The largest Medicaid cuts in US history, which, if signed into law, would sever healthcare for the poorest Americans in order to offset massive tax cuts for the wealthy, have a curious new defense: “Well, we all are going to die.”

The line emerged on Friday as Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) attempted to defend the cuts before angry constituents during a contentious town hall. It was delivered with a smirk, and then, apparent impatience. “For heaven’s sakes, folks,” she said as the audience gasped.

It is true: Every one of us will indeed perish. But implicit in Ernst’s cavalier response on Friday is that the inevitability of death neutralizes how death comes for us. Jeopardizing health care for the most vulnerable? Why the hell not. Speeding up death for the oldest Americans by making them sicker? Well, we all are going to die.

Of course, the reality is that so much of the death that American society tolerates—our gun epidemic, a lack of universal health care, etc.—is a choice enshrined in our shitty politics. Just take a look at the staggering rise in babies born HIV positive right now, thanks to a similar casual cruelty of Elon Musk.

Ernst’s point is an accidental bedrock of GOP politics. Death does not matter, for certain people, if it means a supposed economic boost to the few.

The former Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra said the Trump administration’s explanations of how fake studies wound up cited in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again (MAHA)” report are “BS.”

“This ‘formatting’ BS doesn’t sell,” Becerra said, referring to claims White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and an HHS spokesperson made when dismissing errors found by the news site NOTUS as only issues arising from document formatting. “You’re supposed to do that checking before you publish, at least if you’re a rigorous publisher.”

“We caught this one,” Becerra added, “which ones didn’t we catch?”

Becerra, who announced last month he has entered California’s gubernatorial race, made the comments in response to a question from Mother Jones at the Association of Health Care Journalists conference in Los Angeles on Friday.

NOTUS first reported on Thursday that at least seven of the more than 500 studies cited in the MAHA report, focused on improving children’s health, did not actually exist; later on Thursday, the New York Times reported that at least two additional citations featured in the report were also fake. Both news outlets also said that the MAHA report misrepresented the findings of cited studies that do exist. Experts said that the errors indicated artificial intelligence may have been used in the writing of the report.

Both Leavitt and an HHS spokesperson downplayed the errors as formatting issues and emphasized that the “substance” of the report—which argues that factors like over-processed food, environmental chemicals, social media, and prescription drugs are harming kids’ health—remained accurate. By the end of the day Thursday, the White House, which previously hailed the report as a “milestone” in a post on X, had updated the report to remove the seven fake citations, NOTUS reported.

This is far from the first time the Trump administration has relied on shoddy research or baseless claims to justify its policy positions. Just this week, for example, RFK Jr. announced he was changing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines so as not to recommend the COVID vaccines for healthy children and pregnant women, calling it “common sense and good science” without citing any specific data that had led him to make that decision. Leading public health advocates condemned the move, noting that evidence has shown that the COVID vaccine does not lead to adverse birth outcomes and, instead, offers crucial protections against the virus for babies, pregnant people, and kids.

Becerra said Friday that he had avoided publicly critiquing the administration thus far to give them “a chance to settle in,” but that by now, “they got their chance.”

“I’m going to start talking,” he added, “because to say that we should not recommend that pregnant women and children receive the COVID vaccine; to say that in Texas, it’s okay that there are measles spreading after we had essentially eradicated measles in America—we have an obligation to protect the health of the American people, and to be silent is to acquiesce. There are too many people acquiescing to what’s going on right now.”

“Two young children died in Texas this year from measles,” Becerra said later. “They should be alive today.”

As of last month, Kennedy claimed to endorse the measles vaccine, but has also boosted baseless treatments, as my colleague Kiera Butler and I have reported.

The former secretary also blasted “all these folks that are underneath Secretary Kennedy at HHS, who are allowing this to happen, who know better, who are watching some of their most experienced colleagues who have been involved in saving lives and making the right decisions based on the science, who are being shuttered.”

As my colleagues and I have reported, Kennedy’s HHS laid off 10,000 workers, in addition to another 10,000 who reportedly took buyout offers; those laid off have included people who were working to make IVF more accessible and monitor pregnancy outcomes, and others working on preventing and tracking opioid addictions, gun injuries, and intimate partner violence, just to name a few examples Mother Jones covered. Becerra also noted the administration abolished the CDC’s Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, which he helped establish under the Biden administration.

“As dangerous as the guy in the Oval Office is,” Becerra added, “I think the big danger is those who enable him to do this, because that’s how you end up with tyranny and dictatorship—when others follow and let it happen.”

