President Donald Trump has said on multiple occasions in recent months that he takes a “large” dose of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease. His comments could perpetuate a common misperception, so we wanted to clarify the current science and what the recommendations are.
Low-dose aspirin is recommended for people who have already experienced a cardiovascular event, but it generally isn’t recommended for those looking to avoid a first heart attack or stroke — and neither is high-dose aspirin.
Trump brought up his aspirin use in a Jan. 22 press gaggle when he was asked by a reporter about some bruising on his hand. “I would say take aspirin if you like your heart. But don’t take aspirin if you don’t want to have a little bruising,” he said. “I take the big aspirin. And when you take the big aspirin, they tell you, you bruise.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in January that Trump’s physician said the president takes 325 milligrams of aspirin a day for “cardiac prevention.” That’s considered a high dose, compared with a typical low, or “baby,” aspirin dose of 81 milligrams.
“They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don’t want thick blood pouring through my heart,” Trump told the outlet in the same story, which drew on an October interview with the president. “I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart.”
Trump, who is 79 years old, similarly told the New York Times on Jan. 7 that he takes a “large dose” of aspirin because he wants “nice, thin blood going through my heart,” adding that he has taken aspirin for 30 years and has never had a heart attack or been diagnosed with heart disease of any kind.
Trump has expressed some awareness that his aspirin use deviates from the norm, suggesting on various occasions that his doctors have said that he is taking too much aspirin. It’s not clear if he knows that even low-dose aspirin is not typically recommended for people who don’t have cardiovascular disease. In his remarks, he is primarily speaking about his own case and does not appear to be giving advice to others.
Still, because his remarks could reinforce common misunderstandings about aspirin, we wanted to address the topic.
When we inquired, the White House did not clarify what Trump’s doctors have recommended, but provided a statement attributed to Trump’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, that said the president takes 325 milligrams of daily aspirin “to maintain his exceptional cardiovascular health.” Barbabella added that Trump’s “medical evaluations and laboratory results continue to show excellent metabolic health, and have revealed his cardiovascular health puts him 14 years younger than his age. Overall, the President remains in exceptional health and perfectly suited to execute his duties as Commander in Chief.”
Aspirin is thought to lower cardiovascular risk by reducing blood clotting. By making platelets — the cell fragments that are involved in clotting — less sticky, clots are less likely to form. But for the same reason, aspirin also increases the risk of potentially dangerous bleeding.
While aspirin used to be more widely recommended, as early as 2014 the Food and Drug Administration concluded that “the data do not support the use of aspirin as a preventive medication by people who have not had a heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular problems, a use that is called ‘primary prevention.'”
“In such people,” the agency explained on its website, “the benefit has not been established but risks—such as dangerous bleeding into the brain or stomach—are still present.” The agency also emphasized that people should consult a doctor before starting any daily aspirin regimen.
In subsequent years, additional studies have shown that for many people without cardiovascular disease, the benefits don’t outweigh the risks.
Since 2019, the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association have said that aspirin “should be used infrequently in the routine primary prevention of [atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease] because of lack of net benefit.”
“Most people without known cardiovascular disease like a prior heart attack, stroke, or blockages in major arteries, do not need aspirin,” Dr. Ann Marie Navar, a preventive cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, told us. “This will increase their risk of bleeding problems – not just bruising but bleeding in the stomach or gut.”
Instead, she advised, people should avoid smoking, eat a heart-healthy diet, get regular exercise, and focus on lowering their cholesterol and keeping their blood pressure controlled.
She added that bruising is “common” among aspirin users and that mild bruising “is not concerning.”
The details are a little more nuanced in Trump’s case, as his cardiovascular risk is somewhat elevated, but the president is also taking more aspirin than is recommended. Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chief of preventive medicine at Boston University, told us that given past reports that Trump has plaque build-up in his coronary arteries, it “may be reasonable” to take low-dose aspirin for cardiac prevention purposes. But, he said, the high dose “is certainly not needed or indicated.”
In 2018, Trump’s physician revealed that the president completed a coronary artery calcium test — a scan evaluating the amount of plaque in his arteries — with a moderately high score of 133. Although common for a man of his age, a score over 100 is suggestive of heart disease. Lloyd-Jones said the score “indicates that he has atherosclerotic coronary heart disease and subclinical cardiovascular disease at a moderately advanced state.”
If Trump is unaware of the changing practices around aspirin, he wouldn’t be alone. Last year, a survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, our parent organization, found that nearly half of U.S. adults mistakenly believe that the benefits of low-dose aspirin for cardiac prevention outweigh the risks.
For people without cardiovascular disease, daily aspirin is not explicitly recommended for any population for cardiovascular disease prevention.
According to the 2019 guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association, which are the most recent, low-dose aspirin “might be considered” for people 40 to 70 years old who are at higher cardiovascular risk and do not have an increased risk for bleeding. For anyone above the age of 70 or a person of any age who has a higher risk of bleeding, the groups advise against routine aspirin use.
Similarly, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a federally funded panel of independent national experts in disease prevention, advised in a 2022 update against starting low-dose aspirin for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease in people 60 years or older. For adults 40 to 59 years old at elevated risk only, the group said the decision to use aspirin “should be an individual one,” as the net benefit is “small.”
Both guidelines were influenced by three large placebo-controlled trials that were published in 2018, which collectively involved more than 47,000 patients and helped clarify the current harms and benefits of low-dose aspirin in various groups.
The ARRIVE trial, which included men age 55 and older and women 60 and older at average cardiovascular risk, identified no cardiovascular benefit to low-dose aspirin and a small increased risk of gastrointestinal bleeding.
The ASPREE trial, which enrolled people who did not have cardiovascular disease and were mostly 70 years and older, found low-dose aspirin “resulted in a significantly higher risk of major hemorrhage and did not result in a significantly lower risk of cardiovascular disease than placebo.”
The ASCEND study, which evaluated low-dose aspirin use in people 40 years and older with diabetes but no known cardiovascular disease, did identify a reduction in vascular events, but those were “largely counterbalanced,” according to the authors, by an increase in major bleeding events.
Earlier studies had found aspirin was more effective, Lloyd-Jones told us. As he also detailed in a 2022 editorial in JAMA Cardiology, this is likely because in the past, physicians were not very good at controlling blood pressure, cholesterol or other major cardiovascular risk factors. Now, in an era with statins and blood pressure medications, and less smoking, for example, there is less “room” for aspirin to be needed or to help, he said. And because aspirin has retained the same bleeding risk, it has shifted the risk-benefit calculus.
“For patients without ischemic heart disease, there is very clear evidence from randomized controlled trials that aspirin is not associated with a clear benefit (and may be associated with harm from bleeding),” Dr. William Schuyler Jones, an interventional cardiologist at Duke University, told us in an email, referring to the type of heart disease that occurs when arteries are narrowed, usually due to plaque build-up.
Still, Navar said that there is a bit of a gray area — and that many preventive cardiologists do recommend aspirin for people “with evidence of a lot of cholesterol buildup in their heart arteries,” such as those with “very high” coronary artery calcium scores.
Experts emphasized to us that for all the confusion and discussion about the recommendations for those without cardiovascular disease, for those with disease — such as after a stroke, heart attack or after a stent — there remains a strong recommendation to take low-dose aspirin to prevent another event, or what’s called secondary prevention. Some patients, however, may not take aspirin if they are on other blood thinners or anti-platelet medications, Navar said.
A 2021 trial, which Jones led, compared high- and low-dose aspirin in patients with established cardiovascular disease. It did not find that the higher dose was more effective. And while it also didn’t find that the higher dose led to more bleeding, patients often preferred to switch to the low-dose regimen.
Jones said patients with cardiovascular disease should take the low dose.
Other trials and observational studies, Navar said, “have shown higher doses of aspirin do increase bleeding risk.”
While the Trump administration insists that it is targeting the “worst of the worst” in its immigration enforcement, it has not provided information to substantiate that, and the data that is available suggests the claim has become less accurate over time.
“The Trump administration has specifically targeted the worst of the worst,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a press conference in July. “The individuals that we are going after are those that are violent criminals, those that are breaking our laws and those that have final removal orders.”
While the number of monthly Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests has risen steadily over the first year of Trump’s second term, the percentage of those arrested who have no criminal convictions or pending charges has also gone up.
Our analysis of ICE arrest data obtained by the Deportation Data Project found a doubling over time of the percentage without criminal records, meaning neither convictions nor charges. In Trump’s first three months in office, 21.9% of those arrested had no criminal record. The percentage rose to 34.2% in Trump’s second three months, and then to 40.5% in the three months ending in mid-October.
In January, nearly 43% of those detained had no convictions or charges, according to publicly available ICE data.
Meanwhile, the percentage of those arrested by ICE who have criminal convictions — not merely pending charges — fell from 44.7% in Trump’s first three months to 31.8% in the three months ending in mid-October.
Trump administration officials claim most of those without charges in the U.S. have convictions or pending charges in their home country, but DHS has provided no data to back that up.
Moreover, while the administration has long said it is targeting the “worst of the worst” criminals, only a small fraction of those detained by ICE have been convicted of the type of violent felony offenses often cited by the administration, according to an analysis of leaked ICE data by the libertarian Cato Institute.
“I think when you listen to senior leaders in the Trump administration, what they’re saying is that they’re arresting what they’re calling the, quote, worst of the worst. They’re arresting people that they’re referring to as murderers and rapists,” Graeme Blair, associate professor of political science at UCLA and co-director of the Deportation Data Project, told KTLA 5 News in July. “And I think that that just really doesn’t tell the story of what they’re doing.”
President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted — as he did in a Truth Social post on Jan. 25 — that immigration enforcement efforts are targeted at the “Tens of Millions of Illegal Alien Criminals [who] poured into our Country, including Hundreds of Thousands of Convicted Murderers, Rapists, Kidnappers, Drug Dealers, and Terrorists.”
In early December, DHS launched what it calls its “Worst of the Worst” website. The purpose, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said, was “so every American can see for themselves the criminal illegal aliens that we are arresting, what crimes they committed, and which communities we removed them from.” The site is filled with examples of immigrants arrested by ICE during the Trump administration who have convictions for serious violent felonies, according to DHS.
Noem insists the administration’s enforcement efforts are targeting just such criminals.
“Every single individual [arrested or detained] has committed a crime, but 70% of them have committed or have charges against them on violent crimes and crimes that they are charged with or have been convicted of that have come from other countries,” Noem said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Jan. 18.
“And let’s remember the true data, the true data, 70%, approximately, it goes anywhere from 60% to 70%, of people that are arrested are criminals, bottom line,” White House border czar Tom Homan said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Jan. 11.
Later on that same program, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy disputed those figures. “I heard him [Homan] say that they are undertaking targeted enforcement actions against criminals. Just not true. The vast majority of people they are rounding up are peaceful immigrants.”
DHS’ public data does not provide a breakdown of the types of crimes committed by those with criminal convictions, nor of the types of crimes faced by those with pending charges, that would allow the public to assess Noem’s claim about the percentage detained who have committed violent crimes. (Similarly, the data can’t answer whether the “vast majority” are “peaceful,” as Murphy claimed — though it is accurate that the vast majority have not been convicted of a crime in the U.S.)
“We have no way of knowing if the worst of the worst are being targeted,” Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us. “The government is not giving us access to that kind of data.”
The administration’s 70% claim also relies on including those with pending charges as “criminals.”
“A charge is not a conviction,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen, senior director for justice at the Brennan Center for Justice, told us. “Just because someone is charged with a crime. … People are innocent until proven guilty.”
“Someone with a pending charge who is not convicted is not usually called a ‘criminal’ in our criminal system,” David Hausman, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who directs the Deportation Data Project, told us.
According to DHS data, about 29% of those detained by ICE in January had criminal convictions, down from about 54% last February.
The transition toward arresting a higher percentage of immigrants with no criminal record appears to coincide with the reported pressure from Noem and others in the Trump administration to significantly increase the number of immigration arrests.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day,” senior White House adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News on May 29.
While the number of arrests has not reached that goal, the number of those in ICE detention has risen by about 80% since May, according to DHS data. (Those in ICE detention include arrests made over an unknown period of time.)
Much of that growth, records indicate, is being driven by the arrest of people without criminal records, at least not in the U.S.
