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      in US Politics

      My child has autism. Trump and RFK Jr linking it to vaccines scares parents like me

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      It was a moment when Donald Trump’s larger-than-life presence on the global stage became unexpectedly personal.Near the end of his one-hour, 40-minute speech to a joint session of Congress on 4 March, the US president diverted from his favoured themes of a new golden age of American greatness and grievances against his adversaries to address a more unlikely topic: autism.The president drew his audience’s attention to Robert F Kennedy Jr, his controversial, newly confirmed choice as health secretary, and charged him with one overarching responsibility.“Not long ago, you can’t even believe these numbers – one in 10,000 children had autism,” Trump intoned. “Now it’s one in 36. There’s something wrong. One in 36 think of that. So we’re going to find out what it is. And there’s nobody better than Bobby.“Good luck. It’s a very important job.”It was not the first time that Trump had waded into the controversy swirling around autism – a neurodivergent condition affecting an estimated 75 million people worldwide. Nor was it the first occasion that he had touted Kennedy’s credentials as being able to tackle it.But the high symbolism of the setting brought home to me, a watching journalist, with sobering clarity that a life-changing decision, taken for the most pressing of family reasons, had taken on unforeseen contours.Just over two years ago, my wife and I had moved to the United States so that we could better address the needs of our son, who had been diagnosed with autism just before his third birthday. We had gradually despaired of finding a practical solution in the Czech capital of Prague, where we previously lived, and where state-of-the-art therapeutic remedies were still fledgling works in progress.America, by contrast, seemed to be a land of possibility and innovative approaches and to offer a more amenable environment to our circumstances – and had the added attraction that we all held US citizenship.In the period since our arrival, we found progress uneven, but engaged an outstanding therapist who made up for our difficulties navigating the Maryland state education system. I shifted my career from one centered in Europe, to covering US politics – and the second Trump administration.Now here – in the highest shrine of US democracy – was the graphically vivid figure of Trump digressing from his usual weaving script to elevate the very topic that had brought us to America’s shores to a national priority.It was not, to put it mildly, exactly what we had envisioned.The uptick in the autism trend Trump cited was exaggerated; while the most recent US autism statistics, recorded in 2020, did indeed record one in 36 children in the US having received a diagnosis of autism, the jump was less dramatic than he described – comparing with a rate of one in 150 in 2000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Nevertheless, the undoubted spike in instances of the condition meant that his proclaimed zeal to find a cause resonated with many, us included.The catch lay in his choice of Kennedy, who has declared that autism is caused by vaccines – a scientifically baseless theory which Trump himself has previously indulged – as the lead figure in a national crusade to discover a cause.I spoke with other parents of children with autism, who used a range of pejorative adjectives to deride this conviction; among them “dangerous”, “scary”, “batshit crazy”, “despicable” and “disgusting”.Kennedy’s views carry weight which, experts fear, will be lent still greater authority by his new health portfolio. The CDC is reportedly now planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism.“Were I the father of a child with autism, I would be really angry at the anti-vaccine community for taking this story hostage and for diverting resources and attention away from the real cause, or causes, of autism,” said Paul Offit, a pediatrician specialising in immunology and author of the 2008 book Autism’s False Prophets, which rebutted the alleged links between the condition and vaccines.“There’s financial or emotional burdens that make it hard enough for parents, but to have this offered as a reason for why a child has autism is just spurious and in some ways malicious, because I think it puts the burden on the parent.”Belief in the alleged connection between vaccinations and autism gained traction after a 1998 study conducted by a British physician, Andrew Wakefield, and published in the Lancet asserted a causal link with the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine. The paper ignited a firestorm of controversy in Britain, with the then prime minister, Tony Blair, pressured to say whether his baby son had been administered the MMR shot.But research underpinning the finding was later debunked as fraudulent, leading to the Lancet retracting the paper and Wakefield being struck off the UK medical register. Multiple subsequent studies have found no connection between the vaccine and autism.Despite the countervailing evidence, suspicions persisted – fuelled in no small part by Kennedy himself, who has shown himself unmoved in the face of challenge.My personal interest in Kennedy and his views on vaccines was piqued after hearing a 2023 podcast interview with the New Yorker. He was adamant under questioning from the magazine’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, who – disclosing himself as the parent of a child with “quite severe” autism – asked if he had second thoughts about “slinging around theories … that don’t have any great credibility among scientists”.