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      Americans, including Republicans, losing faith in Trump, new polls reveal

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      Americans, including some Republicans, are losing faith in Donald Trump across a range of key issues, according to polling released this week. One survey found a majority describing the president’s second stint in the White House so far as “scary”.Along with poor ratings on the economy and Trump’s immigration policy, a survey released on Saturday found that only 24% of Americans believe Trump has focussed on the right priorities as president.That poll comes as Trump’s popularity is historically low for a leader this early in a term. More than half of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance as president, and majorities oppose his tariff policies and slashing of the federal workforce.The scathing reviews come as Trump next week marks 100 days of his second stint office, and suggest Americans are already experiencing fatigue after a period that has seen global financial market nosedives and chilling deportations, including of documented people.A poll by the Associated Press-Norc Center for Public Affairs Research published this weekend, found that even Republicans are not overwhelmingly convinced that Trump’s attention has been in the right place.A narrow majority, 54%, of Republicans surveyed said that Trump is focussed on the “right priorities”, while the president’s numbers with crucial independent voters are much weaker. Just 9% of independents said that the president is focussed on the right priorities – with 42% believing Trump is paying attention to the wrong issues.About four in 10 people in the survey approve of how Trump is handling the presidency overall, and only about 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s approach to foreign policy, trade negotiations and the economy.Meanwhile, a New York Times/Siena College poll of registered voters on Friday found that Trump’s approval rating is 42%, and just 29% among independent voters. More than half of voters said Trump is “exceeding the powers available to him”, and 59% of respondents said the president’s second term has been “scary”.While Republican leaders typically receive strong scores on economic issues, Americans have been underwhelmed by Trump’s performance. The Times survey found that only 43% of voters approve of how Trump is handling the economy – a stark turnaround from a Times poll in April 2024, which found that 64% approved of Trump’s economy in his first term.Half of voters disapproved of Trump’s trade policies with other countries, and 61% said a president should not have the authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval, while the Times reported that 63% – including 40% of Republicans – said “a president should not be able to deport legal immigrants who have protested Israel”.Further on immigration, a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll on Friday found that 53% of Americans now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration matters, while 46% approve. In February the majority was the other way, with half of those surveyed approving of Trump’s approach on that issue.The Post reported that as support has drained away on this topic, at this point 90% of Democrats, 56% of independents and 11% of Republicans dislike the way Trump is dealing with immigration.The poor reviews have dogged Trump all week. An Associated Press poll on Thursday found that about half of US adults say that Trump’s trade policies will increase prices “a lot” and another three in 10 think prices could go up “somewhat”, and half of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the possibility of the US economy going into a recession in the next few months.Polling conducted by the Trump-friendly Fox News has brought little respite. A survey published on Wednesday found that just 38% of Americans approve of Trump on the economy, with 56% disapproving.The Fox News poll found that 58% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s performance, and 59% disapproved on inflation. Just three in 10 Americans said they believed Trump’s policies were helping the economy, and only four in 10 said Trump’s policies will help the country.Among generation Z, generally regarded as those born between 1995 and 2012, a staggering 69% told pollsters for an NBC Stay Tuned survey that they don’t approve of Trump’s handling of the economy and the cost of living. Gen Z participants complained of struggling to even pay the rent in some places, let alone buy a home, and they worry about inflation.A minority of gen Z people polled thought the country would be stronger if more people lived by traditional binary gender roles and more than 90% of those polled said they believed foreign students with visas or green cards should have the same due process protections as US citizens. This comes amid the Trump administration declaring there are only two genders, male and female, and arresting and detaining some pro-Palestinian student activists without due process. More

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      FDA suspends milk quality-control testing program after Trump layoffs

