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      The Trump administration is defending abortion pill access in court. What?

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      The Trump administration on Monday asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit that takes aim at the abortion pill mifepristone – a move that stunned many observers for what seemed a defense of the drug by a president who has overseen the most dramatic rollback of abortion rights in modern US history.At first blush, it may seem a victory for abortion access – but experts worry that, in reality, the move preserves the administration’s ability to play coy about any future plans to attack abortion rights.When Donald Trump first returned to the White House earlier this year, US anti-abortion activists had high hopes for the man who helped orchestrate the downfall of Roe v Wade. They thought he might use a 19th-century anti-vice law to effectively ban abortion nationwide. Failing that, they imagined that he might use the power of the Food and Drug Administration to roll back access to mifepristone or even yank it from the market entirely.Instead, over the last few months, the Trump administration has attempted to dodge the issue entirely. The Monday request, to a Texas judge who has become a reliable vote for abortion opponents, continued that pattern.The lawsuit seeks to roll back several FDA regulatory changes that have, over the last decade, considerably expanded access to mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in US medication abortions. It revives a lawsuit that led to a stinging 9-0 defeat for abortion rights opponents when the court ruled the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors, did not have the legal standing to sue in the first place.Rather than let the matter die, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri moved to take over the case as its new plaintiffs. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the US district court for the northern district of Texas, where the case is being heard, agreed to let the attorneys general move forward.However, in its Monday filing, the Trump administration argued that there is no reason why the case should proceed in Texas.“At bottom, the states cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the states’ own claims have no connection to this district,” the administration wrote.Abortion rights supporters have long pointed to one reason why the case was filed in Texas: Kacsmaryk. A Trump appointee with a track record of abortion opposition, Kacsmaryk once took the unprecedented step of ruling to reverse the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, which would lead to its removal from the market.Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, found it “a little funny” that the Trump administration’s filing seemed to call out its own side for judge-shopping.It is possible that Trump, who was never exactly a true believer in the anti-abortion movement, has now soured on it. While the movement helped propel him to the White House in 2016, it became something of an albatross for him in 2024, as outrage over Roe’s collapse led abortion rights to become one of the election’s top issues.Yet Huberfeld found the filing more notable for what it did not say: namely, it shied away from revealing the Trump administration’s plans for mifepristone. She believes the administration may try to change mifepristone access through the FDA, and that the legal reasoning in Monday’s filing could be used against a future lawsuit by blue states against new restrictions.“They’re basically saying that the states don’t get to just challenge FDA policy because they want to,” Huberfeld said. “Which, in my view, is a set-up for anticipating that blue states may try to challenge any changes on mifepristone rules.”FDA Commissioner Martin Makary could, for example, move to reverse regulations that permit people to dispense abortion pills through telehealth – which accounts for about a fifth of all US abortions – or eliminate mifepristone’s approval. Project 2025, the notorious playbook of policy proposals authored by the conservative thinktank the Heritage Foundation, urged the FDA to do exactly that.Last month, Makary told the Semafor World Economy Summit that he had “no plans to take action” on mifepristone. However, he added: “There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.”Decades of studies, conducted in more than a dozen countries, have found that mifepristone is safe and effective. However, anti-abortion groups have repeatedly pushed studies that claimed to find that mifepristone is dangerous. (Some of those studies have been retracted.)“My guess is that the Trump administration is trying to walk the fine line of not looking like it’s threatening access to mifepristone while also, potentially, through the FDA trying to limit access to mifepristone,” Huberfeld said. “In other words, I don’t think the FDA’s actually going to be hands-off.” More

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      ‘Protest can shape the world’: Rebecca Solnit on the fight back against Trump

