law School, and a former FBI lawyer, told NPR something similar about the Bolton case in an Oct. 17 interview.
“In many ways, it is unlike the Comey case and Letitia James case because it appears on the face of it to be stronger and more merited to bring,” he said. “And one indication of that is that career people signed this. So it is – we don’t have that unusual confluence of events that was true of the other two.”
But in his statement to the press, Bolton argued that his indictment is about Trump’s “intensive effort to intimidate his opponents, to ensure that he alone determines what is said about his conduct.” He said he would defend his “lawful conduct” in court and “expose” Trump’s “abuse of power.”
In his own statement to media, Bolton’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, wrote that the charges against his client “stem from portions” of “personal diaries over his 45-year career – records that are unclassified, shared only with his immediate family, and known to the FBI as far back as 2021.” Bolton “kept diaries – that is not a crime,” Lowell said.
But McQuade told us “it is a crime to transmit or mishandle classified information, in any form.”
Bolton pleaded not guilty to all 18 charges in an Oct. 17 court appearance.
After departing the Trump White House six years ago, over differences about foreign policy, Bolton became one of Trump’s harshest critics – saying publicly, and in his book, that Trump was not fit for office. Trump punched back, calling Bolton “grossly incompetent,” “a liar” and a “wacko” who “was not liked.”
When a reporter asked Trump on Oct. 16 about Bolton’s indictment, Trump said he had not reviewed the case but called Bolton a “bad person.”
“Yeah, he’s a bad guy,” Trump said. “It’s too bad, but it’s the way it goes.” Then, in a Fox News interview that aired Oct. 19, Trump called Bolton’s indictment “a good thing.”
Trump himself was indicted in June 2023 for mishandling classified national defense documents after he left office. But a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the indictment in July 2024, based on the Trump legal team’s motion that Jack Smith, the special counsel who obtained the indictment against Trump, was unlawfully appointed without congressional approval.
After Trump won the election in November, Smith filed a motion to drop his appeal of the judge’s dismissal based on the legal interpretation that the Constitution does not allow a sitting president to be prosecuted.
If convicted, Bolton could get up to 10 years in prison for each criminal count.
Donald Trump made crime a centerpiece of his 2024 presidential campaign. But he has surprised even himself, he said at an Oct. 15 press conference, with the intensity of federal efforts he has directed at cities, in what he says is an effort to fight crime, most controversially by sending military troops into cities such as Portland and Chicago, over the objection of local elected officials.
“I didn’t realize I was going to make this such a big factor,” Trump said. “And now it’s like a passion for me. … I did get elected for crime, but I didn’t get elected for what we’re doing. This is many, many steps above.”
Trump had said for weeks that he would send National Guard troops to Chicago, wrongly claiming on social media that the city is the “MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.” As we’ve written, the city has a high number of murders among U.S. cities, but not the highest murder rate in the U.S., let alone the world. The homicide rate has been declining this year, mirroring the general trend among U.S. cities.
As for Portland, Trump claimed the city has been overrun by “antifa thugs” who have “repeatedly attacked our officers and laid siege to federal property in an attempt to violently stop the execution of federal law.” And, he said, the city “is burning to the ground,” which is false.
On Sept. 28, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo mobilizing 200 Oregon National Guard troops for 60 days. And on Oct. 4, Hegseth federalized 300 Illinois National Guard members and later deployed more than 200 members of the Texas National Guard in Chicago. Mayors in both cities and the state governors have opposed the deployments, accusing the president of exacerbating conflict. Their lawyers have called the administration’s claims of a crisis “manufactured” and “wildly hyperbolic.” Courts have since temporarily delayed deployment of federal troops in both cities.
While Trump’s rhetoric has largely focused on overall crime, the deployments are specifically targeted at protecting federal immigration operations and facilities.
Here, we’ll unravel some of the rhetoric with a Q&A about what’s happening in Portland and Chicago, what the Trump administration is doing and under what authority, and what the courts have had to say about it so far.
Under what authority can the president mobilize National Guard troops in states?
Why does the Trump administration say troops are needed?
What’s the Insurrection Act?
What’s happening in Portland?
What have the courts said in the Portland case?
What’s happening in Chicago?
What have the courts said in the Chicago case?
Each state, three territories (Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands) and the District of Columbia have National Guard organizations. With the exception of Washington, D.C., where the guard unit is under federal control, the guard is under each state’s or territory’s control, as the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has explained. However, in certain circumstances, state guard units can be federalized and placed under the president’s control.
Under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, section 12406, the president can federalize any state’s National Guard if the country “is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation,” if there’s “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” against the federal government’s authority, or if the president “is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.”
Such an order “shall be issued through the governors of the States,” the law says.
The administration has cited Title 10, section 12406 in federalizing National Guard troops for deployment to California, Illinois and Oregon, over the objection of the states’ governors. In a June 7 memo prior to deploying troops to Los Angeles in response to protests against federal immigration policy, Trump pointed to the statute’s provisions about countering a rebellion and executing U.S. laws. (See “Q&A on Federalizing the National Guard in Los Angeles.”)
William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law, and Mark P. Nevitt, an associate professor at Emory University School of Law, wrote in a piece for Just Security that the last time this statute had been invoked prior to June was in 1970, when then President Richard Nixon used the National Guard to deliver mail during a postal strike.
Under the Posse Comitatus Act, federal military forces, including the federalized National Guard, can’t perform civilian law enforcement tasks. In Los Angeles, this meant that the guard troops could protect federal property and personnel but not engage in law enforcement activities. However, the Insurrection Act provides an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, and Trump has said he could invoke the law (see below for more on that).
Banks and Nevitt wrote that “the last time the National Guard was federalized over a governor’s objection was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed the Guard to Selma, Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.” Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act.
The National Guard can be deployed for federal purposes but remain under state control under Title 32 of the U.S. Code, section 502(f). In Trump’s first term, his administration invoked this section of law to bring National Guard troops from other states to Washington, D.C., in response to protests in the city following the killing of George Floyd. But again, the president already has control of the National Guard in Washington, D.C.
This statute also has been used recently to mobilize guard troops in Memphis, where Republican Gov. Bill Lee agreed to the deployment. Since the troops are under state control, they are not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act’s restriction against engaging in civilian law enforcement. But the city of Memphis says on its website that the guard troops will act in a support role to local police and won’t make arrests.
Trump has said National Guard troops should be deployed in Chicago and Portland to help fight crime. But in court filings and official correspondence, the administration has said the guard is needed to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and federal property.
“These are unsafe places. We’re going to make them safe,” Trump said of both cities in Oct. 6 remarks. He said people in Chicago “want the guard to come in or they don’t care who comes in, they just want to be safe. … And we’re going to stop this crime. Then we’re going to go to another one. And we’re going to go city by city.” The president has repeatedly made similar remarks about sending National Guard troops to cities to combat crime.
In an Oct. 4 presidential memo federalizing Illinois National Guard troops and in court proceedings in Oregon, the administration and its lawyers have cited Title 10, section 12406 of the U.S. Code, saying the president was authorized to federalize the guard because of an inability to execute the laws of the U.S. with regular forces. The lawyers also cited “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion” in Portland.
