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    Private firms are trying to fill research gaps, but their ‘puny’ budgets are no match for federal funds

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    The federal government has slashed research since Donald Trump took office – hacking away at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its grants, staff and long-held partnerships with academia.Now, some private companies said they want to pick up strands of research that might have otherwise been funded by the federal government. The effort has stoked little optimism among experts, who caution that private efforts cannot remotely replicate the breadth, depth or public service provided by federal funding.“We can’t wait four years to do any women’s health research,” said Priyanka Jain, co-founder and the CEO of the startup Evvy. The company sells at-home vaginal microbiome tests – a product the company argues can help women better understand common conditions such as bacterial vaginosis.Jain said Evvy is funding a small trial to identify biomarkers, or physical indicators, of how the vaginal microbiome can impact in vitro fertilization (IVF) success rates.“There are companies like Evvy raising venture dollars and doing the work the government is not doing,” said Jain. “Women step up and actually solve this problem.”In contrast, health policy insiders such as Sean Tipton, the chief policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said the many small projects that hope to keep research alive cannot remotely match the retreat of federal government research.“It is absolutely not realistic to think that the resources of the federal government can be replaced through some combination of philanthropic and for-profit entities trying to fill the gap,” said Tipton.The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical and behavioral research. When Trump took office, the agency had a $48bn budget and funded projects into nearly every area of medicine imaginable – including administration bugbears such as fluoride and vaccine safety.In the first few months of the administration, the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and billionaire Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” have fired 1,300 NIH employees, canceled $2bn in grants, and slowed new grant approval by nearly one-third, pumping $2.3bn less into research.View image in fullscreenA leaked budget proposal would further shrink the NIH by 40% – or tens of billions less that will not go into research. HHS has also canceled more than $11bn in state grants and frozen billions in grants slated for research at Ivy league colleges such as Harvard University. In the latest move, the National Science Foundation, which finances basic research in areas such as astronomy and quantum computing, canceled $2bn more in funding.“In the research space, my organization is proud because we’re now spending in excess of $3m a year on research grants – that is literally a rounding error compared to what the federal government spends,” Tipton said. “We’re very proud of that, and worked very hard to get it up to that level, and that level is puny and inadequate.”The federal government’s backing of scientific research has been fundamental to modern drug discovery. NIH research contributed to 354 of 356 of the drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 2010-2019, a JAMA Health Forum study found.That money has gone to advance blockbuster drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic – first identified by an NIH-funded researcher and isolated from gila monster saliva by Veterans Affairs researchers – and to the hundreds lesser known FDA-approved treatments.“Tell taxpayers we’re studying gila monsters in a lab – they’ll laugh you out of town, but the first GLP-1 was exenatide, which is a gila monster protein,” said Dr Fred Ledley, the author of the JAMA Health Forum study. Ledley’s favorite example of basic research comes from worms – publicly funded studies of their intestinal development led to the discovery of a trigger of cell death, which now underpins nearly one-third of the new cancer drugs on the market.His research found that for every “first in class” innovative drug brought to market, the NIH funded roughly $1.4bn in research. If government investment was calculated as industry calculates its investment – to include failure and the cost of capital – it is closer to $2.8bn in public funding, or about the equivalent of what industry spends to bring an innovative drug to market.Without NIH’s basic research, there is little hope that the private market will pick up the tab, said Ledley.“It’s too expensive for them,” Ledley said. “What you’ll see industry do is develop more ‘me too’ drugs,’” and “incremental tweaking … This is not what the public wants”.“The public wants something to treat Alzheimer’s with, they want something to prevent diabetes in the first place, and they desperately need better treatments for cancer and heart disease – still the number one killer,” said Ledley.Another indicator of the low likelihood of the industry picking up basic research is in job listings. Since 1 January, listings for research and development positions have fallen 25% based on a “before times” baseline of January 2020 baseline, according to data from job hiring site Indeed. Instead, the private health sector is dominated by demand for services – such as nurses and surgeons.“The government can step in and correct that kind of market failure when something is going to be positive for the society but not necessarily profitable in the market,” said economist Allison Shrivastava, an economist with Indeed. “A lot of this research falls into that category.”Put another way by the Democratic US senator Patty Murray at a recent press conference: “Our public health folks who go out and track measles or track whooping cough or track a new pandemic aren’t going to work for a private company … There isn’t a profit-making course in this.”“In last year’s world we were hoping to get funding” from the federal government for her company’s study, said Jain. She noted that women’s health research has been especially hard-hit by cuts, a victim of “diversity, equity and inclusion” cancellations.“I personally don’t think we should have to raise venture capital money to do this study – that is not the typical use of venture capital money,” said Jain. “Our hope is we survive another four years and the tides turn.” More

