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      ‘The universities are the enemy’: why the right detests the American campus | Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

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      In 2021, JD Vance, then a candidate for Ohio senate, gave a provocative keynote address at the National Conservatism Conference. Vance’s lecture was an indictment of American higher education: a “hostile institution” that “gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in this country”. The aspiring politician did not mince words before his receptive rightwing audience: “If any of us wants to do the things we want to do … We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities.” The title of Vance’s keynote was inspired by a quote from Richard Nixon: “The universities are the enemy.”The Maga movement, of which Vance, the vice-president, is now at the forefront, has been unabashedly on the attack against campuses, professors and students. Donald Trump characterizes colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics”, and student protesters as “radicals”, “savages” and “jihadists” who have been indoctrinated by faculty “communists and terrorists”. He has already delivered swift vengeance against campus protesters and non-protesters alike with visa terminations and deportations. This administration has gleefully withheld hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to force colleges to crack down on student dissent.While Vance paid homage to Nixon and other forebears on the right, he failed to acknowledge that his political lineage had been fighting the university as an enemy for more than 100 years. In fact, reactionary backlash is a feature of two main milestones in the academy’s history: the democratization of admissions and the diversification of curriculum. Trump and Vance’s attacks are part of a longer history of rightwing backlash that follows each time college becomes more democratic.Before the universities were the enemyFor the first 300 years of US higher education, starting with the founding of Harvard College in the 1630s, the academy was a realm exclusive to the Christian elite. Only an extreme few attended the colonial and antebellum colleges, which were meant as sectarian educational clubs for the sons of the landed gentry. Boys of the Protestant ruling class attended college to socialize, form lifelong friendships and business partnerships, and even link their families legally through intermarriage of their sisters. Young men were exposed to the liberal arts and Christian theology, to be sure, but college was just as much a place to meet other boys like themselves and to be steeped in the cultural norms of their religious denomination and social class. This three-century tradition has been slow to change, and when it has, colleges have met fierce opposition from those who have benefited from the status quo.Throughout this time, the only people of color or women who appeared on campus were the wives and daughters of the faculty, maids, cooks, laundry workers, servants and enslaved people. By the 1830s and through the end of the century, segregated colleges were established for white women, and free men of color (until the founding of Bennett College and Spelman College, women of color had to “pass” as white to attend women’s colleges), but these institutions were not meant to rival or even resemble the standard colleges. The curriculums were vastly different from the liberal arts instruction of Harvard and Princeton – for girls, lessons were about homemaking and Christian motherhood; for children and adults of color, the practical vocations. Still, college-going by anyone was a privilege. Even at the turn of the 20th century, less than 5% of Americans went to college, and many fewer completed a degree.Backlash against who gets inThe right’s first rumblings about the college as enemy occurred during the 20th century, as the nature of the campus began to change for the modern era. The right’s grievance at the time was focused on who was admitted. By the 1920s, European immigrant students were starting to matriculate in east coast campuses, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. The oldest and most prestigious colleges, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, sought to severely limit enrollment of the “socially undesirable”, especially Jews, to preserve the campus for old-stock Protestants. A combination of antisemitism and reactionary backlash to the era’s progressivism led rightwingers to cast a suspicious eye on the campus, where all of the decade’s new social science seemed to be emanating. Christian fundamentalists, terrified by the science of evolution, also decried the sinister academic classroom.By the 1930s, wealthy industrialists joined the chorus of college skeptics. The Franklin Roosevelt administration had assembled its famous “brain trust” of academics whose calculus was needed to pull the nation out of the Great Depression. But industry titans who refused to tolerate Roosevelt’s planned economy responded by creating free-market thinktanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that produced rival economic white papers in defense of capitalism. Academic departments, AEI’s existence proved, were not the only place where experts could create knowledge. In fact, the right’s thinktanks would become their signature tool for churning out partisan disinformation such as climate crisis denial and race pseudoscience throughout the 20th century.By the time the second world war ended, Congress needed a way to ensure a smooth economic transition as a mass of veterans returned to the job market. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, AKA the GI Bill, allowed more than 1 million returning soldiers to delay workforce re-entry by a few years as they entered the classroom. To the horror of many free-marketeers and social elites, the GI Bill in effect doubled the national population of college students, thus diversifying the campus by class, age and in the case of wounded veterans, physical ability (though not by race or gender).Backlash against what gets taughtOn the heels of the democratizing GI Bill, the McCarthyite purge of more than 100 academics for their prewar affiliations with the Communist party has become legend. At the same time, Joseph McCarthy’s young admirer William F Buckley Jr produced his 1951 opus, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, arguing that socialist professors had run roughshod over the campus, indoctrinating students in Keynesian economics and atheism. The academy, to McCarthy, Buckley and their followers, had transformed into a hotbed of anti-Americanism. The right’s understanding that higher education could not be trusted was now well developed: too many people were entering college and learning the wrong lessons.Following the McCarthy attacks came the storied 1960s, when the campus continued democratizing its admissions and curriculum. Lyndon Johnson’s Higher Education Act of 1965 allowed for greater access to student loans and work-study programs. This allowed additional generations of working-class students to matriculate, especially more people of color, who demanded to see themselves in their lessons. The creation of Black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies and similar disciplines throughout the 1970s followed militant strikes by student protesters. At the same time, anti-Vietnam war unrest challenged their institutions’ commitments to cold war weapons development. For the right, this was but more evidence of the college as a radicalizing institution.Increasingly, the liberal center began to agree with the notion that the campus had radicalizing potential. The 1980s and the 1990s marked the bipartisan obsession with culture wars, with the campus as its apparent locus. To the benefit of the right, popular debates about political correctness and identity politics in effect drew attention from austerity measures that had sucked resources away from higher education since the Reagan years. Through the 2000s and 2010, the right revved up its offensives against campus antiwar movements, attacking faculty and students who spoke out against the “war on terror” and protests to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel. By the 2010s, in the aftermath of the Great Recession’s deep cuts to higher education, conservative attacks shifted back to campus social crusades as the right railed against the Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, and ginned up moral panics over safe spaces, trigger warnings and cancel culture.Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, conservative rhetoric cast colleges and universities as deeply politicized, inefficient and anti-American. From the 1920s to the 1980s, this generated popular notions that the college should be reformed back to its previous role as a selective space for class reproduction. Since the 1980s, the purpose has been to delegitimize the academy to get mass buy-in to defund, privatize and eventually abolish public higher education. The goal is to return colleges to a carefully constructed environment not to educate all, but to reproduce hierarchy (especially if it can be done for profit).This has not been an exclusively American process. Autocrats around the world have cracked down on the academy, journalism and venues of arts and culture for the last 100 years. These are places where ideas are shared and traditional conventions are challenged. Crushing them is central to consolidating authoritarian power. Today’s international rightwing leaders want to control higher education, just as they want dominion over all other social, cultural and political institutions. For the first time, a US president is finally willing to deliver the right’s century-old goal.

      Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, PhD, is a historian of US colleges and universities. She is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America and host of the weekly American Campus Podcast More

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      Trump is dismantling a key worker safety group. It’s another betrayal of the working class | Devan Hawkins

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      As Donald Trump announced his tariffs in the White House Rose Garden last month, he proclaimed: “We’re standing up for the American worker.” While it remains to be seen what impact these tariffs will have on American workers, his words were belied by the fact that just a day before this announcement, hundreds of workers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Niosh) – an organization that has stood up for US workers since 1970 – discovered that they had been laid off.Niosh was founded as part of the Occupational Health and Safety Act with the purpose of “developing and establishing recommended occupational safety and health standards”. The organization has been on the frontline of protecting worker health and safety ever since. Its work has focused on understanding the risks faced by millions of workers throughout the country who put their safety on the line every day to perform their jobs. For example, Niosh’s Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program investigates fatalities to understand their circumstances and make recommendations, ensuring that more of these workers, who risk their lives for others daily, can be safer in the line of duty.Far from being a caricature of a federal body firmly entrenched in the Beltway, Niosh’s work is spread across the country. One of Niosh’s most notable sites is its Morgantown, West Virginia, facility. Located in the heart of coal country for decades, it has focused on studying the health impacts of coalmining – particularly black lung disease – which has seen notable increases in recent years. Nearly 200 workers were fired from the Morgantown location, which will severely hamper this work. (Some were temporarily rehired.)Niosh also supports surveillance programs run out of 23 states. These state-based programs focus on the unique needs of the workforce in those areas. For several years, I was fortunate to have been an epidemiologist with such a program in Massachusetts, where my colleagues and I focused on understanding and preventing health challenges ranging from bloodborne pathogen exposure among healthcare workers, to asthma risk among cleaners, to fatalities in the construction industry.Since its founding, Niosh has been a nimble organization, adapting to and studying new and emerging threats. The World Trade Center Health Program, which is administered by Niosh, was created to study the health impacts of responding to those terrorist attacks – ranging from traumatic injuries and respiratory disease to cancer and mental health – while providing support for those responders.In a similar way to its response to the September 11 attacks, in the grip of the epidemic of opioids and suicides that have cost tens of thousands of lives over the past two decades, Niosh has sought to understand the workplace component of these challenges. These efforts have helped to shed light on the pathway linking occupational injuries to a high risk of drug overdoses among workers in certain occupations, particularly in the construction industry, and contribute to efforts to prevent these deaths.During the Covid-19 pandemic, Niosh studied the risks faced by frontline workers. The pandemic also highlighted one of Niosh’s most essential functions: air filtration ratings. Niosh tests, approves and certifies respirators to ensure that workers are protected from airborne risks ranging from silica dust to lead.Niosh also supports the future of occupational safety and health workers. Niosh traineeship programs across the country provide support to students studying occupational health and safety. I was fortunate to be supported by such a program when I was in graduate school. Throughout the country, hospital employee safety departments, union workplace safety committees, and community occupational health and safety advocacy organizations are staffed by others like myself who received this support.Now is the worst possible time for Niosh to be dismantled. Traditional workplace hazards still remain. In 2023, the last year with available data, there were 5,283 fatal occupational injuries – one every 99 minutes. Violent injuries at work are a growing concern, particularly among healthcare workers. Increasing temperatures caused by climate change place many vulnerable workers at high risk for illness, injury and death, while extreme weather events, such as the wildfires that devastated southern California earlier this year, threaten the health and safety of emergency workers. Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence are changing the nature of work, presenting new dynamics and hazards.We need Niosh to study these emerging threats and safeguard workers.It remains to be seen what will happen to the remainder of the organization and the programs supported by Niosh throughout the country. Regardless of what occurs, we should support the current and former workers of the organization and carry forward its mission, just as Niosh workers have advocated for the health and safety of workers across this country since the organization’s inception.

