Q: Will U.S. citizens receive stimulus or tariff-based checks of $2,000 in November?
A: No checks are being issued. President Donald Trump said he wants to use tariff revenue to give “dividend” payments of “at least $2,000” to “middle-income people and lower-income people.” But no formal plan has been finalized and approved by Congress. Fiscal policy experts say there’s not enough tariff revenue for that.
A bogus online post falsely claims that this month the federal government will issue “a $2,000 direct deposit payment for eligible U.S. citizens” in three phases from Nov. 10 through Nov. 30.
There are no such direct deposits scheduled and no checks in the mail.
President Donald Trump has only talked about using revenue collected from tariffs, or customs duties, on imported foreign goods to reduce the federal debt and make “rebate” or “dividend” payments to Americans. He reiterated his wishes on Nov. 9.
“People that are against Tariffs are FOOLS!,” Trump wrote on Truth Social that day. “We are taking in Trillions of Dollars and will soon begin paying down our ENORMOUS DEBT, $37 Trillion. Record Investment in the USA, plants and factories going up all over the place. A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
He made his pitch again the next day while taking press questions in the Oval Office.
“Without tariffs, we would be — this country would be in such trouble, as they were for many years,” he said. “That’s why we owe $38 trillion. And one of the things we’re going to do, we’re going to issue a dividend to our middle-income people and lower-income people of about $2,000. And we’re going to use the remaining tariffs to lower our debt.
However, the U.S. has not made “trillions of dollars” from tariffs, as the president’s remarks may suggest. He appears to get to “trillions” by counting unspecified financial investments in the U.S. that companies or countries have pledged to make, which isn’t the same thing as “trillions” in revenue for the federal government. We asked the White House for an accounting of Trump’s “trillions” calculation, but we did not get a response.
Multiple experts on fiscal policy have pointed out that, based on tariff revenue alone, the math for Trump’s proposed dividend and debt payment plan doesn’t quite work.
“The President just proposed a $2,000 tariff ‘dividend’ for each person, excluding high-income earners,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy for the pro-business Tax Foundation, wrote in an X thread that began on Nov. 9. “If the cutoff is $100,000, 150M adults would qualify, for a cost near $300 billion. If kids qualify, that grows.”
“Only problem,” York said, “new tariffs have raised $120 billion so far,” although she noted that the Tax Foundation estimates that net revenue from Trump’s tariffs would equal about $216 billion in fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1. (Including preexisting tariffs, the government, according to Treasury Department data, collected nearly $195 billion total in customs duties in fiscal year 2025, which ended Sept. 30.)
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that tariffs will bring in a bit more revenue: about $300 billion per year, starting in 2026. But the nonpartisan group said that still may not be enough depending on who qualified for Trump’s payments.
“Assuming these dividends are designed like the COVID-era Economic Impact Payments, which went to both adults and children, we estimate each round of payments would cost about $600 billion,” CRFB said.
The full pandemic payments, which were made at three different times between 2020 and 2021, went to single tax filers with less than $75,000 in gross income and jointly filing married couples who made less than $150,000. The payments began to phase out, or were reduced, for individuals and couples earning more than those thresholds.
CRFB said that, on a revenue neutral basis, the dividend payments could be made “every other year, starting in early 2027,” if Trump planned to issue them on a recurring basis. But if the Supreme Court agrees with lower courts and rules that the majority of the tariffs that Trump unilaterally imposed this year are illegal, the remaining tariffs on imports would only raise enough money to make payments after seven years, CRFB said.
In addition, using all of the tariff revenue for rebates or dividends would mean that there would be no money left over to pay down the federal debt, as Trump also said he wants to do. In fact, issuing such rebates would increase the debt (which now totals $38 trillion, as Trump said, including money the government owes to itself).
“Using all the tariff revenue for rebates would push debt to 127% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2035 instead of 120% under current law; if $2,000 dividends are paid annually, debt would reach 134% GDP,” CRFB said.
Furthermore, while the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center also estimates that tariffs Trump had announced through Oct. 23 will raise close to $300 billion in 2026 ($299 billion), it said those same policies “will impose an average burden of about $2,600 per tax unit in calendar year 2026,” reducing the economic impact of any dividend payments to individuals.
That burden on households is because the tariffs are mostly paid by U.S. importers – not foreign countries, as Trump has said – who often pass at least some of their costs onto American consumers through higher prices on goods.
The Tax Foundation estimates a lower average tariff burden on households, but it would still be $1,600 in 2026, the organization says.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a Nov. 12 press briefing that the Trump administration is serious about trying to make the dividend payments a reality.
“The White House is committed to making that happen, yes, and we are currently exploring all legal options to get that done,” she said when a reporter asked about Trump’s recent comments. “I don’t have a timeline for you or any further details, but I can confirm for you that the president made it clear he wants to make it happen.”
The president’s “team of economic advisers are looking into it,” she said.
In an interview on Fox News on Nov. 12, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said there are “a lot of options here that the president’s talking about,” including $2,000 rebates for “families making less than, say, $100,000,” and those options are “in discussion” among White House officials.
Bessent also suggested the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act should be counted as rebates to working families.
“What we did with the tax bill is actually financing the president’s no tax on tips, overtime, Social Security, and the big refunds you’re going to see are a result of that,” Bessent said. “So that’s another payment to the American people.” In addition, he said, starting next year, the law will provide $1,000 for investment accounts — so-called “Trump accounts” — for newborns. “So, that’s another $1,000 for working families,” Bessent said.
We’d note that any dividend payments, like the three rounds of stimulus payments issued during the pandemic, would have to be authorized by Congress.
Walmart’s 2025 Thanksgiving meal consisting of pre-selected products costs about one-quarter less than last year’s meal, but it also includes fewer grocery items and different food brands. Yet President Donald Trump has been misleadingly touting the decline in the price of this year’s meal without mentioning the reasons for the big decrease.
There’s still a drop in price when comparing the same basket of items as the 2024 meal, but it’s a smaller decrease — 6.5% by our calculations.
In a Nov. 5 Truth Social post, Trump wrote: “Walmart just announced that Prices for a Thanksgiving Dinner is now down 25% since under Sleepy/Crooked Joe Biden, in 2024. AFFORDABILITY is a Republican Stronghold. Hopefully, Republicans will use this irrefutable fact!” He made similar claims about Walmart’s annual holiday promotion in remarks on Nov. 5, 6 and 7, while claiming that grocery prices “are way down.”
Average grocery prices are up — not down, as we wrote earlier this month. The Consumer Price Index for “food-at-home” increased by 1.4% from January to September, and was up 2.7% from September 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But this year’s curated dinner basket from Walmart, at nearly $40, is about 25% less than the $55 price of the 2024 basket, Walmart said. The retail giant has made the meals available for purchase since 2022, and it said this year’s offering, which is supposed to serve 10 people, is its “most affordable holiday meal yet.”
In trumpeting the price drop, however, Trump has ignored why the cost of the store’s holiday dinner went down so much this year.
To start, this year’s meal includes fewer food products compared with last year’s.
There are 15 different products in the 2025 meal and 22 individual items. The 2024 meal had 21 different products and 29 individual items.
Also, the meals this year and last do not consist of the exact same foods or brands.
For example, the 2025 meal has a 13.5-pound Butterball turkey, Kinder’s fried onions, Great Value dinner rolls, fresh cranberries and a twin pack of Stove Top turkey stuffing.
Meanwhile, the 2024 meal included a 10- to 16-pound unspecified “Whole Frozen Turkey,” French’s crispy fried onions, Great Value sweet Hawaiian rolls, a can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce and several ingredients that could be used for homemade stuffing.
The 2024 meal also included items, such as sweet potatoes and a pecan pie, that were cut from the 2025 meal.
When we used the Walmart website on Nov. 12 to recreate the 2024 shopping cart, the price was $51.39 based on sales prices and before sales tax. (Prices may vary by location and sale prices.) That’s a decline of about 6.5% from the 2024 price of $55. (Walmart also said that its 2024 dinner was cheaper than its 2023 meal based on purchasing the same list of items both years.)
The 2024 meal served “eight people for less than $7 per person,” Walmart said. A meal using those same items this year would cost about $6.42 per person for a group of that size.
The Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute reported that its 10-person dinner costs less as well.
“Even though the cost of food at home measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is up 2.7% from a year ago, the cost of Wells Fargo’s Thanksgiving menu has fallen by about 2 to 3%, depending on the shopper’s strategy,” the Wells Fargo Thanksgiving Food Report says.
The institute said that a dinner menu consisting of all private-label, or store brand items, would cost $80, while a menu with all national name brand items would cost $95. The Wells Fargo dinner menu includes turkey and stuffing, frozen vegetables, mashed potatoes, gravy, fresh cranberries, dinner rolls, salad mix and pumpkin pie with whipped cream.
“At the heart of the uptick in the CPI’s food-at-home increase is protein, specifically beef and eggs, which are not on the Thanksgiving menu,” the report says. “Without those items, consumers will find relief in a traditional Thanksgiving meal.”
Update, Nov. 13: We noted that prices for the 2024 Walmart meal may vary by location and sale prices.
In defending his Oct. 23 pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, President Donald Trump claimed that Zhao was the victim of a Biden administration “witch hunt.” The billionaire executive known as “CZ” pleaded guilty to allowing money-laundering through his cryptocurrency company. He was fined $50 million and served a four-month sentence in a low-security prison and halfway house.
Trump’s comments came during a Nov. 2 interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes.” Trump said, “I don’t know who he is” and “I know nothing about the guy,” though Zhao’s company assisted in business dealings that benefit World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture run by Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a Nov. 4 briefing that the president meant “he does not have a personal relationship with” Zhao. Leavitt also claimed that the judge who heard the case said the sentencing sought by the Biden administration was “egregious and went too far. And so the president is correcting that wrong.”
Prosecutors in the case had sought a three-year sentence for Zhao, while the defense asked for probation with no jail time. The judge agreed that Zhao’s action didn’t warrant a three-year term, but sentenced him to four months in prison. Trump’s pardon did not change the prison sentence, which ended in September 2024.
Experts have concerns about Trump’s pardon of Zhao and the appearance of a conflict of interest on the president’s part.
Here, we’ll look at the basis of the Zhao case, Trump’s claims about the Biden administration’s prosecution of Zhao and concerns about Trump’s pardon.
During Trump’s “60 Minutes” interview, CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell asked why he pardoned Zhao.
Trump said, “Okay, are you ready? I don’t know who he is. I know he got a four-month sentence or something like that. And I heard it was a Biden witch hunt.”
“But this man was treated really badly by the Biden administration,” Trump said. “And he was given a jail term. He’s highly respected. He’s a very successful guy. They sent him to jail and they really set him up. That’s my opinion. I was told about it. … I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.”
Whether Zhao was “treated really badly,” as Trump claimed, is a matter of opinion. We’ll provide the facts surrounding his case and sentencing.
The government’s case against Zhao was widely covered in 2023, and the Department of Justice began investigating Binance’s activities in 2018, during Trump’s first term as president.
After the yearslong investigation and a settlement with the government, the Department of Justice announced in a press release on Nov. 21, 2023, that Binance Holdings Limited, “the entity that operates the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange,” pleaded guilty to “violations related to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), failure to register as a money transmitting business, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).”
The company agreed to pay more than $4.3 billion in penalties as a result of the investigation, “one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. history,” then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
Zhao, a Canadian national born in China, pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program, in violation of the Bank Security Act, and was forced to resign as CEO of Binance.