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      The United States is witnessing the return of psychiatric imprisonment | Jordyn Jensen

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      Across the country, a troubling trend is accelerating: the return of institutionalization – rebranded, repackaged and framed as “modern mental health care”. From Governor Kathy Hochul’s push to expand involuntary commitment in New York to Robert F Kennedy Jr’s proposal for “wellness farms” under his Make America Healthy Again (Maha) initiative, policymakers are reviving the logics of confinement under the guise of care.These proposals may differ in form, but they share a common function: expanding the state’s power to surveil, detain and “treat” marginalized people deemed disruptive or deviant. Far from offering real support, they reflect a deep investment in carceral control – particularly over disabled, unhoused, racialized and LGBTQIA+ communities. Communities that have often seen how the framing of institutionalization as “treatment” obscures both its violent history and its ongoing legacy. In doing so, these policies erase community-based solutions, undermine autonomy, and reinforce the very systems of confinement they claim to move beyond.Take Hochul’s proposal, which seeks to lower the threshold for involuntary psychiatric hospitalization in New York. Under her plan, individuals could be detained not because they pose an imminent danger, but because they are deemed unable to meet their basic needs due to a perceived “mental illness”. This vague and subjective standard opens the door to sweeping state control over unhoused people, disabled peopleand others struggling to survive amid systemic neglect. Hochul also proposes expanding the authority to initiate forced treatment to a broader range of professionals – including psychiatric nurse practitioners – and would require practitioners to factor in a person’s history, in effect pathologizing prior distress as grounds for future detention.This is not a fringe proposal. It builds on a growing wave of reinstitutionalization efforts nationwide. In 2022, New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, directed police and EMTs to forcibly hospitalize people deemed “mentally ill”, even without signs of imminent danger. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom’s Care courts compel people into court-ordered “treatment”.Now, these efforts are being turbocharged at the federal level. RFK Jr’s Maha initiative proposes labor-based “wellness farms” as a response to homelessness and addiction – an idea that eerily echoes the institutional farms of the 20th century, where disabled people and people of color were confined, surveilled and exploited under the guise of rehabilitation.Just recently, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced a sweeping restructuring that will dismantle critical agencies and consolidate power under a new “Administration for a Healthy America” (AHA). Aligned with RFK Jr’s Maha initiative and Donald Trump’s “department of government efficiency” directive, the plan merges the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and other agencies into a centralized structure ostensibly focused on combating chronic illness. But through this restructuring – and the mass firing of HHS employees – the federal government is gutting the specialized infrastructure that supports mental health, disability services and low-income communities.The restructuring is already under way: 20,000 jobs have been eliminated, regional offices slashed, and the Administration for Community Living (ACL) dissolved its vital programs for older adults and disabled people scattered across other agencies with little clarity or accountability. This is not administrative streamlining; it is a calculated dismantling of protections and supports, cloaked in the rhetoric of efficiency and reform. SAMHSA – a pillar of the country’s behavioral health system, responsible for coordinating addiction services, crisis response and community mental health care – is being gutted, threatening programs such as the 988 crisis line and opioid treatment access. These moves reflect not just austerity, but a broader governmental strategy of manufactured confusion. By dissolving the very institutions tasked with upholding the rights and needs of disabled and low-income people, the federal government is laying the groundwork for a more expansive – and less accountable – system of carceral “care”.This new era of psychiatric control is being marketed as a moral imperative. Supporters insist there is a humanitarian duty to intervene – to “help” people who are suffering. But coercion is not care. Decades of research show that involuntary (forced) psychiatric interventions often lead to trauma, mistrust, and poorer health outcomes. Forced hospitalization has been linked to increased suicide risk and long-term disengagement from mental health care. Most critically, it diverts attention from the actual drivers of distress: poverty, housing instability, criminalization, systemic racism and a broken healthcare system.The claim that we simply need more psychiatric beds is a distraction. What we need is a complete paradigm shift – away from coercion and toward collective care. Proven alternatives already exist: housing-first initiatives, non-police and peer-led crisis response teams, harm reduction programs, and voluntary, community-based mental health services. These models prioritize dignity, autonomy and support over surveillance, control and confinement.As Liat Ben-Moshe argues, prisons did not simply replace asylums; rather, the two systems coexist and evolve, working in tandem to surveil, contain and control marginalized populations. Today, reinstitutionalization is returning under a more therapeutic facade: “wellness farms”, court diversion programs, expanded involuntary commitment. The language has changed, but the logic remains the same.This moment demands resistance. We must reject the idea that locking people up is a form of care. These proposals must be named for what they are: state-sanctioned strategies of containment, rooted in ableism, racism and the fear of nonconformity.Real public health does not rely on force. It does not require confining people or pathologizing poverty. It means meeting people’s needs – through housing, community care, healthcare and support systems that are voluntary, accessible and liberatory.As budget negotiations in New York continue to drag on – with expansions to involuntary commitment still on the table – and as RFK Jr advances carceral care proposals at the federal level, we face a critical choice: will we continue the long history of institutional violence, or will we build something better – something rooted in justice, autonomy and collective wellbeing?The future of mental health care – and of human dignity itself – depends on our answer.