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      The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality-control program for testing fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.The suspension is another disruption to the nation’s food-safety programs after the termination and departure of 20,000 employees of the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, as part of Donald Trump’s effort to shrink the federal workforce.The FDA this month also suspended existing and developing programs that ensured accurate testing for bird flu in milk and cheese and pathogens like the parasite Cyclospora in other food products.Effective Monday, the agency suspended its proficiency testing program for grade “A” raw milk and finished products, according to the email sent in the morning from the FDA’s division of dairy safety and addressed to “Network Laboratories”.Grade “A” milk, or fluid milk, meets the highest sanitary standards.The testing program was suspended because FDA’s Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory, part of its division overseeing food safety, “is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis”, the email said.An HHS spokesperson said the laboratory had already been set to be decommissioned before the staff cuts and that though proficiency testing would be paused during the transition to a new laboratory, dairy product testing would continue.The Trump administration has proposed cutting $40bn from the agency.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe FDA’s proficiency testing programs ensure consistency and accuracy across the nation’s network of food safety laboratories. Laboratories also rely on those quality-control tests to meet standards for accreditation.“The FDA is actively evaluating alternative approaches for the upcoming fiscal year and will keep all participating laboratories informed as new information becomes available,” the email said. More

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      Outrage as Trump’s coal expansion coupled with health cuts: ‘There won’t be anyone to work in the mines’

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      The Trump administration’s efforts to expand coal mining while simultaneously imposing deep cuts to agencies tasked with ensuring miner health and safety has left some advocates “dumbfounded”.Agencies that protect coal miners from serious occupational hazards, including the condition best known as “black lung”, have been among those affected by major government cuts imposed by the White House and the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) run by the billionaire Elon Musk.“The [Mine Workers of America] is thrilled they’re looking at the future of coal,” said Erin Bates, a spokesperson for the United Mine Workers of America, about a series of executive orders signed by the president to expand coal mining. “But – if you’re not going to protect the health and safety of the miners, there’s not going to be anyone to work in the mines you are apparently reopening.”Last week, Trump signed a raft of measures he said would expand coal mining in the US in order to feed the energy demands of hungry datacenters that power artificial intelligence software.“All those plants that have been closed are going to be opened if they’re modern enough, or they’ll be ripped down and brand new ones will be built,” Trump told a crowd of lawmakers, workers and executives at the White House while signing the order. “We’re going to put the miners back to work.”The coal industry has shrunk precipitously in recent years, and now represents only about 15% of the power generated for the US electrical grid. Natural gas, wind and solar have proved to have a competitive advantage over coal, contributing to its decline, because plants are cheaper to operate, according to Inside Climate News.Even as coal mining has shrunk, the potential dangers for people who still work in the field remains high. Pneumoconiosis is among the best known occupational hazards faced by coal miners, but is far from the only risk they face – others include roof collapse, hearing loss and lung cancer, to name a few.Trump’s push for coal came less than a week after the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, imposed a 