In a Nov. 21, 2023, post on X, Zhao wrote: “Today, I stepped down as CEO of Binance. Admittedly, it was not easy to let go emotionally. But I know it is the right thing to do. I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility.”
“Because Changpeng Zhao knowingly operated a financial platform without basic anti-money laundering safeguards, the company caused illegal transactions between U.S. users and users in sanctioned jurisdictions such as Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine – transactions for which Binance profited with significant fees,” said Tessa Gorman, acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington.
“Binance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profit. Its willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform,” Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen said.
The press release also said Binance’s employees recognized that the company “did not have protocols to flag or report transactions for money laundering risks, which employees recognized would attract criminals to the exchange.” A company employee wrote, “we need a banner ‘is washing drug money too hard these days — come to binance we got cake for you.’”
“Zhao told employees it was ‘better to ask for forgiveness than permission,’ and prioritized Binance’s growth over compliance with U.S. law,” the DOJ release also said.
Following Zhao’s guilty plea, he was allowed to travel throughout the U.S. and temporarily return to his family and home in Dubai.
In a court filing at Zhao’s sentencing five months after his plea, federal prosecutors wrote that he deserved a prison sentence of three years for violating U.S. laws “on an unprecedented scale.” Zhao and his company “put U.S. customers, the U.S. financial system, and U.S. national security at risk,” the prosecutors wrote.
Federal guidelines for Zhao’s crime called for a sentence of 12 to 18 months. Zhao’s lawyers sought probation and no jail time.
Judge Richard A. Jones, who heard the case in U.S. District Court in Seattle, told Zhao, “Your conduct does not warrant a 36-month sentence,” the New York Times reported. Jones sentenced Zhao to four months in prison and ordered him to pay a personal fine of $50 million. Zhao had an estimated personal worth of $33 billion to $43 billion at the time.
Zhao served his sentence in 2024 in a low-security prison in California and a halfway house in Long Beach “where, according to a prison official, he would have been able to make supervised excursions and even go to movies,” Fortune reported.
Though Zhao’s settlement with the Justice Department included his resignation from Binance, Trump’s pardon will likely allow him to return to the company, analysts said.
The Trump family’s business interests have veered in recent years from real estate to the cryptocurrency industry, with Trump’s sons pursuing various crypto ventures under the company name World Liberty Financial, including business tied to Binance, which was founded by Zhao in 2017.
Bloomberg reported in July that Binance assisted in creating the initial code that enabled the issuance of USD1, a stablecoin offered for investment by World Liberty Financial. (A stablecoin is a type of digital currency pegged to a traditional currency, such as a U.S. dollar.) That enabled USD1 to be used by MGX, a United Arab Emirates firm, for a $2 billion investment in Binance in May. The investment could channel millions annually from interest-bearing assets to the Trump family, according to Bloomberg.
Days after Trump pardoned Zhao in October, Binance began promoting sales of USD1 on its U.S. site, making the digital coin more accessible to U.S. investors and more likely to increase in value, USA Today reported.
The Trump administration has said the president has no conflicts of interest in these dealings. Leavitt said in a statement: “Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest.”
During the “60 Minutes” interview, Trump said, “My sons are involved in crypto much more than I — me. I — I know very little about it, other than one thing. It’s a huge industry.”
In the “60 Minutes” interview, O’Donnell asked Trump if he was “concerned about the appearance of corruption” in pardoning Zhao.
Trump replied: “I can’t say, because — I can’t say — I’m not concerned. I don’t — I’d rather not have you ask the question. But I let you ask it.”
Some business and legal experts have expressed concerns.
Eswar Prasad, an economics professor at Cornell University and a crypto skeptic, told the New York Times, “There is little justification for this pardon and highlights how far this administration will go to promote the cryptocurrency industry.”
“It is not unusual for businesspeople to be among those who occasionally receive presidential grants of clemency,” Dan Kobil, a professor with expertise in executive clemency at Capital University Law School, told us in an email. “For example, President Biden at the end of his term commuted the sentence of convicted Illinois fraudster Eric Bloom who stole more than $665 million from investors. He was included among 1,500 commutations of non-violent federal prisoners who had been placed on home release during the COVID-19 epidemic. Biden’s commutation did not erase Bloom’s conviction or remove its collateral consequences, but it did reduce Bloom’s sentence by several years.”
“Still, there are several unusual aspects to Trump’s pardon of Zhao,” Kobil said. “First, it was a pardon, the most sweeping form of clemency which entirely erases the consequences of the conviction, almost as if the crime never occurred. Another unusual aspect of the pardon was its timing: the pardon was issued very shortly after Zhao had completed his prison sentence, and before he had established a significant record of ongoing lawful behavior.”
“The pardon also was unusual,” Kobil said, because it was issued after the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s crypto venture was aided by “a partnership with an under-the-radar trading platform” called PancakeSwap that is administered by Binance. The ties between Binance and the Trump family make the pardon “look like a reward,” Kobil said.
A group of seven senators wrote to Attorney General Pam Bondi seeking information about Trump’s pardon of Zhao. “The pardon — which signals to cryptocurrency executives and other white-collar criminals that they can commit crimes with impunity, so long as they enrich President Trump enough — seems likely to encourage, rather than discourage, criminal activity,” they wrote.
A group of 28 Democratic House members also sent a letter to Bondi opposing Trump’s pardon of Zhao and highlighting concerns about “potential conflicts of interest.”
Addressing questions about Zhao’s pardon at the Nov. 4 White House briefing, Leavitt said, “There’s a whole team of qualified lawyers who look at every single pardon request that, ultimately, make their way up to the president of the United States. He’s the ultimate final decision-maker. And he was very clear when he came into office that he was most interested in looking at pardoning individuals who were abused, and used by the Biden Department of Justice, and were over-prosecuted by a weaponized DOJ.”
Over the course of the six-week shutdown — which may be ending soon — President Donald Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that Democrats “want $1.5 trillion for health care for illegal aliens.”
The $1.5 trillion is the total estimated cost over 10 years of the spending bill that Democrats had put forward at the beginning of the shutdown. As we’ve written before, Democrats have sought an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies and a repeal of some health care measures concerning Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, among other funding.
Democrats also want to restore health care for “lawfully present” immigrants affected by the OBBBA.
Lawmakers are closing in on a deal to end the government shutdown, with the Senate passing a procedural vote on Nov. 9. The shutdown began on Oct. 1.
Trump has made the claim about the $1.5 trillion many times. For example, Trump said in an Oct. 19 interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, “They want $1.5 trillion for health care for illegal aliens that come into our country.” In his Nov. 2 “60 Minutes” interview, the president said the money would go to “prisoners and drug dealers” and people “that came into our country from mental institutions.” On Nov. 7, he again said, “We’re not going to give $1.5 trillion to people that came into our country illegally.”
That claim is “totally false,” Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us in a phone interview.
“The legislation being advocated by Democrats as requisite to reopen government would be around $1.5 trillion over 10 years but the large majority of that is not due to immigration, especially ‘illegal aliens,'” Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, told us in an email.
“In fact,” he said, “the current spending on undocumented workers every year is less than $5 billion, mostly due to emergency-only care that is not reimbursed and, therefore, absorbed by Medicaid. These services cover labor and delivery, trauma, and other urgent conditions.”
Under federal law, hospitals are required to provide emergency medical care to people regardless of their immigration status.
Before Trump started making the false claim in mid-October that Democrats wanted to spend $1.5 trillion on health care for “illegal aliens,” the White House had released a memo claiming that the Democrats’ proposal “would result in nearly $200 billion spent on healthcare for illegal immigrants and other non-citizens over the next decade.”
That’s misleading, but the reference to “non-citizens” is defensible.
That claim is mostly based on the Democratic proposal to repeal portions of the OBBBA — recently rebranded by the Trump administration as the Working Families Tax Cut Act. Some of those provisions pertain to immigrants who are “lawfully present.” The term refers to noncitizens with “qualified” immigration status that makes them eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program, as the health policy organization KFF explains. This includes lawful permanent residents, refugees, parolees, and individuals granted asylum, among others.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of U.S. immigration policy at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, told us for an earlier article that the term “lawfully present” is “not a category fully defined in immigration law” and is “a politically contested categorization.”
The OBBBA changed the criteria for Medicaid enrollment to exclude those granted asylum and parolees.
But those provisions don’t affect access for people illegally in the country, Cuello told us. Immigrants living in the country illegally are prohibited by law from receiving federally funded comprehensive coverage.
Whether the health care changes in the OBBBA are repealed or not, “it makes no change to coverage of undocumented immigrants,” Cuello said.
The OBBBA also limited the federal matching funds used to reimburse hospitals that provide emergency care to immigrants. Democrats proposed repealing that. This provision “is at least related to undocumented immigrants, but it does not actually impact coverage,” Cuello explained in an Oct. 2 blog post. “[H]ospitals must still provide the health care, and states must still pay them for the health care, it’s just that the federal government will pay a smaller share of the cost.”
When we asked the White House for evidence to support the president’s claim, spokeswoman Abigail Jackson first sent links to the memo tallying almost $200 billion — $193 billion — for “healthcare for illegal immigrants and other non-citizens.”
When asked about the president’s claim of $1.5 trillion, though, Jackson said, “President Trump is right — rather than support the bipartisan CR they supported 13 times during the Biden Administration, Democrats proposed a $1.5 trillion CR to provide free health care to illegal aliens. This absurdly partisan ploy is why Americans are now missing out on paychecks and benefits. Democrats should reopen the government immediately.”
But, as we said, the $1.5 trillion is the 10-year total of the entire funding bill.
“The original [White House] value of $193 billion is certainly reasonable as it applies to legal immigration,” Smetters said. “The $1.5 trillion is incorrect as applied to any type of immigration, legal or not.”
A presentation by scientists on a work group for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel highlighted various alleged “safety uncertainties” of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, including those about cancer and changes to the immune system. Scientists, however, told us that many of the cited studies are either misconstrued or of poor quality.
As with all medical products, the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are not 100% safe. But the vast majority of people experience only temporary and mild side effects, which are expected. Serious side effects can occur but are rare.
In its Sept. 19 meeting, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices ultimately voted to recommend the COVID-19 vaccines for all ages 6 months and up as long as the decision is discussed with a health care provider. The group, however, nearly voted to require everyone to get a prescription for the shots and also endorsed unfounded or misleading claims about the risks of the vaccines. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who previously led an anti-vaccine organization, replaced the panel in an unprecedented move and installed new members, many of whom either lack expertise in vaccines or have spread inaccurate information about vaccines.
During one part of the meeting, Dr. Wafik El-Deiry, director of Brown University’s cancer center, and Charlotte Kuperwasser, a breast cancer biologist at Tufts University, gave a presentation as members of a newly reconstituted COVID-19 vaccine work group (neither are ACIP members). The presentation focused on several more technical or theoretical alleged safety concerns of the vaccines. Scientists, however, told us that the concerns are based on misinterpretations of studies or on flawed science and were presented without the proper context.
“The slide deck is an example of an anti-science ideology in which facts, evidence, and data no longer matter, but are instead abused: cherry-picked, misinterpreted, overinterpreted, or taken out of context to fit a predetermined narrative, regardless of how it conflicts with reality and the evidence obtained through the scientific method,” Marc Veldhoen, an immunologist at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine in Portugal who addresses scientific misinformation online, told us in an email about the presentation.