Lawyers for Oregon, Portland, Illinois and Chicago have disputed the necessity of guard troops to quell protests or execute U.S. law.
The president has repeatedly said that he could invoke the Insurrection Act to override the objections of the Illinois and Oregon governors to National Guard troop deployments, if the administration doesn’t prevail in court. As we said, the act provides an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibition on using federal military as civilian law enforcement.
Under the Insurrection Act, a state legislature or governor could request that the president send federal military forces to suppress an insurrection, or the president could invoke the act himself “[w]henever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” the statute says.
The president also can invoke the act to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in two scenarios: if it “hinders the execution” of state and federal laws and deprives people’s constitutional rights or protections and state authorities “are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity”; or if the insurrection/violence “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, wrote in an explainer on the Insurrection Act that, in theory, it “should be used only in a crisis that is truly beyond the capacity of civilian authorities to manage,” but the statute “fails to adequately define or limit when it may be used.” Nunn, who has written about limiting the use of the military for law enforcement purposes, said the statute “needs a major overhaul,” calling it “dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.”
On Oct. 6, Trump said he would invoke the act if it was necessary. “If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure, I do that,” he said, again framing it as an issue of crime in cities. “We have to make sure that our cities are safe.”
A week later, Trump told reporters, “I don’t have to go there yet because I’m winning on appeal,” referring to the Insurrection Act. Citing an ABC News interview that included former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Trump said, “He said 50% of the presidents that served in office have used the Insurrection Act and the Insurrection Act, according to all of them, said it can’t even be challenged.”
In the ABC “This Week” interview on Oct. 12, Christie, who is also a former U.S. attorney, said that if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, “you can’t stop him if you’re the governor.” But the governor “could always bring a court action and then the courts could decide whether the facts are there to support his [Trump’s] invocation of the Insurrection Act,” Christie said.
Eighteen of 45 presidents, or 40%, have invoked the act for crises such as rebellions, labor disputes and enforcing civil rights federal court orders. The most recent instance was in 1992, when the California governor asked President George H.W. Bush to do so in order to send federal troops to assist with civil unrest that erupted in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers charged for beating Rodney King, a Black motorist. The Brennan Center for Justice has a list of all times the Insurrection Act has been used for 30 crises, dating back to 1794 under George Washington. Troops have not always been deployed. “Sometimes the mere threat of military intervention has been enough to resolve a crisis,” the Brennan Center said.
There’s “little case law” on the act, Nevitt, with Emory University School of Law, told us. Nevitt said in an email that the “leading case is from the War of 1812 (Martin v. Mott), where the Supreme Court suggested that the president has broad discretion in interpreting the act’s statutory language.”
Nevitt said there’s no judicial review in the statute and “courts have been reluctant to second-guess presidential authority in using the military,” but several courts are now addressing such authority in the cases in California, Oregon and Illinois. “A court challenge is likely,” if Trump uses the Insurrection Act, “but it remains to be seen whether a federal judge will find the case justiciable,” Nevitt said.
Nunn wrote that the high court “has suggested that courts may step in if the president acts in bad faith, exceeds ‘a permitted range of honest judgment,’ makes an obvious mistake, or acts in a way manifestly unauthorized by law” and “that courts may still review the lawfulness of the military’s actions once deployed.”
Protests in Portland against ICE began in June, when small demonstrations were cropping up in cities across the country following the Trump administration’s increased focus on immigration arrests.
As tension escalated in Los Angeles and the administration sent military troops there, the protests in Portland became larger.
“After June 25, 2025, however, the protests were generally peaceful in nature with only sporadic incidents of violence and disruptive behavior. By late September, these protests typically involved twenty or fewer people,” U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut wrote in an Oct. 4 opinion.
“[T]he protests are nowhere near city-wide,” Portland Police spokesman Mike Brenner told us in an email on Oct. 16.
But on Sept. 27, Trump announced that he was “directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” The next day, Hegseth issued a memo calling into federal service 200 members of the Oregon National Guard.
State and local officials challenged the move in federal court, leading Immergut — a Trump appointee — to block the administration by granting a temporary restraining order.
Although news reports and police accounts have characterized the protests as largely peaceful and contained to the area around the ICE facility located in the south end of the city, Trump continued to exaggerate the situation in Portland.
At an Oct. 8 roundtable, Trump said, “You look at Portland and you see fires all over the place.”
But according to Portland Fire & Rescue, that’s not the case.
Between June 6 and Sept. 30, there were four calls from the 911 center about potential fires “near the federal building where folks are gathered to share their views,” Rick Graves, spokesman for Portland Fire & Rescue, told us in an email. “Two of these were reports of a flag burning, a third was a smoke grenade device thrown under a vehicle which was perceived to be a car fire, and the last was someone who had seen a TikTok video of what they believed to be an active fire at this location but was not an active fire at this time.”
There was a 15% increase in fires around the city during that time period compared with the same time frame in 2024, Graves said, but that’s the “result of a drier year and more vegetation, bark dust, and dumpster fires. The building fire component (fires that tend to be more noticeable) is down 33% this year over last year for the same time period.”
The president has also claimed that those protesting his administration are “professional anarchists and agitators.”
But Benner told us that the Portland Police Bureau “has not found evidence that protesters are professional agitators or anarchists.” His department has made a total of 50 arrests since protests started in June, including charges of “disorderly conduct, harassment, arson and interfering with a peace officer.”
“Please remember that [the Portland Police Bureau] makes arrests based on criminal behavior, not ideologies,” Benner said.
Since Trump’s attention focused on the city in late September, demonstrators have embraced the use of large, inflatable animal costumes as a means of protest.
Although California had challenged Trump’s action in Los Angeles, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that he had met the requirements for exercising his authority under Title 10, section 12406 to federalize troops when regular forces can’t execute federal law. The three-judge panel ruled that the president’s action under that law is subject to review by the courts, but that review “must be highly deferential.”
Immergut, the judge handling the Oregon case, cited heavily from the 9th Circuit opinion, but found that the president had not met his burden in this case.
“[T]he President is certainly entitled ‘a great level of deference,’ in his determination that he ‘is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States.’ But ‘a great level of deference’ is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground,” Immergut wrote. “As the Ninth Circuit articulated, courts must ‘review the President’s determination to ensure that it reflects a colorable assessment of the facts and law within a ‘range of honest judgment.’ Here, this Court concludes that the President did not have a ‘colorable basis’ to invoke § 12406(3) to federalize the National Guard because the situation on the ground belied an inability of federal law enforcement officers to execute federal law. The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.”
Immergut granted the temporary restraining order sought by the state, blocking the Trump administration from deploying the National Guard.
The Trump administration appealed that decision, and the appeals court has yet to rule.
Trump has railed for years about crime in Chicago. Even in his first term in office, Trump floated the idea of bringing in National Guard troops to stem the city’s violent crime.
Trump ramped up those threats this year, arguing on Aug. 25 that Chicago “is a killing field right now” and that it only made sense to “send in troops.”