This week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also said he may prevent researchers from publishing in medical journals, arguing that they are “corrupt” and that HHS will likely create its own publications instead. Seemingly responding to that news, Becerra said it was “dangerous” for officials “to say that you’re going to muzzle researchers if their data doesn’t conform to their White House’s view of life.”

Becerra also predicted that the GOP-backed Medicaid cuts proposed in the reconciliation bill could lead Trump voters to see how Republicans’ policies are directly harming them: “Medicaid is as important in red states, in red congressional districts, as it is in blue—in fact, maybe even more. Because when you live in rural America, if you don’t have access to a doctor who uses Medicaid services, you may not have access at all.” More than half of Democrats and more than 40 percent of Republicans say they or someone they know has been covered by Medicaid, according to a KFF poll, which also found large majorities in all political parties view it favorably.

In a statement provided to Mother Jones, HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard repeated prior claims characterizing the fake citations as “minor” and “formatting errors,” adding: “Under President Trump and Secretary Kennedy, our federal government is no longer ignoring [chronic disease affecting children], and it’s time for the media to also focus on what matters.” Spokespeople for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump has been on a spree this week: He’s pardoned or commuted the sentences of a host of people this week, tax fraudsters and TV personalities among them. 

So, how do you get one of these pardons?

In my new video, I point out that if you’re Black, you should probably know Trump’s “Pardon Czar,” Alice Marie Johnson. Trump just pardoned rapper NBA YoungBoy, who spent time in prison for gun charges, and Larry Hoover, founder of the Gangster Disciples gang. Johnson’s fingerprints appear to be all over the pardons. NBA YoungBoy even thanked her in a statement after his release. 

Johnson herself was actually pardoned by Trump back in 2020. When she was released from prison in 2018, she’d served more than 20 years of a life sentence for her involvement in a multi-national cocaine operation in Memphis, TN, which had connections to a Columbian drug cartel. Her story was championed by the ACLU, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West, and others. Now, her Instagram is full of pictures with Black rappers and entertainers, appearing to help turn pardons into loyalty to Trump from some Black entertainers, drawing more Black voters into his orbit. 

Meanwhile, Trump is firing entire civil rights departments, militarizing the police, and ending corruption investigations into police departments known for targeting Black people. 

It’s a bizarre sleight of hand. “Hey, look over here, I pardoned a Black person!”—while making it easier and easier to imprison Black people.

During an official Oval Office event marking the end of his time working at the federal government, Elon Musk on Friday emerged with apparent facial swelling and bruising around his right eye.

“I wasn’t anywhere near France,” Musk replied when asked about the black eye, an apparent joke about Emmanuel Macron’s marital shove.

“I was just horsing around with little X, and I said, ‘Go ahead and punch me in the face,’ and he did,” he continued. “It turns out even a 5-year-old punching you in the face actually…”

“That was X that did that?” Trump interrupted.

“Yeah,” Musk said while giggling.

The black eye encapsulated another fresh round of intense chaos for Musk this week after the announcement that he was leaving the Trump administration. (The departure itself follows months of tumult for Musk as the head of DOGE.) Mere hours before the Oval Office appearance, the New York Times alleged rampant drug use by Musk—frequent ketamine, mushrooms, and ecstasy. It came amid speculation of dramatic feuding between Musk and Stephen Miller, whose wife, Katie Miller, is reportedly leaving the administration to work full-time with Musk.

Elsewhere in the Oval Office on Friday, Musk appeared distracted, at times bobbing his head or staring at the ceiling.

This story was originally published by Vox.com, and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Supreme Court handed down an opinion on Thursday that reads like it was written by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, the authors of an influential book arguing that excessive regulation of land use and development has made it too difficult to build housing and infrastructure in the United States. (Ezra is also a co-founder of Vox.)

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado concerns a proposed railroad line that would run through 88 miles of Utah, connecting the state’s oil-rich Uinta Basin to the broader national rail network. The line is expected to make it easier to transport crude oil extracted in this region to refineries elsewhere in the country. The court’s opinion in Seven County places strict new limits on a federal law that a lower court relied upon to prevent this line from being constructed—limits that should make it easier for developers to build large-scale projects.

Before this rail project can move forward, it must be approved by the Surface Transportation Board. Under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), moreover, this board is required to produce an environmental impact statement, which identifies any significant environmental effects from the rail project as well as ways to mitigate those effects.