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      On 5 April, millions of people rallied against the Trump administration and its campaigns of destruction. In small towns and big cities from Alaska to Florida, red counties and blue (and a handful of European cities), they gathered with homemade signs full of fury and heartbreak and sarcasm. Yet the “Hands Off” protests received minimal media coverage, and the general response was that they didn’t do anything, because they didn’t have immediate and obvious, and most of all quantifiable, consequences. I’ve heard versions of “no one cares”, “no one is doing anything” and “nothing came of it” for all my activist life. These responses are sometimes a sign that the speaker isn’t really looking and sometimes that they don’t recognise impacts that aren’t immediate, direct or obvious. Tracking those indirect and unhurried impacts, trying to offer a more complex map of the world of ideas and politics, has been at the heart of my writing.For more direct impact, at least when it came to the rally I attended in San Francisco, you could have walked six or seven blocks to the Tesla dealership. Weekly protests there since February, like those across the country and beyond, have helped tank the Tesla brand and Tesla shares. They remind Elon Musk that he’s in retail, where the customer is always right – and right now the customer would like him and his Doge mercenaries to stop dismantling the US government the way a hog dismantles a garden.Tesla aside, activists sometimes really do have tangible results and even immediate ones. The protests around the world and in Seattle, where we blockaded the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting, encouraged the global south nations inside to stand up and refuse a raw deal from the global north and corporations. At that very meeting that very week. It might be the most immediately and obviously effective protest I ever attended, in fortysomething years of attending protests (even if protesting this version of corporate globalisation under the rubric “free trade” is hard to explain during a catastrophic tariff crisis).View image in fullscreenBut that was an exception. Mostly protests, campaigns, boycotts and movements do a lot, but do it in less tangible and direct ways than these. They influence public opinion, make exploitation and destruction and their perpetrators more visible, shift what’s considered acceptable and possible, set new norms or delegitimise old ones. Because politics arises from culture, if culture is our values, beliefs, desires, aspirations shaped by stories, images – and yeah, memes – that then turns into politics as choices and actions that shape the world.If you want to measure impact you need more sophisticated tools and longer timeframes than the many versions of “where’s the payoff for this thing we just did”. Take the Green New Deal, advocated for passionately by the young climate activists in the Sunrise Movement, starting around 2018. The simple story to tell about it is that, as legislation cosponsored by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and senator Ed Markey, it did not pass. The complex story is that it shifted the frameworks in which we think about climate and economics in consequential ways. In other words, it was very effective, just not directly. It strongly influenced the Biden campaign’s platform in 2020. His administration sought to pass it as Build Back Better and succeeded in doing so with the watered-down but still impactful Inflation Reduction Act, which influenced governments in other countries to amplify their own climate policies. (The Trump administration is dismantling some of it, but some will survive.)The Green New Deal as a proposal and campaign moved us beyond the old jobs-versus-the-economy framing that had plagued environmental activists for decades, making it clear that doing what the climate requires is a jobs-creation programme, and you could care about both. I don’t hear the old framework any more, and one of the hardest things to detect in the department of indirect consequences is the thing that doesn’t happen or the frame that no longer circulates. Jobs v environment is one. Another is the many stereotypes-become-slurs that treated female rape survivors as inherently dishonest and unreliable, deployed to protect countless rapists. This blanket discrediting is not part of the culture the way it was before the feminist insurrections that began in 2012-13. Seeing what’s no longer there or what didn’t happen is also an art, whether it’s seeing the persecution that ceased or the forest that wasn’t cut down.One of the aphorisms I have been coming back to for at least half my lifetime is “everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”, attributed to Einstein and useful for almost everything. Because we get explanations of how things work – big things such as politics, change, history, human nature – that themselves don’t work when they fail to account for the complexities, ambiguities, uncertainties and indirect and delayed influences and consequences. It’s like hacking off all the limbs of a tree because you’d rather call it a log or because you haven’t quite figured out what leaves and branches do. Or looking at a tree today and saying it isn’t growing, since it hasn’t visibly changed since yesterday. Which, put that way, sounds infinitely ridiculous and yet in speech – which, ideally, reflects thought – people do it all the time.As I write in my forthcoming essay anthology No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, “It’s not that I have anything against the easy, the immediate, the obvious, the straightforward, and the predictable. It’s just that I think much of what we face and endeavour to achieve requires an embrace or at least a recognition of its opposite. So I have chased after the long trajectories of change as both the often forgotten events and ideas leading up to a rupture, a breakthrough, or a revolution, and the often overlooked indirect consequences that come afterward. I’ve celebrated how a movement that may not achieve its official goal may nevertheless generate or inspire those indirect consequences that matter sometimes as much or more than the original goal. I’ve also noticed how often a movement is dismissed as having failed during the slow march to victory, when victory comes. So much activism has, on the sidelines, people telling us we can’t win, who routinely vanish if and when we do.”One of the curiosities of American political life is that Republicans refuse to acknowledge the complexities and interconnections as ideology, but are very good at working with them practically, while the opposite is true of the Democrats. Republicans and the far right famously