In Trump’s first year, about 36.5% of those arrested by ICE had prior criminal convictions. Another 29.8% faced pending criminal charges. And about a third had neither a conviction nor a pending charge. That’s according to our analysis of data gathered by the Deportation Data Project, a joint project of the UC Berkeley Law School and UCLA that obtains individual-level arrest data through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits. Our analysis covers the period between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, and Oct. 15, the latest data the project was able to obtain.
Together, those with criminal convictions or pending charges represented 66% of arrests, which the administration has rounded up to 70%. But there’s more context: the trend over time of higher percentages of arrests of people with neither a conviction nor pending charge.
As we said, in the first three months of Trump’s presidency, about 22% of those arrested by ICE had no criminal record. By the three months ending in mid-October, that had jumped to approximately 40.5%.
ICE’s public statistics also show that over time, a higher percentage of those being detained have no criminal convictions or pending charges.
Consider, in February 2025, the first full month of Trump’s second term, about 14.7% of those detained by ICE had no criminal convictions or pending charges. By September, that percentage had shot up to 34.6%, and in January it was 42.7%.
The number of immigrants detained by ICE who have no convictions or pending charges has soared, from 3,165 in February 2025 to 25,193 in January of this year.
By comparison, just 869 of those detained by ICE in December 2024 (Biden’s last full month) had no convictions or pending charges. Then, 64% of those detained by ICE had criminal convictions. In January, 2026, it was roughly 29%, according to ICE data.
David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, analyzed nonpublic data from ICE leaked to Cato, and he found that among those with criminal convictions detained by ICE, 8% were convicted of violent or property crimes (about 5% were violent criminal convictions).
“And that includes very minor assaults. I mean, not like rape and murder,” Bier said in a radio interview with KPFA on Jan. 22. “These are someone had an altercation at a bar or things like that, not serious violent criminals who committed murder and rape.”
Contrary to administration rhetoric about targeting the worst of the worst, Bier described the arrests under Trump as “indiscriminate.”
“They have removed the prioritization that was in place under the Biden administration to go after those violent criminals that they’re highlighting,” Bier said. “They got rid of that policy and replaced it on Day One with a policy of arresting people who are the most convenient to arrest.”
Cato’s findings were corroborated by a New York Times analysis of ICE data obtained through the Deportation Data Project. Between the period of Jan. 20 and Oct. 15, the Times found that nationwide, 37% of those arrested in ICE operations had any past criminal conviction. Just 7% had a violent conviction. Another 30% had pending criminal charges, and 33% had no criminal charges.
The disparity was even wider in cities and states that have been targeted for enhanced immigration enforcement. In the four areas analyzed — Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Massachusetts and Illinois, the majority of those swept up by ICE had no criminal record (convictions or pending charges). Details on the operations in Minneapolis were not available yet.
The New York Times analysis noted that while only a fraction of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime, “The most common non-violent convictions were for driving under the influence and other traffic offenses.”
Pushing back against reports of higher percentages of ICE arrests of immigrants without criminal records, administration officials have claimed that those people often have convictions or pending charges in their home countries.
Although DHS did not respond to our queries for this story, DHS’ McLaughlin has said, “Many of the individuals that are counted as ‘non-criminals’ are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
But DHS does not provide any public data to corroborate how many of those arrested by ICE fit that description, or what charges they face or have been convicted of in their home countries.
It’s part of the lack of transparency that has been a problem with the Trump administration, said Putzel-Kavanaugh of the Migration Policy Institute, adding that whether the U.S. is able to obtain criminal records from an immigrant’s home country is highly country specific. Some countries are simply more forthcoming about sharing such data.
“We’re not aware of data that DHS holds, and certainly it’s not been provided in the data that they’ve shared with us about any kind of foreign criminal connections,” Blair of the Deportation Data Project said. “I think that that’s, frankly, a lot of bluster.”
Correction, Jan. 28: We corrected the date of a quote by Noem, which was in July, and added the full sentence of her remark.
Minnesota allows individuals with a permit to carry a gun in public, concealed or not, and there is no state law against having a gun while at a demonstration. That contradicts FBI Director Kash Patel’s claim suggesting that “you cannot bring” a loaded firearm “to any sort of protest” in the state.
There are more than a dozen U.S. states with laws prohibiting the open or concealed carry of firearms at a protest or similar event. Minnesota is not one of them.
“This is completely incorrect on Minnesota law,” the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus, a gun rights advocacy group, said in a social media post responding to Patel’s remarks. “There is no prohibition on a permit holder carrying a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines at a protest or rally in Minnesota.”
Patel had made his claim during a Jan. 25 interview on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.” He was responding to Maria Bartiromo, the host of the show, who asked him what he would say to people “outraged” by Border Patrol agents shooting and killing Alex Pretti during a Jan. 24 demonstration against federal immigration agents in Minneapolis.
“As Kristi said, you cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” Patel said, referring to Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s that simple.”
He may have been referring to comments that Noem made in a Jan. 24 press conference about the killing of Pretti – only she didn’t say that protesters “cannot” carry guns in Minnesota.
Instead, Noem said, “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign.” She accused Pretti – who state officials said had a permit for the handgun he had on him – of being in Minneapolis “to perpetuate violence” rather than “peacefully protest.” (Patel had accurately referred to Noem’s comments questioning Pretti’s motivations earlier in his Fox News interview.)
But federal officials have provided no evidence that Pretti “arrived at the scene to inflict maximum damage on individuals and to kill law enforcement,” as Noem also said in her press conference.
As we’ve written, videos recorded by bystanders in Minneapolis do not show Pretti threatening law enforcement officials with the gun or removing it from his waistband during the altercation with immigration officers that led to his death. As other news outlets also reported, it appears from the video available so far that an officer removes a gun from Pretti’s waistband prior to Pretti being shot.
What’s more, Patel was wrong to suggest that protesters in Minnesota aren’t allowed to carry firearms in the first place.
Minnesota is not one of the 16 states that has enacted a law prohibiting concealed or open carry at demonstrations, protests or licensed public gatherings, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Under Minnesota law, a permit is required to carry a gun in public, and the gun doesn’t need to be concealed, according to the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said that the available video evidence suggests that Pretti’s actions were legal.
“It appears that he was present, exercising his First Amendment rights to record law enforcement activity, and also exercising his Second Amendment rights to lawfully be armed in a public space in the city,” O’Hara said in a Jan. 25 interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“There’s no prohibition in Minnesota statute that says you can’t carry a firearm at a protest,” Rob Doar, president of the Minnesota Gun Owners Law Center, told WCCO, the CBS News affiliate in Minnesota, in an interview.
We asked the FBI about Patel’s claim, but a spokesperson declined to comment.
Patel would later argue in a Jan. 26 interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program that bringing a gun to a protest that turns violent is ill-advised, even if it is allowed.
“It’s not smart to go out there with a fully loaded weapon. We’re just saying be careful and be reasonable,” Patel said, describing a “volatile” situation in Minnesota. “If you have a right to a permit for a firearm, that’s OK. But you cannot incite violence and you cannot break the law — and attack federal law enforcement officers.”
The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t provided evidence for some statements administration officials made within hours of the Jan. 24 fatal shooting of Alex Pretti by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, and some of those statements appear to be contradicted by bystander video shared publicly so far.
Multiple analyses of videos of the killing raise questions about the administration’s account that Pretti “approached” officers with a handgun, “violently resisted” an attempt to “disarm” him, and “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
We’d caution that it’s early in the investigation and that more information should be revealed, particularly about what happened before what’s shown in available bystander videos. DHS told NBC News that there is body-camera video available from multiple federal agents, but those videos have not been publicly released.
Pretti, a 37-year-old man who worked as an intensive care unit nurse, had a handgun when he was wrestled to the ground by immigration officers. But it’s unclear when exactly officers were aware of the weapon and whether Pretti had shown the gun or threatened officers with it, as administration comments have suggested.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara told CBS News that Pretti “did have a permit for the handgun to carry it.” In Minnesota, a permit is required to carry a gun in public, and the gun doesn’t need to be concealed.
Pretti was shot and killed by Border Patrol officers shortly after 9 a.m. Central time. Media reports soon said that according to DHS, Pretti had a gun. At 11:31 a.m. Central time, DHS posted a statement on X. “At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here,” DHS said, providing a picture of the handgun on what appears to be the seat of a car. “The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. … The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”
In separate press conferences the same day, Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander in charge of the immigration operation in Minneapolis, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made similar statements, using much of the DHS language, including the speculation that Pretti wanted to “kill” (Noem’s wording) or “massacre” (Bovino’s) law enforcement officers.
“This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” Bovino said.
Noem said that Pretti had “attacked those officers, had a weapon on him, and multiple, dozens of rounds of ammunition, wishing to inflict harm on these officers coming, brandishing like that, and impeding their work that they were doing.”
Bovino didn’t answer questions from reporters about when agents knew about Pretti’s firearm and whether he ever brandished it at agents. “This is under investigation. Those facts will come to light,” he said.
On Truth Social, President Donald Trump posted the DHS picture of the firearm and raised questions about intent, calling Pretti a “gunman.” Trump said: “This is the gunman’s gun, loaded (with two additional full magazines!), and ready to go – What is that all about?”
On X, Stephen Miller, the White House’s homeland security adviser and a deputy chief of staff, went further than the DHS or Trump statements, writing that an “assassin tried to murder federal agents.”
Multiple analyses of the videos of the incident available so far do not show Pretti holding the gun or threatening law enforcement officials with it. Again, more information, particularly about Pretti’s earlier interactions with law enforcement, may later be revealed.
O’Hara told CBS News on Jan. 25, “I cannot speculate, but I do not have any – any evidence that I have seen that suggests that the weapon was brandished.”
John Cohen, a former acting DHS undersecretary for intelligence, a police trainer and an ABC News contributor, told the network, “What the videos depict is that this guy did not walk up to anybody from CBP in a threatening manner.” Cohen said that “there’s nothing in the video evidence that we’ve seen thus far” to support DHS’ statement that he intended to shoot law enforcement officers.
In the videos, Pretti is seen holding his phone, appearing to record video of the federal officers in the street, moments before an altercation where agents push another apparent demonstrator to the ground and then use pepper spray on Pretti. Several agents then force Pretti to the ground as he appears to resist. An agent removes a gun from Pretti’s waistband, and Pretti is shot multiple times.
The Minnesota Star Tribune reviewed more than six videos as well as accounts from eyewitnesses. “The footage does not show him [Pretti] pointing a firearm, attempting to fire a weapon, or advancing toward agents with a gun raised. He is instead captured holding a cellphone, appearing to record,” the newspaper wrote.
“Federal officials have released no evidence supporting claims about Pretti’s intent,” the Star Tribune also said. “Under Minnesota law, carrying a handgun in public is legal with a permit, and law enforcement sources said Pretti was a lawful gun owner.”
The New York Times wrote in its analysis of videos, “About eight seconds after he is pinned, agents yell that he has a gun, indicating that they may not have known he was armed until he was on the ground.” One agent “pulls a gun from among the group that appears to match the profile of a firearm DHS said belonged to Mr. Pretti. The agents appear to have him under their control, with his arms pinned near his head. As the gun emerges from the melee, another agent aims his own firearm at Mr. Pretti’s back and appears to fire one shot at close range.” Update, Jan. 27: A second video analysis by the Times shows that “Pretti does not appear to pose a threat to agents,” the newspaper said.
In its breakdown of available videos, the Washington Post wrote that “[l]ess than a second” after an agent “emerged from the scrum” with Pretti’s firearm, “the first of what appear to be 10 shots was fired. It is not clear from the video whether the other agents realized Pretti — who local authorities believe had a permit to carry the weapon — had been disarmed.”
Hearst Television’s National Investigative Unit also reviewed multiple video angles of the shooting. One angle shows an officer crouching at Pretti’s side, Hearst said, and “searching Pretti’s clothing and is heard saying, ‘Where’s the gun?’ Another officer, a distance away, responds, ‘I’ve got the gun.'”
“At no time in any of the three videos reviewed is Pretti seen brandishing a gun,” Hearst said.
CNN said that “taken together,” cell phone footage from multiple angles, appears “at odds with the Department of Homeland Security’s initial claims about the lead up to officers firing on Alex Pretti.”