“I’ve read the science on autism and I can tell you … If it didn’t come from the vaccines, then where is it coming from?” Kennedy responded.Scientists say there are multiple potential answers to that question, including genetics, drugs taken during pregnancy, age of conception – albeit none giving a definitive explanation.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“When you hear about autism and its causes, the first thing people think is vaccines, which is the one thing you can say it’s not,” Offit said.Caught in the crossfire of this conflict between science and dogma are parents struggling to cope with a condition whose manifestations can be maddening, challenging and bewildering.Autism is a wide spectrum condition and children with it come in a surprising variety of types. Some – like my son – are functional, verbal and teachable, with aspects of high intelligence; others are non-verbal and may have severe intellectual disabilities; many others may fall somewhere in between.“If you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism,” goes the refrain among many specialists.Common to all, however, are atypical behaviours that for the parents, are life-changing and force them to make painful adaptations, sometimes at high financial cost.A complaint frequently heard about Kennedy’s views is that they heap stigmatisation on their children and unwarranted blame on the parents.“It puts a stigma on our children that their parents did something wrong when they were pregnant with them, and thus it’s the parents fault,” said Davina Kleid, 38, an executive assistant in a real estate development company in Maryland, whose nine-year-old daughter has autism.Kleid feared Kennedy’s views have the potential to unleash an eventual crackdown conjuring scenes resembling The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s novel dystopian novel depicting a bleak patriarchal future and female subjugation.“Who knows? Maybe I could be arrested for having a child on the spectrum, because they’re going to say that I did something to purposely cause her to have this condition,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with my child. It’s how she was born. I’m not ashamed of it, and I don’t think anyone should be ashamed of it.”Madeline, a publisher from Maryland who requested that her real name not be disclosed, said Kennedy’s views amounted to a disparagement of her 24-year-old son, who was born at the height of the MMR controversy arising from the Wakefield paper but who showed signs of developmental delay before being vaccinated.“It is just insulting that people would think that it would be better to get measles or mumps or pertussis or whooping cough than to have autism,” she said. “And RFK Jr has said as much. It’s like this is worse than getting these terrible, life-threatening diseases.”Lux Blakthorne, 33, a professional gardener living in Chester county, Pennsylvania, said fears for the future over her non-verbal, nine-year-old autistic son, Kai, had prompted her to make plans to emigrate to Germany, the country of her ex-husband’s birth and where she said provisions for autism had made great strides.The breaking point, she said, would be cuts to Medicaid, the public healthcare system that Kennedy oversees and which pays for Kai’s daily needs including education at a special private facility.An added factor is a recent White House executive order banning puberty blocking medication for those under 18, a measure aimed at stymying gender-affirming care for transgender youth but which, Blakthorne says, would prevent her trying to mitigate harmful autism-related behaviour that is likely to be exacerbated by the onset of puberty.“I think RFK sees disabilities as a problem that needs to be fixed,” said Blakthorne. “He has a dangerous belief system, and it’s not science- or fact-based.”Yet amid the negativity, the Autism Science Foundation, a research group, says Kennedy has a unique opportunity to discover its causes.“Many of us in the autism community give RFK credit for wanting to study the causes of autism,” said Alison Singer, the foundation’s president and the mother of a daughter with autism.“What would be very positive is if as health secretary, he can declare profound autism as a national public health emergency,” she said.“That would open up a variety of actions he could take, like making additional grants, entering into new contracts [and] really focusing funding on investigating the causes of autism, treatments and prevention.” More

