Just after noon today, the Senate passed its version of the budget reconciliation bill. All Democrats and Independents voted no. Three Republicans—Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—joined the Democrats in voting no. That left the bill at 50–50. Vice President J.D. Vance cast the deciding vote, pushing the measure through the Senate and sending it back to the House to vote on the changes made by the Senate.
From the reporters’ gallery above the floor, CNN’s Sarah Ferris heard Senator Angus King (I-ME) yell to his Republican colleagues: “Shame on you guys. That was the most disgusting vote I’ve ever seen in my life.”
The measure cuts taxes for the wealthy and corporations and offsets those cuts in part by slashing Medicaid and food security programs for low-income Americans.
But there is at least one aspect of American life on which the bill is lavishing money. While the measure slashes public welfare programs, it pours $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement. The American Immigration Council broke out the numbers today: The Senate bill provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget.
When Trump talks about undocumented migrants as being dangerous criminals, he appears to have bought into the fantasy that the U.S. is a hellscape. In fact, about 8% of arrested migrants have been convicted of violent crimes. The administration defines anyone who breaks immigration law—which is a misdemeanor, not a felony—as a criminal. One of the reasons for the push to get the bill passed before July 4 is that the Department of Homeland Security has blown through its budget and needs the bill’s additional funding to operate.
While the Senate considered the budget reconciliation bill today, President Donald J. Trump visited the new detention facility in the Florida Everglades designed to hold 5,000 undocumented immigrants. The facility will cost $450 million a year, which will be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The Florida attorney general who came up with the plan gave it the name “Alligator Alcatraz,” a cutesy name for tents filled with cages for undocumented immigrants.
Standing in front of the cages with Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem laughing, Trump told reporters: “Biden wanted me in here…. It didn’t work out that way, but he wanted me in here, that son of a bitch.”
This is nonsense, but it reveals Trump’s conviction that he is always a victim, his determination to destroy the rule of law that threatened to hold him accountable for his actions, and his own drive to imprison and destroy his political opponents.
It was exactly a year ago today, on July 1, 2024, that the United States Supreme Court decided Donald J. Trump v. United States. The court’s majority overthrew the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.
It decided that the president of the United States, possibly the most powerful person on earth, has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.
The Supreme Court had delayed issuing its decision in that case until the last possible moment, guaranteeing that Trump would not face trial in the two federal criminal cases pending against him, one charging him with willfully retaining national defense information by taking classified information with him when he left office, and the other for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
A year later, today provided a snapshot of what happens to a democracy when a president feels he can disregard the law.
Trump’s Education Department announced today it is withholding $6.8 billion in funding for K–12 schools that, by law, was supposed to be disbursed starting today. By law, the executive branch must disburse appropriations Congress has passed, but Trump and his officers have simply ignored the law, saying they believe it is unconstitutional. The Constitution provides that Congress alone has the power to write laws and charges the president with taking “Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
Yesterday, Trump announced new Trump fragrances, perfumes and colognes for which he has licensed the use of his name. They retail for hundreds of dollars per 3.3 ounce bottle. Today, Zach Everson of Forbes reported that Trump Media & Technology Group is testing an international rollout of its streaming platform. The chief executive officer of Trump Media, former Republican congress member Devin Nunes, said in a statement: “International viewers who want to get the other side of the story will soon have an easy opportunity to do so.”
Everson points out that Trump has slashed Voice of America, the largest international broadcaster in the U.S., raising questions about whether Trump’s business interests played a role in his decisions about the congressionally funded U.S. news source.
But it was at a press conference in Ochopee, Florida, today that Trump showed just how profoundly the immunity conferred on him a year ago is undermining democracy.
Trump continues to say he will arrest and deport U.S. citizens to third countries. On April 14, a microphone picked up Trump’s comment to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador that “homegrowns are next” after the undocumented immigrants Bukele was imprisoning for Trump. Today, Trump told reporters that “bad criminals” have migrated to the U.S., “but we also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time. People that whacked people over the head with a baseball bat from behind when they're not looking and kill them, people that knife you when you're walking down the street. They're not new to our country. They're old to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too. You want to know the truth? So maybe that’ll be the next job that we'll work on together.”