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker have pushed back on the president’s narrative, saying that crime is down significantly over the last year. Chicago’s overall homicide rate declined more than 30% in the first six months of this year as compared with last year, experts told us.
“We’re moving in the right direction because we’re making critical investments that actually work,” Johnson said in an interview with NPR published on Aug. 25.
Amid an immigration crackdown, Trump posted an ominous meme to Truth Social on Sept. 6, reading, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
Two days later, the Department of Homeland Security announced the launch of Operation Midway Blitz, vowing ICE would “target the criminal illegal aliens who flocked to Chicago and Illinois because they knew Governor Pritzker and his sanctuary policies would protect them and allow them to roam free on American streets.”
Clashes between protesters and federal agents have escalated as immigration enforcement in the city has intensified, with multiple violent incidents and more than a dozen arrests. Many of the protests have been focused in suburban Broadview at an ICE processing facility, where federal agents erected an 8-foot fence to protect it. Demonstrators have attempted to block access to the facility, and federal agents have, at times, responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.
“Arrests [of immigrants by ICE] are taking place all over the Chicago area, but some of the biggest flash points have occurred on the South and West Sides, which are home to many of the city’s largest Black and Latino communities,” the New Yorker reported. “Conflict has occurred in homes, migrant shelters, city streets, courtrooms, a detention center, and even the areas around churches, schools, and hospitals.”
Although Trump’s comments about Chicago are usually about reducing crime in general — particularly murder — the actions to deploy the National Guard are more narrowly targeted to protect federal activities, particularly immigration enforcement.
“The situation in the State of Illinois, particularly in and around the city of Chicago, cannot continue,” a memo issued by Trump on Oct. 4 said. “Federal facilities in Illinois, including those directly supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Protective Services (FPS), have come under coordinated assault by violent groups intent on obstructing Federal law enforcement activities. These groups have sought to impede the deportation and removal of criminal aliens through violent demonstrations, intimidation, and sabotage of Federal operations. These violent activities appear to be increasing, and the situation in the State of Illinois, particularly in and around the city of Chicago, cannot continue.”
The memo directed the mobilization of 300 National Guard troops to “any locations at which violent demonstrations prevent the execution of Federal law.”
Pritzker, meanwhile, blames the deployment of federal troops for exacerbating violence in the city.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook, cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protestors are a mob, by firing gas pellets and teargas canisters at them. Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act, so that he can send military troops to our city,” Pritzker said at a press conference on Oct. 6.
“There was never an insurrection or an invasion on the ground that justified the deployment of the military to our American city,” Pritzker said. “Donald Trump’s deranged depiction of Chicago as a hellhole, a war zone, and the worst and most dangerous city in the world, was just complete BS.”
On Oct. 6, the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago filed a complaint in federal court seeking to block National Guard members from Illinois and Texas from deploying in Chicago.
“The American people, regardless of where they reside, should not live under the threat of occupation by the United States military, particularly not simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor,” the complaint stated.
Trump’s attempts to deploy the National Guard in Chicago are part of the president’s “long-declared ‘War’ on Chicago and Illinois” and “are unlawful and dangerous,” it said.
On Oct. 9, U.S. District Judge April Perry, an appointee of President Joe Biden, issued a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration “from ordering the federalization and deployment of the National Guard of the United States within Illinois.”
Speaking from the bench, Perry said the Trump directive was unconstitutional and would “only add fuel to the fire that the defendants themselves have started,” according to NBC News.
Perry also criticized the Department of Homeland Security for relying on “unreliable evidence” that cast “significant doubt on DHS’ credibility on what is going on in the streets of Chicago.”
Two days later, on Oct. 11, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals granted part of the Trump administration’s request to halt the lower court’s ruling. The appeals court allowed Trump to federalize the National Guard in Illinois. However, the court also denied the administration’s request to actually be able to deploy the National Guard in the state. That included hundreds of National Guard troops brought up from Texas. “Members of the National Guard do not need to return to their home states unless further ordered by a court to do so,” the order said.
In a subsequent order released Oct. 16, the federal appeals court denied the administration’s effort to lift the block on deployment pending its appeal. The court determined that there was “insufficient evidence of a rebellion or danger of rebellion in Illinois” and that there was “insufficient evidence that protest activity in Illinois has significantly impeded the ability of federal officers to execute federal immigration laws.”
“The spirited, sustained, and occasionally violent actions of demonstrators in protest of the federal government’s immigration policies and actions, without more, does not give rise to a danger of rebellion against the government’s authority,” the court wrote.
In addition, the court noted, “Federal facilities, including the processing facility in Broadview, have remained open despite regular demonstrations against the administration’s immigration policies. And though federal officers have encountered sporadic disruptions, they have been quickly contained by local, state, and federal authorities. At the same time, immigration arrests and deportations have proceeded apace in Illinois over the past year, and the administration has been proclaiming the success of its current efforts to enforce immigration laws in the Chicago area.”
The Trump administration has said while the federal government is shut down, tariff revenue will be used to fund a key federal program that provides food aid and other services to nearly 7 million low-income women and young children. But as the shutdown entered its second week last week, Republicans and Democrats blamed each other for that program being in a financial bind.
U.S. residents are divided on which political party deserves blame for the government being partially shut down, but politicians on both sides are right that the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, or WIC, will remain in jeopardy the longer the shutdown continues.
“There’s a low-income food program, the WIC program, that my mom actually used when I was a baby. That program is about to be underfunded and it’s about to get cut off because Chuck Schumer won’t open the government,” Vice President JD Vance said in an Oct. 9 Cabinet meeting, blaming the Senate Democratic leader for the program’s finances.
Meanwhile, some Democratic lawmakers have used social media to counter claims such as Vance’s, placing the blame on Republicans.
“Funding for WIC is running out because of the government shutdown. American women and children will lose food assistance as a direct result of Republicans’ partisan policies,” Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware wrote in an Oct. 9 Facebook post highlighting the potential impact for people in her state. “Cruelty knows no bounds in this administration,” she said.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts also assigned blame to the GOP.
“WIC is a lifeline that helps new parents keep their babies fed. But thanks to Republicans’ government shutdown, WIC funds could run out in a matter of weeks,” she said in a Facebook post that same day. She demanded Republicans “re-open the government NOW and stop playing with people’s lives.”
Most federal operations stopped after Sept. 30 because Congress failed to pass funding legislation for the 2026 fiscal year that began Oct. 1.
House Republicans, along with one Democrat, passed a continuing budget resolution that would keep the government running through Nov. 21, allowing time for further negotiations on a long-term spending package. But most Senate Democrats repeatedly rejected that plan, opting to hold out for a funding deal that would also extend expiring subsidies for health insurance plans purchased through Affordable Care Act marketplaces as well as reverse certain Medicaid changes in Republican legislation that became law in July.
WIC provides healthy food, breastfeeding support and nutritional services to eligible low-income pregnant, breastfeeding and postpartum women, as well as children under 5 years old who are at nutritional risk. About 6.9 million individuals were receiving WIC benefits as of May, according to the most recent monthly USDA data.