While many of the alleged “safety uncertainties” are familiar to fact-checking organizations, including those about DNA contamination and related claims about cancer that have circulated for years on social media, they have not before been given legitimacy at an ACIP meeting. Since the meeting, unfounded claims about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines have continued to spread online.
In a commentary published in Vaccine about the meeting, former ACIP members criticized the process, content and outcome of the meeting, noting that there was an inappropriate “focus on theoretical vaccine harms using low-quality data” and that “standard methodological practices were not followed.”
According to the CDC, work groups “review relevant published and unpublished data and develop recommendation options for presentation” to ACIP. They must include at least two ACIP members and typically have involved government members, including from CDC, as well as outside experts and medical group liaisons. Under Kennedy, however, direct CDC involvement in the group has declined, and liaisons have been barred. One of the former CDC leads for the COVID-19 vaccine work group resigned in May following changes Kennedy made to the agency.
In a lawsuit that was updated on Nov. 5, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, among other medical and public health societies, called for the court to dissolve the current ACIP panel and void its decisions. Among many issues, the complaint cited “material inaccuracies, including an allegation that the Covid-19 vaccine resulted in ‘DNA contamination'” presented by the new COVID-19 vaccine work group.
We sent questions to El-Deiry and Kuperwasser about scientists’ concerns regarding their presentation. Kuperwasser replied with detailed answers, defending the presentation and telling us that she was aware that other scientists disagreed, but that in her view there are “gaps in knowledge that need to be addressed” and that numerous publications support her claims. On Nov. 5, Kuperwasser made some of the same statements in a piece she republished about COVID-19 vaccination and cancer for the Brownstone Institute, a think tank founded to oppose COVID-19 restrictions.
Much of the presentation was focused on the idea that there could be safety issues, including cancer, that stem from leftover DNA in the mRNA vaccines. As we’ve explained before, a small amount of residual DNA is normal and expected in the vaccines, and there’s no reason to think it is causing cancer. Some reports have claimed to identify excessive amounts of DNA in the vaccines, but scientists have disputed those findings and the way the measurements were done.
Other vaccines made using cells also can contain small amounts of residual DNA.
The presenters cited eight references that they said reported identifying “DNA impurities” in the vaccines. Many of these, however, have not been peer-reviewed or were published in journals that are not indexed on PubMed — a minimal requirement to indicate some reliability. One is not even a paper, but rather testimony before a state legislature, which we’ve previously addressed.
One credible reference, a paper published in Vaccine in March 2025, specifically debunks one of the cited published papers that alleged DNA contamination. It shows in detail why the methods used would overestimate the amount of DNA. Journal editors added an expression of concern in June to the paper that alleged contamination, which was not noted by the presenters.
The reference the presenters relied on the most — including citing its figures claiming DNA levels in the vaccines 36 to 627 times the regulatory limit — is a paper published in the journal Autoimmunity on Sept. 6. Co-written by an individual with a history of spreading incorrect information about vaccines, the paper is by its own description “an expanded version of a previous preprint” that we and another fact-checking organization previously wrote about. Like its predecessor, the published paper has been criticized by other scientists and is being investigated, according to a pop-up message on the journal’s website and Retraction Watch.
As before, the Autoimmunity paper’s claimed high levels of DNA come from measurements using a particular method that uses fluorescent dyes, which is not the standard method regulatory agencies use to evaluate residual DNA. As the Vaccine paper shows, the method is not reliable if the sample is not prepared properly, as the high levels of mRNA and lipids in the vaccine can lead to erroneously high DNA measurements. In addition, many of the tested vaccine vials were expired, and some had been previously opened (see table 1).
Rolf Marschalek, a molecular biologist who studies cancer mechanisms at Goethe University Frankfurt and the senior author of the Vaccine paper, said the Autoimmunity paper should not have been published.
“To be very frank: all these studies have used methods that do not allow [for] … correct measurement” of DNA, he told us in an email. He also said that another paper, currently unpublished but under review at the journal npj Vaccines, did a similar analysis as his group and did not find any vaccine samples with too much residual DNA.
Those authors, from the Slovak Academy of Sciences, used four different methods to measure the amount of DNA in the mRNA vaccines. According to their paper, their results “clearly demonstrate that the quantity of residual DNA in all analysed vaccine batches is below approved limits, in very low quantities relative to mRNA, and degraded into small fragments.”
Kuperwasser said that the DNA in the mRNA vaccines remains a concern, noting that the manufacturers, the Food and Drug Administration and others “all acknowledge that residual DNA impurities are present in mRNA vaccines.”
“We simply do not know the fate of the DNA impurities in the mRNA vaccine products when they come into contact with cells,” she told us, emphasizing that the DNA is present within lipid nanoparticles. “Therefore, no claims can be made that this DNA does not pose a health risk. It is complete speculation to assume that this cannot and is not the case. Said differently, no studies have yet shown that these impurities are too minimal to enter cells, integrate into DNA, or cause any adverse reaction” (emphasis is hers).
Regulatory agencies from around the world have repeatedly said that concerns about DNA contamination of the mRNA vaccines are misplaced, and that testing with established methods has not revealed concerning levels of DNA.
The notion that residual DNA would be a problem is theoretical, as there’s no evidence of harm. It’s also highly unlikely that it poses a risk, since there are multiple layers of protection that prevent outside DNA from altering DNA in a cell or otherwise causing harm, as we explained in a 2023 article.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, our parent organization, and the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia created a short video this year explaining how cells defend against foreign DNA fragments. (We provided some input, based on our reporting, in the early stages of that project.)
As Veldhoen told us, “these vaccines have undergone extensive testing, and the results clearly demonstrate their safety and efficacy, with minimal risk of side effects. This evidence remains robust and will not change retrospectively.”
“While it is important to discuss potential risks of new products or technologies,” researchers with the Paul Ehrlich Institute in Germany noted in a commentary associated with the Vaccine paper, “it must be ensured that such discussions are based on solid data generated on the basis of the accepted rules of good scientific practice.” They, too, found in their own testing that vaccine vials did not contain more residual DNA than expected.
The presenters also pointed to a 2023 Science Immunology paper by a team in Germany to suggest that the COVID-19 vaccines could lead to concerning changes to the immune system.
The paper is one of several that have found that of the spike-specific antibodies people produce after vaccination, people who have been repeatedly vaccinated with an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine tend to have more of a particular type of antibody called IgG4.
Because IgG4 is a type of antibody that in some respects might fight an infection less well than other antibody types, this has been misinterpreted by those with a history of sharing incorrect or misleading information to mean that COVID-19 vaccination makes people more susceptible to infections or even to cancer. Scientists say there isn’t evidence that the increase in spike-specific IgG4 makes any difference clinically, as repeated COVID-19 vaccination continues to protect against severe disease.
Dr. Kilian Schober, an immunologist at Friedrich-Alexander University and one of the co-senior authors of the Science Immunology paper, told us in an email that his results “do not raise any safety concerns” and are “primarily an ‘interesting immunological observation.’”
During the presentation, however, the work group presenters cast the findings as a potential problem.
In citing the Science Immunology paper, Kuperwasser called the IgG4 findings “one of the best documented” and said the “changes were linked to reduced antibody effector function, consistent with IgG4’s role in promoting tumor immune tolerance.”
Later, El-Deiry attempted to link the IgG4 phenomenon to cancer, citing a study of 96 pancreatic cancer patients — something he later emphasized on X.
“The IgG4 mechanism suppresses the immune system after multiple doses of mRNA vaccines,” he also said on X in late September, while defending a study that had just been published purporting to find an association between the vaccines and cancer. (That study, from South Korea, has methodological flaws and is inconsistent with data showing no uptick in cancer cases in the country, Science Feedback and Full Fact have explained. There is a notice on the paper saying it is under investigation by journal editors after readers raised concerns.)
Dr. Robert Malone, one of Kennedy’s new vaccine panelists and a known spreader of inaccurate information about vaccines, also characterized the IgG4 findings as “[i]mmune suppression” on X.
Experts told us that these interpretations are flawed.
“IgG4 is innocuous. In general, it is a ‘good thing’ and reduces inflammation and dampens allergic responses. It does NOT suppress the immune system,” Dr. Shiv Pillai, an immunologist at Harvard Medical School and the Ragon Institute who specializes in B cells, the immune cells that produce antibodies, told us in an email.
He added that while it’s true that viruses “may be theoretically cleared less well” with IgG4, there’s “no evidence” that this makes any difference to an infection. Even with elevated IgG4, he said, there’s still far more of another antibody subtype with strong pathogen-clearing abilities. There is “no scientific basis to consider that IgG4 has adverse effects on immunity,” Pillai said.
IgG4 “interacts less aggressively with immune cells, leading to a more regulated, balanced response rather than immune suppression,” Veldhoen said. “Importantly, IgG4 antibodies remain highly specific to the spike protein and retain neutralising capacity. So, this is not a weakening of immunity; it’s simply a refinement of it.”
Schober noted that even if the increase in spike-specific IgG4 did lower the antiviral response to the coronavirus to some degree, it might not even be a bad thing, since immune system overactivation is one reason why COVID-19 can be so dangerous. It’s the clinical results that matter — and “clearly prove the positive value” of vaccination, he said.
Schober also said that claims about general immune suppression are incorrect since his results are specific to antibodies that recognize the coronavirus spike protein. Overall IgG4 is not elevated in his study, he said. For the same reason, he added, there is no reason to think that this phenomenon would increase cancer risk, either.
Veldhoen said claims linking IgG4 to cancer “are unfounded,” as elevated IgG4 in cancer “is typically a consequence of the disease’s chronic inflammation, not a cause.”
Indeed, Pillai said there is confusion “even among some physicians” about IgG4, likely because they misunderstand a particular autoimmune condition known as IgG4-related disease, which Pillai studies. In the disorder, IgG4 accumulates, but it’s not what causes the disease, he said.
Pillai was also skeptical of the pancreatic cancer study El-Deiry highlighted, which claims to have identified a correlation between repeated vaccination and IgG4 levels with poorer survival among patients with pancreatic cancer.
Veldhoen said there were numerous problems and limitations with that paper. The reported correlations are more plausibly explained by “confounding, selection and timing biases, and small sample sizes in the key subgroup analyses,” he said. Confounding is when one or more other factors is influencing an exposure and outcome, making it look like there is an association between the studied factors, even when there is no causal relationship.
Thomas Winkler, a geneticist at FAU and another co-senior author of the Science Immunology paper, told us that very high overall IgG4 is associated with certain forms of pancreatic cancer when patients have IgG4-related disease. “This is a rare disorder that does not develop in the billions of individuals who have received mRNA vaccines,” he said in an email (emphasis is his).
“To date, only two single case reports from Japan have described a possible temporal association between mRNA vaccination and the onset of IgG4-related disease,” he added. “These isolated observations are entirely consistent with a rare incidental coincidence rather than a causal relationship.”
When asked about her claims about IgG4, Kuperwasser said that the “persistence, clinical significance, and potential long-term consequences of IgG4 production is uncertain,” but that “its excessive production can be associated with autoimmunity, chronic inflammation, immune tolerance, impaired immune surveillance, as well as immune fatigue or immune suppression. Its effects depend on the immunological context and mechanism of induction.”
In addition to the pancreatic cancer study, the work group presenters also pointed to a list of case reports to argue that the COVID-19 vaccines might cause cancer.
“There are over 50+ papers on this subject, and the list keeps growing,” Kuperwasser told us, when asked about her cancer risk claims. “We have reached a critical mass of publications where the temporal association between the vaccine and cancer cannot simply be ignored or dismissed.”