      Devan Hawkins is a writer and researcher from Massachusetts. He is the author of the book Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes More

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      Not just Alcatraz: the notorious US prisons Trump is already reopening

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      Donald Trump’s proposal to reopen Alcatraz, the infamous prison shuttered more than 60 years ago, sparked global headlines over the weekend. But it isn’t the only notorious closed-down jail or prison the administration has sought to repurpose for mass detentions.The US government has in recent months pushed to reopen at least five other shuttered detention facilities and prisons, some closed amid concerns over safety and mistreatment of detainees. While California lawmakers swiftly dismissed the Alcatraz announcement as “not serious” and a distraction, the Trump administration’s efforts to reopen other scandal-plagued facilities are well under way or already complete, in partnership with for-profit prison corporations.The shuttered prisons are being revived for immigration detainees, unlike the US president’s purported plan for Alcatraz, which he claimed on social media would imprison “America’s most ruthless and violent Offenders”.US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has sought to reopen the California city correctional facility, a state prison in the southern California desert region that closed last year, according to government contract records. The facility is owned by CoreCivic, a longtime Ice detention partner, and previously housed more than 2,000 people.California Democrats have also warned that Ice was interested in reopening Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Dublin, a US prison shuttered last year amid scandals surrounding systemic sexual abuse by staff, and concerns about mold and asbestos. The correctional officers’ union has reported that staff were recently forced to do maintenance work at Dublin in hazardous conditions, seemingly to prepare for a reopening, but Ice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BoP), which runs Dublin, have not commented on plans.Communities in California, the country’s most populous state and home to nearly a quarter of immigrants in the US, have long opposed Ice detention centers, and there are currently no Ice jails in the state north of Bakersfield in the Central Valley, said Susan Beaty, senior attorney for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.View image in fullscreen“When there are fewer beds for Ice to incarcerate people, there are fewer arrests and less enforcement,” said Beaty, who represents people in Ice and BoP detention. “We don’t want Ice to expand their ability to cage our community members, because we know that will lead to more incarceration and allow them to terrorize our communities even further.”In rural Lake county, Michigan, Geo Group, another prison corporation, is reopening the closed North Lake correctional facility, which has capacity for 1,800 people and would be the largest immigration detention center in the midwest, according to the local news site MLive.com. Over the years, the facility has housed imprisoned teenage boys, out-of-state incarcerated people and immigrants. But it has sat dormant since it closed in 2022 under the Biden administration.In 2020, detainees at North Lake went on a hunger strike, alleging they were denied access to their mail and religiously appropriate food, their complaint paperwork was destroyed, and they were placed in extended solitary confinement. Geo Group denied the claims at the time.In Newark, New Jersey, Geo Group has recently reopened the closed Delaney Hall facility for immigration detainees even as the company faces a pending lawsuit from the city alleging it failed to file required construction permits or allow inspectors inside, according to news site NorthJersey.com.“They are following the pattern of the president … who believes that he can just do what he wants to do and obscure the laws,” Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, said on Monday.Christopher Ferreira, a Geo Group spokesperson, said in an email that the firm had a “valid certificate of occupancy” and complied with health and safety requirements. The mayor’s opposition was “another unfortunate example of a politicized campaign by sanctuary city and open borders politicians in New Jersey to interfere with the federal government”, he added.In a December 2024 earnings call, Geo Group said it was in “active discussions” with Ice and the US Marshals Service about their interest in six of its facilities that were idle.In Leavenworth, Kansas, CoreCivic is working to reopen an immigration detention center closed in 2021 under Joe Biden. The proposal for the Midwest Regional Reception Center (MRRC) has sparked backlash from the city of Leavenworth, which sued CoreCivic in March, alleging the company has not followed the proper permitting protocols.View image in fullscreenIn 2021, the ACLU alleged that the Leavenworth facility was beset by problems, including frequent stabbings, suicides and contraband, and that “basic human needs [were] not being met”, with food restricted, contact with counsel and family denied or curtailed, limited medical care and infrequent showers. A federal judge called the facility a “hellhole”.Ryan Gustin, a CoreCivic spokesperson, defended the company’s decades of operations in Leavenworth in an email on Monday, saying understaffing amid the pandemic “was the main contributor to the challenges” and “the issues were concentrated in about an 18-month period”: “We’re grateful for a more stable labor market post-pandemic, and we’ve had a positive response with nearly 1,400 [applicants] expressing interest in one of the 300 positions the facility will create.“At any of our facilities, including MRRC, we don’t cut corners on care, staff or training, which meets, and in many cases exceeds, our government partners’ standards,” he said. He also pointed to a recent op-ed by the warden, who argued the facility “is and always has been properly zoned”.CoreCivic also reopened a family detention center in Texas last month.The use of shuttered prisons is just one way Ice is expanding detention for Trump’s mass deportations. He has also moved immigration detainees into BoP facilities currently housing criminal defendants, causing concerns about poor conditions, rights violations and a lack of basic resources as staff manage multiple populations under one roof. Trump has also pushed to expand local jail contracts and use military bases for Ice.Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project, which has obtained public records on Ice’s expanding detention, said Ice was ignoring safety concerns in previously shuttered facilities.“This is a continuing pattern of the Trump administration’s willingness to knowingly place immigrants in detention facilities already well-known for having dangerous conditions,” she said. “They’re putting people in facilities where the conditions are so dire … that people simply give up their valid claims of relief to stay in the United States.”There is growing local backlash to these facilities, Cho added: “When people realize what is happening in these facilities, it’s not something they want to see up close. People are becoming very aware that billions of dollars are being spent to enrich private prison companies to hold people in abysmal conditions … including their neighbors, co-workers and friends.”Ice did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.Donald Murphy, a BoP spokesperson, did not answer questions about the reported reopening of Dublin for Ice. William K Marshall III, BoP director, said in a statement that the bureau would “vigorously pursue all avenues to support and implement the president’s agenda” and had ordered an “immediate assessment” to determine “our needs and the next steps” for Alcatraz: “We look forward to restoring this powerful symbol of law, order, and justice.”Corene Kendrick, ACLU National Prison Project deputy director, dismissed Trump’s Alcatraz statement as a “stunt”, noting that the prison’s cellblock has no running water or sewage and limited electricity.“I don’t know if we can call it a ‘proposal’, because that implies actual thought was put into it,” she said. “It’s completely far-fetched and preposterous, and it would be impossible to reopen those ancient, crumbling buildings as anything resembling a functioning prison.” More