      Jordyn Jensen is the executive director of the Center for Racial and Disability Justice at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law More

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      in US Politics

      How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

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      View image in fullscreenSo far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.Fetal personhood is the belief that embryos and fetuses deserve the legal rights and protections afforded to people. If taken to its logical conclusion in US law, this belief would not only totally outlaw abortion, but also risk pitting the rights of fetuses against the rights of the women carrying them in all kinds of circumstances. In the first year after the US supreme court overturned Roe, at least 200 people were prosecuted for conduct relating to their pregnancies. Most of these cases involved charges of child endangerment, abuse or neglect – language that treats fetuses as children.A Guggenheim fellow who has published seven books on reproduction and abortion, Ziegler has long seen the fight for fetal personhood as the throughline in the anti-abortion movement’s centuries-long history. In recent years, with Roe gone, she grew convinced that the movement was no longer willing to pull punches in that fight. “The trajectory has been more and more punitive, more focused on saying: ‘Justice for the fetus means punishing a larger group of people that encompasses not just doctors, but people who assist them, and potentially abortion seekers themselves,’” she said in an interview.View image in fullscreenPersonhood, which was released Tuesday, argues that the anti-abortion movement did not have to be so punitive. While anti-abortion activists have never agreed on how to best implement fetal personhood, they over time started to take more cues from Republican politicians, whose own veneration of “law and order” grew alongside its antagonism toward a social safety net. Those developments ultimately paved the way for the more extreme anti-abortion activists to grab more power within the movement.After Roe legalized abortion nationwide in 1973, anti-abortion activists organized in support of an amendment to the US constitution that would recognize embryos and fetuses as people. (The effort never gained the political traction it needed to become a serious possibility.) Around the same time, some activists broke with mainstream anti-abortion groups to push for policies that would offer more support for pregnant women, rather than just ban abortion.Yet the voices advocating for better daycare and housing for mothers faded away as the anti-abortion movement tightened its alliance with the Republican party. Anti-abortion activists understood that, by portraying fetuses as defenseless victims of the ultimate crime, they could energize conservative voters – and open their pockets.“The Republican party, from the Reagan era onward, has really equated a kind of justice and equality with punishing wrongdoers,” Ziegler said. “It’s a natural fit for the anti-abortion movement: the more its fortunes relied on Republican politicians, the more it framed things the same way.”State-level bans on abortion still do not technically punish abortion patients. (Instead, it’s abortion providers, long positioned by the movement as coercing or confusing women into the procedure, and sometimes the people who help them, who are at risk of criminal consequences.) But, over the last few years, self-described “abortion abolitionists” have slowly migrated out of the fringes of the anti-abortion movement and moved towards its center. Unlike mainstream “pro-lifers”, “abolitionists” believe that, if a fetus is a person and abortion is the murder of that person, women should be punished accordingly: as murderers.Neither “pro-lifers” nor “abolitionists” are particularly popular. After Roe’s collapse enabled states to make their own abortion laws, several states – including GOP strongholds like Ohio and Missouri – passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. According to Gallup, 85% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances, while a 2024 survey from the 19th News and SurveyMonkey found that 41% of Americans think “a fetus has rights starting at conception that should be protected by the government.”Even people who support fetal personhood can have tangled, even contradictory views on the matter. Only 9% of people think that the government should restrict access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF, even though IVF as it is currently practiced frequently involves the destruction or abandonment of embryos.None of the bills that allow abortion patients to be charged with homicide are likely to pass this year, but Ziegler doesn’t think “abolitionists” are going anywhere, for two reasons. First, the anti-abortion movement maintains a strong grip in southern Republican-dominated state legislatures, where many of these bills have emerged. Second, Ziegler believes that the anti-abortion movement is embracing “a conviction that it matters less what voters think and more what judges think”.“If you don’t worry about what you’re doing being unpopular, and you believe that ideological consistency, or even logical consistency, is paramount, you would be more inclined to go with an abolitionist argument, and you might worry less about that having political fallout in a politically uncompetitive state,” Ziegler said. “You don’t need to convince most Americans you’re right. You only need to convince five justices on the supreme court.”With abortion bans proving deeply unpopular in the US, circumventing popular will has become a necessity for an increasingly hardline movement. And by relying on the courts rather than voters, the anti-abortion movement can afford to ignore voters’ misgivings.The movement has abandoned its earlier goal of amending the US constitution to recognize fetal personhood; instead, the anti-abortion movement is now seeking to convince courts that the 14th amendment, which guarantees the right of due process and equal protection, already recognizes embryos and fetuses as people from the moment of conception. It is, according to Ziegler, yet another sign of the movement’s drift away from democratic norms.View image in fullscreenThis interest in the 14th amendment is also something of an about-face for the anti-abortion movement, which is predominantly white and has had a convoluted relationship with race for more than a century. At the time that the amendment passed, as part of a post-civil war effort to recognize Black people’s rights, anti-abortion leaders “didn’t want to talk about race because they weren’t sure that people of color were persons with rights”, Ziegler said. Over time, the anti-abortion movement began using the language of civil rights and affirmative action – but primarily to argue that fetuses are the greatest victim of discrimination.“I think that’s one of the reasons fetal personhood language has been resonant for so long,” Ziegler said of the movement’s co-option of civil rights rhetoric. “It gives people a way to talk about equality and a way to elevate somebody as a victim of discrimination in a way that makes sense to a largely white group of conservatives.”As Roe recedes further into the rearview mirror, Ziegler expects the movement to become even more committed to some of the most unpopular implications of fetal personhood, such as restrictions on IVF. Although Republican politicians have shied away from limiting access to the treatment, the anti-abortion movement has grown more strident on the topic. Some of its leaders even condemned Donald Trump for his recent executive order supporting IVF.“I think the anti-abortion movement is going to be still full steam ahead,” Ziegler said. “There’s an increasing sentiment in the movement that this is not about pleasing Republicans. This is not about pleasing voters. This is about the importance of this, ideologically, to the people involved.” More