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      in US Politics

      Schools in Puerto Rico are bracing for Trump cuts after gains made during the Biden years

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      Maraida Caraballo Martínez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and the principal of the elementary school Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C Rodriguez for the past seven. She never knows how much money her school in Yabucoa will receive from the government each year because it isn’t based on the number of children enrolled. One year she got $36,000; another year, it was $12,000.But during the Biden administration, Caraballo noticed a big change. Due to an infusion of federal dollars into the island’s education system, Caraballo received a $250,000 grant, an unprecedented amount of money. She used it to buy books and computers for the library, whiteboards and printers for classrooms, to beef up a robotics program and build a multipurpose sports court for her students. “It meant a huge difference for the school,” Caraballo said.Yabucoa, a small town in south-east Puerto Rico, was hard-hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this school community, like hundreds of others in Puerto Rico, has experienced near-constant disruption since then. A series of natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and landslides, followed by the pandemic, has pounded the island and interrupted learning. There has also been constant churn of local education secretaries – seven in the past eight years. The Puerto Rican education system – the seventh-largest school district in the United States – has been made more vulnerable by the island’s overwhelming debt, mass emigration and a compromised power grid.Under Joe Biden, there were tentative gains, buttressed by billions of dollars and sustained personal attention from top federal education officials, many experts and educators on the island said. Now they worry that it will all be dismantled with the change in the White House and Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate the US Department of Education. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the US territory, having reportedly said that it was “dirty and the people were poor”. During his first term, he withheld billions of dollars in federal aid after Hurricane Maria and has suggested selling the island or swapping it for Greenland.View image in fullscreenA recent executive order to make English the official language has worried people on the island, where only one in five people speak fluent English, and Spanish is the medium of instruction in schools.Trump has already made massive cuts to the US Department of Education and its staff, which will have widespread implications across the island. Even if federal funds – which last year made up more than two-thirds of funding for the Puerto Rican department of education (PRDE) – were transferred directly to the local government, it would probably lead to worse outcomes for the most vulnerable children, say educators and policymakers. The PRDE has historically been plagued by political interference, widespread bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.And the local education department is not as technologically advanced as other state education departments, nor as able to disseminate best practices. For example, Puerto Rico does not have a “per pupil formula”, a calculation commonly used on the mainland to determine the amount of money each student receives for their education. Robert Mujica is the executive director of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board, first convened under Barack Obama in 2016 to deal with the island’s financial morass. Mujica said Puerto Rico’s current allocation of education funds was opaque. “How the funds are distributed is perceived as a political process,” he said. “There’s no transparency, and there’s no clarity.”In 2021, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. “For too long, Puerto Rico’s students and educators were abandoned,” he said. During his tenure, Cardona signed off on almost $6bn in federal dollars for the island’s educational system, leading to historic teacher pay increases, funding for after-school tutoring programs, the hiring of hundreds of school mental health professionals and a pilot program to decentralize the PRDE.Cardona also designated a senior adviser, Chris Soto, to be his point person for the island’s education system to underscore the federal commitment. During nearly four years in office, Soto made more than 50 trips to the island. Carlos Rodríguez Silvestre, the executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a non-profit that has led children’s literacy efforts on the island, said the level of respect and sustained interest felt like a partnership, not a top-down mandate. “I’ve never seen that kind of attention to education in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Soto practically lived on the island.”Soto also worked closely with Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the teachers union, Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, or AMPR, which resulted in a deal in which educators received $1,000 more a month than their base salary, a nearly 30% increase for the average teacher. “It was the largest salary increase in the history of teachers in Puerto Rico,” Bonilla said, though even with the increase, teachers here still make far less money than their mainland counterparts.One of the biggest complaints Soto said he heard was how rigid and bureaucratic the Puerto Rico department of education was, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control. The education agency – the largest unit of government on the island, with the most employees and the biggest budget – was set up so that the central office had to sign off on everything. So Soto created and oversaw a pilot program in Ponce, a region on the island’s southern coast, focusing on decentralization.For the first time, the local community elected an advisory board of education, and superintendent candidates had to apply rather than be appointed, Soto said. The superintendent was given the authority to sign off on budget requests directly rather than sending them through officials in San Juan, as well as the flexibility to spend money in the region based on individual schools’ needs. The pilot project also focused on increasing efficiency. For example, children with disabilities are now evaluated at their schools rather than having to visit a special center.But already there are plans to undo Cardona’s signature effort in Ponce. The island’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican and a Trump supporter. The popular secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, returned earlier this year to head the department after leading it from April 2021 to July 2023 when the governor unexpectedly asked him to resign – not an unusual occurrence within the island’s government, where political appointments can end suddenly and with little public debate. He said that the program would not continue in its current form.