10,000-person cut to the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Cuts overseen by Kennedy, alongside those imposed by Musk’s unofficial Doge, represented the elimination of almost a quarter of HHS’s 82,000-person workforce.Nearly 900 of those workers were dismissed from the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH), including in the agency’s respiratory health division in West Virginia, which specifically oversaw an X-ray screening program for black lung. Doge has also pursued cuts to mine safety by eliminating 34 regional offices of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) in 19 states.The deep cuts especially worried those intimately familiar with the suffering caused by pneumoconiosis – such as Greg Wagner, a doctor and former senior adviser at the NIOSH.“My thoughts were, ‘Why NIOSH? Why now?’” said Wagner, whose early work at a community clinic in a small West Virginia coal mining town led him to a career working to prevent the disease at both NIOSH and as assistant secretary of labor for mine safety and health.Wagner also worked with the International Labor Organization and multiple countries in an effort to eliminate pneumoconiosis globally. He is now a professor of environmental health at Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health.The cuts “gutted” NIOSH, said Wagner, even as agency experts were “doing what they were asked to do and doing it extraordinarily well … Over-performing with little recognition. And to see that appear to be going up in smoke – I just – obviously my feelings were profound and complex.”The administration also wants to pause a new rule on silica dust – a kind of pneumoconiosis or “black lung” disease that is increasingly striking younger miners in Appalachia, as workers dig for harder-to-reach veins of coal.“To go into the silica rule – we’re almost dumbfounded,” Bates said. “The number of black lung cases that are showing up in the US is astronomical – it is increasing and not only are the numbers increasing, but it’s happening to younger and younger miners. Every single day this rule is delayed is another day our miners are contracting black lung.”Silicosis is a disease caused by inhaling silica dust, a form of pneumoconiosis that can be even more severe than the black lung of a century ago, and which has long been known to harm the health of coal miners.The government has been aware of the dangers of silica dust for decades, recommending dramatic reductions in exposure levels as early as 1974. In 1993, Wagner’s boss at NIOSH, Dr J Donald Millar, described the persistence of silicosis as “an occupational obscenity because there is no scientific excuse for its persistence”.The MSHA finalized a rule in April 2024 reducing silica dust exposure in mines, which was set to go into effect this year. Last week, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association filed a suit seeking to pause enforcement of the silica dust rule pending a lawsuit. Days later, federal mine regulators told the court they wanted to pause enforcement of the silica dust rule for coal mining operations by four months, delaying any enforcement actions until August 2025.“The sudden shift in litigation position signaled by MSHA’s ‘enforcement pause’, and by its unilateral proposal to hold this case in abeyance for a period of four months is a clarion call to this nation’s miners that the agency charged with the profound responsibility of protecting their health and safety is losing the stomach for the fight to vindicate its own rule,” attorneys for mine and steel unions wrote, seeking to intervene in the case.Wagner said his concerns about delay of the silica rule extended beyond miners into workers in other industries – including people who work sand blasting or carving engineered stone countertops, all known to be environments where workers can be exposed to potentially harmful levels of silica dust.“I don’t have the right words,” said Wagner about the cuts to NIOSH, which was deeply involved in research that showed how silica dust harmed miners. “I feel like it was just done without thought, done without consideration and the consequences of the loss of the agency i think will be felt for years.“We will need to try to rebuild what NIOSH has been doing.” More