built power from the ground up, getting their people to run for school board and other low-level positions at the state and local level, working hard on winning state legislatures to pass voter-suppression measures that would help Republicans broaden their power even while they narrowed their support. They played the long game, patiently building power, pushing propaganda, recruiting – and of course did so with hugely wealthy foundations and billionaire donors who could afford to underwrite such efforts and provide the stability for such campaigns.View image in fullscreenIn other respects, Republicans deny that everything or anything is connected to everything else, that actions and policies have consequences, that the shape of a life is not entirely up to that individual but is influenced by economic and social forces, that everything exists in relationship. It’s convenient for rightwing ideology to deny the reality of environmental impacts, be it mining and burning fossil fuel or spreading toxins, because acknowledging the impact of individual and corporate actions would justify the regulations and collective responsibilities that are anathema to their deregulated free-enterprise rugged individual ethos. Likewise, it’s convenient to claim that poverty and inequality are the result of individual failure, that the playing field is level and everyone has equal opportunity, because if you acknowledge that discrimination is real – well, discrimination is itself a system, and they prefer to deny systems exist.Democrats on the other hand have long recognised the existence of systems, including the systems that are the environment and climate, as well as the ugly systems of discrimination that have permeated American life such as racism, misogyny, homophobia and so forth. But they’re remarkably bad at building political frameworks to address this, failing where Republicans succeed when it comes to the long game of building power from the ground up, being on message, having a long-term strategy and sometimes, it seems, any strategy at all.So we live in an environment of conflicting and confusing information, furthered by the way the mainstream media too often see background and context on what just happened as editorialising and bias, so tend to present facts so stripped of context that only those who are good at building context themselves can find meaning in them. Media outlets routinely play down protest and when they cover it often do so dismissively. Media critic and former Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan writes of the thin coverage of the Hands Off rallies: “Organizers said that more than 100,000 demonstrators came to the protests in both New York and Washington DC. Crowd estimates are always tricky, but that certainly seems like a big story to me.” She points out that for many months news outlets have commented on how the public resistance to Trump is so much quieter than in 2017. “But when the protests did happen, much of the media reaction was something between a yawn and a shrug. Or, in some outlets, a sneer.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionProtests against Trumpism in 2017, which were probably sneered at and dismissed at the time, are now being used to dismiss 2025 protests. But the most precise calibrators of these protests, Erica Chenoweth and colleagues at the Crowd Counting Consortium, write: “And since Jan. 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago … In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017.”The Consortium counted 686 protests on 21 January, 2017, with total participation above 3 million, making the Women’s March the biggest one-day protest in US history. Meanwhile more than 1,300 US rallies happened on 5 April this year. This is part of why it’s hard to recognise the impact of such events; they’re so often written out of the story of change. Mostly the story of change we get is that great men hand it down to us, and we should admire and be grateful to them and periodically implore them for more crumbs.This is built into how history narrows down the civil rights movement and all the crucial work done by women into a few great men, into how the decades of dedicated work by the abolitionist movement are written out of the version in which Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves out of the blue. It’s built into the superhero movies in which problems are solved by musclebound men deploying violence to definitively defeat evil, when the real superheroes of our time mostly look like scruffy stubborn people who build alliances and networks and movements over years, with an occasional burst of drama in the legislatures, courts and streets (but mostly through stuff that looks like office work, even if it’s administration for liberation). The language of “save the whales/children/country” suggests some kind of finality, and so do the plots of action movies. But evil comes back, so you have to keep defending your reproductive rights, your freedom of speech, your marriage equality, your forests and rivers and climate, even though maintenance is not as exciting as conflict.The phrase “theory of change” has become popular in recent years, as in “what’s your theory of change?” Mine is that categories are leaky and anomalies abound. That change happens in complex, sometimes unpredictable ways, that it often unfolds with slow and indirect consequences, and that what ends up in the centres of power often begins in the margins and shadows. That stories have profound power and changing the story is often the beginning of changing the world.Something the current crisis in the US demonstrates is that power is rarely as simple as it’s supposed to be. We see those who are supposed to be immensely powerful – captains of industry, prestige law firms, Ivy League universities – cringe and cave in fear while ordinary people (including lawyers and professors) stand on principle and judges mete out the law without intimidation. As for the unpredictability, I find hope in the fact that we’re making the future in the present, and while you can’t predict it with the certainty too many self-anointed prophets seem afflicted with, you can learn a lot from the patterns of the past – if you can remember the past and view events on the scale of those patterns that spread across decades and centuries.Places popular with tourists often put out maps that oversimplify the terrain on the assumption that we visitors are too dumb to contend with the real lay of the land, but those maps often mislead, literally, so you wander into a sketchy neighbourhood or a marsh that’s not on the map. What I’ve tried to do as a writer is give people maps adequate to navigate the rocky, uneven territory of our lives and times. More