“The pilot isn’t really effective,” Ramos said, noting that politics can influence spending decisions not only at the central level but at the regional level as well. “We want to have some controls.” He also said expanding the effort across the island would cost tens of millions of dollars. Instead, Ramos said, he was looking at more limited approaches to decentralization, around some human resource and procurement functions. He said he was also exploring a per-pupil funding formula for Puerto Rico and looking at lessons from other large school districts such as New York City and Hawaii.While education has been the largest budget item on the island for years, Puerto Rico still spends far less than any of the 50 states on each student: $9,500 per student, compared with an average of $18,600 in the states.The US Department of Education, which supplements local and state funding for students in poverty and with disabilities, plays an outsized role in Puerto Rico schools. On the island, 55% of children live below the poverty line and 35% of students are in special education. In total, during fiscal year 2024, more than 68% of the education budget on the island came from federal funding, compared with 11% in US states. The department also administers Pell grants for low-income students; about 72% of Puerto Rican students apply.Linda McMahon, Trump’s new education secretary, has reportedly said that the government will continue to meet its “statutory obligations” to students even as the department shuts down or transfers some operations and lays off staff. The US Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.Some say the Biden administration’s pouring billions of dollars into a troubled education system with little accountability has created unrealistic expectations and there’s no plan for what happens after money is spent. Mujica, the executive director of the oversight board, said the infusion of funds postponed tough decisions by the Puerto Rican government. “When you have so much money, it papers over a lot of problems. You didn’t have to deal with some of the challenges that are fundamental to the system.” And, he said, there was little discussion of what happens when that money runs out. “How are you going to bridge that gap? Either those programs go away, or we’re going to have to find the funding for them,” Mujica said.Puerto Rico is one of the most educationally impoverished regions, with academic outcomes well below the mainland’s. On the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a test that US students take, just 2% of fourth-graders in Puerto Rico were proficient, and 0% of eighth-graders were. Puerto Rican students don’t take the NAEP for reading because they learn in Spanish, not English, though results shared by Ramos at a press conference in 2022 showed only 1% of third-graders were reading at grade level.There are some encouraging efforts. Flamboyan Foundation, the non-profit in Puerto Rico, has been leading an islandwide coalition of 70 partners to improve literacy from kindergarten through the third grade (K-3), including through professional development. Teacher training through the territory’s education department has often been spotty or optional.The organization now works closely with the University of Puerto Rico and, as part of that effort, oversees spending of $3m in literacy training. Approximately 1,500 or a third of Puerto Rico’s K-5 teachers have undergone the rigorous training. That effort will continue, according to Ramos, who called it “very effective”.A new reading test for first- through third-graders the non-profit helped design showed that between the 2023 and 2024 school years, most children were below grade level but made growth in every grade. “But we still have a long way to go so that this data can get to teachers in a timely manner and in a way that they can actually act on it,” Silvestre said.Kristin Ehrgood, Flamboyan Foundation’s CEO, said it was too soon to see dramatic gains. “It’s really hard to see a ton of positive outcomes in such a short period of time with significant distrust that has been built over years,” she said. She said they weren’t sure how the Trump administration may work with or fund Puerto Rico’s education system but that the Biden administration had built a lot of goodwill. “There is a lot of opportunity that could be built on, if a new administration chooses to do that,” she said.Another hopeful sign is that the oversight board, which was widely protested against when it was formed, has cut the island’s debt from $73bn to $31bn. And last year board members increased education spending by 3%. Mujica said the board was focused on making sure that any investment translates into improved outcomes for students: “Our view is resources have to go into the classroom,” he said.Ramos said he met McMahon, the new US secretary of education, in Washington DC, and that they had a “pleasant conversation”. “She knows about Puerto Rico, she’s concerned about Puerto Rico, and she demonstrated full support in the Puerto Rico mission,” he said. He said McMahon wanted PRDE to offer more bilingual classes, to expose more students to English. Whether there will be changes in funding or anything else remains to be seen. “We have to look at what happens in the next few weeks and months and how that vision and policy could affect Puerto Rico,” Ramos said.Ramos was well-liked by educators during his first stint as education secretary. He will also have a lot of decisions to make, including whether to expand public charter schools and close down traditional public schools as the island’s public school enrollment continues to decline precipitously. In the past, both those issues led to fierce and widespread protests.Soto says he’s realistic about the incoming administration having “different views, both ideologically and policy-wise”, but he’s hopeful the people of Puerto Rico won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. “Somebody said: ‘You guys took the genie out of the bottle and it’s going to be hard to put that back’ as it relates to a student-centered school system,” Soto said.Principal Caraballo’s small school of 150 students and 14 teachers has been slated for closure three times already, though each time it has been spared, partly thanks to community support. She’s hopeful that Ramos, with whom she’s worked previously, will turn things around. “He knows the education system,” she said. “He’s a brilliant person, open to listen.”But the long hours of the past several years have taken a toll on her. She is routinely in school from 6.30am to 6.30pm. “You come in when it’s dark and you leave when it’s dark,” she said.She wants to retire but can’t afford to. After pension plans were frozen, Caraballo will receive only 50% of her salary at retirement, $2,195 a month. She is entitled to social security benefits, but it isn’t enough to make up for the lost pension. “Who can live with $2,000 in one month? Nobody. It’s too hard. And my house still needs 12 years more to pay,” she said.This story was produced by Guardian partner the Hechinger Report, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education More