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      Trump’s already skirting due process. Now he’s musing about deporting citizens | Moira Donegan

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      They’re rounding people up, and you could be next. The Trump administration has largely dispensed with due process rights in deporting immigrants, who are now being targeted for their protected speech, having their visas or green cards summarily cancelled without process and sometimes without notice, and getting kidnapped off the streets and hustled into vans so that they can be shipped to “detention centers” too far away for their loved ones, or their lawyers, to visit them.Some immigrants are being targeted for disappearance because they oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, an opinion that it is now physically dangerous, instead of merely unpopular, to hold. But others the government seems to be seizing almost at random. More than 200 Venezuelan nationals have been seized and deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, rendered outside of US jurisdiction in defiance of judges’ orders demanding that their deportation flights be stopped. Of those Venezuelans, most had no criminal record. Other deportees, like the Maryland father and sheet metal worker Kilmar Abrego García, seem to have been deported by mistake; the Trump administration says that Abrego García, who they admit they did not mean to deport, will not be brought back to his family in the United States. Conveniently, the fact that they have deported him to a foreign prison is supposed, in the Trump administration’s logic, to absolve them of responsibility for putting him there. “We suggest the judge contact [Salvadoran] President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador,” the White House said, obnoxiously, after a judge ordered them to bring Abrego García back.Meanwhile, the sadism of the deportations, and the cruelty of the Salvadoran prison where the men are being kept, seem to hold a kind of aesthetic appeal for the Trump camp. The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, recently flew to the El Salvador prison for a photoshoot with the captives there, where she stood in front of a crowd of men packed into a cell behind bars with her hair coiffed in long beachy waves.Now, the Trump administration may be seeking to extend the lawlessness and cruelty of its deportation regime to the next logical target: American citizens. The White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, confirmed on Tuesday that the Trump administration is considering pathways to deport citizens as well. “The president has discussed this idea quite a few times publicly. He’s also discussed it privately. You’re referring to the president’s idea for American citizens to potentially be deported,” she said. “The president has said, if it’s legal, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he’s not sure.”This would be illegal. But so is so much of what the Trump administration is doing with its deportation policies. It is illegal to cancel visas and green cards without due process, as the Trump administration has done and continues to do as part of a widening dragnet in its anti-immigrant purges. It is illegal to target immigrants for their speech, as the Trump administration has done to pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide activists, from Rümeysa Öztürk to Mahmoud Khalil. It is illegal to deport people to a foreign prison where they have no recourse to enforce their rights and no path to pursue their freedom – it is illegal to do this, as the Trump administration has done, specifically to prevent its victims from seeking to enforce their own rights in American courts. And it is illegal to ignore the binding orders of federal judges to stop all of this conduct in order to ensure that the deportations can continue, punishing innocent people, silencing protected speech, and scaring whole populations out of work, travel, political participation or any of the other daily dignities that they are supposed to be entitled to in this country.But the law, increasingly, is whatever the Trump administration decides it is. And there is no force that seems prepared to make them obey the law when their will does not incline them to do so.That is because the supreme court has been no help, and if anything has acted, so far, as all but an accomplice to Trump’s dismantling of the rule of law in his pursuit of anti-immigrant vengeance. Lower court judges have attempted to intervene on behalf of the disappeared immigrants, issuing orders commanding the Trump administration to stop deportations under a long-dormant 1798 wartime measure known as the Alien Enemies Act, and to return Abrego García to the US immediately. But the supreme court has stepped in to pause these orders, allowing the Trump administration’s deportation agenda to continue. In the Abrego García case, the court weakened a district court order to “effectuate” the innocent man’s freedom and return to a mere command that they “facilitate” it, and only in ways that don’t interfere with the executive branch’s foreign policy prerogatives – in practice, a weakening of the demand to bring Abrego García back home to a request that the Trump administration provide more plausible deniability when they refuse to do so. And while Brett Kavanaugh weighed in with a concurrence to make a pious declaration of the need for due process in deportation proceedings, the court’s actions speak louder than its words: they are allowing the kidnapping and deportation of US residents to continue without due process.The legal precedents being established in these immigration disappearance cases have no limiting principles: if visa holders, asylum seekers and legal permanent residents can be snatched and deported with effectively no practicable recourse to due process protections, then there is no reason why citizens can’t be. It is in the interest of every American citizen to take an active stand in defense of our immigrant neighbors. Because once the Trump administration decides that they have no rights, then neither do we. More