The notion that the vaccines cause or exacerbate cancer has been a persistent claim from those that spread incorrect information about vaccines over the last several years. As we and others have explained, there isn’t credible evidence linking COVID-19 vaccination to cancer.
“There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer, lead to recurrence, or lead to disease progression,” a National Cancer Institute website states.
“[M]any of the alarming claims rely on anecdotal case reports, the weakest form of scientific evidence, often involving exceptional outlier patients,” Veldhoen said. “Such correlations should never be interpreted as proof of causation.”
Large-scale epidemiology studies have not found increases in cancer after vaccination, he explained, and there isn’t a demonstrated mechanism for how the vaccines would cause cancer.
“What’s plausible, and already shown in animal models (correlation in humans), is that infections (which cause much stronger, longer inflammation) can awaken already-present cancer cells,” Veldhoen said. “Vaccination produces a short, localised inflammatory burst and therefore is far less likely to have that effect than an actual infection.”
“Taken together, the totality of epidemiology and biology makes a causal link between COVID-19 vaccination and new cancers very unlikely; isolated case reports and correlations need careful context and controlled follow-up studies before they can be interpreted as evidence,” he said.
A study published in Nature in October found that, far from causing cancer, COVID-19 vaccination in certain cancer patients may help them live longer, as the vaccine appears to make a type of cancer immunotherapy more effective.
The work group presenters also raised concerns about the findings of a 2023 Nature paper that found that due to modified mRNA in the COVID-19 vaccines, the protein-making factories in cells tend to “slip” a bit more when reading the mRNA letters that code for the coronavirus’ spike protein. This occasionally leads to a so-called frameshift and the production of a slightly different protein, which people can then mount an immune response against.
In the study, about a third of vaccinated participants produced unintended proteins. Experiments, however, suggest that more than 90% of the time the correct protein is made, which is consistent with all the evidence showing that the vaccines trigger protective immune responses and are effective in preventing severe disease.
The authors of the Nature paper have emphasized that there’s no evidence this frameshifting with the COVID-19 vaccines is harmful. In their paper and in a press release and other comments, they have repeatedly said that their findings are useful to know when designing other mRNA vaccines or treatments in the future — particularly because there is an easy fix to avoid the issue — but that they don’t call into question the safety of the COVID-19 vaccines.
“The data is clear: there is no evidence linking unintended proteins and immune responses with harm,” the two senior authors of the Nature study, from the University of Cambridge, explained in a Conversation piece shortly after the publication of their paper. Noting the strong safety data supporting the vaccines, they added: “[O]ur latest study should not affect the safety assessment of existing mRNA COVID vaccines.”
Other experts have agreed with this interpretation of the findings.
But the work group presenters instead highlighted the uncertainty, saying the “[i]mmunogenic or toxic properties” of the off-target proteins are “unknown” and the “health consequences … have not been studied.”
Dr. Retsef Levi, the chair of the COVID-19 vaccine work group and ACIP member, also later cited the frameshifting finding in a slide titled, “mRNA Vaccines Don’t Work as Intended.”
In an email, Kuperwasser defended her interpretation of the data. “We neither know the quantities of frameshifted products produced by cells expressing the mRNA nor what their protein products do within cells,” she said. “There are so many unknowns with frameshifting and it is pure speculation at this time to assume they are safe.”
As Veldhoen has noted before, because the mRNA sequence in the COVID-19 vaccines is known, the unintended proteins can be predicted. It’s not the case, as some opposed to COVID-19 vaccination have argued, that the proteins produced are completely “random” or produce self proteins that could trigger autoimmunity.
“A frameshift simply produces a slightly shorter or minimally altered version of the Spike protein,” Veldhoen told us. “Some variants may include a few extra amino acids, but these are too short to make any meaningful difference.”
The Nature paper authors also note in their Conversation piece that “humans regularly encounter unintended proteins and generate harmless immune responses, as seen with proteins produced from our food or by harmless gut bacteria. These immune responses, which occur in all of us constantly, are controlled by our immune system to prevent them from causing damage to our bodies.”
As justification for a Food and Drug Administration review of a drug used in medication abortion, two Trump administration health officials have referenced an April report from an anti-abortion group that claims to show a far higher rate of serious side effects from the drug than has been found previously. However, the report, which is not peer-reviewed research, didn’t disclose where it got its data and has substantial methodological issues, reproductive health experts say.
The drug in question, mifepristone, is used alongside misoprostol for medication abortion and is FDA-approved for terminating pregnancies through 10 weeks of gestation. As we have written before, serious side effects from medication abortion are rare.
Medication abortions make up most abortions in the U.S. — 63% of them in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary have repeatedly promised an FDA review of mifepristone. In a May 14 Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee hearing, Kennedy called the April report “alarming” and said that it “indicates that at very least the label should be changed” for the drug. Kennedy and Makary reiterated the promise of a review in a Sept. 19 letter, again citing the April report as reason for concern about the drug’s safety.
“Recent studies—such as the study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), which you highlighted in your letter—indicate potential dangers that may attend offering mifepristone without sufficient medical support or supervision,” Kennedy and Makary wrote, responding to a July letter from 22 Republican state attorneys general. Kennedy shared his response letter in an Oct. 2 post on X that went further to claim that recent studies “already point to serious risks when mifepristone is used without proper medical oversight.” HHS did not reply to a question seeking to clarify what other studies the letter or Kennedy was referencing.
EPPC is a conservative nonprofit that opposes abortion. EPPC was part of the advisory board for Project 2025, the roadmap for the “next conservative President,” which advocated that the FDA take away its approval for medication abortion drugs or otherwise restrict their use.
The EPPC report, based on health insurance claims data from an undisclosed source, claimed that mifepristone came with a serious adverse event rate of 10.93%, “at least 22 times” higher than the rate of less than 0.5% reported on the drug’s FDA label.
But 263 reproductive health researchers wrote in an Aug. 27 response that “the report does not provide reliable evidence to support this claim, nor does any published literature.” The literature, including 22 clinical trials as well as many years of real-world data, indicates a low rate of serious adverse events, in keeping with the FDA label. Mifepristone was first approved for medication abortion in France in 1988, then in other countries, and in the U.S. in 2000.
“Decades of conclusive scientific evidence amassed through more than one hundred rigorous studies based on hundreds of thousands of patient outcomes have overwhelmingly established the safety and effectiveness of mifepristone for medication abortion and management of early pregnancy loss,” the reproductive health researchers wrote in their letter.
The EPPC report authors “clearly misconstrued and used deceptive methods to erroneously inflate the rate of serious adverse events after an abortion,” the letter’s lead signer, Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program, told us.
After the EPPC report was released in April, Dr. Stella M. Dantas, then president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told AFP Fact Check that the report “manipulates data to drive a myth that medication abortion isn’t safe.”
“FDA approval of mifepristone must reflect the rigorous clinical evidence that has proven unequivocally that it is safe and effective for use in medication abortion and miscarriage management,” a coalition of 13 reproductive health organizations, including ACOG, said in a May 22 statement.
To calculate its serious adverse event rate, the EPPC report counted serious adverse events “within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion” using health insurance claims data. The report states that the team “purchased access to a commercially available all-payer health insurance claims database including de-identified data for all U.S. patients during the years 2017 to 2023.”
However, the report did not specify which claims database EPPC used. Experts said this is unusual and makes it difficult to check the EPPC’s work.
“Data transparency is a hallmark of high quality research,” Alina Salganicoff, a senior vice president and the director of the Women’s Health Policy program at the nonpartisan health policy organization KFF, told us via email. “I have worked with Medicaid claims data and with commercial claims data and the standard practice is to disclose the data source. Without a disclosure, it is impossible to assess the methods and know the reliability and limitations of the data they used, and replicate the findings.”
Hunter Estes, communications director for EPPC, told us in an email that the organization made legal agreements not to disclose the name of the data vendor. However, “over a dozen brokers sell this data, and using it for studies of this kind is standard practice in the medical literature,” he said, referring us to an FAQ posted on the EPPC website. “There is nothing unique about our dataset, which contains nearly all U.S. insurance claims from 2017 to 2023, both public and private.”
Experts said they struggled to identify what data EPPC had used.
“Signatories to this letter, which includes numerous researchers who regularly analyze insurance and medical claims data in their work, do not know of a single ‘commercially available all-payer health insurance claims database’ that includes both private and public health insurance ‘data for all U.S. patients’ as described by EPPC,” the letter from the reproductive health researchers said. It matters what data were used, the researchers said, as there are “known methodological limitations of some databases for analyzing abortion claims data.”
“There are many data aggregators that license access to their products, but I am not familiar with any that claim comprehensive all-payer coverage across the US,” Shirley V. Wang, a pharmacoepidemiologist at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, told us via email. Wang studies drug safety and effectiveness and has worked on improving transparency standards in her field.
“Most of the data aggregator vendors that we work with have in their data use agreement/contract that their company name must be listed in publications (it is part of their advertising for the data product), so it is surprising that such an incredible data asset would go unnamed,” Wang added.
The EPPC report also lacked other details, the letter from reproductive health researchers said. For example, it claimed to have been “conducted and validated by a team of data scientists, analysts, and engineers, with assistance from our clinical team of board-certified obstetricians and gynecologists.” However, the only listed authors were two EPPC leaders, one with a master’s degree in statistics and the other with a doctorate in political philosophy.
EPPC also did not fully report which diagnosis and procedure codes it used to determine whether people who received mifepristone went on to suffer serious adverse events, the reproductive health researchers said.
The EPPC report was published three days after the April 25 publication of a similar report from the Restoration of America Foundation, which is part of a family of conservative organizations and PACs. The reports appear to share underlying data and methods — and even include identical numbers in multiple places, despite some differences — but Estes, the EPPC spokesperson, told us the groups have no affiliation.
We reached out to the Restoration of America Foundation for more details on its report, which has no listed authors, and whether there is any connection to the EPPC report, but did not receive answers to our questions.
The methods the EPPC report did disclose raised further questions for reproductive health researchers, who said the team was likely counting situations as serious adverse events that shouldn’t have qualified.
The “largest issue,” Upadhyay told us, was that the study appeared to overcount emergency department visits as serious adverse events, even though it is known that people receiving medication abortions often visit the emergency department simply due to having questions about symptoms that turn out to be normal or wanting follow-up to see if they remain pregnant. “Oftentimes, people will go to an ER when they don’t have another source of immediate care,” she said.
The EPPC report stated that 4.73% of women receiving a medication abortion had related emergency room visits that qualified as serious adverse events. A fact sheet from EPPC said that the report “excluded a majority of emergency room visits to avoid overstating risks” (the emphasis is EPPC’s). But the letter from reproductive health researchers said that “it is impossible to verify how this was done” based on the information disclosed in the report.
Upadhyay co-authored a 2018 study showing that more than half of emergency department visits for abortion-related issues resulted just in observation of the patient, without a need for treatment. And not all cases where some treatment was needed would qualify as serious adverse events.
Adverse events are negative experiences that occur after using a medical product. While they can be caused by the product — and therefore be a true side effect — they may also be coincidental. According to the FDA, such events are generally considered serious if they are life-threatening or result in hospitalization, disability, permanent damage or death. In the context of medication abortion, Upadhyay said, adverse events are serious when someone has such significant bleeding that they need a transfusion, for example, or when major surgery such as a hysterectomy is required.