One of the videos it analyzed “seems to show officers approaching Pretti instead of the other way around. We’ll see later that Pretti does appear to have had a gun in his waistband, but this video shows he didn’t have a gun in his hand, only a phone,” CNN said.
On Jan. 25, a day after the shooting, CNN’s Dana Bash repeatedly pressed Bovino about the evidence behind DHS’ statements. She asked whether Pretti was “brandishing” the gun, as Noem had said. “Was he brandishing it? Was he a threat because he had a gun in his hand that put law enforcement in danger?” Bash asked.
Bovino responded: “Dana, we heard the law enforcement officer say, ‘Gun, gun, gun.’ So, at some point, they knew there was a gun. So, again, that is going to be part of that investigation as to what was happening on the ground there between those victims, the Border Patrol agent victims, and the suspect.” He later said that Pretti “brought a semiautomatic weapon to a riot, assaulted federal officers, and at some point they saw that weapon. So I do believe the secretary is 100% spot on in what she said.”
We asked DHS about the agency’s early statements on the shooting, including what Noem meant when she said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon. We haven’t received a response.
CNN said when it asked DHS about an agent removing Pretti’s gun before the shooting, it repeated the statement that “officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted.”
When asked on Jan. 25 by a Wall Street Journal reporter whether the shooting by federal agents was justified, Trump didn’t defend the shooting as DHS had. “We’re looking, we’re reviewing everything and will come out with a determination,” he said.
“I don’t like any shooting. I don’t like it,” Trump said, according to the Journal. “But I don’t like it when somebody goes into a protest and he’s got a very powerful, fully loaded gun with two magazines loaded up with bullets also. That doesn’t play good either.”
D’Angelo Gore contributed to this story.
Prior to announcing on Jan. 21 that he has reached a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland with the secretary general of NATO, President Donald Trump had insisted that the United States needed to acquire Greenland for national security reasons — and at first, he wouldn’t rule out potentially taking the territory over by force.
In a Jan. 21 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said, “I don’t want to use force; I won’t use force.”
Throughout his initial push to claim Greenland for the U.S., Trump made several claims about the island in the Arctic, which is home to about 56,000 people, including statements questioning Denmark’s documented ownership of Greenland and statements suggesting that the U.S. needs “ownership to defend” Greenland. Some of his claims are false.
In this story, we’ll present what the president has said and the facts.
Claim: “Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also.” — in a text message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre
Facts: Trump’s claim that “no written documents” attest to Greenland being a territory owned by Denmark is false.
Denmark has had a claim to Greenland since Denmark and Norway were unified under the same monarchy until the early 19th Century. As part of the 1814 Treaty of Kiel, which ended a conflict between Denmark and Sweden, Denmark ceded Norway to Sweden but kept the Norwegian settlements of Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands.
In 1933, during a dispute between Denmark and Norway over territory in the eastern region of Greenland, the Permanent Court of International Justice, as it was formerly known, ruled that Denmark had proven that it “possessed a valid title to the sovereignty over all Greenland,” and cited the Treaty of Kiel as supporting evidence.
Greenland became a county of Denmark, rather than a colony, in 1953, and was granted representation in the Danish Parliament. In 1979, Greenland was granted home rule, a form of increased autonomy, and its own parliament was created. In 2009, through the Self Governance Act, the people of Greenland gained the right to declare independence from Denmark, which has not happened.
Throughout modern history, the U.S. has also recognized Greenland as a territory of Denmark.
For example, upon purchasing the Danish West Indies from Denmark in 1916, the U.S. issued a written declaration that said “the Government of the United States of America will not object to the Danish Government extending their political and economic interests to the whole of Greenland.”
Also, in a 1941 agreement to defend Denmark against Germany during World War II, the U.S. said that it “fully recognized” that Denmark had sovereignty over Greenland.
Ten years later, the U.S. and Denmark, both new members of the NATO alliance formed in 1949, signed an updated defense agreement, which set conditions for U.S. military operations in Greenland. That agreement said that the permissions were granted “[w]ithout prejudice to the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark.”
When that agreement was amended in 2004 during the George W. Bush administration, the U.S. again acknowledged that Greenland is “an equal part of the Kingdom of Denmark.”
Claim: “And all we’re asking for is to get Greenland, including right, title, and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Number one, legally. It’s not defensible that way, totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease.” — at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21
Facts: The U.S. currently has an agreement with Denmark that grants broad access to Greenland for military purposes. Some experts have disputed the idea that the U.S. would need “ownership” of the island in order to “defend it.”
The Defense of Greenland agreement was first signed in 1951 and later updated in 2004.
During the Cold War, Greenland served as a foothold for the U.S. as it competed with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, but American presence there declined in the post-Cold War period, according to briefings by European and U.S. government groups.
But, as a July report from the Congressional Research Service explained, “Over the past 10 to 15 years, the emergence of great power competition and a significant increase in Russian military presence and operations in the Arctic has introduced renewed elements of military tension and competition into the Arctic.”
The U.S. now maintains one base in Greenland, the former Thule Air Base that was renamed Pituffik Space Base in 2023. It conducts space surveillance and provides missile warning and defense. Pituffik is the U.S. Department of Defense’s northernmost outpost and is manned by about 130 active-duty servicemembers, as of September.
As Trump’s rhetoric about acquiring Greenland ratcheted up over the last month, Danish officials and foreign policy analysts have pointed to the existing agreement.
“The U.S. has already a wide military access to Greenland,” Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs Lars Løkke Rasmussen said, following a Jan. 14 meeting between U.S., Danish and Greenlandic officials. “Under the 1951 defense agreement, the U.S. can always ask for increasing its presence in Greenland, and therefore, we wish to hear if the U.S. had any further requests to make in this aspect. We would examine any such request constructively.”
Similarly, the day before, Stine Bosse, a Danish member of the European Parliament, said during a question and answer session with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, “we have already an agreement. It’s from 1951 — you know that as well — between Denmark, the Kingdom of Denmark and the U.S., allowing the U.S. to deploy all the military forces they want.”
Mikkel Runge Olesen, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, told the New York Times, “The U.S. has such a free hand in Greenland that it can pretty much do what it wants.”
We asked the White House if Trump’s “framework of a future deal” concerning Greenland was an extension of the existing agreement, but we didn’t get a response. Instead, we were provided a statement that said, “If this deal goes through, and President Trump is very hopeful it will, the United States will be achieving all of its strategic goals with respect to Greenland, at very little cost, forever. President Trump is proving once again he’s the Dealmaker in Chief. As details are finalized by all parties involved, they will be released accordingly.” (The New York Times reported on Jan. 22, citing anonymous officials, that one point of negotiation is giving the U.S. sovereignty over its military bases in Greenland.)
As for the president’s claim that “you need the ownership to defend” Greenland, some experts have disagreed.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser in his first term, called that claim “crazy talk.”
Bolton said in a Jan. 21 CNN appearance, “If he really believes that — that you have to own something to defend it — they better take notice in Japan, South Korea, where we have defense facilities — and, by the way, a large number of European countries where we have defense facilities, apparently, under the Trump view, we need to own them, too.”
The U.S. has at least 128 military bases in 51 countries, according to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report. Among the reasons for maintaining these facilities, the report says, is “[a]ssuring allied and partner nations of U.S. security commitments.”
“Merely suggesting that the U.S. can only be secure if it owns Greenland raises fundamental questions about its willingness to defend countries that it doesn’t own,” Ivo Daalder, former U.S. ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama, told the Wall Street Journal this month.
Claim: “So, we’re building a Golden Dome and having Greenland makes it a much more effective Golden Dome.” — in a Jan. 20 interview on NewsNation
Facts: The Golden Dome refers to a defense system that Trump says he wants to build to protect the U.S. from potential missile attacks. Trump got the idea from Israel’s air defense systems, collectively known as the Iron Dome, which can detect and intercept short-range threats, such as rockets, artillery and mortars.
Stephen Biddle, adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, previously told us that the Iron Dome “is not a useful system” for intercepting long-range ballistic missiles that could be fired from U.S. adversaries like China, North Korea or Russia.
But Todd Harrison, a senior fellow who focuses on defense strategy and space policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that existing operations in Greenland could at least help track certain missiles.
“Greenland is already used by the United States as a key radar tracking site for homeland missile defense,” he told us in an email. “So yes, it would help Golden Dome by continuing to do what we already do there — track missiles with trajectories going through the arctic region.”
However, Harrison said it’s wrong for Trump to suggest that the U.S. couldn’t already do this in Greenland.
“Where the president is way off base is the idea that we don’t already have access to Greenland for missile defense (because we do) and that we need to own Greenland to use it for missile defense (we don’t). His claims about Greenland are detached from reality,” Harrison told us.
Claim: “We paid for, in my opinion, 100% of NATO because they weren’t paying their bills.” — at the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21
Facts: This is false. The U.S. was not paying for 100% of NATO.
Trump for years has wrongly described what the U.S. willingly spends on its defense budget as funding for NATO. The alliance classifies the amount of money that its 32 member nations independently decide to spend on their own military as indirect spending.
As NATO explained in a December update on its funding: “The volume of US defence expenditure represents approximately two thirds of the defence spending of the Alliance as a whole. However, this is not the amount that the United States contributes to the operational running of NATO, which is shared with all Allies according to the principle of common funding.”
In terms of direct costs, the U.S., since January, pays about 15% of NATO’s “common-funded budgets,” including its civil budget, for its headquarters; its military budget for the NATO Command Structure; and its budget for the NATO Security Investment Programme, which funds certain military capabilities and infrastructure. That percentage is calculated based on a cost-sharing formula that factors in the gross national income of each country.
During Trump’s first term, the U.S. was paying as much as 22% of NATO’s common budgets.
In terms of indirect spending, the alliance in 2025 agreed that countries should spend 5% of their gross domestic product on their individual defense budgets by 2035, up from a prior commitment of 2%. Trump has long complained that several countries have fallen short of the previous spending target.
The president made this claim about NATO funding in saying that the U.S. had gotten “nothing” out of the alliance and “all we’re asking for is to get Greenland.” But the U.S. has received military support from NATO allies. Troops from member countries served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
President Donald Trump has said over the last year that money brought in from his increased tariffs would pay for at least half a dozen initiatives — from reducing the national debt to providing dividend checks to “moderate income patriots” — but the revenue raised so far can’t deliver all of them.
In fact, that revenue would be able to cover only a fraction of what the president has proposed. Trump recently highlighted three initiatives that he claimed would be “easily” paid for because of the tariff revenue: an increase in the defense budget, dividend checks for Americans and paying down the debt. It would take several years for the estimated revenue from Trump’s tariffs to cover the cost of those first two proposals, if the tariff rates remain in effect.
“Tariffs fall very short of funding all the priorities the President has suggested they can pay for,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told us.
“While tariffs are tax increases that raise more revenue for the federal government, the revenue coming in is not enough to cover all the spending the President envisions,” she said.
During Trump’s first year in office, from January through December, the U.S. collected $264 billion from tariffs, according to the Treasury Department’s monthly statements. That is more than three times what tariffs brought in during the previous 12-month period, which was about $79 billion.
But many of the president’s new tariffs didn’t go into effect until the second half of the year, and the $264 billion includes already existing tariffs that the U.S. had regularly been collecting.
Projections from the Congressional Budget Office and the Tax Policy Center estimate that revenues from Trump’s new tariffs would average about $230 billion annually over the next decade, with somewhat higher returns in the near future and lower returns in later years as consumers shift away from buying imports.
But just the three policy priorities that Trump recently outlined would total at least $1 trillion, conservatively.
In a Jan. 7 post on Truth Social, Trump proposed a 50% increase to the military budget, bringing it to a total of $1.5 trillion, and said that the tariffs could “easily” pay for that while, at the same time, paying down the national debt and paying for “a substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country!”
A breakdown of cost estimates for those three initiatives shows:
Military budget — As described by Trump, an increase from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion would cost $500 billion.
National debt — The president hasn’t specified how much he would pay down the debt, but the current total debt is more than $38 trillion and rising quickly.
Dividend checks — Trump hasn’t presented details on the checks, and when we asked the White House for information, we didn’t get a response. But he previously said they would be $2,000 checks to be “paid to everyone” except “high income people.” Based on that, an analysis from Yale University estimated the total cost would be $450 billion, if the income limit were $100,000.