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      I disagree with Mahmoud Khalil’s politics. But the deportation decision is abhorrent | Jo-Ann Mort

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      When the federal immigration judge Jamee Comans ruled in favor of allowing the government to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student in the US on a legal visa, her decision was based on “foreign policy concerns” presented by US secretary of state Marco Rubio. It was so shocking that I had to reread the news report several times before I could believe it.Rubio’s claim is based on Khalil’s leadership role in the anti-Israel protests at Columbia University. I didn’t agree with Khalil’s politics when he led the protests and I don’t agree today with his politics, nor even his actions during the protests. But I’m unwavering in supporting his right to his views, and his right to shout them in what, until Trump took the reins, was our free American nation.As an immigration judge, Judge Comans couldn’t make a constitutional determination. Immigration judges are not actually part of the judicial branch of government; they are part of the executive branch and, as such, don’t rule on constitutional questions but only on issues of immigration law. Therefore, it’s likely – and hopeful – that on further appeal, Khalil’s constitutional right to free speech could be upheld, though less likely than it would have been before the weakening of our constitutional fiber under President Trump.Since Rubio recently argued that non-citizens, even if here legally, can be deported if they undermine US foreign policy aims, the administration has taken further intimidating action. Today, visa-holders and US visitors are finding their social media being examined and their phones taken at the border for searches.From the day he entered office, Rubio has shown himself to be a weak link in preserving the national interest, justifying a range of abuses under the guise of US foreign policy. He has completely crouched under the heavy arm of President Trump, foregoing many of his previously long-held beliefs in everything from support for Ukraine to the use of soft aid via USAID, and generally in promoting American values. A child of parents who came to the United States as emigres from Fidel Castro’s Cuba, he once embraced democracy with as much bravado as he is now displaying in helping to sink it.To claim that one of the reasons for a deportation like this is to stop antisemitism, as the state department says, is really a ruse to garner support for the widening attack on campus free speech and universities. It is certainly not making Jewish students safer. On the contrary, dividing and conquering to strip higher education and free speech of their very essences endangers every group that has relied on the first amendment’s guarantee.It also strikes me as laughable that the secretary is claiming that Khalil’s presence in America is harming US foreign policy aims. After all, as I wrote here just last week, what in the world is US foreign policy, especially regarding the Middle East? There is no diplomacy and there are no stated foreign policy goals, unless you consider Trump’s dream of building hotel-casinos on Gaza’s beaches to be formal American policy.As the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu himself discovered when he traveled to the White House this week, Trump had nothing to offer him. Netanyahu came begging for tariff relief and a green light for continuing his war against Hamas, as well as an even brighter green light to bomb Iran. He was shocked when Trump announced during their joint press availability that he would send his adviser Steve Witkoff to discuss a peace agreement between the US and Iran. Netanyahu went home empty-handed on tariff relief, and stunned at Trump’s sudden dive into talks with Iran.But of course, neither the Gaza beach hotels nor, especially, the deportations of visa-holders are about foreign policy. Everything is about domestic policy; the actual purpose is to pit various groups of Americans one against the other. The memo circulated by Rubio argues that “while Khalil’s activities were otherwise lawful” his presence in the US would harm efforts by those who are implementing “US policy to combat antisemitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States”.Rubio went on to claim that “condoning antisemitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective”.What does this even mean? On the same day that Khalil’s freedom was being constricted, Witkoff, the White House adviser, had a four-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin, one of the leading purveyors of antisemitism in the world today. What is this administration’s plan for fighting antisemitism on a global scale? There is none, of course.Domestically, the president’s plan appears to be not only to divide and conquer, but also to weaken and even cripple institutions of higher education, the arts, and other critical underpinnings of democracy that keep American Jews – and all minorities – safe. Worse still, it is to simultaneously try to make us, American Jews, complicit in his evil dealings.The ripple effect of this ruling and the detention of other students, like Rümeysa Öztürk from Tufts University, is propelling many of us in the American Jewish community to act against the Trump administration. A new amicus brief filed by a coalition of 27 Jewish organizations, supported with pro-bono work by the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine (a firm that deserves a gold star for upholding our constitution, rather than making side deals with the president to crush it), says this: “Without presuming to speak for all of Jewish America – a diverse community that holds a multitude of viewpoints – amici are compelled to file this brief because the arrest, detention, and potential deportation of Rümeysa Öztürk for her protected speech violate the most basic constitutional rights.”Freedom of expression, particularly on matters of public concern, the brief makes clear, is a cornerstone of American democracy and extends to academic settings and campus discourse. I’m proud to say that my synagogue, Congregation Beth Elohim, in Brooklyn, is a signatory of the brief, along with an organization, New Jewish Narratives, where I serve on the board.Tonight begins the Jewish festival of Passover, a festival of liberation and freedom. It marks a journey that the ancient Jews who were slaves in Egypt took from servitude to freedom. It is a time when Jews around the world proclaim, “Let my people go,” as we see our own fight for freedom in the eyes of those who remain unfree. For me, the freeing of the Israeli hostages is central to the Passover message, as is the freedom of both the Palestinian people and the Israelis to live in a state where they are free from fear and have a vibrant democracy.It’s a vibrant democracy that I wish, too, for the United States. And, at my Passover table, I will pledge to fight to maintain and strengthen the bonds of all peoples here in the US toward collective action that defends and maintains our democracy. If Khalil’s right to remain in the US is not upheld, our nation will be weaker for it, and all our rights will be further endangered.

      Jo-Ann Mort, who writes and reports frequently about Israel/Palestine is also author of the forthcoming book of poetry, A Precise Chaos. Follow her @jo-ann.bsky.social More

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      Trump’s chaos-inducing global tariffs, explained in charts