He is also continuing to push the idea of attacking his political opponents. Today, Trump called for an investigation into Alejandro Mayorkas, homeland security secretary under President Joe Biden. He also threatened to arrest the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, if he doesn’t work with ICE agents to arrest migrants, although local and state governments have no legal obligation to work with federal immigration enforcement. Trump claimed—incorrectly—that Mamdani is a communist, and said that “a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally.” In fact, Mamdani is a naturalized citizen.
Today Alan Feuer and Adam Goldman of the New York Times reported that a former FBI agent, Jared Wise, who was charged with telling the January 6, 2021, rioters storming the Capitol to kill police officers, is working with the task force in the Justice Department set up as a way for President Trump to seek retribution against his political enemies.
Once a new system of detention facilities and ICE agents is established and the idea that a Republican president can legitimately attack his political opponents is accepted, a police state will be in place.
In answer to the question “How many more facilities like this do you feel that the country needs in order to enact your agenda of mass deportations?” Trump said today: “Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know Ron's doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time.”
Once that system is in place, it will not matter if Trump is able to do the work of the presidency. Today, a reporter from the Fox News Channel asked Trump about the new detention facility in the Everglades: “Mr. President, is there an expected time frame that detainees will spend here? Days, weeks, months?”
Trump answered: “In Florida? I'm going to spend a lot. Look, this is my home state. I love it, I love your government, I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine. They know very well. I mean, I'm not surprised that they do so well. They're great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I'll spend a lot of time here. I want to, you know, for four years, I've got to be in Washington, and I'm okay with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office, I make it—it's like a diamond, it's beautiful. It's so beautiful. It wasn't maintained properly, I will tell you that. But even when it wasn't, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot. But I'll spend as much time as I can here. You know, my vacation is generally here, because it's convenient. I live in Palm Beach. It's my home. And I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun, and I'm a big contributor to Florida, you know, pay a lot of tax, and a lot of people moved from New York, and I don't know what New York is going to do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York, and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they're leaving. I don't know what New York's going to do about that, because some of the biggest, wealthiest people, and some of the people that pay the most taxes of any people anywhere in the world, for that matter, they're moving to Florida and other places. So we're going to have to help some of these states out, I think. But thank you very much. I'll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”
The Senate’s passage of its version of the budget reconciliation bill yesterday sent House members rushing back to Washington today to debate passing what the Senate had sent them. The bill is hugely unpopular. It cuts taxes for the wealthiest Americans and corporations and slashes Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, energy credits, and other programs that help the American people, while also pouring money into Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detention facilities for migrants.
While Democratic representatives are united against the measure, people from across the country are flooding lawmakers with calls and demonstrations against the bill in hopes of swaying Republicans. At the office of Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), hundreds of his constituents held a die-in to demonstrate how cuts to healthcare in the bill would affect them.
Far-right Republicans think the bill doesn’t make steep enough cuts; Republicans from swing districts recognize that supporting it will badly hurt both their constituents and their hopes of reelection. But Trump has demanded Congress pass the measure before July 4, an arbitrary date he seems to have chosen because of its historical significance.
A new element in the Republicans’ calculation emerged a few days ago as billionaire Elon Musk reentered the fight over the measure, warning he would start a new political party over it. He has threatened to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote yes, a threat that is a counterweight to Trump’s threat to run primary challengers against lawmakers who vote no. Already Musk has claimed to be donating to the reelection campaign of Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY), an outspoken opponent of the bill.
Representative Sean Casten (D-IL) wrote today about the dysfunction on the House floor. “A functioning House leadership team would work the members, make changes as necessary and bring this bill to the floor once they knew they could pass it. But [speaker] Mike Johnson does not run a functional House leadership team. He does what Daddy says and Daddy said pass it before July 4.” This morning, the House took a procedural vote, but recognizing that they did not have the votes to pass the bill itself, Republican leadership refused to close the vote.
Later, House leadership held another vote open for more than two hours when they could not win it. When Representative Joe Neguse (D-CO) challenged this trick, the chair told him that the rules established a minimum time for votes, but no maximum.
To find the votes Republicans need to pass the bill, Trump met today with those expected to vote no. Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman of NOTUS reported that at a meeting with some of the swing-state Republican holdouts, Trump seemed to believe the lie that the bill doesn’t cut Medicaid. Three sources told the reporters Trump told Republicans they shouldn’t touch Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security if they want to win elections. “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill,” one of the members at the meeting answered.