So, the total amount collected from tariffs in 2025 would cover only about half of the cost of either the military spending increase or the dividend checks, and it would cover less than 1% of the national debt.
Those three initiatives aren’t the only ones the president has said would be funded by tariff revenue, either. He has also said tariffs would cover military bonus payments and aid to farmers and might even raise enough revenue to one day eliminate income taxes.
We asked the White House for an explanation of how tariff revenue would cover the cost of all these proposals, but we didn’t receive a response.
Further complicating Trump’s claims that tariffs will pay for government programs and make the U.S. “so rich, you’re not going to know where to spend all that money,” is that he’s described conflicting goals. He has said both that tariffs are meant to “bring in tremendous amounts of money” — a goal that depends on a high volume of imports — and also that they are meant to encourage growth in U.S. manufacturing, reducing imported goods and, therefore, the taxes collected on them.
The president has used two primary avenues for imposing his increased tariffs — section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which has never before been used to implement tariffs like this, according to legal experts.
So far, in the fiscal year that started in October — which also captures the time period during which most of the new tariffs were in effect — collections from the IEEPA tariffs have made up 67% of the total tariff revenue collected, according to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The question as to whether or not Trump can use the IEEPA to impose tariffs is before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to rule soon.
During oral arguments for that case, the lawyer for the administration, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, argued that the tariffs under the IEEPA are legitimate because they are a negotiating tool rather than a means of raising tax revenue. “These are regulatory tariffs. They are not revenue-raising tariffs,” he said. “The fact that they raise revenue is only incidental. The tariffs would be most effective, so to speak, if no person ever paid them.”
Using the example of the national emergency regarding the trade deficit that Trump declared on April 2, Sauer explained further, “If you look at the trade deficit emergency, if nobody ever pays the tariffs and instead Americans direct their consumption towards American producers and stimulate the rebuilding of our hollowed-out manufacturing base, then the policy is by far the most effective.”
York pointed to this argument in saying, “The President has made many contradictory statements about his rationale for imposing tariffs. For tariffs to continue generating revenue, we need to continue importing goods into the United States. But if, as the administration argued before the Supreme Court, revenue is not the rationale and ideally the tariffs would generate no revenue, then the President should not plan to fund his expenditure plans with tariffs.”
Here’s a breakdown of six initiatives Trump has said tariff revenues would fund.
Trump has repeatedly said that tariff revenue could potentially replace the federal income tax.
He said in the spring, “And it’s possible we’ll do a complete tax cut. Because I think the tariffs will be enough to cut all of the income tax.”
And he repeated the idea in the fall, saying, “And over the next couple of years, I think we’ll substantially be cutting — and maybe cutting out completely — but we’ll be cutting income tax, could be almost completely cutting it because the money we’re taking in is going to be so large,” referring to tariffs and trade deals.
As we’ve written before, there is a yawning gap between the revenues raised from personal income taxes versus those raised from tariffs. In fiscal year 2024, tariffs on imports accounted for less than 2% of the more than $4.9 trillion in federal receipts.
Using the most recent monthly Treasury report, the U.S. brought in a total of $484 billion during the month of December. Half of that — $242 billion — came from individual income taxes. Tariffs, however, made up about 6% of the total revenues — $28 billion.
“It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes,” Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, economists with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, wrote last year. “Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.”
The president frequently says that he will use tariff revenues to pay down the national debt, as he did in November, saying, “We’re going to be lowering our debt, which is a national security thing.”
The total national debt, including money the federal government owes to itself, is $38 trillion, as of this month.
As we said, the total amount brought in by tariffs in 2025 was $264 billion, which is less than 1% of the national debt.
Trump hasn’t said how much of the tariff revenue he would use to try to pay down the debt, but it’s worth noting that some of his policies are projected to further increase yearly deficits — and ultimately, the total debt. For example, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which extended parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from his first term and introduced other new tax cuts, is projected by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to increase budget deficits by $3.4 trillion from 2025 to 2034.
For comparison, the CBO has estimated that new tariff rates enacted from Jan. 6 to Nov. 15, 2025, will bring in about $2.5 trillion over 11 years, if those tariffs remain the same. The deficit reduction would be $3 trillion, including the impact on debt interest. So, the total tariff revenues aren’t even expected to cover the cost of a policy Trump has already enacted.
The budget for the Department of Defense in fiscal year 2026 is about $900 billion.
In his Jan. 7 Truth Social post, Trump proposed raising that total budget by about 50%.
“I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars,” he wrote.
“[B]ecause of Tariffs, and the tremendous Income that they bring … we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number,” Trump said.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has estimated that this proposed increase would total $5 trillion through 2035 and add $5.8 trillion to the national debt, including interest.
“In reality, the military spending increase would be about twice as large as expected tariff revenue,” the CRFB said.
“We’ve taken in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs. We gave the military, the entire military … $1,776 dollars, that’s not bad,” Trump said on Dec. 31, referring to so-called “warrior dividend” bonus checks sent to military personnel in December.
When he announced the program on Dec. 17, the president said the bonuses were made possible by revenue from tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
They were actually entirely funded by a $2.9 billion appropriation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed in July – a reallocation of funds initially earmarked for an increased housing allowance.
The $1,776 checks were sent to about 1.5 million active-duty and reserve military members, according to a post from the U.S. Army. That would put the total cost at about $2.6 billion.
The president has also promised tariff-revenue dividend checks to most Americans.
On Nov. 9, Trump posted on Truth Social, “A dividend of at least $2000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone.”
He reiterated that pledge in his Jan. 7 post, but hasn’t offered any further details.
A Yale University analysis estimated that, based on the expectation that the program would provide $2,000 checks for those making under $100,000, it would cost $450 billion.
For reference, the last round of COVID-19 economic stimulus checks — which provided $1,400 to those making less than $75,000 and $1,400 per dependent — went to about 176 million people and cost just under $410 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.
After China slashed its purchase of American soybeans in 2025 following Trump’s imposition of additional tariffs, the administration announced a $12 billion aid payment for farmers.
“The Soybean Farmers of our Country are being hurt because China is, for ‘negotiating’ reasons only, not buying. We’ve made so much money on Tariffs, that we are going to take a small portion of that money, and help our Farmers,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Oct. 1.
During the official announcement on Dec. 8, he repeated the claim that the bailout would be funded by tariffs, saying, “because of the tariffs, this is possible.”
But the bailout is being paid for by the Commodity Credit Corporation, which provides funding for agricultural programs and gets regular appropriations from Congress, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House:
Now that Trump has been back in office for one year, we’re publishing our first “Trump’s Numbers” article of his second term. That’s the schedule we have followed for these reports, which we launched in 2012. We wait a year when a new president is inaugurated to allow for the accumulation of some data on most of these metrics.
Going forward, we’ll provide quarterly updates throughout Trump’s term, as we did for his predecessors, and we’ll be able to include statistics that are missing from this report — household income, poverty and health insurance — once the data are released.
In a Jan. 13 speech, Trump himself cited “the numbers” for his economic record, making a healthy, and incorrect, use of superlatives. “By almost every metric, we have quickly gone from the worst numbers on record to the best and strongest numbers,” he said. “Just based on the numbers.”
While that’s clearly not accurate for “almost every metric,” the idea behind these articles isn’t to fact-check specific claims; rather, we simply provide the numbers. They may be expected or surprising, good or bad, depending on one’s point of view. We leave those opinions to readers, and we make no judgments as to how much credit or blame a president deserves for these measures.
Job growth slowed and unemployment crept up during Trump’s second term. The number of unemployed now exceeds the number of job openings.
Employment — Employment continued growing during Trump’s first 11 months in office, but much more slowly than it had in the previous 11 months.
The most recent figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show an increase of 473,000 in total nonfarm employment between January and December 2025. That’s barely more than one-quarter of the 1,782,000 jobs added between February 2024 and January 2025, when Trump began his current term.
(A note of caution: BLS has announced it will revise its monthly job figures substantially downward for March because its annual “benchmarking” study indicated its monthly survey had overcounted the number of jobs that month by 911,000. Updated figures going back to March 2024 are scheduled to be released in February along with the regular monthly employment report.)
Much of the sluggishness under Trump is due to the president’s deliberate slashing of the federal workforce. Federal government employment has fallen by 277,000, or 9.2%, since he took office.
Looking only at the private sector — excluding federal, state and local government workers — 654,000 jobs were added during Trump’s term so far. But that’s still less than half the 1,414,000 added in the preceding 11 months.
Back in August, Trump reacted to disappointing job-growth figures by calling them “rigged” and “phony” even though we found no evidence of that and the White House offered none. Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer and nominated as her replacement E.J. Antoni, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. Trump withdrew that nomination amid much criticism at the end of September and has yet to name a permanent replacement.
Meanwhile BLS reported a gain of only 50,000 jobs in the month of December. That’s even lower than the initial report of a 73,000 gain in July that prompted Trump to fire the BLS chief. The July gain has since been revised downward to 72,000.
Manufacturing Jobs — The economy continued to lose manufacturing jobs. During Trump’s first 11 months the loss was 63,000. That followed a loss of 98,000 in the preceding 11 months.
Labor Force Participation — The labor force participation rate declined a bit in Trump’s second term, dropping from 62.6% to 62.4%.
The rate is the portion of the population over age 16 that is working or seeking work. It generally has been in a long decline as the population ages and people retire.
Unemployment — The unemployment rate has remained well below the historical norm under Trump, but has gone up slightly since he took office. It was 4.0% in January 2025, and most recently was 4.4% in December.
The median rate for all months since 1948 is 5.5%.
Job Openings — The number of people officially listed as unemployed rose by 638,000 during Trump’s first 11 months, while the number of job openings declined by 616,000. There are now 7.5 million unemployed and seeking work, but only 7.1 million openings. When Trump took office, job opportunities outnumbered job-seekers.
CPI — Trump campaigned on a promise to reduce inflation, and since he took office it has slowed little. Or maybe not. By one important measure it has worsened.
In the 12 months before Trump took office the Consumer Price Index, the most commonly cited measure of inflation, rose 3.0%. And in the most recent BLS report, the 12-month increase was 2.7%.
Over Trump’s first 11 months in office, the CPI went up 2.18%.
One particularly bright spot: The often volatile price of gasoline has eased. The national average price for regular gasoline at the pump was $3.11 the week Trump was sworn in for the second time, and had dropped to $2.78 by the week ending Jan. 12, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Inflation was much worse in 2022, when the 12-month CPI increase spiked at 9.1% in June. That was the largest 12-month increase in over 40 years. But inflation had slowed markedly by the time Trump came in.
Still, inflation remains higher than the Federal Reserve would like, and it’s going in the wrong direction as measured by the Fed’s preferred metric, the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
The central bank’s target is a 2% annual increase in the PCE. When Trump took office, the 12-month increase in the PCE was 2.5%. But the most recent report put the 12-month increase at 2.8%.
That was for the period ending in September. Not only do the PCE figures take longer to gather than the CPI, they have been delayed by the recent government shutdown. The next PCE release is now scheduled for Jan. 22 and will cover both October and November.
Wages — Wage increases accelerated under Trump, even adjusted for inflation.
The average weekly earnings of all private-sector workers, adjusted for inflation, rose 1.4% during Trump’s first 11 months. They were rising when he took office, but had only gone up 0.5% in the preceding 11 months.
Those figures include professionals, executives and supervisory employees, whose pay is normally higher. But rank-and-file wage earners are seeing gains just as rapid as those of their bosses. For private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees, real average earnings also rose 1.4% under Trump, after a 1.0% rise in the preceding period.
After a weak first quarter, the economy showed surprising resilience in Trump’s first year back in office – largely on the strength of substantial artificial intelligence investments and household spending.
Although the first official annual estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis isn’t due to be released until Feb. 20, BEA data available so far show that real gross domestic product declined at an annual rate of 0.6% in the first three months of 2025 but then grew by 3.8% in the second quarter and 4.3% in the third quarter.
The reported third-quarter growth was the largest in two years, when the economy expanded at an annual rate of 4.7%. Fourth quarter growth, which also won’t be released until Feb. 20, may be even higher. As of Jan. 14, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s GDPNow model was projecting growth of 5.3%.