Significantly, as Justice Brett Kavanaugh explains in the Court’s Seven County opinion, “NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions” on the board or on any other federal agency. It requires agencies to identify potential environmental harms that could arise out of development projects that they approve, but once those harms are identified in an environmental impact statement, the agency is free to decide that the benefits of the project outweigh those harms.

Nevertheless, NEPA is often a significant hindrance to land development because litigants who oppose a particular project—be they environmental groups or just private citizens looking to shut development down—can often sue, claiming that the federal agency that must approve the project did not prepare an adequate environmental impact statement. As a result, Kavanaugh writes in his Seven County opinion, “litigation-averse agencies…take ever more time…to prepare ever longer EISs for future projects.”

Indeed, the Seven County case itself is a poster child for just how burdensome NEPA can be. The Surface Transportation Board produced an environmental impact statement that is more than 3,600 pages, and it goes into great detail about the rail line’s potential impact on topics ranging from water quality to vulnerable species, such as the greater sage-grouse.

Nevertheless, a federal appeals court blocked the project because it determined that this 3,600-page report did not adequately discuss the environmental impacts of making it easier to extract oil from the Uinta Basin. The appeals court reasoned that the agency needed to consider not just the direct environmental impacts of the rail line itself but also the impact of increased drilling and oil refining after the project is complete.

All eight of the justices that heard the Seven County case (Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused) agreed that this appeals court decision was wrong, although Kavanaugh’s majority opinion for himself and his Republican colleagues is broader than a separate opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The justices’ agreement in Seven County, moreover, mirrors a growing bipartisan consensus that NEPA has become too much of a burden to development. As Kavanaugh notes in his opinion, President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2023 that limits environmental impact statements to 150 pages and requires them to be completed in two years or less.

Still, Kavanaugh’s opinion goes even further, repeatedly instructing courts to be deferential to an agency’s decision to greenlight a project after producing an environmental impact statement.

One striking thing about Kavanaugh’s opinion is how closely it mirrors the rhetoric of liberal proponents of an “abundance” agenda, which seeks to raise American standards of living by promoting large infrastructure projects.

These proponents often claim that well-meaning laws intended to advance liberal values can have the opposite effect when they impose too many burdens on developers. As Kavanaugh argues, NEPA has “transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool” that even stymies clean energy projects ranging “from wind farms to hydroelectric dams, from solar farms to geothermal wells.”

Broadly speaking, Kavanaugh’s opinion imposes two limits on future NEPA lawsuits. The first is simply a blunt statement that courts should be highly reluctant to second-guess an agency’s decision that it has conducted an adequate environmental review. As Kavanaugh writes, “the bedrock principle of judicial review in NEPA cases can be stated in a word: Deference.”

Kavanaugh also criticizes the appeals court for blocking one project—the Utah rail line—because of the environmental impacts of “geographically separate projects that may be built” as a result of that rail line, such as an oil refinery elsewhere in the country.

As Kavanaugh writes, “the effects from a separate project may be factually foreseeable, but that does not mean that those effects are relevant to the agency’s decisionmaking process or that it is reasonable to hold the agency responsible for those effects.”

Both Kavanaugh and the separate opinion by Sotomayor also point to the fact that “the Board here possesses no regulatory authority over those separate projects.” That is, while the transportation board is tasked with approving rail lines, other agencies are in charge of regulating projects, such as oil wells or refineries.

As Sotomayor writes, an agency is not required to consider environmental harms that it has “no authority to prevent.”

So Seven County is a fairly significant victory for land developers as well as for traditional libertarians and for liberal proponents of an abundance agenda. It significantly weakens a statute that has long been a bête noire of developers.

Last week, Max, a trans man in North Carolina in his twenties—and my childhood friend—got top surgery.

“I didn’t cry when I saw the results because it just looks like how I feel it should,” Max wrote in an email. He cried later, he said—when he realized he’d been able to “build a body I feel fully at home in.”

Three days after Max’s surgery, Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” a massive package of GOP tax and spending legislation, passed the House with a last-minute amendment that would ban Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplace plans from covering transgender health care like Max’s surgery and hormone replacement therapy. Approximately 185,000 trans adults, or about one in twelve in the US, are on Medicaid, according to the University of California, Los Angeles’ Williams Institute.

Max could only afford his surgery because it was covered in part by Medicaid. Medicaid also provided his hormone replacement therapy—prohibitively expensive without insurance—and the rest of his health coverage for the last several years, while he’s juggled school with full-time work.