Trump also met with far-right members, but because the Senate measure must pass the House unchanged, he can offer them little except to promise they will fix the bill after it passes. While that appeared to work on at least one representative, Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) told the NOTUS reporters: “Now we’re having to once again hear the line, ‘Let’s pass this and then we’ll fix it later,’ And we never fix it later, and America knows that.”
Political journalist Judd Legum of Popular Information posted: “To review: Trump spent all day rounding up votes for his mega bill[.] Trump did not round up enough votes[.] So the ‘plan’ was just to start voting and bully anyone who votes no until they switch their vote[.] (It could work.)”
Democrats called out Republicans from swing districts, listing the numbers of their constituents who will lose healthcare insurance if the measure passes. They urged Republicans to stand up to Donald Trump, and to stand up for their constituents.
Pennsylvania representative Fitzpatrick faced the die-in at his office and was also so angry at today’s news Trump is withholding weapons already pledged to Ukraine that he wrote to Trump today, warning that Ukraine is “holding the line for the entire democratic world” and asking for an emergency briefing on the decision to withhold aid. He voted no on a key procedural vote tonight.
Just after 10:00 tonight, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Melanie Zanona reported: “Republicans are trying [to] locate Rep[resentative] Brian Fitzpatrick, who delivered a surprising NO vote on the mega bill rule. Likely to try to flip him. I told a member I saw him bolt out of the chamber & leave the area. ‘Smart,’ the member said.”
As of midnight, the Republicans did not have the votes to advance the measure.
Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) posted: “Speaker Johnson should just take the L on this vote. Most of America doesn’t want this bill to pass anyways. It’s…both the worst and most unpopular piece of legislation in modern history.”
On Bluesky, user shauna wrote: “say what you will about [former Democratic House speaker] nancy pelosi (as one of her constituents believe me i have) she'd have impaled herself with a gavel live on the house floor before she'd have allowed this sh*tshow of a vote on her watch as speaker.”
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump signed the nearly 1,000-page budget reconciliation bill Republicans passed last week. Trump had demanded Congress pass the measure by July 4, and Republicans rammed it through despite the bill’s deep unpopularity and Congress’s lack of debate on it. When House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) presented Trump with the speaker’s gavel during the signing event, the symbolism of the gift was a little too on the nose.
“Today we are laying a key cornerstone of America's new golden age,” Speaker Johnson said at the signing. The new law is the capstone to the dramatic changes MAGA Republicans have made to the U.S. government in the last six months.
The measure makes the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, which were due to expire at the end of this year, permanent. At the bill’s signing, Trump harked back to the idea Republicans have embraced since 1980, claiming that tax cuts spark economic growth. He said: “After this kicks in, our country is going to be a rocket ship economically.”
In fact, tax cuts since 1981 have not driven growth, and a study by the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model of the University of Pennsylvania projects that the measure will decrease national productivity, known as gross domestic product (GDP), by 0.3% in ten years and drop the average wage by 0.4% in the same time frame.
From 1981 to 2021, tax cuts moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, and Penn Wharton projects the top 10% of households will receive about 80% of the total value of this law, too. Those in the top 20% of earners can expect to see nearly $13,000 a year from the bill, while those in the bottom 20% of households will lose about $885 in 2030 as the pieces of the law take effect.
Past tax cuts have also driven budget deficits and increases in the national debt, and like them, this law will increase the deficit by about $3.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The CBO also projects that interest payments on that debt will cost more than $1 trillion a year.
Sam Goldfarb and Justin Lahart of the Wall Street Journal noted on Thursday that economists, investors and politicians are sounding the alarm that the U.S. is “bingeing on debt” when there is no national emergency like a pandemic or a war to require taking on such debt. The measure will raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $5 trillion.
The Republican reliance on tax cuts to increase economic growth has inspired them to cut public programs since 1981. The Republicans’ new law continues the cuts begun as soon as Trump took office, cutting $890 billion from Medicaid over the next ten years, and about $230 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that provides food assistance for low-income Americans. It cuts tax credits for wind and solar power while promoting fossil fuels.
At the White House on Friday, Trump said: “I just want you to know, if you see anything negative put out by Democrats, it’s all a con job.” He claimed the new law is the “most popular bill ever signed.”