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      Trump is trying to pay his way into a US baby boom. Experts say it won’t work

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      One of Donald Trump’s priorities for his second term is getting Americans to have more babies – and the White House has a new proposal to encourage them to do so: a $5,000 “baby bonus”.The plan to give cash payments to mothers after delivery shows the growing influence of the “pronatalist” movement in the US, which, citing falling US birthrates, calls for “traditional” family values and for women – particularly white women – to have more children.But experts say $5,000 checks won’t lead to a baby boom. Between unaffordable healthcare, soaring housing costs, inaccessible childcare and a lack of federal parental leave mandates, Americans face a swath of expensive hurdles that disincentivize them from having large families – or families at all – and that will require a much larger government investment to overcome.It is true that the US is seeing declining birthrates – and has been for some time. While fertility rates bounced around what demographers call “replacement level” – the rate at which the population replenishes ageing people with new ones – in the decades that followed the post-second world war baby boom, they have been on a steady downward trend since the 2010 Great Recession, so that now, US fertility rates sit at about 1.6 births per woman.But these numbers are far from alarming, according to demographers and policy analysts. US birthrates are still in line with those in other developed countries, where societies and economies are continuing to thrive, and concerns about the sustainability of programs such as social security can be fixed through other remedies, like raising the tax limit.In the US, the modest decline in fertility can be attributed to a drop in teen pregnancy rates, as well as more families with two working parents and delaying having children. But these elements alone do not explain the trends we’re seeing, says Paula Lantz, a social demographer and professor of health policy at the University of Michigan. While the number of people who don’t have any children isn’t changing, demographers are seeing the percentage of families who have two kids drop, and the percentage of those who have just one increase. “There is something else going on,” she said.That “something else”, Lantz and her colleagues say, is how challenging it is to raise a family in the US from a financial perspective. For many Americans, having a larger family means sacrificing quality of life.Between the costs of healthcare, including the thousands on average that Americans pay just to give birth in a hospital, childcare, housing and basics such as formula and diapers, having a baby in the US is a huge expense – one that experts say a single $5,000 payment would barely make a dent in.“I had a baby a few months ago, and a one-time payment of $5,000 wouldn’t do much if I didn’t also have paid leave that let me keep my job, good health insurance, family support, incredible childcare and the kind of job that allows me to both provide for my family and be there for pickup,” said Lily Roberts, the managing director for inclusive growth at the Center for American Progress. “Every mom in America deserves that, and every dad does too.”Stephanie Schmidt, the director of childcare and early education at the Center for Law and Social Policy, emphasized that the average cost of infant care in the US is $14,000 per year, with that number ticking up to closer to $25,000 a year in high-cost-of-living areas. “$5,000 gets you almost nowhere when you’re thinking about utilizing it to pay for the expenses of having a young child,” she said.Schmidt also noted that when other countries have tried similar approaches, they made little to no difference in how many children people choose to have.In Australia, where a $3,000 baby bonus was put in place in 2004 to reverse declining fertility rates, there was a brief spike in birthrates immediately after a bonus was offered, but those rates dropped again in subsequent years. Experts say this is because families simply move up their timelines, having the same number of kids they already intended to have, only earlier.“They want to make sure they get [the benefit] before that policy is changed by the next government,” said Ron Lee, the director of the Center on the Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley.Plus, most of the other countries that have tried baby bonuses also have robust social and healthcare systems, so the cash payments went further than they would in the US. “It’s not working in those contexts, so it’s certainly not going to work in ours,” said Lantz.To change minds and behaviors, there need to be much more substantial policy changes, experts say, that address the housing crisis, offer childcare subsidies, make healthcare accessible and affordable and guarantee paid family leave.“[This] would have such a more significant impact for families because it’s not a one-time investment,” said Schmidt.Deliberate efforts to address the climate crisis could also encourage more people to have children as younger people are delaying or forgoing starting families because of climate anxieties, says Lee, pointing to surveys that suggest this trend. Evidence also shows that people have fewer children during times of political uncertainty and instability – a dynamic experts say this administration is only intensifying.“If the problem they’re trying to solve is addressing a low birthrate, then create the conditions to make birth possible and make raising a family possible,” said Mary Ignatius, the executive director of advocacy group Parent Voices California.That isn’t to say that $5,000 wouldn’t be well-received, says Roberts. It might help pay for a month or two of childcare; help families buy a new crib, stroller and other gear, all of which are poised to become more expensive with rising tariffs; or offset hospital costs.For lower-income families especially, research shows that receiving no-strings cash bonuses can help them reach a point of financial stability, especially when kids are younger.But experts emphasize that other actions taken by the administration to dismantle programs that already support American families and children belie any honorable intentions. To date, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating Head Start, a program that supports families with very low incomes in accessing childcare, as well as cutting funds to Medicaid, which provides healthcare coverage for low-income Americans. (Congress also let the child tax credit – which expanded eligibility for pay outs of up to $3,600 for American families – expire in 2021, even though it’s been credited with lifting millions of children out of poverty.)“Those are the things that women need to be able to make the choices of how they want to be a parent,” said Ignatius. “Eliminating the programs at Medicaid, Head Start, TANF [temporary assistance for needy families], food stamps – that equates to much more than $5,000 in support for low-income families.”The dismantling of the federal workforce in the Department of Education, the justice department, which oversees juvenile justice initiatives, and the Department of Health and Human Services, where staff responsible for distributing funds for state welfare and foster care programs were gutted, will also have a negative impact on American families. “Even the little things that improve a family’s life, like children’s museum grants and public libraries, are reeling from cuts”, said Roberts. “All American families are going to feel the impact of this administration, and creepy plans to give moms a medal absolutely won’t make up for what they’re taking away.”For Schmidt, the White House’s actions speak to a fundamental disconnect between statements that encourage Americans to have children and actions that make doing so increasingly out of reach. “There is such an emphasis in this administration on birth, and such a lack of support for people once they’re here,” she said. 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      My rare disease was getting closer to a cure. RFK Jr could undermine that | Jameson Rich