“This strong growth came despite the adverse trade and immigration shocks the economy has absorbed over the past year,” resulting in a “soft labor market,” Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, wrote in December after the third-quarter figures were released. “That interplay — a surging economy and a soft labor market — is likely to be the major economic narrative next year.”
Brusuelas described the economy as a “resilient beast.” He attributed the third-quarter growth to “[h]ousehold consumption driven by higher-income consumers and AI-related investment,” which he wrote “accounted for just under 70% of total growth during the [third] quarter.”
For the full year, Federal Reserve Board members and bank presidents expect growth to come in at between 1.5% and 2%, according to estimates released Dec. 10. Their median projection was 1.7%. Similarly, economists surveyed in October by the National Association for Business Economics estimated 1.8% growth in 2025.
When Trump took office, consumers surveyed by the University of Michigan expressed concern about unemployment and inflation and uncertainty about the potential impact of Trump’s economic agenda.
“Concerns over the future trajectory of inflation were visible throughout the interviews and were tied to beliefs about anticipated policies like tariffs,” Joanne W. Hsu, director of the Surveys of Consumers, said in a press release last January, adding that “consumers of all political leanings will continue to refine their views as Trump’s policies are clarified and implemented.”
A year ago, the university’s survey showed that the consumer sentiment was 71.7. Since then, consumer confidence has precipitously declined in subsequent surveys and remains stubbornly low.
The university’s preliminary Index of Consumer Sentiment for January was 54 – 17.7 points lower than it was when Trump took office. By contrast, consumer sentiment never dropped below 71.8 in Trump’s first term, despite the economic turmoil caused by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
Although those surveyed perceived some “modest improvement” in the economy in the last two months, consumer sentiment “remains nearly 25% below last January’s reading,” Hsu said. Consumers “continue to be focused primarily on kitchen table issues, like high prices and softening labor markets.”
In its most recent Consumer Confidence Survey, the Conference Board — a research organization with more than 2,000 member companies — also reported that consumer confidence declined for the fifth straight month in December.
“Despite an upward revision in November related to the end of the [government] shutdown, consumer confidence fell again in December and remained well below this year’s January peak,” Dana M. Peterson, chief economist of the Conference Board, said in a Dec. 23 press release.
Homeownership — Homeownership rates have declined slightly since Trump became president.
The homeownership rate, which the Census Bureau measures as the percentage of “occupied housing units that are owner-occupied,” was 65.3% in the third quarter of 2025 — 0.4 points below the 65.7% rate during Biden’s last quarter in office.
Although mortgage rates eased in 2025, the homeownership rate in the third quarter “remained below last year’s pace because of ongoing affordability pressures,” according to Realtor.com.
“Persistent affordability challenges and a shortage of reasonably priced homes have kept the rate from rising more meaningfully, though recent inventory gains, softer prices, and easing mortgage rates appear to be helping some previously sidelined households enter the market,” Realtor.com Senior Economic Research Analyst Hannah Jones said in a Dec. 12 article on the company’s website.
The highest homeownership rate on record was 69.2% in 2004, when George W. Bush was president. But millions of Americans lost their homes during the Great Recession, a financial crisis triggered by a housing market crash.
“Following record-high homeownership rates before the 2008 housing and financial crisis, homeownership rates have remained relatively static at the current rate of 65 percent,” HUD’s policy and research arm wrote in a July report on the history of homeownership in the U.S.
Home Prices — Home prices, which soared to new highs under Biden, slowed in Trump’s first year, as mortgage rates continued to fall.
The national median price of an existing, single-family home sold in December was $409,500, according to the National Association of Realtors. That was 2.9% higher than it was in January, when Biden left office.
Looked at another way: The median sales price in December was only 0.24% higher year-over-year.
“2025 was another tough year for homebuyers, marked by record-high home prices and historically low home sales,” NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun said in a press release. “However, in the fourth quarter, conditions began improving, with lower mortgage rates and slower home price growth.”
The Federal Reserve lowered short-term interest rates three times in 2024. After a pause, the Fed cut rates three more times in 2025 – lowering rates last year by a full percentage point since September. While that’s not directly tied to mortgage rates, it can affect how banks set their loan rates.
As of Jan. 8, the average mortgage rate on a 30-year fixed rate mortgage was 6.16% — down from 6.96% for the week ending Jan. 23, 2025, according to Freddie Mac. Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025.
In his first year in office, Trump has followed through on his signature campaign promise to — as he puts it — “close the border,” with numerous executive actions that have dramatically reshaped immigration policy and enforcement.
“The border is totally secure,” Trump told reporters on Jan. 11.
The number of apprehensions at the U.S. border with Mexico decreased 91.4% during Trump’s first full 11 months in office, compared with the same period in 2024, according to the most recent figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The monthly average (7,255) was at a low not seen since the early 1960s.
Calculating the change in border apprehensions is the method we’ve used as a proxy to measure illegal border crossings for our Numbers stories going back to President Barack Obama. But in Trump’s case, that dramatic drop tells only part of the story of the sweeping immigration policy changes that the Migration Policy Institute describes as “unprecedented in their breadth and reach.”
“While some efforts have stalled or not yet met the White House’s lofty goals, the administration has dramatically reshaped the machinery of government to target unauthorized immigrants in the country, deter unauthorized border arrivals, make the status of many legally resident immigrants more tenuous, and impose obstacles for lawful entry of large swaths of international travelers and would-be immigrants,” MPI’s Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh wrote in their Jan. 13 article, “Unleashing Power in New Ways: Immigration in the First Year of Trump 2.0.” The “net change,” the authors wrote, “has been dizzying in its scope and speed.”
The Trump administration has “dismantled longstanding norms,” the authors wrote, invoking “archaic statutes,” enlisting “support from state and local law enforcement as well as federal agencies that historically had no immigration enforcement role,” and pressuring “foreign governments to receive deportees,” the MPI report stated. “Perhaps most visibly, it militarized immigration enforcement.”
Trump has achieved his policy mostly through executive actions, rather than with legislative help, something he has boasted about repeatedly.
“Remember Biden, he said I have to get approval from Congress,” Trump said in a speech in Detroit on Jan. 13. “Had nothing to do with Congress, had to do with respect.”
In one of his first actions upon taking office in January 2025, Trump issued a proclamation that “the current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion under Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States.” He mostly blocked migrants’ ability to request asylum. He canceled humanitarian parole programs that the Biden administration extended to Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. And he reinstated the “Remain in Mexico” policy, so that asylum seekers were sent to Mexico to await their court appearances in the U.S.
In December, Trump paused all asylum decisions at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. And on Jan. 14, the president indefinitely paused the processing of immigrant visas for 75 nations, including Afghanistan, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria, Russia, Thailand, Somalia and Yemen. He had previously issued a full or partial ban on travel from 39 countries.
MPI estimated that in the first year of his second term, Trump has taken more than 500 actions on immigration including 38 executive orders and “hundreds of other actions via presidential proclamations and policy guidance.” That’s more actions than in all four years of Trump’s first term, MPI said.
But Congress has provided some help. In July, Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included more than $170 billion to ramp up immigration enforcement, detention and deportation.
Increasingly, the administration has turned its attention to interior enforcement. According to MPI, “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office, while average daily detention has doubled.”
In December, the Department of Homeland Security reported that its enforcement operations have resulted in more than 622,000 deportations since January 2025 (short of the stated goal of at least 1 million per year). And, DHS said, another “1.9 million illegal aliens have voluntarily self-deported,” some of whom were lured by government incentives — a free flight home and $1,000. MPI said the Trump administration hasn’t provided any data to back up that self-deportation claim.
A New York Times analysis of federal data disputed the administration’s figures, with its Jan. 17 analysis, covering Trump’s first year, estimating the number of deportations at 540,000, including 230,000 people who were detained inside the country, 270,000 deported at the border and 40,000 who signed up for the government incentives to self-deport. The Times speculated that the administration’s 622,000 figure “likely includes all repatriations carried out by various homeland security subagencies,” such as ship crews that are barred from disembarking.
Both the Times and MPI noted that DHS hasn’t released detailed, public reports on these statistics, as it has in the past.
In any case, the Times noted the number of deportations lagged the number in Biden’s last two years in office: 590,000 total deportations in 2023 and 650,000 in 2024, when border apprehensions were much higher than they are now. The number of people Trump has deported from inside the country, 230,000, is far higher than the 50,000 deported from inside the country in 2024.
In his first term, Trump sharply reduced refugee admissions. But now they have nearly stopped entirely.
As we wrote last year, Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office that called for a “realignment” of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, including an indefinite suspension of all admissions until the program “aligns with the interests of the United States.”
There have been few exceptions to the new refugee policy – notably for refugees from South Africa’s white minority Afrikaner ethnic group. In making an exception for Afrikaners, Trump claimed there was “a genocide that’s taking place” against white farmers in the country – which, as we wrote, distorts the facts.
Beginning in February, the U.S. has admitted only 1,226 refugees in Trump’s first full 11 months in office – including 1,059 refugees from South Africa, according to State Department data.
By contrast, the U.S. admitted 70,033 during the same 11-month period, from February 2024 through December 2024, under Biden. That’s a staggering 98% decline.
For fiscal year 2026, which began Oct. 1, 2025, Trump placed a cap of 7,500 on refugee admissions – which is far fewer than the 125,000 cap Biden instituted for fiscal year 2025. It’s also much less than the 45,000 cap that Trump placed on refugees in fiscal year 2018, which was his first full fiscal year as president during his first term.
Other than refugees from South Africa, Trump was forced by a court ruling to admit some refugees who had plans to resettle in the U.S. when he suspended the program.
As we wrote, an appeals court ruled (in a clarifying opinion issued April 21) that refugees who had an “approved refugee application” and “had arranged and confirmable travel plans” on or before Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order can enter the country. About 160 refugees were affected by that decision, a spokesman for the International Refugee Assistance Project told us for an article in September.
Most of the non-South Africans admitted last year came from Afghanistan. The U.S. admitted 100 Afghan refugees in the past 11 months, the State Department data show.
In addition to suspending the refugee program, Trump more recently has threatened to deport refugees who settled in Minnesota, citing an ongoing fraud investigation in that city.
In a Jan. 9 statement, the Department of Homeland Security said it is “reexamining thousands of refugee cases through new background checks and intensive verification of refugee claims,” beginning with “Minnesota’s 5,600 refugees who have not yet been given lawful permanent resident status (Green Cards).”
The international trade deficit, which Trump criticized for reaching record levels under Biden, decreased only slightly in the months since Trump took office for his second term.
Through his first full nine months in office, the U.S. imported $654 billion more in goods and services than it exported, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s about 0.9% less than the $659.7 billion gap between U.S. imports and exports during the same period in 2024.
The full impact of Trump’s new tariff policies on the trade imbalance is still to be determined. The New York Times noted that “because of a surge in imports earlier this year,” to avoid import tariffs that later went into effect, “the overall trade deficit from January to October was still up 7.7 percent from the previous year.”
Also, when the goods and services trade deficit for the month of October went down 60% year-over-year to $29.4 billion, the lowest monthly total since June 2009, the Times said that some economists attributed the decrease to “temporary fluctuations in trade in certain products, like gold and pharmaceuticals.”
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the newspaper: “Cutting through the noise and getting to the underlying signal in the data, it suggests to me that the deficit is as large as its ever been.”
Corporate profits set records each year under Biden, but dipped in the first quarter under Trump before rebounding slightly in the second quarter and recovering fully in the third quarter.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that after-tax corporate profits at an annual rate were $3.59 trillion in the third quarter of 2025 – about $91 billion, or 2.6%, higher than the full-year figure for 2024.
The fourth quarter and annual figures for last year won’t be released until March, so it is still unclear if after-tax corporate profits for the full year will be up or down.
Under Biden, the annual average growth was 31% in 2021, 3.8% in 2022, 7.8% in 2023 and 7.9% in 2024, according to BEA data.
The stock market, which set records during Biden’s presidency, reached new heights again under Trump.
The S&P 500, which is made up of 500 large-cap companies, closed at 15.7% higher on Jan. 16 than it was three days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, made up of 30 large corporations, was up 13.5% over that same period.
And the Nasdaq composite index, comprising more than 3,000 companies, many in the technology sector, surged by almost 19.8% in that time frame.
These gains followed ample market increases during the Biden administration, when the S&P rose 57.8%, the Dow Jones went up 40.6%, and the Nasdaq increased by almost half.