But it is clear administration officials are well aware that polls showed Americans disapproving of the measure more than approving by the huge gap of around 20 points. They are now trying to sell the law to voters. Notably, the previously nonpartisan Social Security Administration sent an email to Social Security recipients yesterday claiming the bill “eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples.” Except the law does not actually eliminate federal income taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, it gives a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for individuals older than 65 with annual incomes less than $75,000, or $12,000 for married couples with incomes less than $150,000.
What the law does do, though, is pour $170.7 billion into immigration enforcement—more than the military budgets of all but fifteen countries. The law provides $51.6 billion to build a wall on the border, more than three times what Trump spent on the wall in his first term. It provides $45 billion for detention facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an increase of 265% in ICE’s annual detention budget. It provides $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement, a threefold increase in ICE’s annual budget.
According to Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, the law gives ICE more funding than the Federal Bureau of Investigations; Drug Enforcement Administration; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; U.S. Marshals Service; and Bureau of Prisons combined. In fact, Reichlin-Melnick told Democracy Now!, the law will make ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency “in the history of the nation.”
And now, with the MAGA Republican political realignment in place, we wait to see whether it delivers the golden age Trump and his MAGA loyalists promise.
The early signs are not auspicious.
Within hours of Trump’s signing the bill into law, Gun Owners of America and a number of other pro-gun organizations filed a lawsuit claiming the measure makes the 1934 National Firearms Act (NFA) unconstitutional. That law regulated machine guns and short-barrel guns by imposing a tax on them and making owners register their weapons. The Supreme Court upheld that law as a tax law. The budget reconciliation bill ended those taxes and thus, the plaintiffs claim, the constitutional justification for the law.
In a press release, Gun Owners of America said its “team in Washington had been working behind the scenes with Congress since the November 2024 election to fully repeal the NFA,” and that the new law had teed up their lawsuit against the registry it called “an unconstitutional relic.”
Scholars of authoritarianism are sounding the alarm over the new law. Timothy Snyder warned that the extensive concentration camps that Trump has called for and the new measure will fund will be tempting sites for slave labor. Undocumented immigrants make up 4% to 5% of the total U.S. workforce. In agriculture, food processing, and construction, they make up between 15% and 20% of the workforce.
Comparing the detention camps to similar programs in other countries, Snyder warns that incarcerated workers will likely be offered to employers on special terms, a concept Trump appears to have embraced with his suggestion that the administration will figure out how to put workers back in the fields and businesses by putting them under the authority of those hiring them. Trump has called the idea “owner responsibility.”
“[T]hey’re going to be largely responsible for these people,” Trump said. This echoes the system legislators set up in the U.S. South during Reconstruction thanks to the fact the Thirteenth Amendment permits enslavement “as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” That system permitted employers to pay the fines of incarcerated individuals and then to own their labor until those debts were paid. While we know that system from the chain gangs of that era, in fact employers in many different sectors used—and abused—such workers.
Today, according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute, of the 1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, nearly 800,000 are prison laborers, working in the facility itself or in government-run businesses or services like call centers or firefighting. About 3% work for private-sector employers, where they earn very low pay.
Snyder urges Americans to be aware that the law paves the way to establish this system.
Harvard sociologist Theda Skocpol identified “massive militarization of ICE” as “the real heart of this law.” She notes that American scholars have thought the federal system in the U.S., in which state and local governments control the police powers, bought the U.S. some protection against a police state.
But, Skocpol says, officials in the Trump administration “have figured out a devilishly clever workaround. Immigration is an area where a U.S. President can exercise virtually unchecked legal coercive power, especially if backed by a Supreme Court majority and corrupted Department of Justice. Now Congress has given ICE unprecedented resources—much of this windfall to be used for graft with private contractors Trump patronizes, but lots of to hire street agents willing to mask themselves and do whatever they are told against residents and fellow American citizens. [Administration officials] are not interested only in rounding up undocumented immigrants,” she wrote to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo. “They will step up using ICE and DOJ enforcements…to harass Democrats [and] citizen critics, and subvert future elections if they can.”
At an event in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, Trump complained that Democrats had not supported the budget reconciliation bill. Less than three weeks after a gunman murdered a Democratic Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, and shot another legislator and his wife, Trump said Democrats had opposed the measure only “because they hate Trump. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”
The move blindsided the State Department, Ukraine, European allies and members of Congress, who demanded an explanation from the Pentagon.