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” has yet to pass in the Senate, and Democratic senators are working to use the Byrd Rule, which limits “extraneous” provisions to the budget, to remove its amendment against gender-affirming care.

If the bill passes with that amendment intact, said Jennifer C. Pizer, chief legal officer at LGBTQ civil rights nonprofit Lambda Legal, “There will be litigation, because the harms are quite serious and it legitimizes the range of other cruel and unjustifiable treatments of transgender people.”

The provision against gender-affirming care, Pizer pointed out, wouldn’t force all states to follow suit; she cited California’s use of state funds to cover domestic partners’ health insurance before federal law recognized same-sex relationships. States protective of transgender rights may take similar steps. But for those with a history of anti-LGBTQ legislation, there’s less hope: ten states already exclude coverage for such care in their Medicaid plans for all ages.

And the Trump administration, Pizer noted, has unlawfully pulled federal funding from programs it opposes—a “battering ram” it may use against states taking action to fund transgender healthcare.

That, together with the administration’s other attacks, has trans people on Medicaid fearful even in states with strong LGBTQ rights protections.

Ory and Caleb, both from Oregon, spoke positively about the state’s Medicaid program. Caleb described the care it provides as vastly improving their mental health; Ory called it “lifesaving.” But both have started to make backup plans to stock up on testosterone out of fear of losing access.

An Oregon law prohibits insurance carriers from denying medically necessary gender-affirming treatment, putting it in direct conflict with the new federal provision should it pass. It’s not clear how such tensions between federal and state authority will be resolved, Pizer said.

Alex joined Medicaid after the death of her partner compelled her to move close to where she grew up in Illinois. She started HRT on the day of Trump’s election. “I did not really plan it that way,” she said. “Let me tell you, that was not fun.”

Still, Alex has loved HRT: “It no longer felt like my body was fighting itself,” she said. “It feels internally aligned in a way I did not know it could previously.”

Alex called her senators for the first time to urge them to vote against the budget bill. Its authors “can pry my estrogen from my cold, dead hands,” she said, “and I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. Fuck those motherfuckers.”

Max, in North Carolina, was hit viscerally by the latest attempt to slash the care he was relying on. “It was a rollercoaster of emotions,” he said, from euphoria and recovery following his surgery to grief following the news.

The bill’s last-minute modifications to strip trans health coverage were made in a “cowardly way,” Max said—at night, with no cameras present—in “a pathetic attempt to avoid backlash, basically admitting that this is a terrible idea.”

“Trans people are vulnerable, but we are not weak,” said Alex. “We will always stick up for one another. We have always existed, and we always will exist, and there’s nothing that anybody could do to stop that, no matter how hard they try.”

Still recovering from surgery, Max writes, “I’m living the dreams of the little boy I used to be.” His wish? “I want more than anything for other trans people to have the options I did.”

This story was originally published by Vox.com and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Nearly two decades ago, scientists made an alarming discovery in upstate New York: Bats, the world’s only flying mammal, were becoming infected with a new, deadly fungal disease that, in some cases, could wipe out an entire colony in a matter of months.

Since then, the disease—later called white-nose syndrome—has spread across much of the country, utterly decimating North American bats that hibernate in caves and killing over 90 percent of three bat species. According to some scientists, WNS has caused “the most precipitous wildlife decline in the past century in North America.”

These declines have clear consequences for human populations—for you, even if you don’t like bats or visit caves.

Bats eat insect pests, such as moths and beetles. And as they decline, farmers need to spray more pesticides. Scientists have linked the loss of bats in the US to an increase in insecticide use on farmland and, remarkably, to a rise in infant deaths. Insecticide chemicals are known to harm the health of newborns.

The only reason we know any of this is because of a somewhat obscure government program in the US Geological Survey (USGS), an agency nested within the Interior Department. That program, known as the Ecosystems Mission Area, is the biological research division of Interior. Among other functions, it monitors environmental contaminants, the spread of invasive species, and the health of the nation’s wildlife, including bees, birds, and bats.

The Ecosystems Mission Area, which has around 1,200 employees, produces the premier science revealing how animals and ecosystems that Americans rely on are changing and what we can do to keep them intact—or risk our own health and economy.

This program is now at an imminent risk of disappearing.