Unlike some mandatory spending programs like Social Security, which continues to pay beneficiaries during a shutdown, the WIC program is run using discretionary federal funds appropriated by Congress and allocated to state and tribal agencies by the USDA. WIC cost the federal government about $7.3 billion in fiscal year 2024, and Congress approved another $7.6 billion for fiscal year 2025, which ended Sept. 30.
Without more federal financing, state governments, if they have money to spare, would have to decide whether to use state resources to finance the program in their areas and then request federal reimbursement when the government reopens.
News outlets reported that states were already burning through $150 million in federal WIC contingency funding for the shutdown when the White House said Oct. 7 that it had come up with a “creative solution” to provide additional money for the program. Citing authority under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1935, administration officials reportedly told congressional staffers that $300 million in unused revenue from tariffs on imported foreign goods would be distributed to states to help keep WIC funded through the end of October.
“The Trump White House will not allow impoverished mothers and their babies to go hungry because of the Democrats’ political games,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, according to Axios. A USDA spokesperson told us in a statement that the department “will utilize tariff revenue to fund WIC for the foreseeable future.”
Although he said he was unfamiliar with the plan, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the leader of House Democrats, told reporters on Oct. 9 that the White House needed to act.
“What we’ve seen in prior shutdowns is that presidential administrations have continued to provide support for women, infants and children, and that needs to continue right now,” Jeffries said. “And to the extent that anything different happens, it will be another example of the Trump administration using the shutdown to continue to inflict cruelty on the American people.”
But that statement overlooks notable differences for WIC in this shutdown compared with earlier ones.
WIC historically has been largely unaffected during past shutdowns but is facing a more challenging situation this year, Nell Menefee-Libey, senior public policy manager for the National WIC Association, told us.
“We’re at the beginning of a new fiscal year, so Congress has not yet appropriated any FY26 funds to support continued operations,” she said in an email, noting that during the shutdown that lasted 35 days between December 2018 and January 2019, WIC was able to keep operating without issue because the program had received some funding through a continuing resolution that had already been passed.
Menefee-Libey also said that participation in WIC has been growing, meaning that state WIC agency budgets “were already tight,” and “generally everything is really expensive right now, so food funds aren’t going as far.”
When the government shut down for 16 days at the beginning of fiscal year 2014 in October 2013, she said participation in WIC “was decreasing, leaving states with more money on hand.” USDA contingency funding also helped states continue to provide services during that 2013 shutdown, the NWA said at the time.
The organization said it welcomes the Trump administration’s use of tariff revenue to keep WIC going this month, but it also emphasized that the short-term funding, however long it lasts, is not a permanent solution.
“There is no substitute for Congress doing its job,” Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the NWA, said in an Oct. 7 statement. “WIC needs full-year funding, not just temporary lifelines. It’s imperative that leaders in Washington come together and act immediately to ensure that millions of families can continue to access the critical nutrition, care, and support they count on every day.”
In a press conference on Oct. 13, the 13th day of the shutdown, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that Congress is “barreling toward one of the longest shutdowns in American history” unless Democrats drop their health care demands and pass a “clean, no-strings-attached budget to reopen the government and pay our federal workers.”
For now, House Democrats have proposed another legislative option: a bill that would fund WIC and make it a mandatory federal program protected from future shutdowns.
The legal clashes between New York Attorney General Letitia James and President Donald Trump took a U-turn with a federal indictment on Oct. 9 charging James with mortgage fraud. The government says when James bought a house in Norfolk, Virginia, she told the mortgage broker it would be a second home in order to get a lower interest rate, but she then used it as a rental property.
James called the charges in the indictment “baseless.” News reports say the house was purchased for her great-niece who lived in the home rent-free, though James has listed a few thousand dollars in income from the property.
Legal experts have questioned the merits of the indictment. “In my experience, federal prosecutors would not have seriously pursued something this minor,” James Kainen, a professor with expertise in real estate and white collar crime at Fordham University School of Law, told us in an email. “The indictment is disproportionate and inconsistent with established prosecutorial norms.”
Here, we’ll look at the allegations and facts surrounding the case, the history of animosity between Trump and James, and what experts say about the weight of the charges.
The case was brought by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia amid pressure from Trump to pursue his longtime political adversaries. In a Sept. 20 post on Truth Social, apparently addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump cited social media posts calling for the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff and James. “They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump’s post said, adding, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” (Comey was indicted Sept. 25 on charges of lying to Congress.)
James is scheduled for an initial court appearance on Oct. 24 on charges of bank fraud and making false statements to a financial institution. A press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said James “faces penalties including up to 30 years in prison per count, up to a $1 million fine on each count, and forfeiture.” The release also noted, “Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties.”
The case against James was brought by Lindsey Halligan, a former personal lawyer for Trump who was appointed interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in September after her predecessor, Erik Seibert, was pushed out of the position for failing to file charges against James after five months of investigation, according to an ABC News report that cited anonymous sources. Halligan had advised Trump following the FBI seizure of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and has worked as a White House special assistant, but she has no experience as a prosecutor.
The five-page indictment filed against James on Oct. 9 alleges she attempted to “defraud” two financial institutions, OVM Financial, the mortgage broker, and First Savings Bank, when she purchased a three-bedroom house in Norfolk for $137,000 in August 2020, financed with a mortgage loan of about $109,600.
The loan required that James use the property as her “secondary residence” and “prohibited its use as a timesharing or other shared ownership arrangement or agreement that requires her either to rent the property or give any other person any control over the occupancy or use of the property,” the indictment says.
“Despite these representations,” the indictment continues, the property “was not occupied by James as a secondary residence and was instead used as a rental investment property, renting the property to a family of (3).”
“This misrepresentation allowed James to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties,” including an interest rate of 3% instead of 3.8% and resulting in “total ill-gotten gains of approximately $18,933 over the life of the loan,” according to the indictment.
The indictment charges James with one count of “bank fraud” and one count of “false statements to a financial institution.”
According to reporting by the New York Times, the house in Norfolk was purchased by James for her great-niece, Nakia Thompson, and Thompson’s children. Thompson testified in June to a grand jury — not the one in Alexandria, Virginia, which charged James — that Thompson had “lived in the house for years and that she did not pay rent,” the Times reported.
“Under the terms of a document that amended Ms. James’s mortgage agreement, she was expected to use the Norfolk property as a second home, with the exception of occasional, short-term rentals, according to the documents and to real-estate experts who analyzed” the documents, the Times also reported.
The indictment says “James filed Schedule E tax form(s),” treating the property as “rental real estate” and reporting “thousand(s) of dollars in rents received.”
James reported on annual financial disclosure statements filed in New York state in 2020 that she had made $1,000 to $5,000 in income on the “investment real property” in Norfolk, but did not report income on that property in other years. She listed the single-family house in Norfolk as an “investment” valued at $100,000 to $150,000 on the financial disclosure statements for the years 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. On her 2024 disclosure statement, James listed the the Virginia house as “real property.”