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      Ice seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children to deport or prosecute

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      Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials are seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide with a view to deporting them or pursuing criminal cases against them or adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US, according to sources and an Ice document.The moves are sparking fears of a crackdown on such children and prompting alarm about what one critic called “backdoor family separation”.In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Ice have begun engaging in “welfare checks” on children who arrived in the US alone, usually via the US-Mexico border, to “ensure that they are safe and not being exploited”, according to a DHS spokesperson.Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s second term, legal services provided to unaccompanied minors have been slashed and funds are not flowing despite court intervention. And the federal agency monitoring unaccompanied immigrant children has begun sharing sensitive data with Ice.The Ice document shows “ it’s not just about checking in on kids, making sure that they can account for them and that they’re not being exploited”, said Michelle Méndez, the director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. “It shows they have other goals, and the goals are criminalization of the kid or criminalization of the sponsor. It’s backdoor family separation.”In addition to verifying that the children are not trafficked or exploited, the Ice document shows officials are also gathering intelligence to see whether the children are a “flight risk” or a “threat to public safety” or whether they are viable to be deported. Immigration experts and attorneys say such “fact finding” operations by Ice to track unaccompanied minors are still in their early stages.“It’s enforcement. It’s in the name of saying that they’re pursuing children’s welfare. They seem to be actually trying to conduct an enforcement operation,” said Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice. “It seems very clear that what they are actually doing is gathering intelligence on the family.”For advocates, one of the most troubling aspects, as stated in the document, is that Ice officials will target children with alleged “gang or terrorist ties/activities”. In recent months, the Trump administration has been engaging in arrests, expulsions and deportations of immigrants – mostly Salvadorians and Venezuelans – accused of having links to gangs deemed to be terrorist organizations. The administration has used flimsy evidence to justify many of the expulsions and deportations under the controversial, rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act, or AEA, leading to a showdown between the administration and the judiciary and a threat to the rule of law.“As long as the government has some nebulous allegation, they know an immigration judge will likely order the person removed,” Méndez said.Earlier this month, Ice officials visited a 16-year-old girl in Washington state for a “welfare check”. During the visit, which was first reported by the Spokesman-Review, the frightened girl messaged and called Samuel Smith, the director of immigrant legal aid at Manzanita House, the organization that is representing the girl in her immigration case.“Both the text messages sent and the tone of communication when talking on the phone, was of a child who was incredibly scared,” Smith said. “She had no idea what was going on and was worried that her life would be flipped upside down.”The Washington Post reported this month that other federal agencies have also been conducting welfare checks and reporting information to Ice.“I can appreciate the publicly stated goal, but I don’t necessarily believe it,” Smith said.According to the Ice document and a federal law enforcement source with knowledge of the operations, two offices within Ice are conducting the unaccompanied immigrant children operations: enforcement and removal operations (ERO) and homeland security investigations (HSI). The former, ERO, runs Ice’s deportation system while HSI runs mostly international criminal investigations into drug smuggling, human trafficking and fraud, but they are increasingly working together in this administration.According to the Ice document, officials from ERO and HSI will coordinate “on pursuing UAC”, which stands for “unaccompanied alien children”, while ERO will verifiy that “immigration enforcement action is taken”, if necessary.“ERO officers should remember they are to enforce final orders of removal, where possible, and HSI will pursue criminal options for UAC who have committed crimes,” the document says.Becky Wolozin, a senior attorney at the National Center for Youth Law, finds it “difficult to reconcile the alleged well-meaning intention of these visits with the reality of the terror and trauma they have caused for children and families across the country”.“Given the intent articulated in this memo, families have well-founded fear surrounding these visits,” Wolozin added.Unaccompanied immigrant children who reach the US border are apprehended by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and then placed in custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), under the department of Health and Human Services (HHS), while their immigration case proceeds. ORR will place children in shelters and later, if there is a sponsor available, children are placed under a sponsor’s care. Typically, sponsors are the children’s relatives in the US; at times, they are unrelated adults. The sponsors complete an assessment process and undergo a background check, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.For years, ORR has operated independently of DHS, in an attempt to address the immigration of children in a humane manner, rather than through law enforcement.Unaccompanied minors then go through lengthy proceedings and in the meantime enroll in school.Some children released to ORR sponsors have been found to have been trafficked and exploited.“There are instances of trafficking in the United States,” Smith said. “But it’s the exception, not the rule here. The vast majority are in placements that are supportive, in a good place for them to be able to live.”For years, Trump allies have pushed the narrative that unaccompanied immigrant children have been trafficked, placing blame on the Biden administration. They have pointed to a DHS inspector general report that found that Ice was not able to adequately track unaccompanied minors under their care. Experts point to a bureaucratic paperwork backlog by Ice, saying most of those children are safe, with relatives or sponsors.“The previous administration allowed many of these children who came across the border unaccompanied to be placed with sponsors who were actually smugglers and sex traffickers,” the DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement. “Unlike the previous administration, President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem take the responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to reunite children with their families.”Since the Trump administration returned to office, HHS has cut legal services for unaccompanied children. There is currently a legal fight at play, in an attempt to restore legal resources for unaccompanied minors who are attempting to stay in the US.During the first Trump administration, ORR began to share data with Ice regarding immigrant children and their sponsors. Similarly at that time, immigration officials arrested 170 undocumented immigrants who tried to become sponsors for children in government custody.Although the Biden administration stopped the data-sharing practice, the new Trump White House has again begun the process of information sharing between agencies. A new Trump-era change now also allows for ORR to share the legal status of children’s sponsors with Ice, sparking fears that the information will be used to arrest and deport undocumented sponsors.ORR did not respond to a request for comment.“I worry about the trauma the kids are going through. There is a climate of fear for immigrants in this country right now,” Aber said. “The amount of trauma that this administration seems willing to put kids through is really upsetting.”The new acting director of ORR is Angie Salazar, a former Ice agent under HSI. Salazar took over the role in March after the prior acting director of ORR, another Ice official, was ousted from the role. More

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      Trump administration’s budget cuts endanger Meals on Wheels: ‘Life and death implications’