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      RFK Jr’s autism study collecting Americans’ private medical records

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      The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is collecting the private medical records of many Americans from several different federal and commercial databases to give to researchers for US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new autism study.With this information being included in the database, the NIH is also reportedly crafting a new registry to track those with autism, per CBS News.The health agency claims it was doing so to fulfill a controversial promise the secretary of health made to root out the cause of autism by September, despite some experts saying that Kennedy’s goal is not even feasible.“If you just ask me, as a scientist, is it possible to get the answer that quickly? I don’t see any possible way,” Dr Peter Marks said on CBS’s Face the Nation earlier this month.On the collection of data, the director of NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, told advisers during a presentation on Monday that the aim was to help researchers study autism by giving them access to “comprehensive” patient data and health records.He added that these records would cover a “broad range” of people across the US.“The idea of the platform is that the existing data resources are often fragmented and difficult to obtain. The NIH itself will often pay multiple times for the same data resource,” he said in the presentation. “Even data resources that are within the federal government are difficult to obtain.”Bhattacharya added that the NIH was also discussing a potential expansion of the agency’s access to data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.The study also plans to link medication records from pharmacies, lab testing and genomics data from patients treated by the Department of Veterans Affairs and Indian Health Service, claims from private insurers and data from smartwatches and fitness trackers.Between 10 and 20 outside research teams will be selected and given grants to study the data, according to CBS News.Bhattacharya said that compiling this data could also potentially give health agencies a window into “real-time health monitoring” on Americans for studying other health problems beyond autism.“What we’re proposing is a transformative real-world data initiative, which aims to provide a robust and secure computational data platform for chronic disease and autism research,” he said.Bhattacharya echoed Kennedy’s words that some answers as to the cause of autism would be discovered by September, but he added that the study would be “an evolving process”.The news followed Kennedy’s first press conference in which he claimed that a significant and recent rise in autism diagnoses was evidence of an “epidemic” caused by an “environmental toxin” despite the evidence collected by health researchers.The Guardian has contacted the NIH for comment. More