The day after the indictment was announced, James’ lawyer, Abbe Lowell, issued a statement saying, “We are deeply concerned that this case is driven by President Trump’s desire for revenge. When a President can publicly direct charges to be filed against someone — when it was reported that career attorneys concluded none were warranted — it marks a serious attack on the rule of law.”
James released her own statement and posted a video on X on the day of the indictment, saying, “These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost.”
We reached out to Lowell’s office for comment on the financial disclosure forms that show James had received some income from the Norfolk home and described it as an investment property, but we did not receive a response.
The hostility between James and Trump dates back to 2018 when she ran for attorney general on a promise to prosecute Trump for “defrauding Americans” and referred to him as an “illegitimate president.” Trump lambasted what he called James’ “GET TRUMP agenda.”
James’ investigation of Trump eventually led to his conviction in a 2024 civil fraud case. He was found guilty of deceiving banks and insurers for years by misrepresenting his wealth on financial statements he used to secure loans. The court fined Trump $450 million in penalties and barred him for three years from serving as the executive of the Trump Organization or any New York company.
During that trial, Trump used his social media platform to claim, in part, “The only Fraud was committed by A.G. Letitia James … She should be prosecuted!”
The staggering fine against Trump was tossed out by a New York appeals court in August, though the fraud charge was upheld.
Allegations against James surfaced in April, when William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and a Trump ally and donor, sent a letter to Bondi accusing James of mortgage fraud in Virginia and New York. James has not been charged in the real estate dealings referred to the Justice Department by Pulte, however. The Norfolk house at issue in the indictment was not cited in Pulte’s letter.
As we said, after the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia didn’t pursue any charges against James, he was replaced by Halligan.
The strength of the mortgage fraud case brought against James has been questioned by legal experts.
Paul Schiff Berman, a law professor at the George Washington University School of Law, told the Associated Press, “It is very uncommon for prosecutors to bring these sorts of claims absent a pattern of malicious activity or evidence that the individual has actually harmed the bank by not paying their mortgage or if it’s part of a much larger fraudulent scheme.”
In James’ case, “the claim is that she said that the house was going to be used as her second home but she also used it as a rental property sometimes,” Berman said, adding that could be a use for a second home that doesn’t violate a mortgage contract.
Kainen, the Fordham law professor, told us, “The claimed mortgage fraud alleges a maximum savings to Ms. James” of about $18,933 “and no loss to the bank. … By comparison, prosecutors overlooked potential mortgage fraud cases involving applicants who lied about thousands of dollars in income and then defaulted on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt during the Great Recession.”
The James case “is hardly an investigation that would have resulted in an indictment for two federal felonies,” Kainen said. “Winning this case at trial requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. James had, in the words of the indictment, ‘no intention to make personal use of the property’ when she applied for the loan. If she changed her mind, thought she might use it, or even had any reason to spend time in Virginia, it would be difficult to convict her. Responsible prosecutors do not spend their time on minor cases that are hard to win.”
The indictment “does not appear to be an attempt to enforce the law with integrity,” Kainen also said. He said that strengthens James’ argument to have the case dismissed due to “selective prosecution,” which refers to prosecution for arbitrary reasons, such as political motivation.
This story discusses suicide. For anyone experiencing thoughts of suicide, help is available from the 988 lifeline.
A day after a shooting at a school in Minnesota, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claimed, as he has before, that certain antidepressant drugs, known as SSRIs, “might be contributing to violence” in such cases. Experts say there is no direct evidence linking SSRIs to mass shootings. He also falsely claimed SSRIs have black box warnings for homicidal ideation.
On Aug. 27, an assailant fired through the windows of the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killing two students and injuring 21 others, before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The suspect, identified as Robin Westman, was a 23-year-old former student of the school who in 2020 legally changed their name to reflect a female gender identity. Authorities have not yet identified a motive, although the Minneapolis police chief said Westman “clearly had a deranged obsession with previous mass shooters.”
The day after the shooting, Kennedy appeared on “Fox & Friends,” and when asked whether he was looking into whether gender-affirming drugs might be behind the shooting, the secretary pivoted to SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
“We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence,” Kennedy said. “You know, many of them … have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we need — we can’t exclude those as a culprit.”
“This kind of violence is very recent. It’s a new thing in human history,” he added. “There was no time in the past when people would walk into a church or a classroom and start shooting people. And it’s not really happening in other countries. It’s happening here. And we need to look at all of the potential culprits that might be contributing to that.”
On Sept. 9, Kennedy again spoke of psychiatric drugs being a potential cause of school shootings and said it was being studied by the National Institutes of Health, although he did not single out SSRIs.
We asked HHS for details on the studies Kennedy said were being started, and what data supports a link between SSRIs and school shootings, but we did not receive a response.
SSRIs, which are not gender-affirming drugs, do have black box warnings cautioning of an increased risk of suicidality, or suicidal thinking and behavior, in young people. But the warning is not the same as an increased risk of suicide — and doesn’t extend to homicidal thoughts or behavior. Depression and other mental health conditions raise the risk of suicide, and treatment can help.
Regardless, experts told us there is no evidence to support the notion that SSRI use is why America has so many mass shooting events. (To date, there is no information about whether Westman was taking an SSRI or any other psychiatric drug.)
“There’s no relationship between SSRIs and mass shootings,” Dr. Ragy Girgis, a clinical psychiatrist at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute who is an expert in mass murder and violence in mental illness, told us.
Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, a psychiatrist also at Columbia, agreed. “If you think about the profile of typical mass shooters (young, male, socially isolated, nurturing grievances), it’s not surprising that some of them would be taking SSRIs for depression and/or anxiety,” he told us in an email. “But the available data do not suggest that SSRIs make them more likely to engage in mass shootings. Indeed, to the extent that SSRIs alleviate their distress, they may reduce the risk of violence.”
“There is no credible evidence that SSRIs or other antidepressants cause school or mass shootings,” James Densley, co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University in Minnesota, told us in an email.
Kennedy has repeatedly invoked SSRIs in the past as an explanation for school shootings, as we’ve noted before.
Speaking to Elon Musk in 2023 about school shootings, for example, Kennedy claimed there is “tremendous circumstantial evidence” that “SSRIs and benzos and other drugs are doing this.”
“Prior to the introduction of Prozac, we had almost none of these events in our country,” he continued, referring to the first SSRI approved in the U.S., in 1987. “The one thing that we have that’s different than anybody in the world is the amount of psychiatric drugs our children are taking.”
“There’s no time in American history or human history that kids were going to schools and shooting their classmates,” he also told comedian Bill Maher on a podcast that same year. “It really started happening coterminous with the introduction of these drugs, with Prozac and the other drugs.”
Kennedy has made similar remarks on other occasions.
Mass shootings, including at schools, have in fact occurred prior to 1987, although it’s true that the events have become more common over time. (The statistics depend on how a mass shooting is defined; one definition requires at least four people other than the shooter to be injured or killed.)
Densley, who is also a professor and chair of criminology and criminal justice at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, said Kennedy’s claim that there were almost no school shootings before Prozac “is historically and demonstrably false.”
