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    Trump expected to sign tax-and-spending bill in win for administration

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    Donald Trump is expected to sign his sweeping spending package into law on Friday during a Fourth of July picnic at the White House, setting up significant cutbacks on federal safety-net programs and increasing funds for aggressive immigration enforcement.Trump has touted the legislation’s passage as a “birthday present for America”, speaking before a crowd at a campaign-style rally in Iowa on Thursday evening, even as Democrats expressed their displeasure at the spending package.After months of deliberations, the bill passed by a single vote in the Senate and later passed the House with a 219 to 213 vote on Thursday, with only two Republicans voting against it. The sweeping legislation accomplishes what rightwingers have pushed for, for decades, as the Guardian explained this week, and provides Trump a huge legislative win.The bill, once signed into law, will significantly cut taxes, building on the 2017 tax cuts during Trump’s first term. Although temporary tax exemptions for tips, overtime pay and car loan interest are included, research from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the bill is skewed to the rich, with the wealthiest in the US benefiting the most from the tax relief.Additionally, the law, once signed by Trump, will add new restrictions to Medicaid, which provides healthcare to low-income and disabled people, and Snap, also known as food stamps, which helps low-income people afford food. Researchers estimate that the Medicaid cutbacks will leave as many as 11.8 million people without healthcare, while 8 million people will lose their Snap benefits. Critics say that the Medicaid cuts will have massive ripple effects on healthcare nationwide.“This is highway robbery,” the Democratic senator Raphael Warnock posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The bill Republicans just passed steals from you to give to the rich.”Proponents of the bill say that the Medicaid and Snap changes are designed to root out waste and abuse.Additionally, the spending package will allocate $170m to immigration enforcement, a monumental amount of money that will help support the Trump administration’s push to engage in “mass deportations”.“This disgraceful, anti-immigrant budget hands the Trump administration a blank check to further ramp up its shameful efforts to terrorize American communities and separate families,” said Nicole Melaku, the executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, an immigrants’ rights organization. “Instead of safeguarding people’s access to healthcare and wellness, the bill gives tax cuts to big corporations and funnels billions of dollars to hire more immigration agents, build more immigration jails and deny people their fair day in court.”Already, the Trump administration has engaged in widespread attacks on immigrant communities, by increasing resources to immigration enforcement operations.“This budget promises to supercharge US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests that disappear community members, leave children parentless and threaten constitutional and due-process rights for all of us,” said Meg McCarthy, executive director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, alegal organization.A recent Guardian analysis shows that undocumented immigrants without any criminal history have been arrested at an exponentially increasing rate, after top White House officials instructed agents to increase arrests.Trump temporarily walked back some of Ice’s aggressive immigration enforcement actions after complaints from leaders in the farming and hospitality industries: last month, the Trump administration engaged in a short-lived pause on raids at farms, restaurants and hotels. But at Thursday’s event, Trump again brought up the idea of pausing large-scale enforcement on farms.“If a farmer is willing to vouch for these people in some way, Kristi, I think we’re going to have to just say that’s going to be good, right?” Trump said to the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. “We don’t want to do it where we take all of the workers off the farms.”In addition to tax cuts, restrictions on Medicaid and Snap and the aggressive supercharging of immigration enforcement, the bill seeks to end green energy incentives created under Joe Biden, seen as a further blow against efforts to combat the climate crisis.The US budget deficit will increase with this bill, leading to opposition by some Trump allies. The non-partisan congressional budget office estimates the bill will add $3.3tn to the country’s debt through 2034, leading to clashes with some rightwingers.One of the two Republicans who voted against the bill, Thomas Massie, said he opposed the spending bill “because it will significantly increase US budget deficits in the near term, negatively impacting all Americans through sustained inflation and high interest rates”.Elon Musk, the rightwing billionaire who established the federal government’s office tasked with slashing federal spending during the first few months of the Trump administration, has also publicly called out the spending bill. Days before Congress passed the bill, Musk repeated his call for the creation of a new political party to oppose the Republicans and Democrats. More

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      Trump’s Medicaid cuts are coming for rural Americans: ‘It’s going to have to hit them first’