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      Since Robert F Kennedy Jr assumed control of the US health department in February, with a mandate to “[lower] chronic disease rates and [end] childhood chronic disease”, he has moved quickly to remake the US’s federal health infrastructure. But the Trump administration’s actions on medical research are already threatening that goal – and could end medical progress in this country for good.Kennedy’s office oversees the National Institutes of Health, the control center of disease research in the United States. Kennedy’s agency has killed almost 800 active projects, according to Nature, affecting medical research into HIV/Aids, diabetes, women’s health, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and more. The administration wants to cut the NIH’s budget up to 40% while consolidating its 27 agencies – separated by disease area – into just eight. Elon Musk’s Doge has been reviewing previously awarded grant funding, reportedly requiring researchers to explain how they are using their grants to advance the Trump administration’s political goals. (Audio obtained by the Washington Post suggests this “Defend the Spend” initiative may be a smokescreen, with one NIH official admitting: “All funding is on hold.”) Separately, Donald Trump has aggressively targeted universities such as Harvard and Columbia over alleged antisemitism and diversity initiatives, using federal contracts that fund research as leverage. And just recently, the NIH passed a new rule banning any university from receiving future federal grants if the universities use DEI programs or boycott Israeli firms.Medical research is a wonkish issue usually kept far away from political discussions. Even popular initiatives like former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s cancer moonshot require long-term vision in a political landscape rarely concerned with anything beyond the day’s news. But in recent years, public and private investments in medical research have seeded a wave of potential cures across major disease areas. Now, just as that wave is about to crest, RFK Jr and the Trump administration’s incursion against the NIH threatens to ensure these cures are never finished.For me, the promise of those cures is personal. At three days old, I was diagnosed with a rare version of the most common type of birth defect: congenital heart disease. CHD affects one in every 100 babies born in the US and is the leading cause of birth defect-related deaths. Congenital heart problems can range from a small hole in the heart to being born with only one ventricle. Many defects are underdiagnosed, and chances are good that you know somebody who lives with one. Even JD Vance does: his relative was born with Ebstein’s anomaly, a deformity of the tricuspid valve that has resulted in her now needing a heart transplant at the age of 12.When I was six weeks old, doctors performed the first in a series of three surgeries aimed at correcting the circulation of blood within my heart and between the other organs of my body. The final surgery in that sequence had first been described in medical journals in 1971, and crucial refinements had been made only a few years before I was brought under the knife.Before the surgery’s advent, the prognosis was grim. Many children like me died before their first birthday. Of congenital patients in the 1950s, “half died before the age of twenty”, writes cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar in his book Heart: A History. “In short, they were cardiac cripples, their existence doomed.” But after the surgery, more of us started living into adulthood. Today, most of these patients live at least another 30 years after the operation. My survival past infancy was an accident of history, the product of being born at the right moment in the lifespan of medical research. “Don’t worry,” my first surgeon told my parents when I was a child. “He’s going to long outlive you both.”But my future and the future of others like me is not guaranteed. As I grew up, my doctors acknowledged that the surgery was merely palliative, not curative – a stopgap, medicine’s way of buying me some time. With medicine advancing so quickly, though, we could hope that new solutions would be brought into existence by the time I needed them. In the decades since, we have come to understand the surgery’s long-term consequences: likely progressive damage across organ systems, leading to the need for heart or multi-organ transplants in most patients by the age of 40. Last year, shortly after turning 31, I was formally diagnosed with cardiac cirrhosis and informed that I will need a combined heart-liver transplant within the decade. The time that those early developments bought me seems to be running out.In recent years, as the patient population has grown, more of us have been able to