The Trump administration has asked Congress to slash USGS funding by $564 million in its preliminary 2026 budget request. And while the proposal doesn’t specify cuts to Ecosystems Mission Area, an email obtained by Vox indicates that his administration had proposed eliminating funding for the program. (The email was originally reported by Science.) Such cuts are also in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy roadmap, which calls for the government to “abolish” Interior’s Biological Research Division, an outdated name for the Ecosystems Mission Area.

USGS has requested that the White House maintain at least some funding for the program, according to a current senior Interior Department employee with knowledge of the Ecosystems Mission Area. Whether or not Trump officials heed that request will be made clear when the White House releases a more detailed budget proposal in the coming days. The employee spoke to Vox on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk with the press.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also reportedly trying to fire government employees in the Ecosystems Mission Area, though a federal judge has so far blocked those efforts.

Eliminating biological research is not good. In fact, it’s very bad.

For a decade now, EMA’s North American Bat Monitoring Program, has been gathering and analyzing data on bats and the threats they face. NABat produces research using data from hundreds of partner organizations showing not only how white-nose syndrome is spreading—which scientists are using to develop and deploy vaccines—but also how bats are affected by wind turbines, another known threat.

Energy companies can and do use this research to develop safer technologies and avoid delays caused by wildlife regulations such as the Endangered Species Act.

The irony, another Interior Department employee told me, is that NABat makes wildlife management more efficient. It also helps reveal where declines are occurring before they become severe, potentially helping avoid the need to grant certain species federal protection—something the Trump administration would seem to want. The employee, who is familiar with Interior’s bat-monitoring efforts, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.

“If they want to create efficiencies in the government, they should ask us,” yet another Interior employee told Vox. “The damage that can be done by one administration takes decades to rebuild.”

In response to a request for comment, an Interior Department spokesperson told Vox that “USGS remains committed to its congressional mandate as the science arm of the Department of the Interior.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In a Senate appropriations hearing last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum refused to commit to maintaining funding for EMA.

“There’s no question that they don’t know what EMA does,” said the senior Interior employee.

Ultimately, it’s not clear why the administration has targeted Interior’s biological research. EMA does, however, do climate science, such as studying how plants and animals are responding to rising temperatures. That’s apparently a no-go for the Trump administration. It also gathers information that sometimes indicates that certain species need federal protections, which come with regulations (also a no-go for President Donald Trump’s agenda).

What’s especially frustrating for environmental advocates is that NABat, now 10 years old, is starting to hit its stride.

“We should be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of this very successful program that started from scratch and built this robust, vibrant community of people all collecting data,” said Winifred Frick, the chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, an environmental group. “We have 10 years of momentum, and so to cut it off now sort of wastes all that investment. That feels like a tremendous loss.”

Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining the program is less than 1 percent of Interior’s overall budget.

The government’s wildlife monitoring programs are “jewels of the country,” said Hollis Woodard, an associate professor of entomology at University of California Riverside who works with USGS on bee monitoring. “These birds and bats perform services for us that are important for our day-to-day lives. Literally everything I value, including food, comes down to keeping an eye on these populations. The idea that we’re just going to wipe them out is just terrifying.”

On Friday, the Trump administration released a detailed look at its proposed 2026 budget, including major cuts to federal science agencies that oversee research on everything from cancer to the cosmos.

While the broad strokes of Trump’s budget had been released in early May, the new proposal reveals more about what specific programs the president would like to see cut—and its impact on American science.

That includes a more than $30 billion cut to the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—agencies tasked with critical work like overseeing food safety, controlling disease outbreaks (see: measles), and supporting vaccine research. The Department of Education, as the New York Times tallied, would have its budget cut by about $12 billion—a blow to funding mechanisms like Pell grants that help promising future scientists afford college. And NASA’s budget, as Space.com reported, would shrink by $6 billion, a nearly 25 percent cut to the agency that oversees space exploration.

At NIH, which has already come under repeated scrutiny by the administration, the president proposed a budget cut of about $18 billion, the Times reports—around a 40 percent decrease of its current funds. Within NIH, the National Cancer Institute, responsible for supporting research on understanding and treating cancer, would see its funding cut from $7 billion to a little over $4.5 billion.

These cuts, experts say, will be detrimental to the national research landscape—and Americans’ health. As Harvard researchers noted in an op-ed published in JAMA Health Forum this week, more than 99 percent of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 had roots in NIH funding. Every dollar of NIH funding, in fact, returns more than 2.5 dollars in economic activity, a coalition of academic and industry scientists estimated in a widely cited report this year. In all, the Harvard researchers estimate, cutting $20 billion to NIH over 25 years may save $500 billion on paper, but it’d end up costing $8.2 trillion in lost human health.