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      When Hurricane Helene drowned western North Carolina in muck and floodwater last year, it caught folks off-guard.Now, local leaders in places like Asheville expect the Republican-led reconciliation bill – called the “big, beautiful bill” by Donald Trump – to bear down on rural America. And they wonder whether people are missing the warning signs.“It’s going to have to hit them first,” said Laurie Stradley, CEO of Impact Health in Asheville, a Medicaid-funded non-profit providing social services to some people still digging out from the flood.Medicaid is the single largest health insurance program in the US. The public program covers 71 million low-income, disabled and elderly US residents. It pays for half of all US births and the care of six in 10 nursing home residents.When Trump’s sprawling tax-and-spending bill passed on Thursday, it heralded more than $1tn in federal cuts to Medicaid, which experts worry will push Republican-led states to abandon parts of the program and leave people without access to timely healthcare.“This is an extraordinarily regressive bill,” said Joan Akler, executive director and co-founder of Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “This is the largest rollback of healthcare coverage that we’ve ever seen and all in service of an agenda to drive tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit wealthy people and corporations.”Medicaid “expansion” is a key provision of Obamacare, formally called the Affordable Care Act of 2010. The expansion provides largely no-cost health insurance to people earning up to 138% of the federal poverty level, or $36,777 for a family of three. Although Obamacare has been the law for more than a decade, Medicaid expansion proved politically divisive in Republican states, and many only recently decided to accept enormous federal subsidies to cover their residents.North Carolina will lose $32bn in the next decadeThe Medicaid cuts in the bill could have particularly acute consequences in North Carolina, a politically competitive state, where experts said the bill could trigger a “kill switch” to end Medicaid expansion.“If the state spends any state dollars to implement the expansion population or expansion coverage, it triggers an automatic ending to Medicaid expansion,” said Kody Kinsley, North Carolina’s former secretary of health and an architect of the state’s Medicaid expansion.North Carolina is set to lose $32bn in federal funding in the next decade, according to an analysis by the office of the Republican senator Thom Tillis, who represents the state. He’s one of just three Senate Republicans who voted against the bill on Tuesday.North Carolina’s expansion only went into effect in December 2023, and in less than 19 months it enrolled more than 650,000 people – all of whom will lose coverage if the program ends.Those North Carolinians are only some of the 17 million people expected to lose health insurance by 2034 across the country, according to estimates from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. Nearly 12 million people will lose insurance because of attacks on Medicaid.“Ultimately, Medicaid being cut is going to kill people,” said Molly Zenkler, a nurse at Mission hospital in Asheville. “I deal with people getting their feet literally amputated because they don’t have access to diabetic care. This is just going to get increasingly worse.”The reconciliation bill cuts state funding through a number of provisions. On healthcare specifically, the bill attacks complex financial maneuvers states use to draw down federal funds. It also requires states to spend enormous sums – perhaps tens of millions of dollars per state – implementing work requirements, effectively adding layers of expensive red tape.Congressional Republicans in favor of the bill argue it targets “waste, fraud and abuse”. However, it is already well-known that most Medicaid beneficiaries who can work do, and that Medicaid is one of the most cost-efficient health programs in the US, according to the American Hospital Association.North Carolina is one of a dozen conservative states that wrote a “trigger” law into Medicaid expansion. Not all function like North Carolina’s – the laws are, in the words of an expert with Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, a “lesson in federalism” – but they nevertheless underscore the difficult choices state legislators will face because of congressional Republicans’ cuts.One such program that could be on the chopping block is a pilot with Impact Health, which uses Medicaid expansion funds for social needs that affect health – an effort to reduce long-term costs. Stradley gave the example of a Medicaid-covered child with severe asthma who hit the local emergency room three times a week for breathing treatments.Impact’s program used Medicaid funds to replace moldy rugs with laminate flooring in the child’s home, and to buy a vacuum with a Hepa filter. The cost to Impact Health was about $5,000, “but now this child is going to the emergency room a couple times a year instead of a couple times a month. And so, every month we’re saving about $4,500.”The program’s knock-on effects boost the local economy: the work to replace the rug was done by a local carpenter, and the child’s mother isn’t calling out from work, increasing her job stability.