advocate for the need for new solutions. Private foundations have started pouring tens of millions of dollars into research aimed at discovering new treatments and identifying the root causes of birth heart defects so they can be prevented. These foundations have also begun correcting an imbalance in funding – historically, pediatric cancer has received five times the amount of funding that CHD does, despite similar prevalence and mortality rates.I volunteer on the patient board of one such organization, a privately funded non-profit aimed at curing heart defects like mine. With the help of researchers and hospital systems across the country, the organization has been making remarkable progress in a short period of time. But this work relies on the infrastructure of university labs. Even before Kennedy took office, the Trump administration ordered that the NIH change how grant funding is allocated by limiting what are known as “indirect costs”, which go beyond the direct needs of a given study. But often, these costs go into funds that help universities keep their labs running: things like building operations and upgrades, legal compliance and paying researchers. Even with this support, university labs struggle to keep the lights on, and researchers are constantly fighting to secure and retain funding. (The order has since been paused by a federal judge and is the subject of continuing litigation.)Some insist the US shouldn’t be funding research with taxpayer dollars at all. Instead, they would leave the task to pharmaceutical companies and biotech firms. But this fundamentally misunderstands the reality: in the decade leading up to 2020, researchers found, government funding played a role in the development of every new pharmaceutical drug; these drugs are then sold back to patients at a premium. The research that for-profit companies do fund is narrowly focused on things that are guaranteed to make money, or to advance discoveries begun in the public sector. For example, the new blockbuster medication category of GLP-1s – Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro – would not exist without a discovery that was first made by an NIH scientist. When people debate the American healthcare system, they often point to the innovations and cutting-edge treatments we’ve pioneered to support the idea that our system, while flawed, is the best in the world. That impression of a world-class system is due almost entirely to the quality and breadth of our university research infrastructure and our medical schools.Private non-profits, like the one I volunteer with, already fund a large amount of medical research. If more university labs start closing, there will be nowhere for this money to go or for this research to be performed. As Dr Kimryn Rathmell, former director of the National Cancer Institute, told the AP: “Discoveries are going to be delayed, if they ever happen.” The result will be both patients and the government spending even more money on emergency and palliative healthcare. That will only benefit the healthcare profiteers Kennedy claims to be going after: pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems and healthcare entrepreneurs such as Brad Smith, who, by some accounts, has been leading Doge’s firings within HHS.My disease isn’t the only one that will be affected by these cuts. Ongoing research has indicated that targeted mRNA vaccines may show promise in preventing or treating Aids and certain types of cancers. The technology is also being studied for its ability to treat cystic fibrosis, heart failure, sickle cell anemia and other genetic birth defects. But scientists working in these areas through the NIH have already been instructed to strike mention of mRNA vaccines from grant applications and materials, perhaps owing to Kennedy’s hostility towards vaccines and his repeated lies about mRNA technology.If the proposed funding cuts and changes at the NIH are allowed to proceed, Kennedy’s mandate to lower chronic disease rates will fail, and his failure will be obvious. We will see it in rising rates of cancer, birth defects, diabetes and other chronic illnesses. We will see it in the exodus of medical experts to other countries, and the collapse of the researcher pipeline in US universities. We will see the quality of our supposed world-class medical system crash as treatments stagnate. We will pay for this cruelty in blood and lives and lost generations.In truth, today’s congenital heart research has arrived too late to save my own life. My future is at the whim of our broken transplant system, itself already showing signs of strain under Kennedy. But I continue championing the work being done because of the hope that future children won’t be consigned to the same fate. The only thing that will have made the suffering I’ve faced worth it is if I’m a part of the last generation to do so.