And that’s just NIH. The National Science Foundation, along with NIH, is another major funder of American research. It would see more than half of its funding slashed under Trump’s budget, from nearly $9 billion in 2025 to $3.9 billion. This reduction, according to the administration, “reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.” As science journalist Dan Garisto pointed out on Bluesky, it would mean the number of staff, students, and researchers involved in NSF-supported science would drop from more than 330,000 to about 90,000—a whopping 73 percent cut.

And at NASA, Trump’s proposed budget would mean “the biggest single-year cut to NASA in history,” Space.com reports, and the cancellation of several programs, including a project to collect material from Mars and explore the depths of the solar system, projects that would reportedly take billions to replace. In a statement Friday, the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization advocating for space exploration and research, called the president’s proposed cuts, if passed by Congress, an “extinction-level event” for science. “It will damage the agency’s highly skilled workforce, abandon national priorities, and gut STEM education and outreach.”

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just green-lit a new Covid vaccine from Moderna, the company said in a press release Saturday. Now the vaccine will bump up against an administration that is loath to recommend it.

The vaccine, called mNEXSPIKE, was approved for adults 65 and older, and people between 12 and 64 years old with “one or more underlying risk factor” defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including conditions like cancer, asthma, and HIV. In a clinical trial of more than 11,000 participants, the vaccine showed higher efficacy than Moderna’s earlier vaccine.

According to Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, the shot offers an “important new tool to help protect people at high risk of severe disease.” Covid, as Bancel noted in the press release, “remains a serious public health threat, with more than 47,000 Americans dying from the virus last year alone.”

Moderna’s announcement comes just days after Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a video posted to X that the CDC would drop Covid vaccine recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women, a decision made outside the agency’s formal expert review process. Previously, everyone 6 months and older was advised to get vaccinated.

“I couldn’t be more pleased to announce that as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC recommended immunization schedule,” Kennedy said on X. “We’re now one step closer to realizing President Trump’s promise to make America healthy again.”

Many experts in the medical community expressed concern about the guidance and how it was delivered. “We were not consulted about this,” Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious diseases, told ABC News. “My biggest concern is about the process. This really ignores a long-established, evidence-based process that has been used to make vaccine recommendations in the US.”

While children are at less risk from Covid generally, many, especially young children, can develop severe illness. Pregnant people, too, are at heightened risk of illness and complications.

On Thursday, the CDC updated its guidance, with a clarification to Kennedy’s plans: Healthy children can still get the vaccine, the CDC said, through “shared clinical decision-making” between their parent and doctor. In other words, rather than advising against the vaccine, the CDC recommended parents speak to their doctors about it. (The American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend children get the vaccine.) The agency’s Covid vaccine guidance for pregnant adults reads, “No Guidance/Not Applicable.”

All this is likely to thwart the impact of Moderna’s shot. Experts worry the changes in recommendations will mean insurers will be less willing to cover Covid vaccines or doctors less likely to stock them, making them harder to access. As former Moderna executive and George Washington University health care law lecturer Richard Hughes told NPR earlier this week, “Expect variability in coverage, prior authorization and out-of-pocket [costs], all of which will discourage uptake.”

Dylan Bringuel remembers the exact moment they got hired by the Holiday Inn Express in Jamestown, New York. It was late August 2022, and Bringuel—who uses they/them pronouns—had recently moved across the country and was struggling to find work. 

Bringuel is transgender and was upfront about their gender identity during the job interview. “ I was like, ‘Just so you’re aware, I am transitioning from female to male,’” they remember saying. “And they said, ‘Okay, we respect that. We’ll do our best to make sure you fit and you’re comfortable here.’”

That wasn’t the case. Bringuel said that the first day on the job, the housekeeping manager called them an “it” and a “transformer” and said people like Bringuel are “what is wrong with society.”

Bringuel reported the harassment to hotel management. Within a day, they were fired. In 2024, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stepped in to help Bringuel sue the hotel for workplace discrimination.

But earlier this year, something unusual happened. The EEOC dropped Bringuel’s case, not because their allegations lacked merit, but because of President Donald Trump’s executive order on “radical gender ideology.” 

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones national politics reporter Abby Vesoulis walks through how the anti-DEI movement evolved from a niche legal fight to an all-out culture war—and what that means for the EEOC and the marginalized people it has historically protected.