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      in US Politics

      ‘There was no place for me in American society’: an ex-Black Panther cub speaks out

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      Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, Guardian Documentaries has released a short film about the life and legacy of the Black Panthers with a focus on the group’s children. It was released alongside a Long Read by Ed Pilkington in the US on the wider group. I spoke to one of those cubs in the film, Ericka Abram, about her childhood within the activist community in the 1970s, and how her life was shaped by the experience. But first, the weekly roundup.‘I lived in a protected Panther bubble’View image in fullscreenThe first thing I notice about Ericka is that she is deliberate in her articulation and her responses are meticulously considered. She is also warm and quick-witted, with a flair for a killer line. She will not argue with people online about Donald Trump, she says, because it’s a waste of time to engage with a “bot, a baby or a bigot”.Ericka is the daughter of Elaine Brown, a former chair of the Black Panther party, and Raymond Hewitt, one of its leaders. She spent her early years in Oakland, California, and the Black Panther party she grew up in was not only a political organisation, but also a social one. The cubs lived in dormitories and had their own school. At weekends, they could return to a home where adult members of the party lived together and played an equal role in their care – “comrade moms” is how she describes the women she lived with.Ericka had no idea her childhood was anything out of the ordinary. Even though reporters showed up at their schools, and she had seen her mother and Huey Newton, the co-founder of the Black Panthers, on television, she did not have a sense of how outsiders perceived the party. I ask her if she was aware of the risks involved for her family and the wider network. “It just felt like family,” she says. Despite this, she shares a chilling story about her mother’s bodyguard stopping a seven-year-old Ericka from opening the door of their house and rebuking her, because he was the first person who should walk out, in case someone shoots.The full picture did not start to become clear until she was in high school, years after her mother left the party and took Ericka with her. She recalls someone once telling her: “Your mother is the only woman in US history to lead a paramilitary organisation.” Ericka says it was “strange” to hear her mum being described like that.She recalls a community that was deeply activist but also, perhaps counterintuitively, apolitical. Ericka tells me it often shocks people that she not only had no insights on the internal politics of the Black Panthers, but she had almost no idea what the party actually was. “The Black Panther party and the reasons it existed were unknown to me. [This is] because I wasn’t suffering racism or sexism; I lived in a protected Panther bubble.” The group participated in boycotts with farmworkers, who successfully secured better working conditions and union rights, and Ericka “hated” that party members couldn’t eat grapes and things she thought were delicious. But the boycotts were explained to her in such a way that she grasped that there were overlords who needed to be forced to play fair. She says from an early age she understood capitalism as synonymous with greed.View image in fullscreenLeaving that bubble was a sharp adjustment. When Ericka was eight her mother left the party and moved to Los Angeles, and the experience of attending a non-Black Panther school for the first time was full of conflict. “I had fights frequently – arguments with my teachers – most of it was about injustice. One teacher put me out of class because I said Australia was founded by prisoners and bigots or something like that. I was in seventh grade.” Another time she was ejected from class for sitting quietly during the pledge of allegiance. “I might not have understood the values that were raising me, but as soon as I was removed from them I needed them most,” she says.I ask how she adjusted to living in the mainstream. Her answer is unequivocal: “There was no place for me in American society.” That might have led to her finding refuge in drugs, says Ericka, who started using cocaine when she was 15. “I was trying to medicate a pain I didn’t understand. And living a life I hadn’t any intention of living.” As a child, she had assumed she would one day become a Black Panther. When that life did not come to pass, a profound sense of effacement took hold. “I developed this idea that unless I die for the people, my life was worthless,” she says. Growing up in an organisation with such a clear purpose raised the hurdle so high that one may as well not try to scale it. That’s what comes “from being raised by people who knew what they were willing to die for”, she says.I suggest that she is describing a sort of nihilism and erasure. Well, yes, is her answer. Ericka has always believed that individuals do not matter. “We were raised to believe we were precious – but we were precious for a purpose. I went to school with a kid called Bullet. I mean, there’s no pressure there.” Ericka says at times she felt she did not live up to expectations. As a teenager “I felt I had failed my mother,” she admits casually. I stop her. Why? “Because when we left [the Black Panther party] there was nothing to protect us from America. I thought I could protect her but I didn’t understand what that meant.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWith such a legacy, I wonder if she harbours any resentment towards her mother, or indeed that generation of Black Panther parents, for not preparing their children for life outside the party? “No,” she says, before I finish the question. “I didn’t feel resentment. But I remember I was about to start my sophomore year when Huey Newton was killed. I felt so alone. And I realised that I wasn’t mourning his death but that, even at the age of 19, some part of me thought that as long as he was alive, someone would still come and tell me what to do.” As she holds back tears, there is such plaintiveness and loss in her voice. For a moment, she is again that 19-year-old faced with figuring life out on her own.And it feels as if she has. Ericka’s sense of failure has been replaced by an understanding that what the Black Panthers signed up to was something exceptional. She refuses to call herself a cub, because a cub grows up to be a Panther. And she is not that. “They really did promise their lives to an ideal,” she says.The values she grew up with are serving her well during a tumultuous time in US political history. “I know that I see the world in a unique way,” Ericka says when I ask how the Black Panthers shaped her life. She understands now that the difference between “activists and revolutionaries is what you are willing to risk” – and that without solidarity, nothing can be achieved. The Black Panthers were not just seeking racial equality but interconnection between all who are suffering the depredations of state and capital. There is in Ericka a clear understanding that what it takes to stabilise politics in a country roiled by a second Trump administration is a combination of empathy but also resolve – action guided by love.The Black Panther Cubs: When the Revolution Doesn’t Come is out now. For more on this story read Ed Pilkington’s in-depth essay, here. And for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the Guardian’s latest films as they release, sign up here to the Guardian Documentaries newsletter.To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here. More

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      Hegseth suggests judge who blocked trans troops ban abused her power