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      US supreme court hears challenge to Obamacare free preventive healthcare

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      The US supreme court on Monday heard arguments in a case that could threaten Americans’ access to free preventive healthcare services under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.At issue is the constitutionality of the US preventive services taskforce, which plays a critical role in determining which preventive services health insurers must cover without cost to patients. The 16-member panel of medical experts, appointed by the health secretary without Senate confirmation, has designated dozens of life-saving screenings and treatments as essential preventive care.If the justices uphold the lower court’s ruling, health associations said in a filing, life-saving tests and treatments that have been cost-free would become subject to co-pays and deductibles, deterring many Americans from obtaining them.The case represents the latest in a long series of legal challenges to Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation to reach the nation’s highest court since its passage in 2010. A big critic of the program during his first term, Trump and his administration have now taken over the case after the Biden administration initially filed the appeal.In oral arguments, the justices posed sharp questions over whether the law gives the HHS secretary the appropriate level of supervision over the taskforce, including the power to influence its recommendations and fire members at will, or if the group operates as a largely independent governmental body whose recommendations effectively have the force of law.Jonathan Mitchell, the conservative lawyer representing the plaintiffs who previously represented Trump in ballot access litigation, insisted that taskforce members are “principal officers” because “their preventive care coverage mandates are neither directed nor supervised by the Secretary of Health and Human Services”.Mitchell’s argument hinges on interpreting statutory language requiring the task force to be “independent” and “protected from political pressure”, which he argues is incompatible with secretary oversight: “We don’t see any way that statutory language can be squared with the regime envisioned by the government,” he told the justices.Several justices appeared skeptical of Mitchell’s reading of the statute, with Justice Elena Kagan questioning whether Congress would create a board without specifying who appoints its members: “I mean, it would be an odd statute. I doubt you could find another where Congress has set up a board and … just not said who should appoint.”The taskforce is made up of medical experts who serve four-year terms on a volunteer basis. It reviews medical evidence and public feedback and issues recommendations about which preventive services would be most effective for detecting illnesses earlier or addressing ailments before a patient’s condition worsens.The taskforce has identified dozens of preventive services as having a high or moderate net benefit to patients including screenings to detect diabetes and various types of cancer, statin medications to lower the risk of heart disease and stroke, and interventions to help patients quit smoking or unhealthy alcohol use.The New Orleans-based fifth US circuit court of appeals ruled in 2024 that the taskforce’s structure violates the constitution, as the plaintiffs claimed. The government’s appeal of the fifth circuit’s decision initially was filed by Biden’s administration before being taken up by Trump.Trump’s administration argued in a supreme court brief that the taskforce’s preventive care recommendations cannot become legally binding on insurers without the HHS secretary’s permission.“The secretary can remove them at will, and the threat of removal is the ultimate tool for control over final decisions on recommendations,” justice department lawyers wrote.For this and other reasons, justice department lawyers argued, the taskforce’s members should be seen as so-called “inferior officers”, meaning they can be lawfully appointed by an executive branch department head – like the HHS secretary – and do not require Senate confirmation under the constitution.In a supreme court filing, the plaintiffs argued that the Affordable Care Act has transformed the longstanding taskforce from an advisory body into one that now issues “decrees” to insurers, adding that the HHS secretary has no authority to stop taskforce recommendations from becoming binding law.The taskforce’s lack of supervision, they argued, makes its members “principal officers” who must be presidentially appointed and Senate confirmed under the constitution.Before the case was narrowed to the appointments issue, the lawsuit included a religious objection to being required to cover pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV. They claimed that such drugs “facilitate and encourage homosexual behavior, prostitution, sexual promiscuity and intravenous drug use”.The fifth circuit’s ruling also rejected the government’s request to remove certain offending words from the Obamacare provision at issue – a process called severing – in order to make that part of the law conform to the constitution. That issue was also part of the appeal before the supreme court.The supreme court’s decision was expected by the end of June. More

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      Massachusetts governor calls Trump’s attacks on Harvard ‘bad for science’