At least 80 people are dead and more than 40 are still missing in Central Texas after almost a foot (30 centimeters) of rain caused flash floods overnight on Friday. Most of the deaths were in Kerr County, where the Guadalupe River rose 26 feet (8 meters) in 45 minutes, engulfing a Christian girls’ camp.
Even as rescuers search for survivors, the disaster has highlighted the dangers of MAGA governance. The steps that left people in the path of the floods on Friday are unclear, but observers are already pointing to the administration's cuts to government as well as the lack of systems that could have provided earlier warnings to those in the path of the floods.
Immediately after the catastrophe became apparent, Texas officials began to blame cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS)—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—for causing inaccurate forecasts. The “Department of Government Efficiency” cut about 600 staffers from the NWS. After the cuts, the understaffed agency warned that “severe shortages” of meteorologists would hurt weather forecasting.
All five living former directors of the NWS warned in May that the cuts “[leave] the nation’s official weather forecasting entity at a significant deficit…just as we head into the busiest time for severe storm predictions like tornadoes and hurricanes…. Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life.”
But former NWS officials maintain the forecasts were as accurate as possible and noted the storm escalated abruptly. They told Christopher Flavelle of the New York Times that the problem appeared to be that NWS had lost the staffers who would typically communicate with local authorities to spread the word of dangerous conditions. Molly Taft at Wired confirmed that NWS published flash flood warnings but safety officials didn’t send out public warnings until hours later.
Meanwhile, Kerr County’s most senior elected official, Judge Rob Kelly, focused on local officials, telling Flavelle that the county did not have a warning system because such systems are expensive and “[t]axpayers won’t pay for it.”
Officials will continue to examine the crisis in Texas but, coming as it did after so many deep cuts to government, it has opened up questions about the public cost of those cuts. Project 2025 called for breaking up and downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, claiming its six main offices—including the National Weather Service—“form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” by which it meant the fossil fuel industry.
CNN’s Andrew Freedman, Emma Tucker, and Mary Gilbert note that several NWS offices across the country are so understaffed they can no longer operate around the clock, and many are no longer able to launch the weather balloons that provide critical data. The journalists also note that the Trump administration's 2026 budget calls for eliminating “all of NOAA’s weather and climate research labs along with institutes jointly run with universities around the country.”
Brad Plummer of the New York Times noted that the budget reconciliation bill passed by Republicans last week and signed into law on Friday boosts fossil fuels and destroys government efforts to address climate change, even as scientists warn of the acute dangers we face from extreme heat, wildfires, storms, and floods like those in Texas. Scott Dance of the Washington Post added yesterday that the administration has slashed grants for studying climate change and has limited or even ended access to information about climate science, taking down websites and burying reports.
When a reporter asked Trump, “Are you investigating whether some of the cuts to the federal government left key vacancies at the national weather service or the emergency coordination?” he responded: “They didn’t. I’ll tell you, if you look at that water situation that all is and that was really the Biden setup. That was not our setup. But I wouldn't blame Biden for it either. I would just say this is a 100-year catastrophe and it’s just so horrible to watch.”
The tragedy in Texas is the most visible illustration of the MAGA attempt to destroy the modern U.S. government, but it is not the only one.
On July 2, Gabe Cohen of CNN reported that state and local officials are meeting a “wall of silence” from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Cohen reported that FEMA leaders have ordered FEMA personnel to stop communicating with the Office of Management and Budget, the National Security Council, members of Congress, and state and local partners, leaving those communications up to the political appointees running the agency. FEMA is housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose secretary, Kristi Noem, is tightening her control over the agency and recently called for the firing of employees who “who don’t like us.”
On June 30, the medical journal The Lancet published an analysis of the impact of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and consequences of its dismantling. The study concluded that from 2001 through 2021, programs funded by USAID prevented nearly 92 million deaths in 133 countries. It estimates that the cuts the Trump administration has made to USAID will result in more than 14 million deaths in the next five years. About 4.5 million will be children under 5.