“One of the ways that we talk about this program is that it’s a hand up rather than a handout,” she said. “Almost half of the folks that are recipients in our program are children … Then you look at the adults. Most of them are working multiple jobs, and those jobs don’t come with benefits, because they’re working two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet.”The enormity of Medicaid means large cuts to the program imperil not only patients, but the institutions that serve them – especially rural hospitals and clinics hanging on “by a thread”, according to Kinsley.One of US residents’ few rights to healthcare is in emergency departments, where hospitals are required to stabilize patients regardless of ability to pay. That makes emergency departments the go-to source for healthcare for the uninsured.An analysis released by the Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill earlier this year showed that 338 rural hospitals around the country were at risk of imminent closure with the cuts to Medicaid contained in the bill.‘Hospitals will be forced to restrict services, or close’Rural states such as Kentucky are expected to be disproportionately hard-hit as well. Thirty-five of the rural hospitals at risk of closure – about 10% – are in Kentucky, even though Kentucky’s 4.5 million residents comprise about 1.3% of the US’s population. About a third of Kentucky residents are on Medicaid, according to figures from Kentucky’s cabinet for health and family services. The program benefits about 478,900 adults.The situation is similarly dire in Arizona, another battleground state, which also has a trigger law on the books. Although the reconciliation bill may not “trigger” a rollback of Medicaid expansion, it does undermine a key financing mechanism for the state’s program called a “provider tax”.“We estimate Arizona’s healthcare system would lose over $6bn over the next seven years,” said Holly Ward, a spokesperson for the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, in a statement.“In other words, more than 55% of Arizona hospitals would be operating in the red,” she said. “Hospitals will be, at best, forced to restrict services such as obstetrics, behavioral healthcare and other complex services, and at worst, will close their doors altogether.”Another issue is the potential for Republicans’ cuts to drive up the cost of healthcare for Americans who are privately insured, including through employers. As hospitals fight to survive, they will try to extract as much money as possible from other sources of funding – namely, commercial insurance.In addition, rural healthcare providers worry the water will be muddied by the sheer complexity of US healthcare. Private companies have a hand in managing – and therefore branding – state Medicaid programs.“A lot of our rural voters may not even realize that what they have is Medicaid, because there are so many names for it,” said Stradley. However, the precarious situation is already worrying people whose lives have been stabilized because of Medicaid.Amanda Moynihan is a single mother of three children – ages nine, 12 and 16 – living in Kuna, Idaho. Medicaid expansion has helped her become a “functioning human in society”, she said. Routine medical care for herself and her children, along with other assistance programs, has meant the difference between grinding poverty and a shot at the middle class.Idaho, one of the most politically conservative states in the union, expanded Medicaid in 2018 with an overwhelming ballot-referendum vote of 61-39. Even if Idaho’s “trigger law” does not go into effect, the state could face similar fiscal challenges to Arizona.“Back two years ago, before I started school, I was just in fight-or-flight, just trying to pay the bills there. I didn’t ever see a future of what I could do. And then I just started with one class,” she said.Moynihan has completed an associate degree in psychology and is starting the social work bachelor’s degree program at Boise State University in the fall. For now, she’s working part time with the Idaho Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired and planning to pick up work at a gas station because it has a college scholarship benefit.But without stability to pursue higher education, her future “would be making the minimum wage, which is about $15 an hour, barely paying rent in a low-income household”. More