This does not include treatments that are sometimes provided in cases in which the medication abortion was not fully effective, the letter from reproductive health researchers said. The authors wrote that “characterizing follow-up treatment for an incomplete or failed medication abortion as a serious adverse event is inconsistent with published literature and FDA guidance.” About 3% to 5% of people getting a medication abortion need further treatment to complete the abortion, such as getting more misoprostol or a procedure to evacuate the uterus, which is not a major surgery, Upadhyay noted.
The EPPC report, however, counted instances in which medication abortion had not fully worked as serious adverse events, listing “Repeated (surgical) abortion” as a serious adverse event affecting 2.84% of women. Despite the name, surgical abortions are procedures that are typically performed in clinics and do not involve incisions.
The reproductive health researchers also said that the report did not “sufficiently define hemorrhage.” The purpose of medication abortion pills “is to cause vaginal bleeding,” Upadhyay said, and a common issue with studies is counting vaginal bleeding as hemorrhage when it should not qualify. The EPPC report said that 3.31% of women experienced hemorrhage qualifying as a serious adverse event. “Without a standardized definition, EPPC is likely misclassifying many cases of normal bleeding that occur with a medication abortion,” the letter from the reproductive health researchers said.
As we’ve said, other research on serious adverse events following medication abortion, including research looking at health insurance claims data, shows a far lower rate of major complications from medication abortions. For example, a 2015 study that looked at Medicaid claims data found a serious adverse event rate of 0.23%, in keeping with the FDA-reported rate of less than 0.5%.
The letter from Kennedy and Makary promised that the FDA would review mifepristone’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, a set of restrictions placed on the drug when it was originally approved that have been modified over the years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, the FDA stopped enforcing previous requirements to dispense the drug in-person and in 2023 formally allowed the drug to be sent via mail, based on data showing this had not led to increased risks for patients.
On X, Kennedy specifically referenced the decision to begin allowing telehealth abortions. “The Biden administration removed mifepristone’s in-person dispensing rule without studying the safety risks,” he said. “We are filling that gap.”
A Q&A on the FDA’s website, however, says that the agency “conducted a comprehensive review” of the available evidence before modifying mifepristone’s REMS in 2023, finding that “there did not appear to be a difference in adverse events between periods when in-person dispensing was and was not enforced.” Studies since then have continued to show that telehealth abortion is safe.
The FDA letter cited the EPPC report as indicating “potential dangers that may attend offering mifepristone without sufficient medical support or supervision.”
To be clear, the “FDA never recommended that the mifepristone be prescribed or dispensed without medical support or supervision,” KFF’s Salganicoff said. Those prescribing the drug must be certified, and it must be dispensed by a certified prescriber or pharmacy.
Nor did the EPPC report present evidence indicating whether the reduced restrictions on mifepristone affected its safety, the letter from the reproductive health researchers said. There was no breakdown of the data by location of mifepristone dispensing, they wrote, “so there is no evidence that adverse events would be different based on in-person versus remote dispensing of mifepristone.”
Upadhyay also pointed out that the data EPPC used was limited to insurance claims, and therefore didn’t include people who paid for abortion pills in cash or otherwise did not use insurance coverage. The data only go through 2023, she said, and in the first years after in-person dispensing requirements were relaxed, telehealth abortions were provided by virtual clinics that didn’t accept insurance. “There’s very, very few if any telehealth abortions represented in this dataset,” Upadhyay said.
Other studies indicate that telehealth abortions are not associated with elevated risks compared with those disclosed on the FDA label for mifepristone. Upadhyay co-authored one such study, published in 2024, on more than 6,000 telehealth abortions, finding a rate of serious adverse events in keeping with the FDA label.
“It makes sense because the way a medication abortion works is you go to a clinic, you get the medications and then you go home, and the process occurs at home anyway,” Upadhyay said. “So theoretically, there should be no difference” between getting the pills from a clinic or through the mail. Regardless, she said, the patient is evaluated for medical eligibility and informed of the risks and the possibility that the pill will not be effective.
“All of the largest studies out there have found that telehealth is just as safe and effective as in-person care,” she said.
Q: Did Democrats request funding for “climate resilience” in Honduras, “civic engagement” in Zimbabwe, and “LGBTQI+ democracy grants” in the Balkans, to end the government shutdown?
A: A Democratic proposal would restore almost $5 billion in unused funding for foreign aid that President Donald Trump let expire on Sept. 30. The proposal did not specify which international projects should receive the funds.
During the government shutdown, House Speaker Mike Johnson has said that Democrats’ demands include “up to $5 billion … for wasteful spending for international projects,” listing specific amounts for civic engagement or “LGBTQI+ democracy grants.” Asked about those projects, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told a reporter he had “no idea what you’re talking about.”
Democratic lawmakers’ temporary funding bill, which amounts to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, did call for restoring about $5 billion approved by Congress for foreign assistance that the Trump administration allowed to expire. However, the Democrats’ proposal didn’t request that the funding be spent on specific projects.
Several readers have asked us about these claims, which have also circulated on social media, including in posts by other Republican lawmakers.
The government has been shut down since Oct. 1 because congressional Republicans and Democrats are at an impasse.
Republicans want to pass a “clean” continuing resolution to temporarily fund the government with no strings attached. Meanwhile, Democrats primarily want Republicans to agree to a funding bill that would extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies that expire this year and reverse certain Medicaid changes that became law with the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
But some Republicans have said that Democrats have other motives.
In an Oct. 14 press conference about the shutdown, Johnson said that a counterproposal offered by Democrats “would restore up to $5 billion of American taxpayer funds for wasteful spending for international projects.” He then listed examples of spending requests that he said were “in their legislation.”
“They want to spend $24.6 million of your hard-earned dollars as a taxpayer for climate resilience in Honduras. They want to spend $13.4 million for civic engagement in Zimbabwe. They want to send $3.9 million for LGBTQI+ democracy grants in the Western Balkans. They want to spend $2.9 million of your dollars for desert locust risk reduction in the Horn of Africa, and $2 million for ‘organizing for feminist democratic principles in Africa.’
“We are not doing that,” Johnson said.
The issue also came up when a reporter from a conservative news outlet asked Jeffries about the purported spending requests during an Oct. 22 press conference held by House Democrats.
“Can you speak to some of the programs that Democrats want funding for in the $1.5 trillion list of demands?” the reporter asked, referring to an estimate of the total 10-year cost of the continuing resolution proposed by Democrats. “We’ve heard things like $13.4 million for civic engagement in Zimbabwe, $3.9 million for LGBTQ democracy grants in the Balkans, things like this. You guys say this is about saving health care, but how do these pet projects fit in?”
Jeffries responded dismissively: “We have no idea what you’re talking about, or what Republican extremist fed you those talking points. But the reality is, what we are doing is defending the health care of the American people.”
While there is a basis for the claim that Democrats want to restore billions of dollars in canceled foreign aid, Republicans have gone too far in stating that Democrats have demanded specific projects around the world be funded with the money.
The issue began when the White House notified Congress on Aug. 28 that Trump planned to rescind nearly $5 billion in unobligated foreign aid funds through a maneuver known as a “pocket rescission.”
The standard rescission process gives Congress 45 days to act on a president’s request to withhold funds appropriated by Congress. If Congress doesn’t act in that time, the funds must be spent. However, a pocket rescission happens when the request to cancel funds is made less than 45 days before the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, making it more likely that the deadline to spend the money (Sept. 30) would occur before Congress responds.
The rescission package that Trump submitted to Congress listed the budget amounts that were proposed for cancellation, the government accounts holding those funds, and examples of international projects that have been funded from those accounts, including some of the projects highlighted by Johnson. The White House called it “government spending that is woke, weaponized, and wasteful.”
For instance, Trump asked to withhold nearly $3.2 billion in budget authority authorized for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s account for Development Assistance, which the proposal said “is intended to fund programs that work to promote resilient societies, but in practice has done the opposite.” The document listed “$24.6 million to build climate resilience in Honduras” and “$13.4 million for civic engagement in Zimbabwe” as examples of what it called “wasteful” spending from that account.
Democrats responded by arguing that the president’s pocket rescission was illegal, and a U.S. District Court judge agreed. But the Supreme Court on Sept. 26, in a preliminary 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, said that the president could continue withholding the unused funds.
Before that Supreme Court ruling, Democrats, in their own continuing resolution introduced on Sept. 17, proposed that the almost $5 billion the White House froze be extended for the State Department to spend in fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1. That’s the same legislation that also proposes permanently extending the Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies and undoing changes that Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act made to the Medicaid program.
But contrary to Republican claims that the Democrats are pushing to fund projects in Honduras, the Balkans and parts of Africa, the Democratic proposal doesn’t stipulate which foreign projects would have to be funded with the money.
“The Democrat-backed fiscal year 2026 continuing resolution would not automatically fund those specific projects, but it would provide funding for the State Department and foreign aid accounts from which those projects received funding in the past,” Joshua Sewell, director of research and policy for Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan government watchdog for fiscal responsibility, told us in an email.
“It would create a situation where Congress provides additional funding that the administration will likely attempt to not spend over the next year,” he said.
To avoid a similar scenario in the future, the bill proposed by Democrats included a provision that would prevent the president from being able to make future rescissions in the 90 days prior to when the approved funding is set to expire.
If Congress voted to make the roughly $5 billion available for spending in the 2026 fiscal cycle, it would be the Trump administration that would control which foreign projects receive funding, a House Democratic aide told us.
The aide said that the Biden administration had “awarded specific programs” based on “broad direction” given by Congress on how appropriated funds could be used, and that the grants mentioned by Johnson and others “have been terminated already” by the Trump administration. Extending the availability of funds that had not been obligated would make those dollars eligible for use based on the “original purposes and conditions” set by Congress, the aide said.
“The Trump Administration would then get to decide what kind of programs and countries they wanted to focus on,” the aide explained.
The office of Sen. Patty Murray, who introduced the Democratic continuing resolution along with Rep. Rosa DeLauro, previously criticized the Trump White House for “citing cherry-picked examples of past projects and initiatives that it finds objectionable” to excuse suspending approved funding for foreign assistance.
“The reality is this administration has flexibility to determine how exactly to fulfill the objectives provided by Congress for this funding — just as any administration does,” Murray’s office said in late August, after Trump’s pocket rescission was submitted to Congress.
When we reached out to Johnson’s office, a spokesperson defended his claims, saying in a statement: “The Speaker has clearly and accurately stated what is plainly written in Democrats’ own proposal which includes a demand that President Trump’s rescissions be removed so Democrats can go back to spending $5 billion in American taxpayer funds on wasteful woke projects in other countries. The Democrats’ own appropriations website acknowledges this fact, stating that their CR ‘extends the availability of the funds at issue.’”
It’s true that the continuing resolution would extend the availability of the funds that Trump withheld, but not necessarily for the specific foreign projects cited by Johnson and others.
In a lengthy “60 Minutes” interview, President Donald Trump made false and questionable claims about nuclear weapons testing, inflation and military strikes in the Caribbean Sea. He also repeated numerous misleading claims he has made before on a range of topics.
The president touched on the Insurrection Act, ending wars, federal indictments, the autopen, aid to Ukraine and the 2020 election in making claims we have written about before.
CBS News posted an extended version of correspondent Norah O’Donnell’s interview with Trump that ran over an hour. A shorter version aired on the program on Nov. 2. The full transcript is also available.
Trump defended recently ordering the Pentagon “to start testing our Nuclear Weapons” by claiming that the U.S. was the only nation not doing so.