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      The Trump administration’s slashes to the Department of Health and Human Services is threatening Meals on Wheels, the popular program dedicated to combatting senior hunger and isolation. Despite decades of bipartisan support, Meals on Wheels now faces attacks from Republicans whose budget blueprint paves the way for deep cuts to nutrition and other social safety-net programs as a way to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy.It’s a move anti-hunger advocates and policy experts warn could have disastrous ramifications for the millions of older Americans who rely on the program to eat each day.“It’s not hyperbolic to say that we’re going to be leaving people hungry and that this literally has life and death implications,” said Nicole Jorwic, the chief of advocacy and campaigns at Caring Across Generations, a non-profit that advocates for ageing Americans, disabled people and their caregivers. “This is not just about a nice-to-have program. These programs are necessities in the lives of seniors all over this country.”While it is still unknown exactly what will be slashed, the blueprint sets the stage for the potential elimination of the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG), a key source of funding for local Meals on Wheels programs in 37 states, and serious cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) and Medicaid, which would increase food insecurity and hardship and steeply increase demand for Meals on Wheels services. The entire staff who oversaw SSBG have already been fired, according to reports.If Congress takes away SSBG funding and weakens other programs, seniors who rely on in-home deliveries or meals in community and senior centers to survive would receive less help as Meals on Wheels community providers would be forced to reduce services, add people to waitlists or turn seniors facing hunger away altogether. Some program operators who are already making tough choices about who to serve due to strained budgets and rising need have said it feels as though they are “playing God”.“We’re talking about lives here so it’s worrisome to me,” said Ellie Hollander, the president and CEO of Meals on Wheels America. “Some of our programs are already operating on razor-thin budgets and are pulling from their reserves. [If funding goes away], it could result in some programs having to close their doors.”In the US one in four Americans is over the age of 60 and nearly 13 million seniors are threatened by or experience hunger. Meals on Wheels America, a network of 5,000 community-based programs that feeds more than 2 million older Americans each year, has been a successful public-private partnership for more than 50 years. The Urban Institute estimates that the number of seniors in the US will more than double over the next 40 years.The Older Americans Act (OAA) nutrition program, which supports the health and wellbeing of seniors through nutrition services, is the network’s primary source of federal funding, covering 37% of what it takes to serve more than 250m meals each year. The exact mix of local, state, federal and private funding of Meals on Wheels’ thousands of on-the-ground community programs varies from provider to provider.Under the orders of the Elon Musk-led unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) and the health and human services (HHS) secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, 20,000 people at HHS have lost their jobs in recent weeks, including at least 40% of the staff at the Administration for Community Living, which coordinates federal policy on ageing and disability. Since many of those staffers helped fulfill critical functions to serving older Americans through the OAA, some Meals on Wheels programs are worried about funding disbursements, reporting data and the loss of institutional knowledge and expertise.HHS has said it will reorganize the ACL into other HHS agencies, although how that would happen is unclear. The co-chairs of the Disability and Aging Collaborative, composed of 62 member organizations that focus in part on ageing and disability, said in a recent statement: “This disruptive change threatens to increase rates of institutionalization, homelessness and long-lasting economic hardships.”Since experiencing multiple strokes that left her cognitively impaired and at risk for falls, Dierdre Mayes has relied on Meals on Wheels Yolo County to deliver meals that are the 64-year-old’s primary source of nutrition. “I’m really thriving off of the meals I get,” said Mayes, a Woodland, California, resident who also receives $20 a month in food stamps, which she uses to purchase cases of water. “The best part about it is I don’t have to go anywhere to get them.” For Mayes and other homebound older Americans, the program is a lifeline.The uncertainty around Meals on Wheels’ future is causing stress for seniors who are worried about how federal cuts, layoffs and tariffs will impact their daily deliveries. The non-profit FeedMore WNY, which serves homebound older adults in New York’s Erie and Niagara counties, said they’ve been hearing from fearful older clients as word of other recent cuts circulated in the news.Catherine Shick, the public relations manager for FeedMore WNY, said they served 4,775 unique Meals on Wheels clients last year and that demand for their feeding programs increased by 16% from 2023 to 2024, a trend they expect to continue. “Any cut to any funding has a direct impact on the individuals who rely on us for food assistance and any cuts are coming at a time when we know that food insecurity is on the rise,” she said. “We need the continued support of all levels of government, as well as the community, to be able to fulfill our mission.”In addition to delivering healthy, nutritious food, Meals on Wheels drivers, who are primarily volunteers, provide a host of other valuable services: they can look for signs of cognitive or other health changes. They can also address safety hazards in the home or provide pet support services, as well as offer crucial social connections since drivers are often the only person a senior may see in a given day or week.Deliveries have been shown to help keep seniors healthy and in their own homes and communities and out of costly institutional settings. Republicans in the House and Senate have said their goal is to reduce federal spending, but experts say cutting programs that help fund organizations such as Meals on Wheels would instead increase federal spending for healthcare and long-term care expenses for older Americans.“If people can’t stay in their own homes, they’re going to be ‘high flyers’ in hospitals and admitted prematurely into nursing homes,” said Hollander, “all of which cost taxpayers billions of dollars annually versus providing Meals on Wheels for one year to a senior for the same cost of being in the hospital for one day or 10 days in a nursing home.”Experts agree that even before the cuts, Meals on Wheels has been underfunded. Advocates and researchers say OAA hasn’t kept up with the rapid growth of the senior population, rising food costs or inflation. One in three local programs already have waiting lists with many programs already feeling stretched to their limits. For more than 60% of Meals on Wheels providers across the country, federal funding represents half or more of their total revenue, underscoring the serious damage that could be done if cuts or policy changes are made in any capacity.“It feels like a continuous slew of attacks on the programs that seniors rely on to be safe, independent and healthy in their own homes,” said Jorwic of Caring Across Generations. “Everything from cuts to Meals on Wheels to cuts to Medicaid, all these things that are being proposed and actively worked on being implemented, are a real threat to the security of aging Americans.” More

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      How ‘revenge of the Covid contrarians’ unleashed by RFK Jr puts broader vaccine advances at risk