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      No one wanted Trump’s devastating budget bill. Of course it passed | Moira Donegan

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      The budget reconciliation bill that passed the US House of Representatives on Thursday and was promptly to be signed into law by Donald Trump represents the particular perversity of national politics in America: seemingly no one wants it, everyone hates it, and it is widely agreed to be devastating for staggering numbers of Americans. And yet, the bill felt inevitable: it was a foregone conclusion that this massive, malignant measure was something that everyone dreaded and no one had the capacity to stop.They didn’t really even try. In the Senate, a few conservative Republicans made noise about the bill’s dramatic costs: the congressional budget office estimates that the bill will add $3.3 tn to the deficit over the coming decade, and the senator Rand Paul, a budget hawk from Kentucky, declined to vote for it for this reason. But other Republicans, who used to style themselves as fiscally responsible guardians against excessive government spending, engaged in a bit of freelance creative accounting in order to produce an estimate that falsely claimed the cost of the bill would be lower. Most of them quickly found themselves on board.Moderate Republicans, or what remain of them, also quickly quit the field. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina facing down an uncertain re-election bid, expressed concerns about the bill’s massive cuts to Medicaid, the federal low-income healthcare program on which many Americans – and many of his constituents – rely. When Donald Trump threatened to secure a primary challenge to Tillis in retaliation, the senator announced that he would not seek re-election after all; he voted against the bill, but also ended his political career. Susan Collins, of Maine – she of the perennial “concern” about the sadistic Republican agendas that she continues to support – made a rare departure from her usual formula and voted against the bill, a move that came close on the heels of polling showing her dismal approval rating among her constituents. That left just Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, who agreed to play ball: she would vote for the bill, which she had publicly disparaged, in exchange for some money for her state. The result was that Alaska will be exempted, at least temporarily, from new rules associated with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Snap, which helps low-income Americans buy enough food to keep themselves alive. Republicans threw in a tax deduction for Alaskan whaling captains – of all things – and with that, her vote was secured.When the bill was sent to the House, a handful of Republicans threatened to withhold their votes over budget and Medicaid concerns. But no one believed them. They were always going to cave, abandon their stated principles and follow Trump’s orders, and they did. Trump, after all, had said that he wanted the bill passed in time for the Fourth of July; it passed on the third. He says jump, and the Congress asks: How high?They do so even when the demands that Trump makes are morally grotesque. The bill will devastate Americans. Its massive cuts to Medicaid, combined with expiring Obamacare subsidies, will result in an estimated 17 million Americans losing health coverage over the next 10 years, effectively undoing the expansion of healthcare coverage that was achieved with Barack Obama’s health law. Cuts to Snap are so profound that they cannot be made up with additional state spending; some people who are eating today because they have food assistance will go hungry in the future. There are deep cuts to federal loans and grants for college students, and a near-reversal of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act’s investments in green energy, with tax breaks now going to climate-damaging sectors like coal and oil instead. Because the bill creates a dramatic budget deficit, law requires that Medicare, the healthcare program for seniors, will face cuts, too.All of this is to say nothing of the downstream effects of the legislation. The steep cuts to Medicaid, in particular, will devastate America’s already fragile and partial healthcare system. Planned Parenthood is now excluded from federal Medicaid dollars, meaning that about 200 of its roughly 600 clinics will probably have to close, making abortion less accessible even in states where it is legal, and putting contraception and STD and cancer screenings out of reach for untold numbers of American women. Many rural hospitals will likely have to close, too, along with nursing homes. Those healthcare clinics that remain will have longer wait times and more crowding, and offer more expensive care. Ultimately, fewer people will be going to the doctor, and more of them will suffer and die needlessly of treatable and preventable conditions.But the bill does have winners. It has been called, among other things, the largest tax cut in the nation’s history, although the benefit is disproportionately to billionaires. The budget of Ice, Trump’s anti-immigrant secret police force, is also expanded exponentially: from $3.5bn to $48.5bn, making it the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, though still no more accountable.The bill, in other words, steals from the sick, the elderly, the hungry and the curious, and gives that plundered loot to billionaires and jackboots. It will warp American life – already sickly and impoverished by the standards of our peer nations – in cruel and enfeebling ways. It will make us sicker, poorer, more fearful, more ignorant and more endangered. It will make the rich, meanwhile, even richer.Why are Republicans voting for a bill that will hurt their own constituents? A bill that undermines their stated values and threatens their careers and will immiserate people they care about – if only themselves?One of the more confounding aspects of the Trump era is his ability to vacate what the constitution’s authors – and indeed most reasonable adults – would have assumed would be a defining feature of the contest among the branches: self-interest. Republicans will follow him anywhere, even to unpopular votes, even to self-sabotage, and frequently to the diminishment of their own branch’s relevance. Some say that now, he is leading them to a midterm defeat. Democrats made a show of their opposition to the bill – in the minority, shows are about all they can accomplish – with the minority leader Hakeem Jeffries delivering an eight-and-a-half-hour, filibuster-style speech on the floor telling the stories of Americans who will be hurt by the legislation, laying out the bill’s cruelty and recklessness. But you could also detect a hint of pleasure in his voice as he read out the testimonies of Americans who live in what the Democrats see as particularly vulnerable districts for Republicans in 2026.The bill is unpopular now, and it is likely to become much more so as the full breadth of its cuts to social services, and its impacts on Americans seeking to get healthcare, buy food, secure an environmentally livable future or go to school, become clear. Many of the politicians who ultimately voted for it criticized it sharply just days or hours before. They will be attacked about this in the midterms: the suffering that the bill will cause will be cut into television and social media ads and played incessantly on networks in what the Democrats believe are winnable districts. But it is unclear, in the end, if hurting Americans, including their own voters, really will come back to bite the Republican party. It hasn’t for a long time.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      CDC vaccine panel to review ingredient RFK Jr has targeted for removal