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      Massachusetts governor Maura Healey said on Sunday that Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University and other schools are having detrimental ripple effects, with the shutdown of research labs and cuts to hospitals linked to colleges.During an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, the Democratic governor said that the effects on Harvard are damaging “American competitiveness”, since a number of researchers are leaving the US for opportunities in other countries. After decades of investment in science and innovation, she said: “intellectual assets are being given away.”In the past week, the US president cut off billions of dollars to Harvard in federal funds, after the university refused to concede to a number of the administration’s demands. Trump also called for its tax-exempt status to be revoked, a potentially illegal move, against the world-famous college in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Of the moves against colleges, Healey said: “It’s bad for patients, it’s bad for science, and it’s really bad for American competitiveness. There’s no way a state can make up for the cuts from federal funding.”She added: “I was in a hospital recently, Boston Children’s, where some of the sickest kids in the country receive care. Cuts to Boston Children’s and other hospitals are a direct result of Donald Trump’s actions, as these are part of a teaching hospital system.“These cuts to universities have significant ripple effects, resulting in layoffs of scientists and doctors, and clinical trials for cancer treatments have been shut down.“As governor, I want Massachusetts and America to soar. What Donald Trump is doing is essentially inviting other countries, like China, to take our scientists and researchers. This is terrible, especially considering what he has done to the economy. I am working hard every day to lower costs in my state, cut taxes, and build more housing, while Donald Trump is making life more expensive and harder for all of us.”Since Trump took office, his administration has deployed an “antisemitism taskforce” to demand various policy changes at different universities around the country.Columbia University, one of the first institutions targeted by the taskforce, quickly caved to the Trump administration’s demands to restore $400m in federal funding. Some of the measures that Columbia conceded to included banning face masks on campus, empowering security officers to arrest people, and placing control of the Middle Eastern department under a new senior vice-provost.Former Columbia University president Lee Bollinger said on Sunday that the Trump administration’s attacks on academic institutions represent a significant attack on first amendment rights.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” Bolinger said on CNN, adding that it “seems like a campaign of intimidation”.“This is a kind of weaponization of the government’s power,” he said.Earlier this month, the federal government sent Harvard two separate letters with specific demands. After the university publicly rejected those demands, the administration quickly froze nearly $2.3bn in federal funding.The conflict between the administration and the elite university took a strange turn on Friday, with the New York Times reporting that an 11 April letter from the administration with additional demands – which escalated the showdown – was “unauthorized”. The university disputed that the letter was “unauthorized,” claiming the federal government has “doubled down” on its offensive. 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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      American women and children are in crisis. Republicans are about to make it worse | Karen Dolan