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      Donald Trump’s announcement of a long slate of new tariffs on the US’s trading partners has caused chaos in global markets and threatens a global trade war and US recession.Long trailed on his election campaign, Trump’s plans were even more sweeping than many had predicted: a baseline 10% tariff on all imports and higher tariffs for key trading partners, including China and the EU.Though the tariffs won’t go into effect for a few more days, global markets have been reeling from the announcement of what’s to come.Here’s a breakdown of what the tariffs are and how they’ve affected the economy since Trump’s announcement.The new tariffsTrump’s new tariffs are twofold. First, all imported goods will be subject to a 10% universal tariff starting 5 April. Then, on 9 April, certain countries will see higher tariff rates – what Trump has deemed “reciprocal tariffs” in retaliation for tariffs the countries have placed on American exports.Keep in mind that tariffs are paid by American companies that are importing goods such as wine from Europe or microchips from Taiwan.Some of the highest tariffs will be put on imports from Asian countries, including China, India, South Korea and Japan. EU exports will also have a 20% tariff.How did the White House calculate its reciprocal tariffs? The administration said that it looked at the trade deficit between the US and a specific country as a percentage, and then considered that to be a tariff. So, for example, the value of US goods that are exported to China are 67% of the value of the Chinese goods that are imported into the US.The White House calls this definition a “tariff” placed on American goods, though a deficit and a tariff are not the same thing.It then halved the “tariff” and used that percentage to represent the new levy that the US would place on goods from that country.Canada and Mexico are notably absent from the list, despite being targets of a proposed 25% tariff. The White House said that goods covered under an existing trade agreement between the two countries will continue to have no tariffs.Targeting key trading partnersTrump and his economic advisers argue that the tariffs will strengthen US manufacturing while also lowering barriers other countries put on American goods. But the US has long been in a trade deficit, importing more goods than exporting.While increasing domestic manufacturing and relying less on foreign suppliers could strengthen the US economy in the long run, economists say that Trump’s tariffs are too aggressive and uncertain for them to actually encourage domestic investment. Instead, companies have said they will pass the cost of the tariffs on to consumers.Fear on Wall StreetMarkets immediately plummeted when exchanges started trading on Thursday morning, as Wall Street reacted to the new levies.Wall Street has been slumping for the last month as Trump introduced new tariffs and teased the ones he announced on Wednesday. All three exchanges went into correction territory in March, meaning that the indexes fell more than 10% from their recent peaks.The tariffs have also hit stock markets abroad. The UK’s FTSE 100 saw its worst day since August 2024, while markets in Japan, Hong Kong and Germany also tumbled.Leaders around the world expressed shock and frustration over the new tariffs. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, called the tariffs “a major blow to the world economy”.“The global economy will massively suffer,” she said Thursday. “Uncertainty will spiral and trigger the rise of further protectionism. The consequences will be dire.”The new tariffs have also made the US dollar fall in value in relation to other major currencies.The strength of the US dollar is an important measure of how the US economy is seen by investors, relative to other economies. That the dollar has been falling shows that investors see instability in the US economy that is likely to last. More

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      Trump makes sweeping HIV research and grant cuts: ‘setting us back decades’