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, joined the mounting criticism of federal judges by Donald Trump and others in his administration on Saturday, mocking the judge who blocked a ban on transgender troops in the US military and suggesting she had exceeded her authority.The US district judge Ana Reyes in Washington ruled that Trump’s 27 January executive order, one of several issued by the Republican president targeting legal rights for transgender Americans, likely violated the US constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.Hegseth in a post on social media mockingly called the judge “Commander Reyes” and suggested she was abusing her power by making decisions about warfare.“Since ‘Judge’ Reyes is now a top military planner, she/they can report to Fort Benning at 0600 to instruct our Army Rangers on how to execute High Value Target Raids,” Hegseth wrote. “After that, Commander Reyes can dispatch to Fort Bragg to train our Green Berets on counterinsurgency warfare.”Reyes was appointed by the Democratic former president Joe Biden. There have been rising tensions between Trump’s administration and members of the federal judiciary who have issued rulings impeding some of Trump’s actions since he returned to office in January, and rising concern about the safety of judges.Trump, his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, the attorney general Pam Bondi and other administration officials have assailed judges in recent weeks. For instance, Trump on Tuesday called for the impeachment of the judge presiding over a legal challenge to deportation flights, calling him a “Radical Left Lunatic” and a “troublemaker and agitator” – prompting the US supreme court chief justice to issue a rare rebuke of the president.Federal courts are hearing more than 100 lawsuits challenging various initiatives by Trump and his administration, with some judges imposing nationwide injunctions to block policies, such as his move to curtail automatic birthright citizenship.Hegseth, a military veteran and former Fox News television host, has made culture war issues such as banning transgender troops and abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in the US military a top priority.After Hegseth took over the Pentagon, Trump also relieved the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, General CQ Brown, who is Black, and the Navy’s top admiral, who was the first woman to hold the position. Hegseth had previously questioned whether Brown only got the job because he was Black.While Trump and Hegseth have broad authority to relieve US military officers, their efforts to ban transgender service members have triggered numerous lawsuits.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe military said on 11 February it would no longer allow transgender individuals to join the military and would stop performing or facilitating medical procedures associated with gender transition for service members. Later that month, the military said it would begin expelling transgender members.Plaintiffs in the lawsuit before Reyes argued the order was illegal, pointing to a 2020 US supreme court ruling that found that employment discrimination against transgender people is a form of illegal sex discrimination.Lawyers for the administration have argued in court that the military is entitled to bar people with certain conditions that make them unsuitable for service, also including bipolar disorder and eating disorders. At a 12 March hearing, they told Reyes she should defer to the judgment of the current administration that transgender people are not fit for service. More

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      in US Politics

      What is the US Department of Education and what does it do?

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      Donald Trump has taken the overwhelming step of undoing the Department of Education on Thursday by signing an executive order to dismantle the agency in charge of the country’s national education policy.With the stroke of a pen, Trump fulfills a campaign promise he made all the way back in 2016.What is the Department of Education?The Department of Education is a cabinet-level agency created by Jimmy Carter in 1979 to oversee national education policy and administer federal assistance programs for schools across the country.The department manages a budget of approximately $268bn and employs about 4,400 staff members. Its core responsibilities have included distributing federal financial aid for education, collecting data on the US’s schools, identifying major educational issues and enforcing federal education laws prohibiting discrimination and implementing congressional education legislation.Among its most significant functions is administering federal student aid programs, providing billions in grants, work-study funds and loans to more than 13 million students. The agency also oversees programs addressing special education, English-language acquisition and education for disadvantaged students.Critics have long questioned the need for the department, arguing education should remain entirely under state and local control, while its supporters maintain it plays a crucial role in protecting educational equity and providing much-needed federal backing to schools serving vulnerable populations.Can Trump legally eliminate a government agency?Scrapping an entire department would require congressional approval – something that conservatives seeking to get rid of the education department have failed to do for decades.No president has ever successfully closed a cabinet-level agency enshrined in law before. And the constitutional separation of powers means the president’s executive authority alone isn’t sufficient to close the agency by the stroke of his pen.The White House has acknowledged this limitation, with administration officials confirming they don’t have the necessary votes in Congress to eliminate the department completely.So instead, Trump’s executive order would essentially direct the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure”, according to administration officials, while working within existing executive branch powers. This could include reorganizing certain functions, appointing leadership aligned with the aggressive drawing-down goal and potentially returning specific authorities to states where federal law permits.What does the executive order mean for American students?The mass weakening of the agency will undoubtedly create significant uncertainty for America’s 50 million public school students and their families, with impacts varying widely depending on how the directive is implemented.In the immediate term, most students will probably see little change to their daily educational experience, as schools primarily operate under state and local control and budgets for the year are already set. However, the long-term implications could be substantial if federal education programs are modified or reduced.Shuttering the department puts marginalized students most at risk, experts say. Since federal programs support special education, English-language learners and disadvantaged students, they face the brunt of the impact. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (Idea), which provides protections for students with disabilities, is federally enforced through the department.What happens to student loans?There is significant uncertainty for the federal student loan system, which currently manages approximately $1.69tn in outstanding debt for more than 43 million Americans.While the White House has indicated functions such as student loans will continue, any disruption to the department’s distribution of grants, work-study funds and loans could affect the more than 19 million college students in the United States.There are questions about which department might oversee these operations, but earlier this month, Trump suggested transferring loan management to either the treasury department, commerce department or the small business administration next. The treasury department may be the most likely choice.Borrowers currently in repayment are unlikely to see immediate changes to their payment requirements or loan terms, but may face uncertainty about where to direct questions and how to navigate repayment options if administrative responsibilities shift. But the executive order’s impact on new student loans and financial aid processing for incoming college students remains unclear. More