“Because you have to see how they work,” Trump said, when O’Donnell asked why the testing would be necessary. “The reason I’m saying testing is because Russia announced that they were going to be doing a test. If you notice, North Korea’s testing constantly. Other countries are testing. We’re the only country that doesn’t test, and … I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test.”
But the Energy Department says its National Nuclear Security Administration already periodically tests the “safety, security, reliability, and effectiveness of America’s nuclear warheads” with “subcritical experiments” that don’t require explosive testing.
If Trump meant detonating test nuclear bombs, none of the nine countries with nuclear weapons has done so since North Korea in 2017, according to the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on national security issues. North Korea is not a signatory to the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which says nations that sign the pact agree “not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.”
Trump said in the interview that some countries, such as China and Russia, do secret testing and “don’t talk about it.” But Robert Floyd, executive secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, said in an Oct. 30 statement that the CTBTO’s International Monitoring System “has successfully detected all six declared nuclear tests conducted this century,” which were all done by North Korea. No other nuclear power nation has done one since 1998, when India and Pakistan each conducted two tests.
President Bill Clinton signed the CTBT treaty on behalf of the U.S. in 1996, but Congress didn’t ratify it. The U.S. still has honored the moratorium and has not conducted such a test since 1992.
Russia, another signatory, and the nation with the most nuclear weapons, rescinded its ratification of the treaty in 2023. But it last conducted a similar nuclear test in 1990. When Trump said Russia had recently announced a test, he may have been referring to its testing of a nuclear-capable cruise missile and a nuclear-capable underwater drone. Neither is equivalent to testing an exploding nuclear bomb.
Before Trump’s taped interview aired, Chris Wright, secretary of the Department of Energy, which is responsible for managing the country’s nuclear weaponry, said on Nov. 2 that the U.S. would not be using test bombs, as Trump’s testing comments may suggest.
“I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests,” Wright said on Fox News’ “Sunday Briefing.” “These are not nuclear explosions. These are what we call noncritical explosions.” He said the department will be “testing all of the other parts of the nuclear weapon to make sure they deliver the appropriate geometry and they set up a nuclear explosion.”
Trump made several false statements about inflation and consumer prices during the interview, including the claim that “we don’t have inflation. It’s at 2%.” The Consumer Price Index rose 3% year-over-year in September, up from the 2.9% increase in the 12-month period ending in August, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
When he was asked about recent high prices for groceries, the president said, “They went up under Biden. Right now they’re going down. … When I first took over, eggs were double, triple, quadruple what they were. This was because of Biden.” He added later, “Biden gave me the worst inflation rate in the history of our country.”
Trump did not inherit “the worst inflation rate” in U.S. history. The annualized inflation rate was below 3% for the six months before Trump returned to the White House, as we’ve written.
Inflation did rise substantially during the first half of President Joe Biden’s term, due partly to his American Rescue Plan, but largely because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, as we’ve previously explained. But it was never the “worst” in history. For the 12-month period ending in June 2022, the CPI increased 9.1%. The worst inflation occurred after World War I, when the largest 12-month price increase was 23.7% from June 1919 to June 1920. Overall inflation reached 14.8% from March 1979 to March 1980, the economic period known as stagflation.
Trump’s claim that grocery prices are “going down” was also inaccurate. The CPI for “food-at-home” — products bought at a grocery store or supermarket — increased from January to September by 1.4%, and was up 2.7% from September 2024.
The price of eggs has fallen significantly since Trump took office, as the president said, dropping 29.6% from January to September. But as we’ve written, many economists said the primary cause for the increase in egg prices during Biden’s tenure was the avian influenza, which led to an egg shortage, as millions of hens were killed to reduce the virus’s spread.
Trump also said during the interview, “Energy is way down. You know, you’re going to have $2 gasoline very soon. Nobody could believe it. You were at $4, $5, $6, and even $7.”
The week Trump took office, the national average retail price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.11, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It was $3.02 the week of Nov. 3.
Trump cherry-picked high prices from 2022, some in California. Gasoline prices reached a peak of $5 a gallon on average in mid-2022 nationally. In California, prices hit an average of $6.05 per gallon in May 2022, climbing to $7 in one county. The high prices that year were due primarily to a drop-off in global oil supply following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a resurgence in demand as the world emerged from the pandemic.
We can’t say whether, as Trump claimed, we will have “$2 gasoline very soon.” The Energy Information Administration projected that gasoline prices will average $2.90 in 2026. Experts say global market factors determine the price of gasoline. U.S. presidents have little control over the price that consumers pay.
When asked about the U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and the growing military presence near Venezuela, Trump made the implausible claim that “every one of those boats kills 25,000 Americans. Every single boat that you see that’s shot down kills 25,000 on drugs and destroys families all over our country.”
Fifteen vessels have been hit by the military strikes since early September, nine of them in the Caribbean and the rest in the Pacific Ocean. U.S. overdose deaths totaled 105,007 in 2023 and declined to 79,383 last year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. So, the math doesn’t add up that each boat carrying drugs would’ve killed 25,000 Americans.
Trump could be referring to the number of potentially deadly doses of drugs on each boat, even though each lethal dose of a drug wouldn’t result in an overdose. (We wrote about such a claim from Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this year.) While the administration has said these boats were operated by narco-terrorists carrying drugs, it hasn’t provided details on the boats’ cargo or the identities of the people killed.
After one strike in October, Trump said the “vessel was loaded up with mostly Fentanyl, and other illegal narcotics.” As we’ve explained, boats from Venezuela and Colombia are known to smuggle cocaine, not fentanyl, which is “primarily manufactured in foreign clandestine labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico,” a fact sheet from the Drug Enforcement Administration says.
There were nearly 30,000 deaths from cocaine in the U.S. in 2023, a number that has been rising in recent years. Most of those overdoses also involved synthetic opioids, including fentanyl.
Trump has charged that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the drug cartel operating in international waters, as he said after the first military strike on a boat in early September.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, O’Donnell asked Trump if the military action was about stopping drug trafficking or about ousting Maduro from power. Trump said it was “about many things” and repeated his unsupported claim that the country “allowed their prisons to be emptied into our country,” also saying that Venezuela “emptied their mental institutions and their insane asylums” into the U.S. through illegal immigration.
Trump made this claim over and over again during the 2024 campaign, saying that other countries did it as well. Immigration experts told us there’s no evidence for that. Trump has pointed to a drop in crime in Venezuela as support for his claim, but crime experts in the country told us the reasons for the decline had nothing to do with sending criminals to the U.S.
“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.
O’Donnell asked Trump if the military action, including the deployment of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, meant that the U.S. was “going to war against Venezuela?” Trump responded: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.”
Insurrection Act. Trump said that if he wanted to, he could invoke the Insurrection Act to send military troops, including the Army or the Marines, into U.S. cities and “no judge can even challenge you on that.” The Insurrection Act provides an exception to a legal prohibition on using federal military as civilian law enforcement. But contrary to Trump’s claim, a governor could challenge the president’s action in court.
Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, wrote in an explainer on the act that the Supreme 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.”
Trump also distorted the facts in saying that “almost 50%” of presidents have used the Insurrection Act and that “recent ones have used it 28 times,” adding that it’s “been used routinely.” The act has been used for 30 crises, dating back to 1794 under George Washington, with more than half of these crises occurring before 1900, according to a list compiled by the Brennan Center for Justice. The most recent instance was in 1992, when the California governor asked President George H.W. Bush to send federal troops to assist with civil unrest that erupted in Los Angeles after white police officers charged for beating Rodney King, a Black motorist, were acquitted.
Bush also used the act in response to looting in the Virgin Islands after Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Before that, President Ronald Reagan invoked the act to quell a prison riot in a federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 1987, but, as was the case for some other invocations of the act, the president did not end up deploying troops.
In the interview, Trump said he has chosen to not use the Insurrection Act “because I haven’t felt we need it.”
Ending wars. Trump repeatedly said that he “solved eight wars.” As we wrote when the claim was seven wars, experts in international relations said the president has had a significant role in ending fighting in four conflicts, though officials in one country (India) refute Trump’s claim. But some of the international disagreements Trump cites have not been wars, and some clashes have not ended.
For the eighth war, Trump is including the two-year-long war between Israel and Hamas. The two sides agreed to a ceasefire in early October and the return of hostages and prisoners. Many, including Biden’s former national security adviser, have said that Trump deserves credit for getting the deal done.
Steven A. Cook, a CFR senior fellow for Middle East and Africa studies, wrote that this first phase “is significant,” though challenges remain in implementing Trump’s 20-point peace plan. “Whether this leads to an end to the war remains an open question,” Cook said.
Indictments: O’Donnell cited the recent indictments of former FBI Director James Comey, former National Security Adviser John Bolton and New York Attorney General Letitia James — “all public figures who have publicly denounced you” — and asked Trump if their indictments were “political retribution.” “Did you instruct the Department of Justice to go after them?” O’Donnell asked. Trump responded, “No, and not in any way, shape or form.”
But 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 Comey, James and Sen. Adam Schiff. “They’re all guilty as hell,” Trump’s post said, adding, “We can’t delay any longer … JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Comey was indicted five days later on Sept. 25 on charges of lying to Congress. James was indicted on Oct. 9 on charges of mortgage fraud. And Bolton was indicted on Oct. 16 for mishandling classified national defense information obtained during his tenure in the first Trump administration. As we wrote, some legal analysts have said that the government appears to have a strong case against Bolton – more so than it does against Comey or James.
Immigrant murderers. Trump claimed there were “over 11,000 murderers released into our country.” He has been citing variations of this figure for more than a year. But as we have written, he’s referring to noncitizens convicted of murder who were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list, known as the agency’s non-detained docket, included 13,099 people as of July 21, 2024. The “vast majority” of them entered the country prior to the Biden administration and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement last year, noting that many were in prison. Also, the noncitizens include those who entered the country legally, such as green-card holders.
Trump also claimed that “50%” of the 11,000 “have murdered more than one person.” We don’t know the source of that claim.
Autopen. “He illegally used, as you know, a machine, the autopen in order to give pardons to people,” Trump said of Biden. As we have written, White House lawyers during the George W. Bush administration said the use of an autopen is perfectly legal, and constitutional scholars say that nothing in the Constitution even requires pardons to be signed.
As we noted then, pardons would be invalid if any pardons were signed by a staffer without Biden’s knowledge or consent. Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued a 91-page report on Oct. 28 alleging that “there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him.” But it offered no solid proof that Biden didn’t authorize the pardons. In a July 10 interview, Biden told the New York Times that he “made every single one” of the clemency decisions, including those signed via autopen. And those who claim Biden’s aides used the autopen without his authorization are “liars,” Biden said.
Trump indictments. “You’re looking at a man who was indicted many times, and I had to beat the rap,” Trump said. “Otherwise I couldn’t have run for president.” Trump has mixed up the order. He didn’t beat the rap, thereby enabling him to run for president; winning the presidency allowed him to immediately beat the rap.
Trump was indicted in June 2023 for mishandling classified national defense documents after he left office. 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 Justice Department’s legal interpretation that the Constitution does not allow a sitting president to be prosecuted.
Trump was also indicted in August 2023 over his attempts to remain in office after losing the 2020 presidential election. Smith filed a motion on Nov. 25, 2024, to dismiss those indictment charges, again saying the Constitution does not allow for the prosecution of a sitting president. But Smith stood behind the investigation and the charges. The prohibition against criminal prosecution of a sitting president “is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” Smith wrote in his motion.