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      The federal government has cancelled dozens of grants to study how to prevent new HIV infections and expand access to care, decimating progress toward eliminating the epidemic in the United States, scientists say.The National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated at least 145 grants related to researching advancements in HIV care that had been awarded nearly $450m in federal funds. The cuts have been made in phases over the last month.NIH, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, is the largest funding source of medical research in the world, leaving many scientists scrambling to figure out how to continue their work.“The loss of this research could very well result in a resurgence of HIV that becomes more generalized in this country,” said Julia Marcus, a professor at Harvard Medical School who recently had two of her grants cancelled. “These drastic cuts are rapidly destroying the infrastructure of scientific research in this country and we are going to lose a generation of scientists.”In 2012, the FDA approved pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), an antiviral drug taken once a day that is highly successful at preventing new HIV infections. While the drug has been a powerful tool to contain the virus, inequities remain in accessing those drugs and sustaining a daily treatment. Despite major progress, there are still 30,000 new infections each year in the US.Many of the terminated HIV-related studies focused on improving access to drugs like PrEP in communities that have higher rates of infections – including trans women and Black men. One of Marcus’s projects was examining whether making PrEP available over the counter would increase the use of the drug in vulnerable communities.“The research has to focus on the populations that are most affected in order to have an impact and be relevant,” said Marcus.Yet, this may be the justification for defunding so many HIV-related studies. A termination letter reviewed by the Guardian dated 20 March cited that “so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”The National Institutes of Health did not expand on why the grants were terminated in response to questions from the Guardian. In a statement it said it is “taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities. We remain dedicated to restoring our agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science.”Many researchers were left stunned by the scale of the cancellations since in 2019, Donald Trump announced in his State of the Union address a commitment to eliminate the HIV epidemic in the country over the next 10 years. As part of this initiative, his administration negotiated a deal with drug companies to provide free PrEP for 200,000 low-income patients.“Scientific breakthroughs have brought a once-distant dream within reach,” said Trump in his address. “Together we will defeat Aids in America.”Amy Nunn, a professor at the Brown University School of Public Health, said she had even tailored grant proposals to fit the policy goals of the initiative, which included geographically targeting HIV prevention efforts. One of her studies that was terminated focused on closing disparities of PrEP use among African American men in Jackson, Mississippi.“They finally adopted those policies at the federal level,” Nunn said, noting that Trump was the first president to make ending the epidemic a priority. “Now they’re undercutting their own successes. It’s so strange.”Though hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds had been awarded for the grants, the terminations will not recoup all of that money for the administration, since many are years into their work. Some are even already finished.Nathaniel Albright learned earlier this month that an NIH grant supporting his doctoral research was cancelled even though his project had already been completed. A PhD candidate at Ohio State University, Albright is defending his dissertation at the end of the month. Still, Albright is concerned how the cuts impact the future of the field.“It’s created an environment in academia where my research trajectory is now considered high risk to institutions,” said Albright, who is currently struggling to find postdoctorate positions at universities.Pamina Gorbach, an epidemiologist who teaches at University of California, Los Angeles, had been following hundreds of men living with HIV in Los Angeles for 10 years to learn their needs. She had been awarded an NIH grant to better facilitate their treatment through a local clinic. Her funding was cancelled earlier this month as well.“It’s really devastating,” said Gorbach. “If you’re living with HIV and you’re not on meds, you know what happens? You get sick and you die.”Clinic staff in Los Angeles will likely be laid off as a result of the cuts, said Gorbach. Others agreed one immediate concern was how to pay their research staff, since the funds from a grant are immediately frozen once it is terminated. The NIH funds also often make up at least a portion of university professor’s salaries, all said they were most alarmed by the impact on services for their patients and the loss of progress toward ending the epidemic.“This is erasing an entire population of people who have been impacted by an infectious disease,” said Erin Kahle, the director of the Center for Sexuality and Health Disparities at the University of Michigan who lost an NIH grant.Scrapping an entire category of disease from research will have innumerable downstream effects on the rest of healthcare, she added.“This is setting us back decades,” said Kahle. More

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      What is ‘abundance’ liberalism, and why are people arguing about it?