“Countries with the highest antidepressant use based on OECD Health Data (e.g., Iceland, Canada, etc.) also have very low rates of gun homicide and virtually no mass shootings, further undercutting the ‘more SSRIs = more shootings’ claim,” he added, referring to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Several databases of mass shootings fail to show a connection to SSRI usage.
Girgis, who is a curator of the Columbia Mass Murder Database, told us that in his database, only about 4% of mass shooters in the U.S. over the last three decades had a history of ever taking antidepressants, and only 7% had a history of ever taking any kind of psychotropic medication.
“We discovered psychotropic medication use among perpetrators of mass shootings to be far below rates in the general population,” Girgis and co-authors wrote in a letter to the editor published in Psychiatry Research in September, sharing an analysis of those results. “In most cases, they were either not actively taking psychotropic medication(s) at the time of, or anytime proximate to, the shootings, or medication appeared to play no causal role.”
While acknowledging some inherent limitations in the database information, which may not be complete, the authors concluded that the “scientific evidence strongly suggests that antidepressant medications, such as SSRIs, do not directly cause people to commit mass murders and suicide.”
While the percentages are different, the Violence Project’s database also does not support a link between antidepressant medications and mass shootings. In the database, which covers 1966 through 2024, 24% of mass shooters took some prescribed psychiatric medication at some point in their lives, Densely said, and among those with known medication status, “the share with a recorded SSRI tracks the background rate of antidepressant use in the U.S. general population. Specifically, 22 perpetrators in our database were known to have taken SSRI medications, which is 11% of mass shooters. The CDC says that about 13% of U.S. adults (and 8% of adult men) reported antidepressant use in the past 30 days (among adolescents, it’s ~3–4%).”
Densley noted that “people in acute crisis are more likely to be prescribed medication, so simple yes/no comparisons overstate any drug–violence link.”
These results are consistent with a 2019 review of publicly available information about school shootings between 2000 and 2017, which found that “most school shooters were not previously treated with psychotropic medications – and even when they were, no direct or causal association was found.”
There are some studies that have identified associations between SSRI treatment and violence. A 2020 study, for example, used registry data in Sweden and found an association between being convicted of a violent crime and being dispensed SSRI medication, when comparing periods of use versus non-use in the same individuals.
However, because the studies are observational, and cannot control for all of the factors that might have also contributed to violence, such as disease severity, it does not mean that the SSRIs necessarily caused the violence.
“Given that a vast majority of individuals taking SSRIs will not commit violent crimes, our results should also not be used as reason to withhold SSRI treatment from patients who may benefit from it, especially as causality remains unclear,” the authors of the 2020 paper cautioned.
In the study, fewer than 3% of SSRI users committed a violent crime, and young men and those with a history of violent crime drove most of the observed association.
Girgis, who was not involved in the study, noted that some of the violent crimes in the paper would not necessarily involve physical violence, but instead would be classified as aggression in the scientific literature.
“Aggression is an important construct and is horrible, but it is not violence,” he said.
In his view, all the Swedish study shows “is that people with more severe depression receive antidepressants.”
Regardless, the paper does not say anything about SSRIs and mass shootings.
Dr. Seena Fazel, a professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Oxford, who was a co-author of the Swedish paper, told us that the study “will not be directly relevant to mass shootings. It’s based in Sweden, where guns are highly regulated (and for hunting purposes primarily).” He said he was “not aware of this having been studied in a way that would allow definitive conclusions.”
As for suicidality, Kennedy is correct that there are black box warnings on SSRIs that caution that the drugs could raise the risk of suicidal thinking or behavior in people below the age of 24. That, however, is not the same as an increase in suicide. And the labels, which have been controversial, also note that depression and other mental health conditions “are themselves associated with increases in the risk of suicide.” Experts told us that the issue is nuanced and is not as simple as it might appear.
The Food and Drug Administration first applied black box warnings to all antidepressants in 2004 for children and teens. The warnings were based on an FDA-commissioned meta-analysis, which went back and scoured two dozen randomized pediatric clinical trials for suicide-related adverse events, after a report to the FDA indicated there could be a concern with one SSRI.
As the FDA’s website explains, the meta-analysis “showed a greater risk of suicidality during the first few months of treatment in those receiving antidepressants,” at a rate of about 4% compared with the placebo risk of 2%. There were, however, no suicides recorded in the trials.
The FDA recommended that patients starting the drugs “should be observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behavior” and that families “should be advised to closely observe the patient and to communicate with the prescriber.”
In 2007, the agency extended the warnings up to the age of 24. As the black box warning explains, studies have not found an increased risk of suicidality in adults above the age of 24, and in older adults above the age of 65, there is a reduced risk.
Some experts do not agree with the warnings, arguing that they have done more harm than good when the overall data doesn’t suggest that SSRIs increase the risk of suicide.
“These studies aren’t linking SSRIs with suicide,” Girgis said. “They suggest links with suicidal thoughts and suicidal behavior that does not lead to suicide. And there’s a big difference.”
Girgis explained that one possibility is that antidepressant treatment allows depressed patients to report their suicidal thoughts more.
“In studies, when we see that suicidal thoughts increase after someone receives a medication, it’s not because the medication is causing suicidal thoughts,” he said. “It’s because the person is improving. The suicidal thoughts are now becoming disagreeable to them, and they’re reporting them to their clinicians because they want help.”
A 2021 review about depression in teens notes that a 2007 meta-analysis that included more trials than the FDA analysis “showed a small but still significant risk difference of 0.7 percentage points … for suicidal ideation or attempted suicide between adolescents receiving a drug and those receiving placebo.” But data “from more recent trials of antidepressant treatment in the pediatric population show no significant difference in suicide risk … possibly because these trials included suicide-specific measures, whereas the previous trials relied on reported adverse events,” it said.
Experts have also pointed to data that show a decline in teen and young adult suicides when SSRIs first came out, as well as a rise in suicides for those groups after the FDA warnings, which studies have found did not increase monitoring for suicidal thoughts or behaviors, but did reduce prescribing and other treatment for depression.
“In the most rigorous studies on mental healthcare, suicide attempts and suicide deaths, the black box warnings consistently backfired because they reduced care and increased all adverse outcomes through increased stigma and fear,” Stephen Soumerai, a professor of population medicine at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute who has co-authored several of those studies, told us.
“Taken as a whole (i.e., not cherry-picking individual studies) the available data do not show an increased risk of either suicide or homicide with SSRIs,” Columbia’s Appelbaum said. “Indeed, if you look at the rates of SSRI use internationally, you will see that there are a number of countries with higher rates than or equivalent rates to the US that have nowhere near our incidence of mass shootings. But in none of them are guns as readily available as in the US.”
As has been the case each year since 2022, updated COVID-19 vaccines were released leading into the fall season, and the shots should be broadly available to people age 6 months and up. For the first time, however, the vaccines are not approved for all age groups, and the vaccines are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention only after a discussion with a health care provider.
Experts emphasize that there has been no real change in the benefits or risks of the vaccines, which are quite safe and offer additional protection against the coronavirus. Vaccination can benefit everyone but is particularly important for those at higher risk of severe illness, including older people, very young children, pregnant people and those with certain other risk factors.