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      A key vaccine advisory panel reconstituted by health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr is slated to discuss thimerosal-containing influenza vaccines in its first meeting – an ingredient which has been a fixation of anti-vaccine activists for decades.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will hold two separate votes later this month: one on “influenza vaccines” and one on influenza vaccines that contain thimerosal.Thimerosal is an ethylmercury preservative used in multi-dose vaccine vials to prevent fungi and bacteria growth. The preservative has been studied and deemed safe, but was nevertheless removed from all routine childhood vaccines in 2001 as a precaution.“I was there when we went through this the first time,” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center and an attending physician in the division of infectious diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about debates over the preservative in the early 2000s.Offit served on the ACIP panel in question from 1998 to 2003. He said the issue of thimerosal was vigorously debated and found safe then, prompting him to ask: “What’s the point?”In a short history of the thimerosal controversy published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Offit described how some parents became convinced thimerosal gave their children autism, resulting in thousands of autistic children receiving heavy metal chelation treatments each year.Studies have found no link between thimerosal and autism, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has also denied claims of a thimerosal-autism link. Kennedy, however, has written a book arguing against the use of thimerosal.Offit said the discussion of thimerosal appeared to geared to, “accomplish [Kennedy’s] goals of making vaccines less affordable, less accessible and more feared”, he said.“Here’s what you do know – you do know RFK Jr is an anti-vaccine, science-denying conspiracy theorist. He is devoted to this, he is a zealot, there is no middle ground with him,” said Offit. “He believes we have merely substituted infectious diseases for chronic diseases.”The panel’s advisory recommendations are critical because they result in vaccine “schedules”. These schedules are relied on by health insurers to determine which vaccines to cover and by clinicians who use them as an evidence-based guide on immunization – effectively giving the American public access to the medicines.Although the CDC does not always take the panel’s advice, the CDC typically affirms the panel’s decisions. However, the agency is currently without a leader, as Senate hearings have not yet been held for nominee and CDC career official Susan Monarez. As a result, Kennedy has signed off on some previous ACIP recommendations.Kennedy wrote a book on the preservative thimerosal in 2014 called Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, in which he argues that “there is a broad consensus among research scientists that thimerosal is a dangerous neurotoxin that should be immediately removed from medicines”. Kennedy said in the book he is “pro-vaccine”.Until 9 June, the ACIP was an independent panel of 17 experts who served staggered terms and were rigorously vetted by career CDC staff. Kennedy broke with tradition when he fired the entire panel, claiming in a Wall Street Journal editorial that he was working to “restore public trust in vaccines”.The same week, Kennedy appointed eight new members to the committee, including medical professionals with little vaccine expertise and known vaccine skeptics.A wide spectrum of groups criticized the decision, from MomsRising, who said they were “alarmed and disgusted”, to major doctors’ groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, to public health leaders who described Kennedy’s actions as “a coup,” to the former members of the committee, who warned the independent panel was at “a crossroads”.The group is scheduled to meet the last week of June. Prior to Kennedy’s changes, they had been expected to discuss reducing the number of shots needed for human papilloma virus (HPV) and a meningococcal vaccine.On Wednesday, the panel released a draft agenda for its upcoming meeting. A wide range of vaccines will be discussed – including those against influenza; the tropical disease chikungunya; the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) vaccine; anthrax; Covid and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).The agenda scheduled a vote on recommendations for flu vaccines, including the multidose versions that still contain thimerosal. These vaccines are used only in adolescents and adults. The panel is also scheduled to vote on recommendations for maternal and pediatric versions of the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).Notably, despite Kennedy’s repeated pledges of “radical transparency”, the draft agenda does not include the names of many speakers, which are listed as “TBD” (to be determined) for instance on “Covid-19 safety update”.New ACIP members have not been added to a conflict of interest tracker for ACIP members developed by the Trump administration. A spokesperson for HHS said the new members ethics agreements “will be made public” before they start work with the committee.In addition to the new draft agenda, there have also been changes to the committee’s meeting times not reflected in the Federal Register, according to Politico. The group will meet for two days instead of three, and there does not appear to be a vote scheduled on Covid vaccines. More

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      CDC official in charge of Covid data resigns ahead of vaccine meeting