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      Is progressive public policy in America broken? Do many left-leaning laws actually make life more expensive for struggling people? Is regulatory red tape hindering growth and innovation? Have Democratic-run cities, such as New York and San Francisco, become giant billboards against liberal governance?These arguments wouldn’t sound out of place in a policy paper from a conservative thinktank. Yet their newest champions are two of America’s best-known left-leaning journalists, the New York Times’ Ezra Klein and the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson – and they believe the left is overdue for a reckoning of sorts.Klein and Thompson make their case in a new book simply called, with no subtitle, Abundance. The authors put forward a positive pitch for “abundance liberalism”: a vision of the US where policymakers spend less time fighting over how to apportion scarce resources and more time making sure there’s no scarcity to start with.View image in fullscreenAbundance has received a mostly positive reception so far, but also sparked debate, with critics arguing that the book ignores the effect of corporate power, downplays Republicans’ role in the crises that the US faces or overstates the effectiveness of its policy prescriptions. A writer in the left-leaning magazine American Prospect accused the “abundance agenda” of being “neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world”.The book opens with a striking image of a US, in the year 2050, that is close to utopia. Americans’ electrical needs are powered by sustainable energy “so clean it barely leaves a carbon trace and so cheap you can scarcely find it on your monthly bill”. AI breakthroughs, labor rights and economic reforms mean that most people can do their jobs in a shorter workweek. Vertical farms provide cheap and fresh vegetables, desalinated water from the ocean is used as drinking water, and lab-grown meat has replaced animal slaughter.This near-future America – less the gritty neon smog of Blade Runner than a hi-tech Copenhagen – is entirely achievable, the authors argue. It just requires political vision and a willingness to reconsider certain assumptions.Despite being the richest country in the world, the US has a problem of scarcity, particularly in Democratic-run metropolitan areas, where the costs of housing and other basic needs have spiraled out of control. This is exacerbated by the traditional progressive solution of giving people money or vouchers to help them pay for finite resources such as housing, healthcare and food, the book argues, which increases demand and merely makes those things even more expensive.“The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing,” Klein has said. He and Thompson have described themselves as “supply-side” progressives, borrowing a term usually associated with conservative economic theories.What the US badly needs to do is build, they argue – build more houses, public transportation, power plants and other infrastructure – but that isn’t happening.One obstacle is nimbyism, the tendency of people to support public works and development in the abstract but fight them when they affect their own neighborhoods. Another is “everything bagel” logrolling that complicates what should be narrowly focused legislation by layering it with other social and political objectives, such as diverse hiring requirements or climate crisis goals, in order to appease interest groups or political constituencies.In an example Thompson recently discussed on a podcast, then president Joe Biden signed legislation in 2021 providing $42bn of funding to expand access to broadband internet in rural America. As of this December, according to Politico, the program had “yet to connect a single household”. Critics told Politico that this was partly because of a “suite of federal conditions” that required states “accepting the money to make sure providers plan for climate change, reach out to unionized workforces and hire locally”, as well as guarantee affordable broadband plans for people with low incomes.“I don’t want the state of Virginia taking, say, federal money to build broadband internet and then charging poor rural folks, like, $200 a month to go online,” Thompson said. “But by holding those values so closely … we accidentally built just about nothing.” A “confusion of process versus outcomes” meant that “very little was actually done on behalf of the Americans for whom we wanted to raise their living standards”.Another example is California, which in 1982 began studying the idea of implementing a high-speed rail system across the state. The idea was, and is, extremely popular with voters, and billions of dollars were budgeted for the project. Four decades later, almost none of it has been built. A “vetocracy” of regulatory, legal, environmental and political considerations have caused endless delays and continually narrowed the project’s ambition.“In the time California has spent failing to complete its 500-mile high-speed rail system,” Thompson and Klein write, “China has built more than 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.”The solution to these problems, Abundance argues, is a combination of techno-optimism, ambitious and clearly defined policy goals, and political leadership that is willing at times to say no to progressive pressure groups.Klein and Thompson favorably cite what happened when a bridge collapsed in Pennsylvania in 2023, crippling an essential highway. To fix it would typically take months of planning, consultation and reviews; Governor Josh Shapiro instead declared a state of emergency that allowed the reconstruction of the bridge with union labor but free from many normal processes. The highway reopened in 12 days, instead of the 12 to 24 months that it might have taken.Abundance makes clear that it is a book written for the left, and isn’t really interested in elaborating the ways that Republicans and conservatives have contributed to these problems, though Klein and Thompson acknowledge that they have. Yet within the left the book has proved controversial.“[I]t would be a huge mistake,” Matt Bruenig, a policy analyst, wrote in Jacobin, “to sideline whatever focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.”He continued: “Indeed, we have now seen what it looks like when the government supports and subsidizes technological innovation and implementation without concerning itself with the inegalitarianism of the system. His name is Elon Musk. In its desire to promote electrical vehicles and rocketry innovations, the US government made him the richest man in the world and then he used his riches to take over a major political communications platform and then the government.”While agreeing with some of Abundance’s aims, the journalists Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, writing in the Washington Monthly, argued that the book’s prescriptions wouldn’t necessarily bring the kind of sweeping changes that Klein and Thompson believe. For example, according to examples they cite, areas of the US that have reformed zoning laws to make it easier to build apartment buildings and multifamily homes have seen only modest reductions in the cost of housing.Thompson and Klein have argued that the abundance agenda is bigger than any individual policy proposal, and more about the Democratic party and other left-leaning institutions rethinking their own ambitions and how they conceive of success and failure.“Liberals should be able to say: Vote for us, and we will govern the country the way we govern California!” they write. “Instead, conservatives are able to say: Vote for them, and they will govern the country the way they govern California! … What has gone wrong?” More