In the end, the CDC recommendation means that most people who want a vaccine — even if they do not meet the approval criteria — can get one, although doing so may be more difficult.
Here, we explain what’s different this year and walk through the complexities of getting vaccinated under the new rules.
In previous years, the Food and Drug Administration either approved or authorized COVID-19 vaccines for all ages 6 months and older, and the CDC also recommended the vaccines for all, while noting that vaccination is most important for higher-risk groups.
This August, the FDA approved the COVID-19 vaccines, but only for those age 65 and older or for those with a risk factor. At some point for each vaccine, according to FDA memos, the head of the vaccines division, an administration official, had overruled career staff that had recommended approval for a broader population.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted on Sept. 19 to recommend COVID-19 vaccination for everyone 6 months of age and up, but only after consultation with a health care provider, or what’s known as shared clinical decision-making.
The panel originally had been scheduled to vote on the COVID-19 vaccine recommendations in June. But that month, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismissed the committee and installed new members of his choice. The CDC director, who had just been confirmed by the Senate, was fired in August, and other top officials resigned. Meanwhile, Kennedy has repeatedly made false or misleading claims about COVID-19 vaccines this year.
At its September meeting, ACIP did not complete its normal procedure of gathering and presenting the evidence behind its recommendations. Members made misleading and unfounded claims about vaccine safety, despite a lack of data showing new safety concerns. The CDC then did not announce that it had accepted ACIP’s recommendations until Oct. 6.
It’s worth noting that before Kennedy dismissed the prior advisory panel, the group was considering making age- and risk-based recommendations, given evidence that hospitalization rates in healthy older children and younger adults had declined from the early phase of the pandemic.
However, these recommendations would likely have been quite different from those the CDC ultimately made. Guidance that was being considered more decisively recommended the shots to very young children, older adults and other people at high risk of severe disease, rather than only recommending the shots after consultation with a health care provider.
Amid growing doubts about the vaccine guidance coming from the CDC, states and expert organizations have issued their own updated COVID-19 vaccine recommendations — some that are different from the agency’s for the first time in decades.
There is broad agreement among experts that vaccination is most important for people age 65 and older, those who are pregnant, babies and toddlers from 6 through 23 months, and people with health conditions that put them at high risk of severe COVID-19.
This advice is backed by clear patterns in the recent data on hospitalization rates for COVID-19, Dr. Fiona Havers, an infectious disease physician and respiratory virus and vaccine policy expert, told us. Havers formerly led the CDC’s Respiratory Virus Hospitalization Surveillance Network team before resigning in June, citing the corruption of CDC processes under Kennedy.
People age 75 and older have the highest rate of hospitalization, Havers said, and those age 65 to 74 have “very high rates” of hospitalization. “At the other extreme, very young children, particularly children under 2, and especially those babies less than 6 months of age, have high hospitalization rates for COVID,” she said. Outside these extremes of age, she said, those still at highest risk for severe COVID-19 are those with underlying medical conditions.
The COVID-19 vaccines were originally demonstrated to be effective at preventing symptomatic disease in randomized controlled trials. The CDC and others have monitored vaccine effectiveness since then, finding consistently that additional doses add protection, on top of the immunity people already have from past vaccination and infection.
The 2024-2025 vaccines reduced the risk of hospitalization and critical illness in adults age 65 and older, data presented at the September ACIP meeting showed, with the best and most lasting protection against critical illness. For children and adults more generally, the additional vaccine doses also lowered the rate of urgent care and emergency room visits.
Havers explained that vaccination during pregnancy is also “really important,” not only because pregnancy puts a person at risk of complications from COVID-19, but also because vaccination during pregnancy protects the baby. Babies under 6 months of age cannot yet be vaccinated against COVID-19. “The best way to protect them is for the moms to be vaccinated during pregnancy,” she said.
The latest guidance from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists states that it “continues to recommend that all pregnant and lactating individuals receive an updated COVID-19 vaccine or ‘booster.’”
Guidance issued in August by the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends vaccination for all children from 6 through 23 months and older children who fall into various high-risk groups or whose household members are at high risk. The guidance states that older kids without risk factors can get vaccinated if a “parent or guardian desires their protection from COVID-19.”
The American Academy of Family Physicians, meanwhile, issued recommendations for children and pregnant people that match the AAP and ACOG recommendations. AAFP also recommends COVID-19 vaccination for all adults, with an emphasis on its importance for people with high-risk conditions, those who have never gotten a COVID-19 vaccine, and people age 65 and older.
Dr. Margot Savoy, chief medical officer for the American Academy of Family Physicians, told Spotlight PA that it broadly recommended vaccination in adults because there are few who don’t either fall into a high-risk group or live with someone who does. “So why make it more complicated than it needs to be?”
New recommendations from states or coalitions of states often draw on guidance from these expert organizations. State recommendations vary in their details, such as how broadly they recommend the vaccines for younger adults, but generally emphasize the importance of vaccination for the high-risk groups described above. As of a Sept. 24 review by the health policy research group KFF, 22 states “specifically identify non-federal entities as sources for their vaccine recommendations, either in addition to or instead of CDC/ACIP.”
But even if a person is not at high risk for severe disease or hospitalization, Havers explained, getting a vaccine can offer benefits. “You are likely to have milder disease if you are recently vaccinated and then you get COVID than if you hadn’t been vaccinated,” she said.
If older children have been previously vaccinated and are not in a high-risk group, the choice to vaccinate “could be considered ‘low risk, low reward,’” an informational page on COVID-19 vaccinations from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia states.
Havers said that “the best protection is going to be within the first couple of months after getting a vaccine.” Given that there has historically been a winter wave of COVID-19, “now is not a bad time to get” a vaccine, she said.
There are four 2025-2026 formula COVID-19 vaccines: Spikevax and mNEXSPIKE from Moderna, Comirnaty from Pfizer/BioNTech, and Nuvaxovid from Novavax.
This year’s Comirnaty and Spikevax vaccines are updated versions of the two original COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. These vaccines use mRNA to prompt a person’s cells to temporarily make a small quantity of spike protein, the protein the coronavirus uses to get into cells. This prepares the immune system to respond when it encounters the virus.
It is relatively simple to update mRNA vaccines to target a slightly different version of the spike protein, since it only requires tweaking the sequence of the mRNA. This year, the mRNA vaccines target the spike protein from the LP.8.1 subvariant of the coronavirus.
LP.8.1 was the dominant subvariant when the FDA issued advice in May on formulations for the updated vaccines. It is part of the JN.1 lineage, which is itself part of the lineage of omicron variants that have been spreading since late 2021. CDC modeling indicates that as of late September, the most commonly circulating subvariant is the closely related XFG, which is a combination of an LP.8.1 subvariant and another JN.1 subvariant.
Unlike last year, there is a third, lower-dose mRNA vaccine, mNEXSPIKE, which was first approved on May 30 following testing in a randomized controlled trial comparing it to Spikevax. The study found the vaccines had similar safety and efficacy, with possibly improved efficacy for the newer vaccine in older adults with underlying conditions. By instructing the body to make just the two most critical parts of the spike protein, the mNEXSPIKE vaccine is able to use one-fifth the amount of mRNA included in the adolescent and adult dose of Spikevax.