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      The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, entered office with a pledge to tackle the US’s chronic disease epidemic and give infectious disease a “break”. In at least one of those goals, Kennedy has been expeditious.Experts said as Kennedy makes major cuts in public health in his first weeks in office, the infrastructure built to mitigate Covid-19 has become a clear target – an aim that has the dual effect of weakening immunization efforts as the US endures the largest measles outbreak since 2000.“If his goal is to undermine public health infrastructure, he’s making strides there,” said Dorit Reiss, a University of California Law School professor whose research focuses on vaccine law. “If his goal is combating chronic diseases – he’s not doing very well.”The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been characterized by upheaval since Kennedy and the billionaire Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) cumulatively axed 20,000 jobs – roughly a quarter of the 82,000-person workforce.And it appears that turmoil will continue: a leaked budget memo shows the administration poised to propose a budget cut of another $40bn, or roughly one-third of the department’s discretionary spending.Amid the cuts, attacks on Covid-19 infrastructure have proven thematic, and show the administration’s hostility toward work that once mitigated the virus. That’s included attacking promising vaccine platforms and elevating once-ostracized voices to high-level roles.“The Covid-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” a spokesperson for HHS told the Guardian in response to questions about its strategy.“HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University associate professor and infectious disease epidemiologist, calls this strategy the “revenge of the Covid contrarians”.“They’re not interested in the science, they’re interested in their conclusions and having the science bend to their will,” said Gonsalves. “They want to create a Potemkin village of their own making that looks like science but has nothing to do with science at all.”Among Kennedy’s changes: attacks on the promising platform that supported Covid-19 vaccine development, delayed approval of a Covid-19 vaccine, the clawing back of grants that provided local immunization support and studied vaccine safety, and elevating one-time critics of Covid-19 policy.“When the new administration came in, we were hearing even within the organization: ‘We can’t say Covid, we’re not allowed to say Covid,’” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (Naccho), about her members’ conversations.Freeman noted that “we kind of saw the writing on the wall a couple months ago that: ‘OK, they really don’t want anything Covid-related to be pursued any more.’ Everything Covid-related is quite honestly at risk.”In the latest change, Kennedy said this week he may remove Covid-19 shots from the childhood vaccine schedule, which would probably make the shots harder to get by limiting insurance coverage.“The recommendation for children was always dubious,” Kennedy told Fox News. Although a minority of children are vaccinated, the shots are recommended, especially for immune-compromised children.Freeman believes the desire to erase the government’s Covid legacy led to HHS’s decision to claw back $11bn in public health funds from states and localities. In effect done overnight, the clawback gave local officials only hours to lay off workers, cancel immunization clinics and even stop construction projects.“That’s why we feel like the drawback of the funding occurred: Covid,” said Freeman.A spokesperson for HHS characterized this as a savings, and said most canceled awards were for Covid-19-related work.The pullback led to the cancellation of more than 50 measles immunization clinics in Texas, where the measles outbreak has already claimed the lives of two unvaccinated children, to pilot programs such as “Text4Vax”, which sent reminders about pediatric vaccines to parents.Among the canceled grants were also programs that would seem to align with Kennedy’s rhetoric about vaccine safety – among them, a study of the safety and effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines in pregnant women in California and global Covid-19 vaccine safety monitoring in New Zealand.“If you start to take away people from health departments – the immunizers, the educators, the clinicians – through some of these other funding cuts , it disables the program naturally,” said Freeman. “You can’t put as many shots in arms.”Larger cancelled grants included a $2.25bn grant program to reduce Covid-19’s impact on the people worst affected, which had been sent to states and localities from South Dakota to Florida and the Virgin Islands to Vermont.Under Kennedy’s watch, HHS has also taken the unusual step of delaying an expected vaccine approval, reportedly under the watch of a Kennedy political appointee.The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which sits under the umbrella of HHS, delayed the expected 1 April approval of the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine. Novavax confirmed to the Guardian that its application remained on hold, and said it would have “no further comments”.Reiss said she doesn’t think “any vaccine that’s in the pipeline is going to go forward under Kennedy” or that “he will let any vaccine go far now”.Dr Tracy Hoeg, a political appointee, was reportedly involved in the decision. Hoeg also appeared as the FDA’s representative at a special advisory committee on immunizations in April, where she took the opportunity to question the efficacy of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.An HHS spokesperson told the Guardian: “The FDA’s independent review process for the Novavax vaccine, like all vaccines, is based solely on ensuring safety and efficacy, not political considerations. Any delays are a result of scientific review, not a lack of priority. It’s important to focus on the facts rather than unfounded speculation.”Scientists have also said they fear for the future of messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology – the platform that underpinned the fast development of Covid-19 vaccines and that held promise for treating and preventing a wide range of diseases.Hoeg served on Florida’s public health integrity committee, which served as a platform for Covid-19 criticism during the pandemic. At the time, it was chaired by the Florida surgeon general, Dr Joseph Ladapo, who has also sown doubt about the safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines.Hoeg could be further buttressed by insiders such as Dr Matthew Memoli, who, Kennedy said, “is going to be running Niaid [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases]”. Memoli, whom Kennedy described as “the top flu researcher at NIH”, is known for opposition to Covid-19 vaccine mandates and declined to be vaccinated. In March, Memoli sent an email to NIH grant officials requiring any grant applications that reference mRNA technology to be reported to Kennedy’s office. He also canceled government-backed studies on vaccine hesitancy.The nominee for HHS general counsel, Michael B Stuart, is also well-known for involvement in vaccine fights. Stuart, a former West Virginia lawmaker, in 2023 proposed a bill to exempt virtual public school students from vaccine requirements and allow private schools to set their own requirements, according to Stat.“Dismantling the sort of vaccine infrastructure this country relies upon – that’s been in place for several dozens and dozens of years – only impacts the chronic disease front he’s trying to ameliorate as well,” said James Hodge, a professor of law at Arizona State University and a health law expert who said he worries about the future of vaccine advisory committees. “Acquiring infectious diseases leads to chronic conditions later.”Still, some of Kennedy’s most ardent supporters and reported informal advisers, such as the former cardiologist Peter McCullough, have argued these actions don’t go far enough.“The big threat is that we still have Covid-19 vaccines on the market,” McCullough told KFF Health News. “It’s horrendous. I would not hesitate – I would just pull it. What’s he waiting for?” McCullough did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian. More