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      ‘It’s back to drug rationing’: the end of HIV was in sight. Then came the cuts

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      This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.Many fell under the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) programme, which has been the backbone of global efforts to tackle HIV and Aids, investing more than $110bn (£85bn) since it was founded in 2003 and credited with saving 26 million lives and preventing millions more new infections. In some African countries it covered almost all HIV spending.View image in fullscreenThere is a risk, says Lewin, director of Melbourne University’s Institute for Infection and Immunity and past president of the International Aids Society, of “dramatic increases in infections, dramatic increases in death and a real loss of decades of advances”.There is no official public list of which contracts have been cancelled, and which remain. It appears that virtually no HIV-prevention programmes funded by the US are still in operation, save a handful principally providing drugs to stop pregnant women passing on the infection to their babies. Countries report disruption to the most basic measures, such as condom distribution.Some treatment programmes have been spared, but not those whose focus conflicted with the Trump administration’s war on “gender ideology” or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), such as those working with transgender communities. Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers have been laid off, while worried patients are hoarding drugs or stretching supplies, according to UNAids surveillance. UNAids itself has lost more than half of its funding.Even programmes that have survived the cull have faced turmoil since February, with instructions to stop work rescinded but with no certainty that funding will continue.View image in fullscreenIn only one example, the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric Aids Foundation says it has had to halt HIV treatment for 85,000 people in Eswatini, including more than 2,000 children, and tests for thousands of pregnant women and babies to prevent transmission and begin life-saving medication.Access to drugs represents an “immediate crisis”, Lewin says. “If people with HIV stop the medications, then not only do they get sick themselves, which is tragic, but they also then become infectious to others.”As clinics on the frontline of treating the disease scrabble to secure access to basic drugs, scientists at this month’s Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco were hearing that HIV might soon be preventable with a once-a-year injection.The drug lenacapavir was already generating huge excitement in the field, after trial results showed that a six-monthly jab could prevent HIV. New results from the manufacturer Gilead suggest that a tweak to the formula and how it is given could see its protective effects last even longer.Nevertheless, Lewin says, the mood at the meeting, packed with many of the world’s leading HIV specialists, was “dire”.As well as programme cancellations, there are “huge concerns around science and what’s going to happen to the [US] National Institutes of Health, [whose] funding of science has been so significant on every level”, she says.Some scientists in receipt of US funding have been told to remove their names from DEI-linked research, she says, even though DEI is fundamental to the HIV response.View image in fullscreen“I don’t mean that in a sort of touchy-feely way, I mean that’s what we need to do: you need to actually get those treatments to these diverse communities.”In 2022, 55% of all new HIV infections were within “key populations”, such as gay men, other men who have sex with men, sex workers, transgender people, prisoners and people who inject drugs.Prof Linda-Gail Bekker, of South Africa’s Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, has seen US funding for three trials of potential HIV vaccines involving eight countries cancelled and only reinstated after an appeal to the US supreme court.“We’re running around like chickens without heads to at least get one going, because the vaccines are sitting in the fridge and will expire,” she says.She led the lenacapavir trial that showed it offered 100% protection to young women in sub-Saharan Africa, but now worries about HIV/Aids prevention “falling off the radar completely”.The global community had been making headway towards the United Nations’ goal of ending Aids by 2030, she says, with a five-year plan to use “amazing new innovative tools and scale them up”, which would have led to “less dependence on foreign aid and more self-reliance” as new infections fell and attention shifted to maintaining treatment for people with HIV.“All of that is hugely at risk now because, without these funds, our governments will have to step up but they will concentrate on treatment,” she says. “We know they will do that, because that is what we did for the first 30 years.”Efforts to control Aids were entering “the last mile”, which was always likely to be more expensive, she says. “The people who were happy to come into health facilities, they would have come into health facilities.”It would be difficult to rely on government funding to reach the remaining groups, she says, not only because of fewer resources but also because in some countries it means targeting groups whose existence is illegal and unrecognised, such as sex workers or sexual minorities, and young girls may be reluctant to use government clinics if they are not supposed to be sexually active.“I feel like the odds are very stacked against us,” says Bekker, adding: “We’re obviously going to have to re-programme ourselves [and] formulate a different plan.”Pepfar had pledged funding to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, to deploy 10m doses of lenacapavir in low-income countries. While the Global Fund has promised to maintain its commitment, it might receive fewer than the planned number of doses, Bekker fears.“Six months ago, I was saying the best thing we can do with lenacapavir is offer it to everybody in a choice environment. [Now] I think we’re gonna have to say who needs [injectable] prep,” she says, “and the rest have to do the best they can.“How do we make that decision? And what does that look like? It is back to sort of rationing.“When we started ARVs [antiretroviral drugs] way back in 2000,” Bekker recalls, “you would go, ‘you get treatment; you don’t, you don’t, you don’t’.“It feels terrible … but you have to get over that. You have to say it will be infection-saving for some people. And we’ve got to make it count.”View image in fullscreenFor Beatriz Grinsztejn, president of the International Aids Society, the disruption is critical and threatens many vulnerable people. But, she adds, it could present “an important opportunity for ownership – otherwise we are always left in the hands of others”.She worries about the impact of cuts to funding on younger scientists, with their potential loss from the research field “a major threat for the next generation”. But, she adds, the HIV community is “powerful and very resilient”.There have already been calls for new ways of doing things. It is “time for African leadership”, members of the African-led HIV Control Working Group write in the Lancet Global Health. There are now plans for Nigeria to produce HIV drugs and tests domestically.Christine Stegling, deputy director of UNAids, says it began “a concerted effort” last year to develop plans with countries about how their HIV programmes could become more sustainable domestically “but with a longer timeframe … now we are trying to do some kind of fast-tracking”.Governments are determined, she says, but it will require fiscal changes either in taxation or by restructuring debt.The goal of ending Aids by 2030 is still achievable, Stegling believes. “I think we have a very short window of opportunity now, in the next two, three months, to continue telling people that we can do it.“I keep on reminding people, ‘look, we need to get back to that same energy that we had when people were telling us treatment can’t be available in the global south, right?’ And we didn’t accept it. We made it happen.“We have national governments now who are also very adamant, because they can see what can happen, and they want to make it happen for their own populations.” More