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      The scientist responsible for overseeing the CDC team that collects data on Covid and RSV hospitalizations resigned on Monday.Dr Fiona Havers told colleagues in an email that she no longer had confidence the data would be used “objectively or evaluated with appropriate scientific rigor to make evidence-based vaccine policy decisions”, according to Reuters.She resigned before a planned meeting of a new vaccine panel put in place by Robert Kennedy Jr after he fired all 17 members of the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory panel. Kennedy also dropped a recommendation to get the Covid shot for healthy children and pregnant women.Havers, leader of the Resp-Net hospitalization surveillance team, did not respond to requests for comment.Her resignation follows moves by Kennedy, the health secretary, to abruptly fire all 17 members of the CDC’s independent vaccine advisory panel and drop a recommendation for administering Covid shots to healthy children and pregnant women.Kennedy, who has long sown doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines, replaced the advisory board with eight members of his own choosing, some of whom have histories of objecting to Covid shots or vaccines in general.Havers said in her email that the Covid and RSV data collected by her team had been used in more than 20 peer-reviewed manuscripts and 15 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports issued by the CDC.The newly installed vaccine panel, known as the advisory committee on immunization practices, is expected to meet 25-27 June to vote on the use of Covid-19 boosters and other vaccines by the American public.A Health and Human Services spokesperson told Reuters that the agency is committed to “gold standard science” and that the vaccine policy will be based on objective data, transparent analysis and evidence. More

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      DC rally protests cuts to US veterans programs: ‘Promises made to us have come under attack’

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      A flurry of red, white and blue American flags fluttered across the National Mall on Friday as more than 5,000 military veterans and their allies descended on Washington to protest against the planned elimination of 80,000 jobs at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the cancellation of hundreds of contracts for veterans services with community organizations.“I hope that in the future veterans will be able to get their benefits,” said David Magnus, a navy veteran who decided to travel from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after his doctor told him she was quitting during a recent mental health appointment. Before Donald Trump returned to office in January, “the VA was good”, he said, but since then medical staff have faced harassment that puts the entire system at risk.“It used to be, you’d call and get an answer,” he said. “Now, so much is going on that they don’t know where to put you.”Organizers said that in addition to the march in Washington, there were more than 200 corresponding actions across the country, from watch parties to vigils held at VA clinics. Many veterans told the Guardian they came to the nation’s capital on their own after hearing about the rally online.The VA secretary, Doug Collins, has said the efforts are designed to trim bureaucratic bloat and will have no impact on veterans’ healthcare or benefits. Reporting by the Guardian last month found the agency, which provides healthcare to more than 9 million veterans, has already been plunged into crisis. Across the nation, appointments have been cancelled, hospital units closed, the physical safety of patients put at risk.View image in fullscreenDemonstrators said the Trump administration is seeking to destroy the VA, the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States, with 170 government-run hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics, and replace it with a private voucher program that will provide substandard care.“We’re a generation of service. We volunteered and stepped up to lead. Now we are seeing the promises made to us come under attack,” said Kyleanne Hunter, the chief executive of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and a Marine Corps veteran who flew multiple combat missions as an AH1-W Super Cobra attack pilot.The administration’s proposed budget for the VA, released on Friday, slashes spending for “medical services” by $12bn – or nearly 20% – an amount offset by a corresponding 50% boost in funding for veterans seeking healthcare in the private sector.“We’re already being starved,” said Sharda Fornnarino, a Navy veteran and one of about three dozen nurses brought to the rally by the National Nurses United union. Fornnarino, who works at the VA in Denver, Colorado, said that while politicians in Washington debate permanent staff reductions, essential healthcare positions are being left vacant.With fewer staff on the floor, veterans on hospice “are being left to die in their own piss and shit”, said Teshara Felder, a Navy veteran and nurse at the agency’s hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, said.A blue-ribbon commission established by the agency last year found veterans received significantly better care at lower cost from the public system. Private providers operated with little oversight, they wrote, and “are not required to demonstrate competency in diagnosing and treating the complex care needs of veterans nor in understanding military culture, which is often critical to providing quality care for veterans”.The VA says the budget submission “prioritizes care for our most vulnerable veterans, including those experiencing homelessness or at risk of suicide” and “eliminates nonessential programming and bureaucratic overhead that does not directly serve the veteran”.View image in fullscreenThe march was held on the 81st anniversary of D-day, when Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, a decisive turn in the war against Nazi Germany during the second world war. Organizers said their inspiration goes back even further – to the “Bonus Army” march on Washington in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression, when thousands of first world war veterans gathered on the National Mall to demand promised benefits, only to have the US military deployed against them.Christopher Purdy, an Afghanistan war veteran and organizer of today’s march, said the Bonus Army rally helped set the stage for the New Deal social programs and eventually the GI Bill, which provided higher education, healthcare and home ownership to veterans returning from the second world war.Other speakers criticized Trump’s decision to impose a travel ban on visitors from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, where many of the demonstrators served alongside translators who risked their lives for the US. Shortly after taking office in January, Trump ordered a pause on the US refugee admissions program, putting translators’ safety in doubt.“We all left behind people who are now marked,” said Nadim Yousify, who immigrated to the United States in 2015 after working as a US government translator in Afghanistan and later joined the Marine Corps. More