Nuvaxovid targets the JN.1 variant, as it did last year. This vaccine contains the spike protein, rather than the mRNA instructions for making it. It takes longer to update protein-based vaccines than to update mRNA vaccines.
Everyone age 6 months and older is eligible to get a COVID-19 vaccine under shared clinical decision-making, according to the CDC. Unusually, this recommendation is broader than the current FDA approval, which says the vaccines are only indicated for certain groups. But people should be able to get vaccines outside the FDA label after talking to a health care provider.
In the past, the CDC has issued shared clinical decision-making recommendations when it does not consider a vaccine to be universally necessary across a certain age or risk group, according to a page on the CDC website. Rather, a health care provider and patient should make the decision for or against vaccination, based on factors including individual health conditions and preferences, as well as health care provider discretion. Health care providers can be “anyone who provides or administers vaccines,” according to the CDC, including doctors, nurses, physician assistants and pharmacists.
In practice, recommending the vaccines under shared clinical decision-making “largely affirms that people considering vaccination should have an opportunity to discuss any questions about the vaccine with a health care provider before making their final decision, something that is already the norm for any vaccination,” Jason Schwartz, a professor at the Yale School of Public Health with expertise in vaccine policy, told us via email.
The ACIP recommendations emphasized that for people under age 65, the balance of benefits and risks is most favorable for those who have high-risk underlying conditions, as listed by the CDC.
Notably, the list of high-risk conditions includes pregnancy or recent pregnancy. That marks a shift from May when Kennedy announced that the CDC was no longer recommending COVID-19 vaccines for healthy pregnant women.
Until recently, children under age 5 could get either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, which were provided for this age group under emergency use authorizations.
But this summer, the FDA revoked the emergency use authorizations for these vaccines while also issuing the new, narrower approvals. Spikevax, from Moderna, is the only vaccine approved this year for those age 6 months and up. Comirnaty, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, is approved for those age 5 and up. The Novavax vaccine and mNEXSPIKE are approved for age 12 and up.
The updated CDC vaccine schedule states that adults age 65 and older may get two or more doses of this year’s COVID-19 vaccines under shared clinical decision-making. It also states that for people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised, “Additional doses may be necessary,” also under shared clinical decision-making.
The vaccine schedule is not clear about when or how often people should get these extra doses, and ACIP has so far not weighed in on whether these additional doses are recommended.
Last year, ACIP and the CDC recommended in October that both older adults and people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised get a second dose of that year’s vaccine, at least two months but preferably six months after their prior dose. The guidance at the time added that people in the immunocompromised group could get additional doses beyond that after engaging in shared clinical decision-making.
“Typically, ACIP would have discussed and voted on the use of the vaccine in a more granular fashion than they did at their September meeting,” Schwartz said. “This would have included discussions of the use of the vaccines in particular populations, including groups for whom different dosing regimens would be appropriate.” However, he added, the vaccine schedule links to a non-updated clinical considerations document that lays out these details.
An HHS spokesperson did not reply to a request for clarification about the number of doses recommended for these high-risk groups.
Update, Oct. 22: The Infectious Diseases Society of America issued vaccination guidelines on Oct. 17 for immunocompromised patients, recommending at least one dose of a 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccine for all such individuals 6 months and older. The guidelines stated that a second dose “is likely to extend protection” and that decisions on additional doses should be “based on prior vaccination history and clinical judgment.”
Any child 6 months of age and older and any insured adult should be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine without paying out of pocket, if the patient and a health care provider determine via shared clinical decision-making that vaccination is warranted.
“If that determination is made, insurers should cover the vaccine at no-cost, although it is possible that some consumers may face challenges,” a KFF analysis states. The vaccines are available at pharmacies or doctors’ offices, although availability will vary depending on whether providers choose to stock the vaccines.
Vaccines recommended by ACIP and the CDC are required to be offered at no cost to most people with private insurance, Medicare or Medicaid. The Vaccines for Children program, for which half of all U.S. children are eligible, offers free recommended vaccines to children who are uninsured or underinsured, eligible for Medicaid, or American Indian or Alaska Native. A smaller number of children get free recommended vaccines via the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which offers low- or no-cost coverage for kids who don’t qualify for Medicaid.
The CDC said in its Oct. 6 press release that recommendations based on “individual-based-decision-making,” also known as shared clinical decision-making, “allows for immunization coverage through all payment mechanisms,” including those mentioned above.
Some experts are concerned that in practice, this year’s federal approach to COVID-19 vaccine approvals and recommendations could open new gaps in access.
Havers said that health care providers tend to dislike such broad recommendations for shared clinical decision-making “because it gives them no guidance and nothing clear to follow.”
She said she was particularly concerned about very young children falling through the cracks. “The under 2 group has never had COVID before, and they have an underdeveloped immune system, and they’re at high risk for severe disease if they get COVID,” she said. Nothing, however, in the CDC’s recommendations indicates that these young kids are at particularly high risk. Moderna’s Spikevax is the only vaccine FDA-approved for this age group, and the approval is only for children with underlying conditions.
Even if vaccines should be theoretically available to young children, getting a child vaccinated requires finding a provider who has pediatric doses in stock and is able to vaccinate. Pharmacies vary in the age groups for which they stock vaccines and face restrictions on vaccinating the smallest children.
Some pediatricians’ offices were waiting for the CDC sign-off to order doses, and some may choose not to order doses if demand is low. The Vaccines for Children Program also was unable to ship doses until the CDC signed off on the recommendations.
Confusion could also keep people from getting vaccinated.
Health care providers are allowed to give vaccines to people for whom they are not approved, a practice called off-label use. It’s not “unprecedented” for providers to give vaccines off-label, but Schwartz did call it “quite uncommon” in a blog post on the Yale website. “Here, ACIP has opened the door to off-label use of the vaccine for tens of millions of Americans, essentially all healthy individuals between 6 months and 65 years of age,” he said.
“There could be some providers (and individuals) who are confused about how the approval relates to the recommendation,” Jennifer Kates, senior vice president and director of the Global Health & HIV Policy Program at KFF, told us via email. “This could create a barrier for someone seeking to get a COVID vaccine.”
Havers also said that historically, expert groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics were included in discussions leading up to the issuance of CDC guidance and would endorse one unified recommendation. The variety of recommendations now being issued is “more confusing for patients and more confusing for providers,” she said.
Members of the Vaccine Integrity Project, an initiative of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, also pointed to the lack of government advertising and media campaigns to encourage vaccination against COVID-19 and other diseases this year. “If you add the conspicuous absence of pro-vaccination messages to the glut of misleading statements from top health officials about vaccine safety and effectiveness, the federal government’s effort this year looks more like a proactive campaign to discourage vaccination,” the authors said in a Sept. 30 post (emphasis theirs).
“There’s confusion around what the federal government is recommending, and there’s increased vaccine skepticism writ large,” Kates told us in an interview. “That is likely going to dampen vaccine rates.”