After a slight increase in enrollment during Biden’s presidency, the latest data from the Department of Agriculture show that under Trump fewer people are accessing benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps.
About 41.6 million people were receiving federal food assistance in September, according to preliminary USDA figures published last month. The number has gone down by about 1.2 million participants, or 2.8%, since Trump took office.
The number of individuals benefiting from SNAP is expected to decline further because of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which changed eligibility requirements for SNAP and is estimated to reduce federal spending on the program. For example, the law extends work requirements to include “able-bodied adults without dependents” aged 55 to 64, who were previously exempt.
In August, the Congressional Budget Office said that provisions in the law “will reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month over the 2025-2034 period.”
We won’t have annual 2025 crime data from the FBI until the fall. But other reports on part of the year show violent crime has continued to drop, a trend that began in 2022 after a spike in crime, particularly murders, in 2020.
AH Datalytics, an independent criminal justice data analysis group, produces a Real-Time Crime Index, an aggregation of crime data collected from 570 law enforcement agencies. That index shows a 19.8% decline in the number of murders for January to October 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. Longer term, the index shows the number of murders jumped in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, then leveled off and has been dropping since 2022.
The latest report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which compares Jan. 1 to Sept. 30, 2025, to the same period in the prior year, similarly found a 19.1% decline in the number of murders for 67 law enforcement agencies. The number of rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults also went down, with the latter decreasing by 10%.
A midyear 2025 report by the Council on Criminal Justice on 42 cities, which consistently published data since 2019, found the same trend, with crime levels now mostly below pre-pandemic levels. “Examining trends over a longer timeframe, violent crimes are below levels seen in the first half of 2019, the year prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020,” the CCJ report said. It noted, though, that the drop in murders has been concentrated in a few cities.
“Much of the decline in the national homicide rate, which began in late 2022, has been driven by large drops in a few sample cities with high homicide levels, such as Baltimore and St. Louis,” CCJ said in a press release about its findings. “The most recent data show that all of the sample cities are now below the general peak of 2020 to 2021, but more than 60% continue to experience homicide levels above pre-2020 rates.”
After reaching a record high in 2020, estimated gun sales declined every year that Biden was president. That downward trend continued during Trump’s first year back in office.
The government doesn’t collect data on gun sales. But the National Shooting Sports Foundation — the gun industry’s trade group — estimates gun sales by tracking the number of background checks for firearm sales based on the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. The NSSF-adjusted figures exclude background checks unrelated to sales, such as those required for concealed-carry permits.
According to NSSF, the number of background checks for gun purchases in 2025 was roughly 14.6 million – down 4.1% from about 15.2 million in 2024. But the 2025 total was still higher than the almost 13.2 million estimated sales in 2019, before the pandemic.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has yet to publish its annual manufacturing figures, so we don’t know whether firearm production, specifically of handguns, increased or decreased in 2025.
Trump’s campaign pledge that “we’re going to actually start paying off debt” hasn’t happened yet. The publicly held debt increased by about one-third on Biden’s watch and continued to rise during the first year of Trump’s second term.
As of Jan. 14, the debt held by the public, which excludes money the federal government owes to itself, was almost $30.8 trillion – up about 6.7% from more than $28.8 trillion on Jan. 17, 2025, three days before he took office.
Another annual deficit – close to $1.8 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 – was a key factor. It was the fourth highest fiscal deficit of all time (behind FY 2020, FY 2021 and FY 2024) and the sixth consecutive budget gap of more than $1 trillion.
Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency had promised to cut federal spending by at least $1 trillion, a goal it did not achieve. Instead, federal spending went up a bit in fiscal 2025.
And, so far, the U.S. appears headed for another debt-increasing deficit in FY 2026 – although perhaps a smaller one. From October through December, the first quarter of the current fiscal cycle, the CBO said that federal outlays exceeded revenues by $601 billion. That’s about $110 billion less than the deficit in the same quarter of fiscal 2025.
Trump campaigned on a promise that the U.S. would “drill, baby, drill” during a second Trump term, and on his first day back in office, he signed an executive order with a stated goal of “unleashing American energy.”
As of October, U.S. crude oil production had increased to an average of 13.6 million barrels per day in Trump’s first full nine months in the White House, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s up almost 2.5% from the same nine-month period in 2024.
Before Trump was inaugurated, and before any of his policies were in place, the EIA had already projected in its monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook that average daily production would increase to a record 13.5 million barrels a day in 2025.
U.S. crude oil imports are trending in the opposite direction.
Imports were down to an average of about 6.1 million barrels per day during Trump’s first full nine months — a decrease of 6.9% from nearly 6.6 million barrels per day during the comparable period a year earlier. During the Biden years, average imports increased annually.
EIA data also show a small increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption under Trump
There were approaching 3.2 billion metric tons of emissions from the consumption of coal, natural gas and various petroleum products in his first full eight months in office. That was roughly 1.4% more than the over 3.1 billion metric tons that were emitted from consuming those energy sources during the same stretch in 2024.
In early January 2025, the EIA projected that CO2 emissions would increase slightly in 2025, but remain in the ballpark of 4.8 billion metric tons emitted in 2024. The agency said it expected emissions growth due to the increased consumption of petroleum products across multiple sectors, particularly the use of diesel fuel and jet fuel.
Emissions had declined in 2023 and 2024 after increasing in Biden’s first two years as president.
We don’t yet have data on how health insurance coverage has changed so far under Trump’s second term. Typically, the National Health Interview Survey has released quarterly preliminary reports on the insurance status of Americans. But the NHIS’ website now says that as of 2025, the data will only be released biannually.
The latest report, posted in June 2025, covers calendar year 2024. The NHIS is a project of the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A report on estimates from the survey for January to June 2025 is scheduled to be released on Jan. 30.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law in July, is expected to prompt a rise in the number of people who lack health insurance, starting next year. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the uninsured would increase by 10 million people over 10 years, with most of the increase due to the law’s changes to Medicaid. For 2026, the rise was estimated at 1.3 million people. (See the link to estimated changes in people without health insurance.)
In 2024, the last year of Biden’s term, 8.2% of the population, or 27.2 million people, were uninsured, according to the NHIS’ estimates, which measure those uninsured at the time they were interviewed. A Census Bureau report, released in September and measuring those who were uninsured for the entire calendar year, similarly put the uninsured rate at 8%.
Under Biden’s full term, the percentage and number of Americans who are uninsured declined, as we explained in our “Biden’s Final Numbers” report.
In his first term, Trump filled one-third of the Supreme Court, nearly 30% of the appeals court seats and nearly 26% of District Court seats. So far in his second term, the judiciary confirmation numbers lag a bit behind those in Biden’s first year.
Supreme Court — There hasn’t been a vacancy on the Supreme Court during the first year of Trump’s second term, just as there wasn’t a vacancy in Biden’s first year.
Court of Appeals — As of Jan. 16, Trump has won confirmation for six U.S. Court of Appeals judges. At the same point in his term, Biden had won confirmation for 12.
District Court — Twenty-one Trump nominees to be District Court judges have been confirmed, while 29 were confirmed at the same point in Biden’s first year.
Two U.S. Court of Federal Claims judges also were confirmed in Biden’s first year. None have been confirmed so far under Trump, and there are no vacancies for such positions.
As of Jan. 16, there were no vacancies for Court of Appeals judges, 39 for District Court judges with five nominees pending, and one vacancy for the international trade court.
We provide links to the sources for these statistics throughout the article.
President Donald Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to send federal military forces to Minneapolis in response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions in the city. We’ll explain what the law says about the president’s authority to do so.
Trump cited the act in a Jan. 15 social media post, eight days after an ICE officer fatally shot Renee Nicole Good during a protest confrontation. The shooting sparked more protests in Minneapolis and the Trump administration’s deployment of hundreds more immigration officers to join 2,000 Department of Homeland Security agents sent to the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as of early this month, according to DHS. The department has called it “Operation Metro Surge.”
“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
On Jan. 12, Minnesota and the Twin Cities filed a lawsuit against DHS, asking the courts to end the surge of immigration officers, calling it “unconstitutional and unlawful.” The suit says that the “agents’ reckless tactics endanger the public safety, health, and welfare of all Minnesotans.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said on Jan. 15 that the city’s police force was “approximately 600,” while there were “approximately 3,000 ICE agents in the area.” The latter figure, which includes other DHS officers, not solely ICE, amounts to “nearly one agent for every 1,000 of the Twin Cities’ 3.2 million residents,” the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
Last fall, Trump similarly said he could invoke the Insurrection Act to override the objections of the Illinois and Oregon governors to Trump’s National Guard troop deployments in those states. (Those deployments have been blocked by the courts while litigation proceeds.) Here, we’ll repeat much of what we wrote about the law in an Oct. 17 article about the issue then.
Under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, federal military forces can’t perform civilian law enforcement tasks. However, the Insurrection Act provides an exception to this.
Under the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, a state legislature or governor could request that the president send federal military forces to suppress an insurrection, or the president could invoke the act himself “[w]henever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings,” the statute says.
The president also can invoke the act to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in two scenarios: if it “hinders the execution” of state and federal laws and deprives people’s constitutional rights or protections and state authorities “are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity”; or if the insurrection/violence “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, wrote in an explainer on the Insurrection Act that, in theory, it “should be used only in a crisis that is truly beyond the capacity of civilian authorities to manage,” but the statute “fails to adequately define or limit when it may be used.” Nunn, who has written about limiting the use of the military for law enforcement purposes, said the statute is “dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse.”
In his Jan. 15 social media post, Trump said that “many” presidents have used the act, and a week prior, he said that “48 percent of the presidents have used it.”
Eighteen of 45 presidents, or 40%, have invoked the act for crises such as rebellions, labor disputes and enforcing civil rights federal court orders. Most of these crises occurred prior to 1900. The most recent use of the act was in 1992, when the California governor asked President George H.W. Bush to do so in order to send federal troops to assist with civil unrest that erupted in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers charged for beating Rodney King, a Black motorist.
The Brennan Center for Justice has a list of all times the Insurrection Act has been used for 30 crises, dating back to 1794 under President George Washington. Troops have not always been deployed. “Sometimes the mere threat of military intervention has been enough to resolve a crisis,” the Brennan Center said.
William Banks, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law, and Mark P. Nevitt, an associate professor at Emory University School of Law, wrote in a piece for Just Security that “the last time the National Guard was federalized over a governor’s objection was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson deployed the Guard to Selma, Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators.” Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act.
In 1989, Bush invoked the act to send troops to the Virgin Islands to quell lawlessness following the destruction caused by Hurricane Hugo. The Brennan Center says there’s a dispute over whether the territorial governor of the islands requested the federal deployment.
There’s “little case law” on the act, Nevitt told us last fall. Nevitt said in an email that the “leading case is from the War of 1812 (Martin v. Mott), where the Supreme Court suggested that the president has broad discretion in interpreting the act’s statutory language.”
Nevitt said there’s no judicial review in the statute and “courts have been reluctant to second-guess presidential authority in using the military,” but the courts are addressing such authority in the cases in California, Oregon and Illinois involving federalization of the National Guard over governors’ objections. “A court challenge is likely,” if Trump uses the Insurrection Act, “but it remains to be seen whether a federal judge will find the case justiciable,” Nevitt said.
Nunn wrote that the high court “has suggested that courts may step in if the president acts in bad faith, exceeds ‘a permitted range of honest judgment,’ makes an obvious mistake, or acts in a way manifestly unauthorized by law” and “that courts may still review the lawfulness of the military’s actions once deployed.”
In an Oct. 12 ABC News interview, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is also a former U.S. attorney, said that if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, “you can’t stop him if you’re the governor.” But the governor “could always bring a court action and then the courts could decide whether the facts are there to support his [Trump’s] invocation of the Insurrection Act,” Christie said.
In sweeping changes to the childhood vaccine schedule, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends universal vaccination against six diseases. In justifying the move, health officials made misleading claims about vaccine safety while downplaying or omitting benefits.
In signing a Jan. 5 memo, CDC Acting Director Jim O’Neill eliminated routine childhood recommendations for vaccines against four diseases: rotavirus, hepatitis A, meningococcal disease and influenza. We’ll assess the rationale for the change for those vaccines. Previously, O’Neill accepted proposals to end the universal recommendation for hepatitis B and COVID-19 vaccination. We previously addressed misleading and unfounded claims about those shots.