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      ‘This isn’t just about Trump’: the Rev William Barber arrested after prayer-protest against Republican-led budget

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      A police officer’s sense of timing seemed to illuminate the Rev William Barber’s moral mission with startling clarity.During a prayer vigil on Monday in the Capitol Rotunda, close to the very heart of US democracy, Barber was lamenting that Congress starts each day with its own prayers to the Almighty even while preying on the poor. A Capitol police captain, John Hersch, serendipitously choose that very moment to intervene.“Your activity right now is taking the form of a demonstration,” Hersch told Barber and an accompanying gathering of clergy. “It is unlawful to demonstrate in the Capitol Rotunda. If you do not cease your demonstration at this time, there is a possibility you will be placed under arrest.”Moments later, after two further warnings, Barber and seven accomplices – standing in front of the portrait of three 19th-century women’s suffrage campaigners – were arrested as police sealed off the Rotunda.The arrests marked the climax of the latest Moral Monday protest organised by Repairers of the Breach, a group founded by Barber that’s trying to derail Donald Trump’s planned tax and spending bill on the grounds that it will slash vital health and social services to lower-income Americans.It was the third Moral Monday Barber had led at the Capitol since April – and the third time he and his cohorts had been arrested.Barber, a social activist and founding director of Yale Divinity School’s centre for public theology, had earlier led a rally outside the US supreme court attended by an estimated 2,000 protesters.As a band belted out gospel songs, demonstrators held signs with slogans such as “Slashing the safety net is moral murder” and “Don’t cut Snap for 40 million poor people.”Wearing a white robe emblazoned with the words “Jesus was a poor man,” Barber – the son of civil rights workers who campaigned for racial desegregation – enjoined demonstrators to crusade against legislation that the US president has termed his “big, beautiful bill” and deemed essential to extending his 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire this year.The Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the bill last month by a single vote, 215 to 214. It now goes forward to the Senate against a chorus of criticism over its potential impact on the most vulnerable.Passage would result in 13.7 million people losing access to Medicaid and health insurance, Barber said.“This bill represents the worst kind of evil, which is the love of money … the root of all evil,” he said “This isn’t just about Trump. Two hundred and fifteen Republicans in the House voted for this bill – and now every senator is going to decide whether they’re going to vote for the ‘we’re all going to just die’ approach to politics.”Barber was referring to remarks by Joni Ernst, a Republican senator for Iowa, who faced criticism for telling a town hall last week that “we’re all going to die” after a constituent warned that health cuts could result in some people dying.Ernst doubled down by issuing a mock “apology” filmed in a cemetery, saying: “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.”Barber compared Ernst’s rhetoric with justifications used by slaveowners.“That’s the same language that slave masters used to tell slaves,” he said in an interview. “They would say: ‘Don’t fight for freedom, but believe in Jesus so that in the eternal life …’“It’s so cynical. What she said was one of the most contradictory misinterpretations of faith I’ve ever heard. It’s theological malpractice.“As Dr [Martin Luther] King once said, we’re not talking about over yonder. We’re talking about over here and people need healthcare over here. People need food over here. For her to bring up religion and bring up Jesus – if Jesus did anything, he provided everybody he met free healthcare. He never charged a leper, or a sick person, or a blind person, for their healing.”The Moral Monday protests have been adapted from similar demonstrations Barber started in North Carolina in 2013, following the election of rightwing Republican Pat McCrory as governor. The protests lasted two years, recalled Barber, resulting in thousands of arrests for civil disobedience but also spurring thousands more to register to vote.As protests against Trump ramp up, Barber is vowing to make Moral Mondays a regular feature of the landscape of dissent.“Moral Monday is not a one-time event,” he said. “If this budget passes the way it is, it will have a negative impact on this country for 10 years. It could possibly not be fully reversed for up to 50 to 60 years. This is serious business.”The protests are likely to expand to encompass a broader pro-democracy agenda. “Our role is not just the budget passing or not passing, but mobilizing poor and low-wage folk. We stand against any attacks on voting rights, on public education, [or] on healthcare,” said Barber.“Poor and low-wage people now represent 30% of the electorate in this country, and in battleground states, over 40%,” he said, making them the largest potential expansion for voting power in the country.In an acknowledgment of Moral Monday’s growing significance, this week’s rally was addressed by Ezra Levin, co-executive director of the progressive Indivisible movement, which spearheaded nationwide Hands Off protests in April that drew millions of participants.Levin praised protesters for having the courage to overcome fear.“People see us organized, and they say, wow, you are fearless,” he said. “Oh no. If you are fearless in this moment, you’re not paying attention. The authoritarians over there, they’re taking over our democracy.”But congressional Republicans, too, felt fear, he said. “They are projecting strength right now. They’re acting as if this is inevitable. They’re acting as if they have the power, you know, passing a bill through the House in the middle of night. [But] that’s not strength, pushing it through before the public can comment on it“The truth is, they’re terrified. They are terrified their voters are going to see what they’re doing. They’re terrified they’re going to lose their majority. And you know what? They should be terrified.” More