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      Women and children are under threat in America.Jocelyn Smith of Roswell, New Mexico, knows this too well. “I’m disabled, taking care of my disabled daughter. I work, and I volunteer to help feed and house my community,” she told me. “Yet I need assistance affording meals for my family. Something is broken.”Smith knows, but did you know, that in the United States, nearly 43% of women – and almost half of all children – are poor or low-income? And that last year, families with children experienced the largest single-year increase in homelessness, with nearly 40% more people in families with children experiencing homelessness?And what if I told you that Donald Trump’s agenda – expressed through his more than 100 harmful executive actions, Elon Musk’s Doge cuts, and his budget making its way through his Republican-majority Congress – will make things even worse for women and children?I bet you’ll be pretty angry. Smith is.“Is Congress working on any of this?” she asks about the struggles of working families. “Unfortunately, no.” As she wrote in a recent op-ed: “they’re doing the opposite right now.In fact, the GOP budget proposal could slash $880bn from Medicaid and $230bn from food assistance. They’re also cutting government agencies that assist with affordable housing, transportation, safety, veterans, and children with disabilities.”The final amounts of those cuts will vary, but the numbers stand to be huge and devastating. Why? Because the GOP is looking for at least $4.5tn in more tax breaks for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. “They are reaching into my very shallow pockets, into my daughter’s life-saving medical care to pay for it,” Smith says.A new paper I co-authored for Repairers of the Breach and the Institute for Policy Studies tries to reckon with what these costs would mean for working Americans. For women and children, we found that some of the harshest blows will come in healthcare access and in help putting food on the table.Nearly one in five women and almost half of all children rely on Medicaid or its Children’s Health Insurance Program for healthcare. The House Republican budget resolution calls for potential cuts of hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid – as much as $880bn by 2034, as Smith points out.And a shocking 9 million people, disproportionately women and children, could lose all food assistance under the proposed supplemental nutrition assistance (Snap) cuts. Children could also miss out on food at school, since the Republican House budget proposal also calls for a $12bn cut to public schools’ free and reduced meals programs. This would eliminate 24,000 schools – serving 12 million students – from the program.Beyond food and healthcare, these cuts and proposals would also harm women and children in countless other ways.Nationally, women are already paid 18% less than men, which contributes to their higher likelihood of poverty. But now, nearly 3 million pregnant workers are at risk of losing their jobs amid doubts that Trump will properly enforce the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which provides worker protections for pregnant women.That’s especially egregious when you consider that 22 million women and girls of reproductive age live in states where their reproductive rights have been either eliminated or significantly eroded since justices appointed by Trump helped overturn Roe v Wade.Trump’s budget cuts could also lead to 40,000 children losing their childcare – and affect 2.4 million children’s access to childcare and early childhood education. That could have negative effects that follow those kids around the rest of their lives, in addition to imposing greater hardships on their parents.Other cuts target funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) research on health disparities, including Black maternal and fetal health, as well as $11.4bn in state and community health department grants. And of course all this comes alongside Trump’s anti-DEI executive actions, which target anti-discrimination protections for transgender children and transgender women.One of the few winners in this budget is the mass deportation system, which is poised to see significant increases. Yet the immigration raids and deportations this will fund will separate families – including up to 4.4 million US citizen children with an undocumented parent and another 850,000 undocumented minors.None of this is popular. By large majorities, Americans across the political spectrum oppose cuts to Medicaid, Snap and other safety net programs, as well as deportations that separate families and target Dreamers who came here as young children. It’s no wonder that countless women and children were among the millions who turned out for 5 April’s “Hands Off” rallies.I agree with Jocelyn Smith, who asks: “I don’t think this is fair. Do you?”

      Karen Dolan is a federal safety net expert and a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. More

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      ‘No guidance and no leadership’: chaos and confusion at CDC after mass firings