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      Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win

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      Russell T Davies has said gay society is in the “greatest danger I have ever seen”, since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November.Speaking to the Guardian at the Gaydio Pride awards in Manchester on Friday, the Doctor Who screenwriter said the rise in hostility was not limited to the US but “is here [in the UK] now”.“As a gay man, I feel like a wave of anger, and violence, and resentment is heading towards us on a vast scale,” he said.“I’ve literally seen a difference in the way I’m spoken to as a gay man since that November election, and that’s a few months of weaponising hate speech, and the hate speech creeps into the real world.”“I’m not being alarmist,” he added. “I’m 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we’re in the greatest danger I have ever seen.”Since his inauguration, Trump has ended policies giving LGBTQ+ Americans protection from discrimination. He has also restricted access to gender-affirming healthcare, said the US would only recognise two sexes, and barred transgender people from enlisting in the military.Davies also used his keynote speech at the awards ceremony, which rewards the efforts made to improve the lives of LGBTQ+ people in the UK, to criticise Trump, and the president’s ally Elon Musk.“I think times are darkening beyond all measure and beyond anything I have seen in my lifetime,” he told the audience, which included the singers Louise Redknapp and Katy B, and the Traitors contestants Leanne Quigley and Minah Shannon.Davies said he had turned 18 and left home in 1981, adding: “And that is exactly the year that rumours and whispers of a strange new virus came along, which came to haunt our community and to test us in so many ways.”“The joyous thing about this is that we fought back,” he said. The community “militarised, campaigned, marched and demanded the medicine”.He added: “We demanded the science. We demanded the access.”When he wrote the TV series Queer As Folk in the late 1990s, he said, it was part of a movement, with writers “fomenting ideas” and putting gay and lesbian characters on screen.Had he been asked to imagine then what life for LGBTQ+ people would be like in 2025, “I want to say it’s going to be all rainbows,” he said, “skipping down the street hand-in-hand, equality, equality, equality.”But the peril the gay community now faced, he said, was even greater than that in the 1980s.“The threat from America, it’s like something at The Lord of the Rings. It’s like an evil rising in the west, and it is evil,” Davies said.“We’ve had bad prime ministers and we’ve had bad presidents before. What we’ve never had is a billionaire tech baron openly hating his trans daughter,” he added.Musk, the de facto head of the “department of government efficiency”, bought the social networking site Twitter, which he renamed X. A study by the University of California, Berkeley found hate speech on the platform rose by 50% in the months after it was bought by the billionaire.“We have never had this in the history of the world,” Davies said. “It is terrifying because he and the people like him are in control of the facts, they’re in control of information, they’re in control of what people think, and that is what we’re now facing.”But Davies said the gay community would do “what we always do in times of peril, we gather at night”, and would once again come together, and fight against this latest wave of hostility and oppression.“What we will do in Elon Musk’s world, that we’re heading towards, is what artists have always done,” he told the Guardian, “which is to meet in cellars, and plot, and sing, and compose, and paint, and make speeches, and march.”“If we have to be those rebels in basements yet again,” he added, “which is when art thrives, then that’s what we’ll become.” More