      Jameson Rich is a writer and film-maker from Massachusetts who covers healthcare and culture More

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      Does Nayib Bukele’s campaign against democracy give a blueprint for Trump?

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      “I have no doubt the government are watching,” said Ingrid Escobar, an activist lawyer who has proved a thorn in the side of El Salvador’s authorities. “There are cars that follow me – I have them identified.”Since president Nayib Bukele launched a sweeping crackdown on gangs, Escobar has advocated for the tens of thousands locked up without due process. She points to a photo of Geovanni Aguirre, a childhood friend and trade unionist who worked in San Salvador’s mayor’s office. He disappeared into the prison system in 2022.“The threat is real,” said Escobar. “There are activists and unionists in prison. There are others with arrest orders out for them. Yes, we are afraid.”This is the dark side of the “Bukele model”, which extols an ultra hardline approach to crime spearheaded by a populist leader – but also entails an assault on civil society and democratic institutions, and the accumulation of near absolute power. All with soaring approval ratings.It has made Bukele, 43, the envy of populist authoritarians worldwide, including many in and around the Trump administration. “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador,” TV host Tucker Carlson gushed after interviewing him. “He may have the blueprint for saving the world.”But El Salvador’s embattled civil society and independent press – the only counterweights to Bukele’s power that remain – warn the regime may yet take a still darker turn.View image in fullscreen“Bukele still benefits from his popularity, but El Salvador could go the way of Nicaragua, where public opinion has swung against the regime,” said Pedro Cabezas, an environmental defender. “And then it comes down to military control.”Fears that Donald Trump might take cues from Bukele spiked last month when he deported more than 200 migrants to Cecot, El Salvador’s mega-prison, and then defied the supremecourt when it ordered that his administration “facilitate” the return of one of them, Kilmar Ábrego García.For Salvadorians, this was reminiscent of Bukele’s actions back in 2020, when he defied a supreme court ruling to stop detaining people for violating quarantine during the pandemic.Some now see this is a turning point.Over the following years Bukele went on to march the army into the legislature to intimidate lawmakers; fire judges who opposed him; modify the electoral system in his favour; and start a state of exception, suspending Salvadorian’s constitutional rights, which shows no sign of ending.Bukele followed the authoritarian playbook – with great success. Last year Salvadorians voted to give him an unconstitutional second consecutive term.All of this has to be seen in the context of what life was like under the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, said Amparo Marroquín, a professor at the Central American University. “The levels of violence were brutal, especially in the poorer neighbourhoods. It paralysed the social life of the country.”By locking up 85,000 people without due process, many of whom likely have nothing to do with the gangs, Bukele provided a brutal solution. The gangs’ territorial control was broken, homicides fell, and many Salvadorians enjoyed a kind of freedom they had not experienced for years.On the outskirts of San Salvador, one taxi driver pointed to the side of the road. “The gangs dumped bodies here like it was nothing,” he said. “Sometimes in pieces, over hundreds of metres.”“It used to be that every time you left home you ran the risk of being robbed or even killed,” he said. “The president changed that.”Bukele has ridden this wave of relief, with approval ratings consistently around 80% – even if this figure masks an undercurrent of fear.“Around the same number say they would be afraid to express an opinion that was not aligned with the president,” said Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, a human rights organisation. “And nobody in this country has any doubt that the government can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants.”One veteran of El Salvador’s civil war, who asked not to be named, said he lost a teenage son to a gang shooting in 2010, and that he had been happy to see the gangs brought low.View image in fullscreen“But now the soldiers bother us. I don’t feel safe, I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, searching for the words. “It’s like there are more gangsters with credentials in their hands.”Now the only counterweights to Bukele’s power that remain are civil society organisations and the independent press – and he is turning the screws on both.Bukele has portrayed both as political enemies working against him and the Salvadorian people, and the message has been faithfully amplified by his media machine.“Bukele is like an antenna,” said Cabezas, the environmental defender. “Then there are the repeater antennae: the ministries, the legislative, all the institutions of the state. And then comes the army of trolls.”At the same time, Bukele pressures civil society through regulations, audits and exemplary persecution, such as in the case of five environmental defenders who were at the forefront of El Salvador’s campaign to ban metal mining – which Bukele recently overturned.“These leaders are known at the national and even international level,” said Cabezas. “Now, imagine you are someone who doesn’t have that kind of profile, and you see the state persecuting them. You’d wonder what they would do to you.”Cristosal found that 86% of civil society organisations in El Salvador now self-censor to avoid reprisals.Meanwhile journalists are subject to harassment and targeted with spyware.“It has become normalised for security forces to demand journalists’ phones in the streets, to threaten them with arrest, or even hold them for a time,” said Sergio Arauz, president of El Salvador’s association of journalists.Trump’s freezing of USAID, which supported 11 media outlets in El Salvador, and various civil society organisations, was a gift to Bukele.View image in fullscreenYet the government stops short of all-out repression – and journalists continue to produce damaging investigations into corruption and the negotiations Bukele’s government held with the gangs.“I think Bukele understands that there is an international cost if he attacks journalists too much, and the question is whether he is willing to pay that cost,” said Marroquín.“When you cross that line, there is no going back,” added Marroquín.When Bukele was in the Oval Office last month, denying that he could return the wrongly deported Ábrego García, Trump was sat next to him, visibly admiring the spin and aggressive handling of the press.“Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” said Bukele, as he defended his mass incarceration spree. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.”Trump smiled and asked: “Who gave him that line? Do you think I can use that?”To what extent Trump wants to emulate the “Bukele model” is an open question, but it’s far from clear Bukele’s methods would work in the US, which both lacks a social crisis of the gravity of El Salvador’s gangs and still has a range of formal checks on Trump’s power, from the independent judiciary to the federal system.“American democracy is more resilient – but Americans should not take it for granted,” said Juan Pappier of Human Rights Watch. “Bukele managed to destroy the Salvadoran democracy in two or three years. And putting institutions back to together is a daunting task.” More