Iran’s nuclear capability. O’Donnell asked Trump if he was convinced that Iran has no capability to produce a nuclear weapon since the U.S. air strikes in June. The president responded that “they have no nuclear capability, no.” But arms control experts have said Iran’s three nuclear enrichment sites targeted in the attacks were severely damaged but not completely destroyed, as we’ve written.
“It is also now quite clear that the Iranians, in anticipation of the U.S. attack, removed” a stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of uranium “enriched to 60%,” as well as other equipment from at least one of the nuclear sites, Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on national security issues, told us in June. “This is the material that could be further enriched to bomb grade (90%) and provide enough raw material for about 10 nuclear devices; which would according to U.S. intel before the strikes take another 1-2 years to fashion into warheads small and light enough to be delivered via a ballistic missile.”
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Associated Press in October that “nuclear material enriched at 60% is still in Iran,” and recent satellite imagery has shown renewed activity around Iran’s nuclear sites.
‘Rigged’ election. Five times in the interview Trump claimed the 2020 election he lost to Biden was “rigged.” But as we have written repeatedly, there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump’s election challenges were almost universally dismissed by judges. And Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency concluded that the 2020 election “was the most secure in American history” and that there was “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
William Barr, who served as the U.S. attorney general under Trump, told a House committee in testimony released June 13, 2022: “In my opinion then, and my opinion now, is that the election was not stolen by fraud, and I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.” Barr told the committee the election fraud narrative the Trump campaign was “shoveling out to the public … was bullshit.”
Ukraine aid. Trump claimed, as he has numerous times in the past, “Joe Biden gave $350 billion to Ukraine, including a lot of weapons, a tremendous amount of weapons.” But as we wrote in August, Trump’s figure is much too high.
An August report from the special inspector general overseeing U.S. support for Ukraine said more than $187 billion was made available through June for military operations and the broader response to Russia’s invasion since February 2022. As we’ve written, about $174.2 billion of that was approved in five bipartisan appropriation bills, according to the Congressional Research Service. In addition, the U.S. provided to Ukraine a $20 billion loan to be repaid with proceeds from frozen Russian assets.
Republicans say funding for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits — formerly known as food stamps — will run out on Nov. 1 due to the federal government shutdown, and there’s nothing they can do about it. Democrats say there’s a contingency fund that could and should continue to fund regular SNAP benefits.
And, in fact, that was the Republican plan up until at least a few weeks ago. Now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers SNAP, says it can’t legally tap the contingency fund for that purpose.
“There has to be a preexisting appropriation for the contingency fund to be used, and Democrats blocked that appropriation when they rejected the clean continuing resolution,” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said at a press conference on Oct. 27. “The best way for SNAP benefits to be paid on time is for the Democrats to end their shutdown.”
We can’t say whether the USDA is barred from tapping the contingency funds for regular SNAP benefits — ultimately that may be a decision for the courts — but the USDA position that Johnson cited has apparently changed in the past month. When the Trump administration’s USDA issued a “Lapse of Funding Plan” on Sept. 30, it stated that the contingency fund, estimated to be more than $5 billion, can and should be used to fund SNAP payments in the event of a shutdown.
“In addition, Congressional intent is evident that SNAP’s operations should continue since the program has been provided with multi-year contingency funds that can be used for State Administrative Expenses to ensure that the State can also continue operations during a Federal Government shutdown,” the document states. “These multi-year contingency funds are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs in the middle of the fiscal year.”
That document has since been scrubbed from the USDA website, but it’s still available via the Wayback Machine archives.
“It’s also important to note that the money currently exists within the Trump administration, including $5 billion in a contingency fund, specifically, for this kind of circumstance, to continue providing SNAP benefits to the American people, including 16 million children who might otherwise go hungry, if Donald Trump successfully withholds these SNAP benefits,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on CNN on Oct. 29. “The Trump administration doesn’t need Congress to act in order to continue providing nutritional and food assistance to everyday Americans.”
Democrats and Republicans have been locked in a stalemate over efforts to extend federal government funding. Democrats have insisted legislation should include an extension of the more generous Affordable Care Act subsidies, which were first enacted in 2021, and a repeal of some health care measures affecting Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Republicans have balked at those demands, and have offered only a “clean” bill to temporarily extend current federal government funding levels. As a result, the government shut down on Oct. 1.
Funding of SNAP benefits continued through October, however, because, as the since-deleted “Lapse of Funding Plan” explained, the Office of Management and Budget’s general counsel advised obligating fiscal 2025 funds to cover SNAP benefits in October in the event of a government shutdown at the start of the fiscal year (Oct. 1). But the USDA now says it has no way to continue funding SNAP benefits beyond October, jeopardizing food assistance used by nearly 42 million Americans each month.
A banner at the top of the USDA Food & Nutrition website now states, “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 01. We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats. They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.”
(The votes cited in that message were votes on Republican funding bills that didn’t include the Democrats’ demands on health care funding changes.)
Democratic leaders say the Trump administration could continue funding, but has chosen not to as a form of leverage in the shutdown standoff.
The SNAP program is funded through annual appropriations, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024, allocated about $122 billion to fund food and nutrition programs (mostly SNAP benefits), in addition to $3 billion in reserve “for use only in such amounts and at such times as may become necessary to carry out program operations” through the end of September 2026. The reserve fund is good for two years, and together with funding from the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act of 2025, the contingency reserve totaled about $6 billion prior to the shutdown.
The amount is now likely between $5 billion and $6 billion, as some of the reserve was tapped to pay administrative costs in October, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
As we said, up until earlier this month, the USDA’s “Lapse of Funding Plan” envisioned tapping that reserve to pay regular SNAP benefits in the event of a shutdown. That has been the understanding guiding past administrations, as well.
For example, the USDA’s 2021 contingency plan — cited in the run-up to a 2023 shutdown — assured that SNAP benefits would be paid during a shutdown, in part by tapping “multi-year carry over funds” and “contingency reserves.”
That was also the guidance during Trump’s first presidential term, according to CBPP.
During a shutdown in early 2019, the USDA assured that SNAP benefits would continue to be paid even “without an additional appropriation from Congress.”
“At President Trump’s direction, we have been working with the Administration on this solution. It works and is legally sound. And we want to assure states, and SNAP recipients, that the benefits for February will be provided,” Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue said in a press release at the time. “Our motto here at USDA has been to ‘Do Right and Feed Everyone.’ With this solution, we’ve got the ‘Feed Everyone’ part handled. And I believe that the plan we’ve constructed takes care of the ‘Do Right’ part as well.”
As CBPP documented, guidance issued by the USDA in 2019 stated that in the event of an extended shutdown, there were contingency reserve funds available to help continue to make SNAP benefit payments.
The USDA, however, now says it cannot use the reserve to pay regular SNAP benefits.
A USDA memo provided to NPR says, “Contingency funds are not legally available to cover regular benefits.”
“SNAP contingency funds are only available to supplement regular monthly benefits when amounts have been appropriated for, but are insufficient to cover, benefits,” the memo states. “The contingency fund is not available to support FY 2026 regular benefits, because the appropriation for regular benefits no longer exists.
“Instead, the contingency fund is a source of funds for contingencies, such as the Disaster SNAP program, which provides food purchasing benefits for individuals in disaster areas, including natural disasters like hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods, that can come on quickly and without notice. For example, Hurricane Melissa is currently swirling in the Caribbean and could reach Florida. Having funds readily available allows the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to mobilize quickly in the days and weeks following a disaster.”
The memo also says transfers from the contingency fund would “pull away funding for school meals and infant formula.”
And, it says, states can’t cover the cost either: “Despite their willingness, States cannot cover the cost of benefits and be reimbursed. Unlike other reimbursable programs, SNAP allotments are fully Federally funded. States are responsible for determining household benefits, and the movement of dollars through to the processors and ultimately to the retailers. There is no provision or allowance under current law for States to cover the cost of benefits and be reimbursed.”
“I got a summary of the whole legal analysis, and it certainly looks legitimate to me,” Johnson said at his press conference on Oct. 27. “The contingency funds are not legally available to cover the benefits right now. The reason is because it’s a finite source of funds. It was appropriated by Congress and if they transfer funds from these other sources, it pulls it away immediately from school meals and infant formula, so it’s a trade-off.”
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer isn’t buying it.
“Don’t give me the lie that this can’t be done legally,” Schumer said from the Senate floor on Oct. 29.
“Just weeks ago, Trump’s own U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed in writing that contingency funds — about $6 billion in emergency reserves — were ‘available to fund participant benefits,'” Schumer said. “That’s not Democrats saying that. That’s the Republican-appointed U.S. Department of Agriculture saying, again, $6 billion in emergency reserves were ‘available to fund participant benefits.'”
It should be noted that the cost to fund SNAP benefits through the entire month of November (about $8 billion) is more than the amount in the contingency fund (between $5 billion and $6 billion).
According to CBPP, in addition to tapping the contingency fund, “the Administration could use its legal transfer authority … to supplement the contingency reserves, which alone are not enough to fund families’ full benefits for November.”
Said Schumer: “Never before in American history — not once under a Democratic president or a Republican president — has SNAP funding lapsed during a shutdown. Not even in 2019, during Trump’s last shutdown. In fact, Trump himself funded SNAP throughout that shutdown. So, this argument that he can’t do it and that he doesn’t have the money and that it’s not legal is just bull.”
Democratic attorneys general and governors from more than 20 states filed a federal lawsuit claiming the suspension of SNAP benefits “is both contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
According to the lawsuit, “USDA suspended SNAP benefits even though, on information and belief, it has funds available to it that are sufficient to fund all, or at least a substantial portion, of November SNAP benefits.”
Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill, the “Keep SNAP Funded Act,” on Oct. 21 that seeks to ensure SNAP benefits are paid during the shutdown. It has 14 Republican co-sponsors.
In an op-ed, Hawley said, “There is no reason any of these residents of my state — or any other American who qualifies for food assistance — should go hungry. We can afford to provide the help.”
At least one Republican, Sen. Susan Collins, who co-sponsored Hawley’s bill, questioned the administration’s interpretation that it does not have the authority to use the contingency fund to continue to pay SNAP benefits.
“It is a novel interpretation for the department to claim that it cannot use that $5 billion in contingency money to help with SNAP benefits,” Collins said. “I don’t think this was a USDA opinion. I really think it was imposed by OMB and we’ve been having discussions with OMB’s attorneys.”
In an interview aboard Air Force One on Oct. 28, Trump was asked if SNAP payments would stop on Nov. 1.
“Well, we’re going to get it done,” Trump said. “The Democrats have caused the problem on food stamps. Of course, all they have to do is sign.”
Update, Oct. 31: A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration to continue paying SNAP benefits during the shutdown. According to the New York Times, Judge John J. McConnell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island specifically noted that USDA “must distribute the contingency money timely, or as soon as possible, for the Nov. 1 payments to be made.” In a separate case, Judge Indira Talwani, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, found the Trump administration’s hold on paying SNAP benefits was “unlawful.” “Congress has put money in an emergency fund,” Talwani said during a hearing in the case, according to the New York Times. “It’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency, when there’s no money and a lot of people are needing their SNAP benefits.”
In the shutdown standoff over expiring Affordable Care Act tax credits, Democrats emphasize thousand-dollar premium increases for middle- or “working-class” Americans, while Republicans say people who are well-off unfairly benefit from the subsidies. Some higher-income earners could get subsidies, if they live in areas with costly insurance premiums, but about 95% of those getting subsidies in 2024 earned less than 400% of the poverty level.