The CDC now recommends all children receive vaccines targeting 11 diseases, down from 17 just a few months ago.
The latest changes came after President Donald Trump asked O’Neill and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Dec. 5 to review vaccine schedules of “peer, developed countries” and consider “aligning” the U.S. schedule with them.
“After an exhaustive review of the evidence, we are aligning the U.S. childhood vaccine schedule with international consensus while strengthening transparency and informed consent,” Kennedy said in a Jan. 5 press release announcing the changes.
However, as we have written previously, vaccine schedules among high-income nations are quite similar. In recommending vaccination against just 11 diseases, the U.S. childhood schedule now universally targets fewer diseases than nearly all other “peer nations,” as defined in a table cited in the HHS memo, with the sole exception of Denmark.
The Jan. 5 memo bypassed the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. This group for many years followed a formal, evidence-based process — occurring over months and involving experts with multiple specialties — to assess potential changes to the vaccine schedule. Findings were presented to experts and the public in advance of making changes.
To justify the recent changes, HHS officials instead cited a 33-page assessment prepared by two political appointees: Dr. Tracy Beth Høeg, a doctor specializing in sports medicine who is acting director of the Food and Drug Administration’s drugs division; and Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and epidemiologist whose appointment to an HHS leadership role was announced last month. Kulldorff was formerly the chair of ACIP after Kennedy reconstituted the committee in June.
O’Neill was chosen for his CDC role after the prior director was fired following clashes with Kennedy over the vaccine schedule.
“You basically have a group of federal appointees going behind closed doors and making recommendations about a vaccine — without any input from the public, without any input from experts in the field — and just making up their own schedule,” Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician and vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us.
The six vaccines dropped from universal recommendations are now recommended under shared clinical decision-making, which means that people may still get these vaccines after a discussion with a health care provider. (Surveys done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, our parent organization, found some misunderstanding of the term among the public.) This designation was previously used for uncommon cases where a vaccine was “not recommended for everyone in a particular age group or everyone in an identifiable risk group,” according to the CDC. There remain stronger recommendations that children with certain risk factors get hepatitis A, hepatitis B and meningococcal disease vaccines.
For the time being, the changes largely do not alter whether insurers cover vaccination, and the affected vaccines should be available at no cost, according to a review from KFF, a nonpartisan health policy organization.
We asked HHS a variety of questions, including why the normal process for changing the vaccine schedule was not followed. Press Secretary Emily G. Hilliard described Trump’s memo asking for a review of vaccination recommendations. “The updated CDC childhood immunization schedule reflects the results of that thorough review and preserves access and insurance coverage to all vaccines currently available to American children and adolescents,” she said.
Rotavirus is a gastrointestinal infection that causes diarrhea, vomiting and fever and can lead to dangerous dehydration. According to the analysis in the HHS assessment, 17 out of 20 peer nations routinely recommend vaccination against the disease.
In justifying no longer recommending rotavirus vaccines routinely, HHS officials deemphasized the significant number of hospitalizations the vaccines prevent while also minimizing the number of children the virus previously killed.
“In the U.S., it can cause hospitalization for gastroenteritis, but the virus poses almost no risk of either mortality or chronic morbidity,” the assessment and memo both said.
Offit, the vaccine expert from CHOP, told us that the suffering caused by rotavirus was significant. Offit co-invented one of the two available rotavirus vaccines.
Prior to the 2006 CDC recommendation to vaccinate all babies against the disease using an oral vaccine beginning at 2 months of age, around 55,000 to 70,000 children were hospitalized each year due to rotavirus, according to a 2018 review by CDC researchers.
“It’s very hard for parents to rehydrate their child orally when the child is constantly vomiting,” Offit told us, recalling that before rotavirus vaccines were available, his hospital during his pediatric residency saw around 400 inpatients with severe dehydration from rotavirus each year. He also saw a previously healthy nine-month-old girl die of the disease. Today, he said, “most pediatric residents at our hospital have never seen an inpatient with rotavirus dehydration.”
Vaccination not only lowers the risk of hospitalization in vaccinated people, the CDC review noted, but it also lowers transmission and, therefore, the risk of hospitalization in those who are not vaccinated.
The assessment went on to give low estimates of rotavirus deaths in the pre-vaccine era. “Data from CDC indicate that among all U.S. children <15 years of age, there were an average of 3.3 deaths per year with the rotavirus diagnostic code listed on the death certificate between 1999 and 2005,” they wrote, citing a CDC database.
The 2018 review by CDC researchers estimated 20 to 60 deaths from rotavirus annually before the vaccines were recommended.
The assessment’s approach of estimating deaths relies on the deaths being recorded using a specific code, Offit said. “That’s a fairly blunt tool and no doubt is an underestimate,” he said. An HHS spokesperson did not answer a question on why the assessment estimated rotavirus deaths in this way.
Since 2005, the CDC has universally recommended a vaccine, MenACWY, at age 11 or 12 that targets four subtypes of meningococcal bacteria to protect against meningitis and sepsis. These infections are rare but are very serious and can be fatal. In 2010, the agency added a universal recommendation for a booster dose at age 16. (A separate vaccine exists for meningococcal type B bacteria, but it has not been recommended for all children in the U.S.)
Under the new changes, the MenACWY vaccine is now recommended for all kids only under shared clinical decision-making. For high-risk groups, including those with certain medical conditions, college freshmen living in residential housing or those traveling to certain countries, the vaccine remains fully recommended.
The cited rationale for removing the universal recommendation was primarily that the disease incidence is low, currently around 0.12 cases per 100,000 people. The memo and assessment particularly cited World Health Organization guidelines, which advise widespread vaccination when the incidence is 2 cases per 100,000 or higher. The HHS documents also pointed to a country comparison to suggest that universal vaccination programs have not driven down disease rates and noted that not all peer countries recommend meningococcal vaccination for all children.
“The incidence of meningococcal disease has declined during the past decades, both in countries with and without the routine vaccine recommendations for children, and the magnitude of the decline appears to be independent of vaccination policy,” the memo said.
While there isn’t universal agreement on routine meningococcal vaccination, most high-income countries do recommend the shots — even though their disease incidence is also low. According to the health officials’ own count, 15 out of 20 peer nations have a recommendation for all children, while five have a risk-based recommendation. Some nations, such as Germany, Switzerland and the U.K., now routinely recommend two different meningococcal vaccines during childhood.
Meningococcal disease is indeed rare in the U.S. But several experts told us this is not a reason to stop vaccinating. They also disputed the suggestion that vaccination hasn’t helped to lower disease incidence.
“Every parent should want to prevent this disease in their children,” Dr. David S. Stephens, an expert on bacterial meningitis at Emory University, told us, noting the seriousness of meningococcal disease.
Even with antibiotics and proper medical care, around 15% of patients die and as many as 20% are left with after-effects of the illness, including amputations, neurologic disabilities and hearing loss, according to a 2020 summary report of ACIP’s recommendations for meningococcal vaccines.
“[L]ow incidence in the context of a vaccination program is what we want,” Stephens said in an email. “Even though polio is very low in the US we still recommend routine vaccination.”
Stephens, who is a member of the expert panels advising the WHO and the CDC on meningococcal vaccination, noted that the disease is more common among adolescents and young adults than in the general population and that the incidence can fluctuate. CDC data show that in recent years, infections have surged, with 2024 posting 503 confirmed or probable cases of meningococcal disease — the highest number since 2013. Antibiotic resistance is also increasingly a problem.
Stephens said that the vaccination program has helped reduce disease incidence and that the MenACWY vaccines in particular provide “significant ‘herd’ protection to the unvaccinated.” He said the cited country comparison “has no bearing on the question of meningococcal vaccine effectiveness.”
“It is well known that the disease incidence began to decline before the introduction of the meningococcal vaccine, however, there is evidence that the decline was faster after the introduction of the vaccines,” Dr. Jaime Fergie, an infectious diseases specialist with Driscoll Children’s Hospital in Texas, told us, citing a 2020 paper.
He added that a 2024 modeling study estimated that through 2021, vaccination in the U.S. prevented 500 cases of invasive meningococcal diseases and 54 deaths of people 11 to 23 years of age. Without vaccination, invasive meningococcal disease incidence “would have been at least 59% higher than reported,” the study concluded.
The HHS memo also misleadingly noted that the current meningococcal vaccines “were not evaluated in large-scale double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trials before FDA approval.”
While true, Caroline Trotter, infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Cambridge who specializes in vaccine-preventable bacterial meningitis and also advises the WHO on meningococcal vaccination, told us this is “because such studies were not ethical (because of the existence of already licensed polysaccharide vaccines for MenACWY) or feasible (given the large numbers that would have to be recruited).”
When vaccines that protect against a disease already exist, it’s unethical to test newer versions against a saline placebo, since the control group would have to forgo any protection.
“There is compelling evidence from a range of different settings, including the UK, that meningococcal vaccines are safe and effective,” she added.
“The change in schedule will increase vaccine disparities, we are also likely to see the return of this disease in more adolescents, young adults, and others over the next decade,” Stephens said.
The CDC first recommended annual flu shots for all children 6 months and older in 2008, when it expanded the recommendation to include school-aged children 5 to 18 years old. The agency had already recommended the shot for children under the age of 2 in 2004 and children below the age of 5 in 2006.
According to the published ACIP recommendation, the decision was based on “accumulated evidence” of the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness in school-aged kids, “increased evidence” of flu’s “substantial adverse impacts among school-aged children and their contacts,” and “an expectation” that the simpler recommendation would boost vaccine uptake among kids who were at higher risk of severe disease or were in contact with such individuals. About half of school-aged children were in that category and were already recommended to get vaccinated.
Children below the age of 5 and those with certain chronic conditions are at higher risk for flu complications such as pneumonia, according to the agency, but healthy older children can also get seriously ill.
Death is rare, but does occur. Since the 2004-2005 flu season, reported pediatric flu deaths, which are likely an undercount of the true number of deaths, have averaged 137 a year when excluding the 2020-2021 season during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year’s flu season was rough, however, and 289 children died — the most since the agency began tracking deaths over two decades ago. More than 40% of those children did not have underlying medical conditions, and nearly 90% had not been fully vaccinated. This year is also shaping up to be an unusually bad flu season.
In explaining why they no longer recommended universal flu vaccination for kids, health officials pointed to the lack of randomized controlled trial data showing a hospitalization or death benefit of flu vaccination in children.
“The trials could not evaluate differences in hospitalizations or mortality, as there were none or few in either group, so they provide no evidence that the vaccines reduce hospitalization or deaths,” the memo said, citing a 2018 Cochrane review, which the health officials called the “most comprehensive review.”
The memo also dismissed observational studies, calling one particular type of study — the test-negative case-control study — “a notoriously biased study design with highly implausible results,” and the memo referred to a “scarcity of reliable safety data.”
In an interview with CBS News on Jan. 7, HHS Secretary Kennedy also cited the Cochrane review when he said it may be “better” if fewer kids receive the flu vaccine as a result of the new policy. “They found that there is no evidence that the flu vaccine prevents serious disease or that it prevents hospitalizations or death in children,” he said, referring to the Cochrane authors. “There’s no scientific evidence. And what we tried to do is to follow the science.”
Experts, however, say this is misleading.
The Cochrane review, which focused almost exclusively on randomized controlled trials, did not identify hospitalization or death benefits of flu vaccination, but it also did not include any trials with data on those outcomes. It did, notably, find evidence that flu shots worked to reduce influenza in children.
Dr. Mark Loeb, an infectious diseases specialist at McMaster University in Canada who has studied flu vaccines, told us that one of the limitations of randomized controlled trials is that they are not practical to use to evaluate outcomes that are rare, such as hospitalization or death in this case. “Because the outcomes are very rare” in healthy kids, he said of influenza, “you’d need millions of people in a randomized controlled trial.”
This does not mean that flu vaccines don’t work to prevent severe outcomes, but that randomized trials are not an ideal way to measure those potential benefits. Loeb said that he primarily conducts randomized trials — and thinks such trials should be done whenever possible — but not in this case.