On June 30, Dr. Steven H. Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University warned in the New York Times that a health catastrophe is brewing in the U.S. as well, as “[t]he administration has upended the operation of almost every agency that deals with our health and medical care, leaving behind fewer staff members and programs to address critical needs, and changing policies in ways that could endanger us all.” Woolf lists cuts of 39% to the institute that researches heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and diabetes; 37% to the institute that researches cancer; 40% to the institute that researches stroke, 40% to the institute that researches Alzheimer’s; 38% to the institute that researches drug overdoses and suicide; and 36% to the institute that researches covid, flu, and pneumonia.
Those cuts, along with the deregulation of industries that pollute our environment and the destruction of programs and agencies that address mental illness, suicide, chronic diseases, poisoning, car accidents, and drowning, Woolf writes, are putting Americans at risk. In May, Laura Ungar and Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press noted the elimination of 20,000 jobs at national health agencies as well as cuts of $11 billion in covid-era funding to state and local health departments that inspect restaurants, monitor wastewater, and so on.
In a New York Times op-ed on July 4, Dr. Perri Klass added that changes to the childhood vaccine schedule under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. threaten to bring back diseases that routine immunizations had all but eliminated in the U.S.
Yesterday, Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that measles cases in the U.S. have surged to a record high since the country declared the disease eradicated twenty-five years ago. There have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles in the U.S. this year, passing the previous record of 1,274 set in 2019 and likely a “severe undercount.”
On July 2, Nahal Toosi of Politico reported that cuts to the National Security Council (NSC) have created a “dysfunctional” policymaking process. The NSC is supposed to coordinate policymaking across the different parts of the government. But Toosi reported that when the Pentagon recently announced it was reviewing whether the AUKUS security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom advances Trump’s “America First” agenda, the announcement came from Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby without input from other key U.S. officials, who were blindsided by the move.
The acting national security advisor, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has downsized the NSC and held so few meetings that career staffers are kept in the dark and others are jockeying for power. One person told Toosi, “It’s Game of Thrones politics over there.” Under Trump, the NSC has gone from being a body that can give the president advice to one designed simply to advance the president’s agenda.
And that is the point of the dismantling of modern government systems under Trump: to give him and his loyalists the power to control the country. On July 3, Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported on letters Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to companies like Google and Apple, claiming Trump has the constitutional power not just to ignore laws himself, but to authorize others to ignore them too.
Last year, Congress passed a law banning TikTok in the U.S. unless its China-based parent company, ByteDance, sold its stake in the platform to a non-Chinese company within nine months, or twelve if a sale was in progress. The Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously, and TikTok disappeared from U.S. app stores.
But when he took office, Trump told the Department of Justice not to enforce the law for 75 days while his administration reviewed it. He also told Bondi to tell companies they can continue to carry the TikTok app “without incurring any legal liability,” no matter what the law says.
The letters she wrote, newly available through Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, suggest Trump can ignore the law because of his “unique constitutional responsibility for the national security of the United States, the conduct of foreign policy, and other vital executive functions.” The law banning TikTok— that Congress passed, President Joe Biden signed, and the Supreme Court upheld 9–0— had to give way, she wrote, to Trump’s “core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.
Six leading medical organizations filed a lawsuit on Monday against Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, and the federal Department of Health and Human Services, charging that recent decisions limiting access to vaccines were unscientific and harmful to the public.
Milestone comes as health secretary RFK Jr has injected upheaval into US vaccine policy and spread misinformation
The annual tally of measles cases in the US is the highest in 33 years, as an ongoing outbreak in west Texas continues to drive cases.
The latest figures mean Americans will have to look back to 1992 to find a worse year with the vaccine preventable disease. The official tally very likely undercounts the scope of the outbreak, experts told the Guardian.
“When you talk to people on the ground, you get the sense that this outbreak has been severely underestimated,” said Dr Paul Offit, director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Confirmed cases appear to be the “tip of a much bigger iceberg”, he said.
Measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000. However, as the pandemic disrupted routine childhood visits to the doctors and anti-vaccine organizations saw their coffers swell during the pandemic, measles vaccination rates have fallen below a critical threshold to prevent outbreaks in some communities.
As of 4 July, Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Outbreak Response Innovation counted 1,277 measles cases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports 1,267 cases, but has not updated its data since 2 July.
“The number of new cases has slowed down, but I don’t think there’s any reason to suggest this will be our last,” said Dr Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert and dean for the national school of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
He later added: “It’s a very dark epidemic that never had to happen.”