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      For the past two months, members of the Elon Musk-led “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have stalked the halls of the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) Atlanta headquarters.Several employees told the Guardian that if a Doge staffer walked through their offices and saw a badge at an untended workstation, its owner would be fired promptly. Firing someone for a security violation gave Doge an excuse to circumvent the defenses of civil service protection, or performance reviews, or seniority.Loose badge. Gone.If being fired for leaving a badge at a bathroom break seemed arbitrary to those working at the CDC – some for decades – then the mass firings on 1 April made it brutally so. On that day thousands of federal workers at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) all of its branches and related agencies across the country were let go in a culling indicative of Donald Trump’s second term.Roughly 10,000 people lost their jobs at agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health in a continuation of one of the largest mass firings in American history.Among the cuts to the CDC: the entire Freedom of Information Act team, the Division of Violence Prevention, laboratories that test antibiotic resistance and a team that determines recalls for dangerous baby products.“There’s been no guidance and no leadership,” said one CDC scientist who still has a job, speaking on condition of anonymity. “This week has just been looking through the wreckage for survivors.”A week of chaos and confusionThe scope of the cuts remains a mystery to federal health workers, including it seems the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who said as much as 20% of the cuts may be mistakes, and moved to reinstate some staff fired in error. Kennedy said that “was always the plan”.In the hours after the cuts, an aqua-green dry erase board in a library at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta tallied the losses Tuesday morning like a casualty board for earthquake victims.View image in fullscreenThe words “DO NOT ERASE” topped a constellation of acronyms like NCCDPHP for the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, or NCICP for the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Under each top line followed a second set of acronyms showing the branches of each department that had been pruned, like the Women’s Health and Fertility Branch (WHFB) of the Division of Reproductive Health, or the Violence Prevention Practice and Translation Branch (VPTB) in the Division of Violence Prevention.No real warning had been given about who would keep their job and who could expect to be fired. Right up until Doge sent reduction-in-force notices to inboxes early Tuesday morning, even supervisors had no idea who would be left.People gathered around the board for updates as word drifted in from colleagues about cuts, as it was the only planning document staff leaders had. Health workers circulated updated pictures of it through informal group chats and Discord servers.Scientists began breaking down in tears in the library stacks.An inquiry to the CDC about the scope of the cuts and its plan was routed to HHS.“All statutorily required positions and offices will remain intact, and as a result of the reorganization, will be better positioned to execute on Congress’s statutory intent,” said Emily G Hilliard, a deputy press secretary for the department. Hilliard claimed the “collaborative” process “included three rounds of feedback from each division”, and that “HHS leaders focused personnel cuts on redundant or unnecessary administrative positions”.The fact sheet Hilliard provided contained no references to the scientific functions lost in the purge.Heartbreak and warnings of dangerShelby Hutton, a biologist working on HIV research, learned she had been fired on 1 April. “We had until the end of the day to pack up our personal belongings before we lost all access,” she said at a press conference with Nikema Williams, the Democratic congresswoman representing Atlanta, on Friday.“We were given no time to conduct an orderly shutdown of the laboratories to ensure that our sensitive equipment and priceless biohazardous specimens were protected and stored properly.”Fired staffers like Hutton found themselves mourning not just for their lost jobs, but because they are acutely aware that without their research some people will die who would have otherwise lived, but for the research they had been conducting.View image in fullscreenLaboratories around the world submit biological samples and testing data to the CDC, which maintains a repository of historical information for research references.In critical areas like antibiotic-resistant infection surveillance, no one is left at the labs to take those samples, one scientist said.Hospitals also ask the CDC for advice when seeing a novel illness. But the process of examining those requests and answering them has been disrupted, said Kevin Pettus, a 30-year-old veteran scientist at the agency who lost his job last week.“I think when they decided to cut our branch, they didn’t think this through,” he said. “If the agenda was to make America healthy again, all Elon Musk and 47 have done is make this country in a worse position than it already was.“What has occurred has put everybody in danger, not just our families, but their families as well. Some of this needs to be addressed and addressed immediately and reversed.”Kennedy, the US health secretary, said at a press availability Wednesday that administrative roles, not research, was the Doge target. But as healthcare workers piece together the scope of the cuts, it’s clear that the cuts struck bone, not fat.“The US had incredible research infrastructure and was doing incredible research to identify the next cure, to prevent the next disease, and that’s what’s being cut,” said Carmen Marsit, executive associate dean at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.“I mean, the government has made enormous investments in many of these drugs, in many of the programs that have been developed, and now we’re ready to move them over the finish line and really get them to act. And that’s being stopped.”Widespread cuts impact health and safetyAs federal workers learn of the work that has been stalled and teams have been cut, the impact is slowly becoming clear.Among the cuts are almost everyone at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which among other things, monitors air quality around fracking drill sites, tests personal protective technology and provides injury data to government agencies for recalling consumer products like defective baby cribs.The office of Smoking and Health at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion saw its public health work disrupted. As did the division of violence prevention, injury prevention and informatics at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Among other things, the division researches gun violence and domestic violence, which both spiked during the pandemic, with the goal of reducing sexual assault and gun deaths.Cuts hit the laboratories researching viral hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases at National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, as well as the Division of HIV Prevention’s communication, surveillance and research branches.The Global Health Center at the CDC saw health informatics, scientific integrity and special initiatives for HIV and tuberculosis decimated.View image in fullscreenAnd amid a larger effort to dismantle environmental protection, workers were cut at the asthma and air quality monitoring and childhood lead prevention teams in the CDC’s environmental health division.Other CDC reductions include the technology branch of the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, housing the software engineers and computer scientists supporting a new center created amid the Covid-19 pandemic to help predict disease outbreaks.CDC staff had already been navigating the impact of a deluge of executive orders raining from Trump’s pen since January. At one point, research databases had been taken off line to comply with an order to replace all references to “gender” with “sex,” even in scientific research documentation.But at least then, the CDC had staff ready to fix a problem. Now workers say the problems will emerge and the people who understand how to solve those problems are gone.Insiders say only a skeleton staff remains in dozens of departments and branches, capable only of performative gestures toward the work mandated by law and congressional budgets.Looking forwardStanding across the street from the CDC headquarters on a busy street near Emory University, Atlanta drivers honked in support as congresswoman Williams stood with fired CDC workers at a press conference.Williams called the CDC the “pride of the fighting fifth”, a reference to Trump’s disrespect for the city that began with his conflict with the late congressman John Lewis and Georgia’s fifth congressional district.“It is in these moments of public transgressions against our communities that our reaction in the name of justice and prosperity must be loud and clear,” she said, describing the firings as illegal and unconstitutional. “We fight for the health and decency of our country.“We fight in our communities.” More