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      Republican senator criticized for mock apology after saying ‘we all are going to die’

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      Senator Joni Ernst triggered fierce criticism after making light of voters’ fears that Republican Medicaid cuts could prove fatal, telling a town hall audience “we all are going to die” and then filming a mocking response video over the weekend.The Iowa Republican, who is facing a possibly challenging re-election battle in 2026, was explaining at a Friday town hall how the Republican immigration and tax package would affect Medicaid eligibility when an audience member shouted that people could die if they lost coverage through the proposed cuts.“Well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded as the crowd groaned. “So, for heaven’s sakes. For heaven’s sakes, folks.”Rather than clarify or apologize, Ernst channeled Trump-era defiance in her response on Saturday with an Instagram video that appeared to be filmed in a graveyard.“I made an incorrect assumption that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth,” she said. “So I apologize, and I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well.”She concluded by telling viewers: “For those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I encourage you to embrace my Lord and savior Jesus Christ.”The controversy comes as Senate Republicans prepare to tackle the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill”, which passed the House and would slash social safety net spending by more than $1tn over a decade. Congressional Budget Office projections suggest the measure could strip Medicaid coverage from 8.7 million people and leave 7.6 million more Americans uninsured.On Monday afternoon, the White House defended the legislation with a “mythbuster” statement dismissing claims that the bill would cause deaths as “one of Democrats’ most disgusting lies”.The White House argued the bill would actually “strengthen and protect the social safety net” by removing what it claimed were 1.4 million undocumented people from Medicaid rolls and implementing work requirements for able-bodied adults.“By removing at least 1.4 million illegal immigrants from the program, ending taxpayer-funded gender mutilation surgeries for minors, and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, the One Big Beautiful Bill will ensure Medicaid better serves the American people,” the statement read.Senate Republicans acknowledge the House-passed bill will undergo significant revisions, with several Republican senators seeking changes to the Medicaid provisions. Ernst’s comments have also provided Democrats with potent ammunition for their argument that Republicans prioritize tax cuts for wealthy Americans over healthcare for ordinary citizens.Iowa Democratic state senator JD Scholten told Politico on Monday he is launching a campaign to unseat Ernst, saying the senator “disrespected” its residents.The Democratic National Committee chairperson, Ken Martin, said Ernst had “said the quiet part out loud”, arguing Republicans don’t care “whether their own constituents live or die as long as the richest few get richer”.Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told CNN on Sunday that the Republican bill “is about life and death”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Everybody in that audience knows that they’re going to die. They would just rather die in old age, at 85 or 90, instead of dying at 40,” Murphy said. “And the reality is that, when you lose your healthcare, you are much more at risk of early death.”In Iowa, the stakes are notably high, with roughly one in five residents relying on Medicaid coverage, including half of all nursing home residents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.Ernst attempted damage control during Friday’s town hall, insisting Republicans would “focus on those that are most vulnerable” and protect people who meet Medicaid eligibility requirements.The senator faces several primary challengers as she seeks a third term, with the Medicaid controversy potentially complicating her political positioning in a state where healthcare access remains a key voter concern. In December, she was attacked from her right flank for being a “Rino” after initially hesitating on confirming the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.When asked for comment, her office stayed the path.“There’s only two certainties in life: death and taxes,” a spokesperson for Ernst said, “and she’s working to ease the burden of both by fighting to keep more of Iowans’ hard-earned tax dollars in their own pockets and ensuring their benefits are protected from waste, fraud and abuse.” More

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      Has RFK Jr misdiagnosed America? – podcast

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