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      RFK Jr calls sugar ‘poison’ but says government probably can’t eliminate it

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      The US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr on Tuesday called sugar “poison” and recommended that Americans eat “zero” added sugar in their food, while acknowledging that the federal government was unlikely to be able to eliminate it from products.Kennedy, however, said that better labeling was needed for foods and that new government guidelines on nutrition would recommend people avoid sugar completely.The health and human services secretary also announced plans to eliminate the last eight government-approved synthetic food dyes from the US food supply within two years.Kennedy said at a press conference on Tuesday: “Sugar is poison and Americans need to know that it is poisoning us.”He added moments later: “I don’t think that we’re going to be able to eliminate sugar, but I think what we need to do, probably, is give Americans knowledge about how much sugar is in their products, and also, with the new nutrition guidelines, we’ll give them a very clear idea about how much sugar they should be using, which is zero.”The secretary said the public is under-informed about food.“Americans don’t know what they’re eating. We’re going to start informing Americans about what they’re eating,” he said.Meanwhile, he did not talk about vaccines or vaccinations at the press conference, but it was reported by Politico, citing sources familiar with departmental discussions, that Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, was considering removing the Covid-19 shot from the official federal list of recommended inoculations for children.The outlet quoted an HHS spokesperson as saying a final decision on whether to continue recommending coronavirus vaccines for children had not been made.In the food discussions at the press conference, Kennedy talked about various dyes. Health advocates have called for the removal of artificial and petroleum-based dyes from foods, with some studies suggesting a link to neurobehavioral problems, including hyperactivity and attention issues, in some children, although a conclusive link is still contested.The Biden administration previously moved to ban Red No 3 food dye, citing cancer risks in animal studies. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has consistently maintained that the approved dyes are safe.Following Biden’s directive, Red No 3 must be removed from foods by 2027 and from medications by 2028. Kennedy aims to remove the remaining petroleum-based dyes, health officials said.“American children have increasingly been living in a toxic soup of synthetic chemicals,” the FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, said. “These steps that we are taking means that the FDA is effectively removing all petroleum based food dyes from the US food supply.”The move could mark a major step in Kennedy’s broader campaign against potentially harmful food additives. But some are still questioning how successful this campaign will be, especially regarding the Trump administration’s anti-regulatory stance towards industry giants.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen asked whether a formal agreement with food industry heads had been made, Kennedy responded: “I would say we don’t have an agreement. We have an understanding.”An enforcement strategy or a clear timeline for the upcoming ban remains unclear, though Makary said that the administration aims to eliminate the dyes “by the end of next year”.Kennedy questioned during the conference how the US would maintain world leadership “with such a sick population”, going on to refer to “all these autoimmune diseases” and “these exotic diseases”. He also expressed concern that the majority of American children cannot qualify for military service with certain conditions.He went on to speak about the apparent rise in several types of diseases and disorders, which he believes could be possibly linked to the use of food dyes or other additives. “I never knew anybody with a peanut allergy,” he said, referring to when he was a child. “I never knew anybody with a food allergy. Why do five of my seven kids have allergies?”The FDA has approved 36 food dyes for use in the US, nine of which are artificial and made from petroleum. The others are derived from natural sources, such as vegetables. More

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      US army to test enlisted men and women with same physical standards

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      The US army unveiled plans on Monday to require a fitness test with identical physical standards for men and women in combat positions after the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered the elimination of gender-based fitness requirements in frontline roles.The revamped army fitness test, which replaces the combat fitness test, will be “sex-neutral” and force female soldiers in 21 combat specialties to meet the same benchmarks as men – a change expected to drastically cut the number of women qualifying for these positions.“The five-event AFT is designed to enhance Soldier fitness, improve warfighting readiness, and increase the lethality of the force,” the army said in a press release.Gone is the “standing power throw” or “ball yeet”, replaced with a streamlined assessment of deadlifts, push-ups, planks, a two-mile run and a sprint-drag-carry exercise. For younger women, the standards jump significantly – deadlifting 140lb instead of 120, and shaving nearly 90 seconds off required run times.The new policy appears to contradict findings from a 2017 study of US army soldiers that concluded “gaps in cardiorespiratory and muscular performances between men and women should be addressed through targeted physical training programs that aim to minimize physiological differences” rather than applying identical standards.A 2022 Rand Corporation study also found that women and older service members were failing the previous fitness test “at significantly higher rates than men and younger troops”, which raises questions about the feasibility of the new standardized requirements.Combat soldiers must now score “a minimum of 60 points per event and an overall minimum score of 350” under the sex-neutral standards, according to the army’s press release. Active-duty troops have until January 2026 to meet requirements, while national guard and reserve members have until June 2026.Hegseth has previously said that he does not think women should be allowed to serve in combat roles, though he later moderated his stance. The former Fox News host wrote in a recent book that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men” and that mothers were needed “but not in the military, especially in combat units”.Soldiers who fail to meet the new standards twice consecutively face potential removal from the army or, according to Sgt Maj Christopher Mullinax, would be required to transfer to non-combat roles, which will continue using sex- and age-based scoring.The army will begin rolling out the changes on 1 June, with full implementation guidelines expected in May. More