And while there are cases where out-of-pocket costs are set to increase by $1,000 or $2,000 a month if the expanded tax credits are allowed to expire as scheduled, the average increase is $1,016 for the year, a 114% rise, according to estimates from the health policy research organization KFF.
(KFF’s estimate includes a median 18% increase in premiums by insurers, who have cited rising health care costs and government policies for the increase — including the expiration of the expanded subsidies, which is expected to cause some healthier enrollees to drop their coverage, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker. Having fewer healthier enrollees in a risk pool results in higher rates for the remaining policyholders.)
The impact of the expiration can vary greatly, depending on age, income, family size and location. Those earning above 400% of poverty (that’s above $84,600 for a couple, $128,600 for a family of four) would experience the high-dollar increases in out-of-pocket costs, because they wouldn’t get any tax credits if the expanded subsidies expire. And the increase would be particularly high for older enrollees, as their premiums can be three times higher than younger policyholders.
Very low-income enrollees could experience high percentage increases, or go from paying nothing for an insurance plan to paying about 2% to 4% of their income. For those earning under 400% of poverty, the amount they have to pay would still be capped at a percentage of their income — no more than 10% for 2026 — but they’d pay higher percentages than they are paying now.
As we’ve explained before, expanded ACA subsidies, first passed by Democrats in 2021 as part of pandemic relief legislation, are set to expire at the end of the year. Democrats want an extension of those more generous subsidies to be part of legislation to continue funding the federal government, while Republicans have said the issue should be discussed separately at a later time. The impasse has caused a government shutdown that began Oct. 1.
A permanent extension of the more generous subsidies would cost nearly $350 billion over 10 years, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office.
Under the ACA, subsidies are available for people buying their own insurance on the ACA marketplaces if they earn between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level (the starting point is 138% in states that adopted the Medicaid expansion). But in 2021, the subsidies were expanded as part of the American Rescue Plan Act. The enhancement increased the financial help enrollees could get, and eliminated the 400% income cap. Those earning above that level could get subsidies, though they’d have to pay 8.5% of their income toward premiums, as KFF has explained.
The poverty level for this year is $15,650 for an individual or $32,150 for a family of four, with the threshold rising as family size increases.
The enhanced subsidies were originally set to last for two years but were extended through the end of 2025 by other legislation passed by Democrats.
Enrollment in ACA marketplace plans has more than doubled from 2020 to 2025, when enrollment hit 24.3 million, about 7% of the U.S. population. The vast majority of enrollees in 2025 — 92% — received subsidies, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. That means that more than 22 million people could see some increase in their out-of-pocket costs if the enhancement expires, with some dropping coverage as a result.
The CBO estimated that 4.2 million more people will lack health insurance in 2034 if the enhancement expires. The Urban Institute estimated that 4.8 million more would lack insurance next year.
Politicians on both sides have made some accurate, but cherry-picked, claims about who gets, or could potentially get, subsidies and how people could be affected by the pending expiration of the enhancement. We’ll provide context on these talking points and explain what’s known about the income levels of those benefiting from the subsidies.
In an Oct. 22 press conference, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that “notices are going out to millions of people right now, as we speak, across the country, frightening them to death when they see that their premiums are about to increase, in some instances by more than $1,000 or $2,000 a month. And more than 90% of the people who receive Affordable Care Act tax credits make approximately $63,000 a year. Think about that. How can you possibly afford premium increases of more than $1,000 or $2,000 a month?”
According to 2024 data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, about 95% of those getting the ACA subsidies earn up to 400% of the poverty level, which is $62,600 for an individual. The income cut-offs are higher for families, though. A family of five earning $150,600 is also at 400% of poverty.
There are some instances where out-of-pocket costs are expected to increase by $1,000 or $2,000 per month, or more. But those increases are expected to affect those earning above 400% of poverty, a group that would no longer get any financial help if the enhanced subsidies expire. The Urban Institute analysis found that on average, the net premium cost for those getting subsidies and earning above 400% of poverty would nearly double, increasing by $4,035 for the year.
But the increase would be particularly high for older enrollees, those in high-premium areas or those earning just over the 400% threshold.
“While virtually all subsidized enrollees will pay more next year to keep the same plan, older middle-income ACA enrollees will see the largest dollar increases in premium payments due to the return of the ‘subsidy cliff,'” KFF’s Shameek Rakshit, a research associate, wrote in an early October post, using a term for what happens to those no longer eligible for subsidies if the enhancement expires.
A graphic shows how an average 60-year-old earning a bit over 400% of poverty faces high out-of-pocket increases. For a 60-year-old making well over 400%, the percentage or dollar increase in out-of-pocket cost would be less, because the enrollee is still required to pay 8.5% of income under the enhanced subsidies. By the time this enrollee earns $180,000, no subsidies are offered, even under the enhancement.
“On average, a 60-year-old couple making $85,000 (or 402% FPL) would see yearly premium payments rise by over $22,600 in 2026, after accounting for an annual premium increase of 18%,” KFF’s late September report on the expiring subsidies said. “This would bring the cost of a benchmark plan to about a quarter of this couple’s annual income, up from 8.5%.”
For those earning under 400% of poverty, the impact also varies, but they’d still receive subsidies if the enhancement expires. The enhancement changed the percentage of income people have to pay before ACA subsidies kick in. These required contributions are on a sliding scale.
For example, those at 300% to 400% of poverty used to pay 9.5% of their income; the enhanced subsidies lowered that to 6% to 8.5%. (See Figure 4 in this report from the Bipartisan Policy Center. Note that Trump administration changes will increase the required contribution percentages in 2026.)
Many of those earning between 100% and 150% of the poverty level could get insurance for $0 out of pocket under the enhancement, but would pay up to about 4% of their income if the more generous subsidies expire. “For example, a family of four with a household income of $45,000 (140% of FPL) with a $0 premium in 2025 will see their premiums increase to $1,607 a year,” the Bipartisan Policy Center report says.
KFF provides other scenarios, and a calculator that can produce more. A young family of four in Alameda, California, earning $93,000 would pay 73% more (about $3,770 for the year) without the enhancement. A 28-year-old earning $35,000 in Leavenworth, Kansas, would pay $1,582 more for the year, a 153% increase, KFF said.
Democrats have highlighted the higher-dollar impact on those earning just over 400% of poverty.
In an Oct. 28 press conference, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, “In New York, the average family with a plan costing $280 a month will pay $1,700 a month for the same plan next year.” His office had posted a document with several examples of the pending increase for “the average couple making $85,000” in various locations in the state. One, for Plattsburgh, New York, fits Schumer’s description and others show increases of nearly or over $1,000 per month.
Similarly, in the same press conference, Sen. Tammy Baldwin highlighted high increases for people earning a bit over 400% of poverty in her state of Wisconsin. “Yesterday in Wisconsin, my constituents got a sneak peek. For an average family of four, their premiums are skyrocketing by nearly $17,000. For an average 60-year-old couple, they will be paying more than $24,000 for health care next year,” she said.
Those examples come from Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Insurance. A family of four earning $130,000 a year (about 405% of poverty) would see annual premium increases of more than $12,000 to more than $24,000, depending on the county they live in. The 60-year-old couple earning $85,658 would see higher increases, up to $33,000 in one county.
A third example from the state shows an annual increase of up to $2,100 for a 26-year-old earning $48,000.
Jeffries has repeatedly framed this as an issue for “working-class” Americans. “The American people know that Democrats are fighting for them, for working-class America, for middle-class America, and for everyday Americans, and that Republicans continue to show up for the wealthy, the well-off, and the well-connected,” he said. Republicans have countered that the ACA subsidies go to the well-off.
On the Sunday political talk shows on Oct. 19, Republican Sen. Katie Britt said that “millionaires” were getting subsidies. “Do you understand Democrats are actually asking for us to continue premiums that are going to millionaires in some cases? We have got to be more — more responsible with taxpayer dollars,” she said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Britt made the same point on CNN’s “State of the Union” that day, saying that she is “willing to have a conversation” about “reforms to these credits” after Congress votes to open the government.
Britt wasn’t talking about people earning a million dollars a year. A spokesperson for the senator referred us to a 2016 CNBC article that said early retirees who had a net worth above $1 million had received subsidies because their annual incomes met the ACA parameters. The program, well before any expansion of subsidies, considers annual income, not net worth, to determine eligibility.
Other Republicans have highlighted the enhanced subsidies’ lack of an income cap. Sen. Lindsey Graham said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Oct. 12 that he wouldn’t vote to extend the enhancement. “If you make over $400,000 you get subsidies for your health care,” he said. Sen. Rand Paul said on “Fox News Sunday” on Oct. 26 that those earning $225,000 could get subsidies.
It’s possible for a family with those incomes to get subsidies, depending on their ages, family size and where they live, but it would likely be rare for a family at the $400,000 level to do so.
Insurance premiums vary by location because of competition, and differences in the risk pool and health care costs. For instance, a fictional family of five living in Manhattan and earning $400,000 likely wouldn’t qualify for subsidies, according to KFF’s subsidy calculator, but if the family lived in central Arizona, they could get nearly $1,200 per month in 2026 with the enhancement — while paying about $2,200 or $2,800 per month out of pocket for their insurance.
“There isn’t a single income that premiums tax credits are phased out at,” Justin Lo, a senior researcher for KFF’s Program on the ACA, told us in an email. “With enhanced premium tax credits, the maximum amount for the subsidized, out-of-pocket premium payment is capped at 8.5% of annual income. So, if a family’s unsubsidized premium is really high—such as for older adults, larger families, or those living in areas with overall high premiums—they are more likely to get a subsidy even with a high income. Additionally, poverty level scales with family size. A larger family with a six-figure income is at a lower level of poverty than a smaller family with the same income.”
While the vast majority of ACA enrollees getting subsidies earn 400% of the poverty level or less, as we said, an estimated 5% of those getting the financial help were above that threshold, according to 2024 open enrollment information from CMS.
Most enrollees — 66% — earned 200% of the poverty level or less.
Those above the 400% level got an average tax credit of $354 per month, solely due to those expanded subsidies.
If the enhanced subsidies were extended, the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that 85% of federal spending for the subsidies next year would go to those earning $150,000 or less, categorized by tax returns. About $1.5 billion, or 5.5% of federal spending, would go to the $200,000 to $500,000 income group. JCT estimates that no money would go to income groups above $500,000.
About 1.6 million ACA marketplace enrollees in 2025 are above 400% of the poverty level (not all get subsidies), and nearly 1 million of those are above 500% (that’s $160,750 for a family of four), according to CMS data compiled by the Bipartisan Policy Center. About another 1 million enrollees haven’t provided income information, “but it is likely they have higher incomes and have not applied for tax credits,” KFF says.
The CMS data doesn’t provide more of a breakdown on income, so we don’t know if families earning upwards of $400,000 are getting subsidies. Jessica Banthin, a senior fellow in the Urban Institute’s health policy division, told us that it would be “extremely unlikely” and only possible with a large family, older parents and high-cost states.
For instance, Banthin was able to make the math work for a family of five with 64-year-old grandparents as the heads of household in the high-premium state of West Virginia. They’d get a tax credit of over $3,000 a month. But “I don’t think that family exists in reality,” Banthin said, “or that many people are getting subsidies at that level of income.”
A family earning that much would have other options, she said, such as employer-based insurance or the small-group market for small-business owners, where they would “probably get a better plan.”