“The HHS Decision Memo ignores the fact that clinical trials are not powered to detect rare outcomes such as hospitalization and death,” Dr. Edward Belongia, a global expert on flu vaccine effectiveness who retired from the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin last year, told us in an email. “Post-licensure observational studies are needed to provide valid estimates of influenza vaccine protection in the real world, including protection against serious outcomes.”
Contrary to HHS’ claim that test-negative case-control studies are “notoriously biased,” Loeb said they were “one of the most rigorous forms of observational studies.”
Belongia said the test-negative design “is the current gold standard” for observational studies of influenza vaccine effectiveness, noting that it “has been directly compared with clinical trial data and shown to generate comparable results.”
In such studies, patients needing medical care for respiratory illness are enrolled in the study and then tested for influenza, Belongia explained. Vaccine effectiveness can then be estimated based on the number of “case” patients who test positive for flu compared with the number of control patients who test negative. “An important advantage of this design is that it inherently controls for bias due to differences in health care seeking behavior,” he said.
“Like the Cochrane review authors, the HHS Decision Memo ignores a large body of evidence that influenza vaccines are effective in children, including substantial protection against severe illness,” Belongia added, citing multiple papers.
A review published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October, for example, which looked at the evidence since ACIP’s last review of the subject a few years ago, identified a vaccine effectiveness of 67% in preventing pediatric hospitalization. Another study, assessing vaccine effectiveness during the 2015-2016 season, found vaccination was 56% effective against hospitalization in children.
Last year, Loeb also published a review of test-negative studies on flu vaccination, which concluded that “[s]easonal influenza vaccination moderately reduces severe influenza-related outcomes, particularly in children.”
As for safety, Loeb said that unless a person has had a severe allergic reaction to a previous flu shot, the vaccine is a “very safe” vaccine. “There is a large amount of safety data,” he said, and “very good evidence” that the benefits “greatly outweigh” the risks.
The hepatitis A virus infects the liver, in rare cases causing liver failure and death. HHS officials emphasized the low incidence and death rate from hepatitis A, while making misleading claims about the safety of hepatitis A vaccines.
Hepatitis A vaccination was first recommended for some children in 1996 and eventually universally recommended in 2006 starting at 12 months of age. Now, the vaccines are recommended for all kids only after discussion with a doctor, although they are still fully recommended for kids traveling to countries with high or intermediate levels of hepatitis A, which is spread in feces.
“Given the low U.S. incidence and mortality, and the lack of randomized placebo-controlled safety data, the benefit-risk ratio is at best very low for most children,” the assessment and memo both said. An HHS spokesperson did not answer a question about what harms from hepatitis A vaccination the documents were referring to.
Dr. Noele Nelson, a physician and epidemiologist at Cornell University, told us the new recommendations are “missing the big picture” of why hepatitis A vaccination was recommended for children in the first place. Nelson was previously in leadership roles at the CDC, including as a branch chief in the viral hepatitis division.
Young children are not at high risk of death or severe illness from hepatitis A and generally have no symptoms when infected, but they do transmit the virus, Nelson explained. Those at higher risk of severe disease include adults over the age of 40 and people with certain health conditions.
Children can shed the hepatitis A virus in their stool for months, and it can remain infectious on surfaces for months, according to a 2020 report co-authored by Nelson, which summarized a review of hepatitis A vaccination by ACIP. Children “can transmit in daycare centers, they can transmit in schools, they can transmit to caretakers,” Nelson told us. It “used to be children in diapers were the ones who were spreading it to susceptible adults,” she said. If vaccination rates go down substantially, “it’s very conceivable that you would start to see that again.”
Vaccinating kids against hepatitis A both prevents them from spreading the virus and protects them into adulthood, as the vaccine “has long-term effectiveness and likely confers lifetime immunity, really one of the marvels of vaccinology,” Nelson added.
The HHS assessment and memo also cast doubt on the safety of the hepatitis A vaccines, misleadingly claiming that “without a proper placebo-controlled randomized trial, reliable safety data is limited.”
As we’ve written in the past, this is an anti-vaccine trope that relies on a very narrow definition of a proper clinical trial and dismisses other types of studies that can be used to help establish vaccine safety.
The clinical trials testing the hepatitis A vaccines “were incredibly successful, with no severe adverse events noted,” Nelson said, adding that in her judgment they were “done properly.” Furthermore, she said, data on vaccine safety are regularly reviewed, including by ACIP for the 2020 review and update she participated in. “Again, there were no concerning or unexpected safety findings,” she said.
One randomized, placebo-controlled trial that the assessment did not consider “proper” in their assessment compared a hepatitis A vaccine to a vaccine diluent. This contained an aluminum adjuvant, used in hepatitis A vaccines to stimulate a better immune response, as well as a preservative formerly used in the vaccines. These vaccine ingredients have a proven safety record. A second trial used a hepatitis B vaccine as a control.
Vaccinologist John Grabenstein, formerly head of medical affairs at Merck, told Science that it is common to use such controls in vaccine clinical trials. Merck’s hepatitis A vaccine, for example, he said, was compared to the diluent so that the trial could remain blinded and people would be less likely to tell whether they had been given the vaccine.
The other vaccine, made by GSK, was compared with a hepatitis B vaccine in a clinical trial in Thailand because the researchers wanted to ensure all children got some benefit from enrolling, the Science article explained. Using the hepatitis B vaccine in the control group also helped the trial remain blinded, Nelson told us.
She said that regardless of which groups they were assigned to, the participants in the trials only experienced “common, expected reactions,” such as pain at the injection site and fever. She added it was difficult to see, “even if those studies were done differently, how that would have changed the findings.”
Offering universal hepatitis A vaccination for children is a relatively uncommon practice among high-income nations. Among the 20 peer nations in the assessment, just one — Greece — had a universal hepatitis A vaccine recommendation.
However, stopping hepatitis A vaccination in childhood has risks, Nelson said. There are currently adults who are too old to have been routinely vaccinated as children but who grew up at a time when childhood infection was becoming less common. As a result, many don’t have immunity from past infection. Because infection is riskier when people are older, this group of people is now at risk of severe disease.
The problem with “not vaccinating children, when you still have circulating virus in the population and continued threats from food and threats from travel, is that you can increase the number of children with hepatitis A, which can then increase the number of adults,” Nelson said. Then “you really start to see this increase in morbidity and mortality, hospitalizations, and cost and burden on health care.”
In addition, children who never get vaccinated and who avoid infection will be susceptible to infection and severe disease as they age.
Low rates of hepatitis are “not a reason to stop vaccinating,” Nelson said, “because as soon as you let your guard down, or let that susceptible population increase, then you open yourself up to disease.”
President Donald Trump said one reason that the U.S. will “run” Venezuela and “indefinitely” control its oil sales is because “years ago” Venezuela “took our oil away from us” and “stole our assets.” That’s an oversimplification of what happened when Venezuela assumed greater control of its energy sector.
In 2007, under then President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela continued the nationalization of its oil industry that began in 1976. The Chavez administration required the foreign oil companies still operating in the country to enter into new contracts giving Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company majority control of their oil projects.
The companies that did not agree to those conditions were expropriated, meaning their oil-related assets were seized by the Venezuelan government.
“They did change the terms of the deals that they had with the companies that were operating in Venezuela,” Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told us in an interview. But Vigil said the assets belonged to the private companies, not the U.S. government.
Furthermore, the oil in the ground always belonged to Venezuela.
Samantha Gross, director of the energy security and climate initiative at the Brookings Institution, told CBS News that “the oil itself was never ‘our oil,'” as Trump said. Gross clarified that Venezuela has ownership of its oil reserves, which are the largest of any nation.
Two U.S.-based oil companies, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, did not agree to Chávez’s conditions and left the country. Chevron, another American company, did agree to the terms and continues to produce oil in the country.
But in Trump’s eyes, Venezuela “stole” from the U.S.
“We built [the] Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us,” Trump said in a Jan. 3 press conference, in which he talked about the U.S. military operation that led to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
The following day, while on Air Force One, Trump told reporters, “It was the greatest theft in the history of America. Nobody has ever stolen our property like they have. They took our oil away from us.”
When we inquired about the president’s claims, a White House official pointed to the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry to support what Trump said.
In 1975, Carlos Andrés Pérez, then the president of Venezuela, signed a bill nationalizing the country’s oil industry and creating a state-run company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., or PDVSA, to completely control oil production in the country.
A New York Times article from that year said that the new law ended “more than half a century of dominance by foreign oil companies” in Venezuela, including U.S. companies such as Exxon, Mobil and Gulf Oil, which previously had been granted concessions contracts to extract Venezuela’s oil in exchange for at least half of the profits that companies made from oil sales.
Before nationalization, “the contracts that these companies had,” which were set to expire in 1983, “basically authorized them to produce oil and pay royalties and taxes to the Venezuelan government,” Francisco Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University, told NPR in a podcast interview published on Jan. 8.
In 1977, a year after nationalization went into effect, the Times reported that about 20 foreign oil companies affected by the takeover ended up being paid about $1 billion in compensation from the Venezuelan government, and some negotiated contracts to continue providing marketing and technological support in the country.
Monaldi said that the arrangement “was not controversial at all with the oil companies.”
In the 1990s, Venezuela implemented a policy that allowed foreign oil companies back into the country specifically for the purpose of increasing oil production, particularly in the Orinoco Belt region, where most of the country’s oil reserves are located. However, things went differently in 2007, when the Chávez regime enacted another nationalization plan that saw PDVSA take a minimum 60% stake in foreign oil projects in the Orinoco Belt.
At least four major international oil companies, including Chevron in the U.S., agreed to the terms of new contracts that allowed them to continue their oil operations there. “And in fact, Chevron has been able to make money after they were partially expropriated,” Monaldi said on the podcast.
Two other U.S. companies, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, did not agree to Chávez’s demands, and withdrew from the country, abandoning their oil projects and equipment. Petro-Canada, which had partnered with Exxon Mobil on an oil project in the country, also opted to pull out of Venezuela.
At the time, news outlets quoted then U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey as saying, “The government of Venezuela, like any other government, has the right to make these kinds of decisions to change ownership rules.” But he said he hoped to “see them meet their international commitments in terms of providing fair and just compensation” to the companies.
Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips ended up having to go through international arbitration to get compensated by Venezuela for the expropriation of their oil assets.
It wasn’t until 2012 that the International Chamber of Commerce said that Exxon Mobil should receive $908 million in compensation and then awarded $2 billion for ConocoPhillips in 2018. Meanwhile, the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ordered Venezuela to pay $1.6 billion to Exxon Mobil in 2014 and $8.7 billion to ConocoPhillips in 2019.
The companies say they have been paid only a fraction of the billions of dollars they’re owed.
Exxon Mobil’s past experience with Venezuela is one of the reasons the company says it is taking a wait-and-see approach to reinvesting in oil ventures in the country – even though Trump has said that U.S. oil companies will now “spend billions of dollars” to fix the country’s “badly broken infrastructure.”
To reenter Venezuela a “third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here and what is currently the state,” Darren Woods, Exxon Mobil’s chairman and CEO, said at a Jan. 9 meeting of oil company executives at the White House. “If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela, today it’s uninvestable.”
Energy experts also have said that improvements would be necessary to secure future investments.
“Foreign companies are looking for an improvement in governance, the restoration of the rule of law, and an easing of US oil sanctions,” including ones levied against Venezuela during the first Trump administration, Luisa Palacios, an adjunct senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, said in a Jan. 4 blog post.
She said if the Venezuelan government can “commit to these reforms in a serious way,” leading the U.S. to remove sanctions, it’s “plausible” that in two years, oil production in Venezuela could increase by as much as 1 million barrels per day. As of November, production in the country was about 860,000 barrels per day, according to an International Energy Administration oil market report.
Jorge León, senior vice president and head of geopolitical analysis for Rystad Energy, told ABC News in Australia that it would take 15 years and investments of more than $180 billion for Venezuela to return to its pre-Chavez production rate of 3 million barrels per day.
In the meantime, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the U.S. will take from Venezuela “between 30 and 50 million barrels of oil” that have already been produced and packaged, and “sell it in the marketplace.” Purchased at market value, the oil could raise between $1.65 billion and $2.75 billion in revenue for the U.S. government, according to CNN.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC that any oil revenue would first be used to help “stabilize the economy in Venezuela.” He said that repaying the U.S. oil companies that Venezuela still owes money is a “longer term issue.”