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      Pro baseball player Tarik El-Abour is everything RFK Jr says he can’t be

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      When Tarik El-Abour was in middle school, his teacher asked him and his classmates a simple question. What do you want to be when you grow up? When it was time for him to answer, El-Abour gave a reply that thousands of children have said before. He wanted to be a baseball player. But his teacher shot back with something less than encouraging: “You’d better have a Plan B.” El-Abour, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, remained undeterred. Rather than listening to his pessimistic instructor, he distanced himself from her.He thought that if he continued to talk to her, she might convince him he was unable to achieve his goal. In the end, he was right, and the teacher was wrong. El-Abour grew up to become a baseball player after receiving a degree in business administration from Bristol University in California. He first played professionally in the Empire League, where he was named rookie of the year in 2016 and was an All-Star in 2017. Then, in 2018, he signed a deal with the Kansas City Royals, a franchise just three years removed from winning the World Series. He played outfield in the minor leagues during the 2018 season, flourishing under the mentorship of JD Nichols of World Wide Baseball Prospects and Reggie Sanders of the Royals, becoming the first recorded autistic player in MLB history.All of this will be news to the US health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who said earlier this month that: “Autism destroys families, and more importantly, it destroys our greatest resource, which is our children … These are kids who will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.”El-Abour chooses to let Kennedy’s comments slide off him.“When it comes to politics,” the 32-year-old tells the Guardian, “I’m so used to crazy stuff being said by people. I’m just in a spot where it doesn’t really get to me. I get that’s just how some things are. The way I look at it, the only things I care about are the things I have control over – like baseball and those I care about most.”El-Abour, who is now playing in the Zone 22 scouting league in Los Angeles and hoping for another shot at the majors, says he doesn’t know what it’s like not to be autistic. But he explains that the way his brain works helps him focus and embrace repetition – both valuable qualities for a ballplayer. “Baseball requires a lot of repetition to be good at it,” he says. “And people with autism tend to be repetitive. I guess that’s maybe where it benefits me.”Kennedy, a fan of doing his own research, may want to note that El-Abour is not the only autistic professional athlete in the US. Tony Snell, who also has two autistic sons, was diagnosed with autism. And he had a nine-year NBA career, playing on several teams, including the Chicago Bulls and New Orleans Pelicans. “Learning I have [autism] helped me understand my whole life,” said Snell in a recent interview. “This is why I am the way I am.” Joe Barksdale, who revealed in 2022 that he was diagnosed with autism, played eight years in the NFL. And Nascar driver Armani Williams also stated publicly he is autistic. Of course, there are more autistic athletes coming up in the ranks, too.“It was a surprise when the [Kennedy] news came out last week,” El-Abour’s mother, Nadia, tells the Guardian. “I wanted to post something then Tarik said, ‘No, the [media] will take care of it.’ Tarik started laughing. He goes, ‘Oh, wow, why did he [Kennedy] choose baseball?’”She says that, unlike some politicians today, her son is very logical. Many autistic people, she explains, don’t attach emotion to the truth. Something simply either is true or it isn’t. “They can’t understand why we don’t accept the truth,” Nadia says. It’s the same reasoning El-Abour employed when flouting his middle school teacher’s “Plan B” idea. In fact, he bristled at it so much that he didn’t even want to be around the energy of the school building, often crossing the street rather than walk near it.“He doesn’t see obstacles,” Nadia says of her son. “He doesn’t think of ‘I can’t.’ He just thinks, ‘How … how can I do that?’”El-Abour, who was non-verbal until he was about six years old, started playing baseball later in life, around 10 years old. At first, he was unsure if he liked the game, which his father signed him up for. But when he got into the batter’s box, something happened. He even gave up his spot as pitcher on the team because he was told pitchers don’t bat in the pros. From then on, he arranged his whole life around things that would make him be a better player. He painted an X on the garage to practice his throwing accuracy. He took fly balls into the night with his coaches. Rather than, as Kennedy would have us believe, baseball was something unattainable for El-Abour, it helped him blossom.Indeed, El-Abour’s life is a far cry from the picture Kennedy Jr and others have tried to paint. But despite any number of ignorant comments, El-Abour says he’s grateful for who he is and proud of what he’s achieved so far in his life. He says “it’s an honor” that people ask him about his autism and he’s glad he can add to the conversation. “It’s very humbling,” El-Abour says, “to be possibly making an impact. Baseball really gave me something that I enjoy and love doing. It always gives me something to be motivated for and to be better at each day throughout my life. And that’s really good.” More