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      The Zelenskyy-Trump deal – podcast

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      After the heated exchange between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, the prospect of a deal between the US and Ukraine was uncertain.“Every week, it feels like we get a new position from Donald Trump,” Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s global affairs correspondent based in Washington DC, tells Michael Safi. “Sometimes we get multiple new positions from Donald Trump in a single morning. Nobody really believed that that was going to happen until the two names were on the dotted line.”And yet, last week the countries agreed a momentous minerals deal, agreeing to split future profits of the minerals industry in Ukraine 50/50.“We’re talking about natural gas, oil, possibly, but more importantly we’re talking about critical earth minerals. These include a couple of things, lithium, graphite, titanium. These are rare, important, critical minerals that are used in all kinds of industries around the world,” says Roth.Does US economic interest in Ukraine bring the country closer to peace?Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod More

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      Trump blocks grant funding for Harvard until it meets president’s demands

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      The US Department of Education informed Harvard University on Monday that it was ending billions of dollars in research grants and other aid unless the school accedes to a list of demands from the Trump administration that would effectively cede control of the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university to the government.The news was delivered to Dr Alan Garber, Harvard’s president, in a deeply partisan letter from Linda McMahon, the education secretary, which she also posted on social media.“This letter is to inform you that Harvard should no longer seek grants from the federal government, since none will be provided,” McMahon wrote.The main reason for the crackdown on Harvard is the school’s rejection of a long list of demands from the Trump administration’s antisemitism taskforce, prompted by campus protests against Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October 2023. McMahon also accuses the university of “a systematic pattern of violating federal law”.As Garber explained in a message to the Harvard community last month, the university decided to sue the federal government only after the Trump administration froze $2.2bn in funding, threatened to freeze an additional $1bn in grants, “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status”.The government’s “sweeping and intrusive demands would impose unprecedented and improper control over the university”, Garber wrote.In its lawsuit against the Trump administration, Harvard said the government’s funding cuts would have stark “real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff [and] researchers” by ending crucial medical and scientific research.The text of McMahon’s letter, much like a Truth Social post from Donald Trump, is littered with all-caps words. “Where do many of these ‘students’ come from, who are they, how do they get into Harvard, or even into our country – and why is there so much HATE?”“Harvard University has made a mockery of this country’s higher education system. It has invited foreign students, who engage in violent behavior and show contempt for the United States of America, to its campus,” McMahon claims.The university recently published its own, in-depth investigation of allegations that Gaza solidarity protests had crossed the line into antisemitism, and a second that looked at anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias.But McMahon’s letter is not mainly about the claim that Jewish students feel unsafe at Harvard – a view the school’s president, who is himself Jewish, has some sympathy with – but is filled with extended diatribes about a series of other grievances, including: the supposed far-left politics of Penny Pritzker, a member of the university’s governing board who previously served as US commerce secretary during the Obama administration; the complaints of Harvard alumnus and Trump supporter Bill Ackman; what McMahon calls the “ugly racism” of Harvard’s efforts to diversify its student body; complaints about what Fox News has termed a “remedial math” course which is intended to address gaps in new students’ math skills following the Covid pandemic; accusations that the Harvard Law Review has discriminated against white authors; and two brief fellowships the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health offered to the former mayors of New York and Chicago, Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot.In language that seemed to echo Donald Trump’s own, McMahon told Harvard’s president that De Blasio and Lightfoot, who were recruited to share their experiences of bringing universal pre-kindergarten to New York, and leading Chicago through the pandemic, are “perhaps the worst mayors ever to preside over major cities in our country’s history”.“This is like hiring the captain of the Titanic to teach navigation,” McMahon wrote.“Harvard will cease to be a publicly funded institution, and can instead operate as a privately-funded institution, drawing on its colossal endowment, and raising money from its large base of wealthy alumni,” McMahon wrote. “You have an approximately $53bn head start.” More