July 10, 2025







In Flooded Texas, Questions About FEMA’s Role and Fate


“‘[W]ho’s to blame?’” Texas governor Greg Abbott repeated back to a reporter. “That’s the word choice of losers.” “Every football team makes mistakes,” he continued, referring to Texas’s popular sport. “The losing teams are the ones that try to point out who’s to blame. The championship teams are the ones that say, ‘Don’t worry about it, ma’am, we’ve got this.’”

Abbott’s defensive answer reveals the dilemma MAGA Republicans find themselves in after the cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service that came before the Texas disaster. Scott Calvert, John West, Jim Carlton, and Joe Barrett of the Wall Street Journal reported that after a deadly flood in 1987, officials in Kerr County applied for a grant to install a flood warning system, but their application was denied. They considered installing one paid for by the county but decided against it. Then county commissioner Tom Moser told the reporters: “It was probably just, I hate to say the word, priorities. Trying not to raise taxes.”

Since 1980, Republican politicians have won voters by promising to cut taxes they claimed funded wasteful programs for women and racial and ethnic minorities. Cutting government programs would save money, they said, enabling hardworking Americans to keep more of their hard-earned money. But leaders recognized that Republican voters actually depended on government programs, so they continued to fund them even as they passed tax cuts that moved more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Now, in Trump’s second term, MAGA Republicans are turning Republican rhetoric into reality, forcing Americans to grapple with what those cuts really mean for their lives.
President Trump wants to shutter the agency and shift responsibility and costs of emergency management to the states. In Texas, that process appears to already be underway.

Texas: Gov. Greg Abbott said that rescuers would continue to search for those affected by the floods: “We will not stop until we identify, recover every single body.” At least 173 people remain missing.

Under fire, Texas officials can’t answer why the Texas Hill Country flood victims didn’t get more notice of the impending catastrophe. The National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning at 1:14 a.m July 4 of a “catastrophic” potential for loss of life, and questions are intensifying about what local officials were doing during those hours after the warning. Kerr County County Sheriff Larry Leitha acknowledged that he wasn’t notified about the flooding until between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m.—by which point the river had already risen as much as 26 feet near Camp Mystic.

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While inflation remained relatively muted through May, consumer spending, which is the primary driver of U.S. economic growth, has started to sputter, as Americans pull back on purchases after months of stockpiling to get ahead of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

David Kelly, the chief global strategist for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, still described the U.S. economy as a “relatively healthy tortoise,” resilient and expanding, slowly but surely. He projected that the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its total output, would grow about 1 percent by the end of 2025 compared with the year prior.

But, he added, the economy has reached a “bit of a diversion in the road,” as some of Mr. Trump’s new policies start to take effect.

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The Collapse of the F.D.A.: Since R.F.K. Jr. was confirmed as Trump’s health secretary, the Food and Drug Administration has been buffeted by staff cuts that have crippled divisions and gutted the agency. Thousands of scientists and other experts have left or been let go, putting the storied agency’s mission at risk.
The administration is getting pushback in a number of other places as well, including from medical organizations. Yesterday the American Academy of Pediatricians, the American College of Physicians, and four other groups sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the changes Kennedy has made to the vaccine advisory panel, to the availability of covid vaccines, and to vaccine recommendations. The lawsuit calls those changes "unlawful” and “unilateral” and says they violate the Administrative Procedure Act.


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While inflation remained relatively muted through May, consumer spending, which is the primary driver of U.S. economic growth, has started to sputter, as Americans pull back on purchases after months of stockpiling to get ahead of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.

David Kelly, the chief global strategist for J.P. Morgan Asset Management, still described the U.S. economy as a “relatively healthy tortoise,” resilient and expanding, slowly but surely. He projected that the nation’s gross domestic product, a measure of its total output, would grow about 1 percent by the end of 2025 compared with the year prior.

But, he added, the economy has reached a “bit of a diversion in the road,” as some of Mr. Trump’s new policies start to take effect.

NYC opioid deaths hit five-year low, latest data shows

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July 9, 2025

For Israel, It Pays to Be a Winner

July 8, 2025

Credit...Eric Lee for The New York Times

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist

A core misconception about Israel’s policy since Oct. 7 is that the country has favored military action at the expense of diplomacy. The truth is that it’s Israel’s decisive battlefield victories that have created diplomatic openings that have been out of reach for decades — and would have remained so if Israel hadn’t won.

In Beirut on Monday, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy for Syria, said he was “unbelievably satisfied” by the response he got from President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon on U.S. proposals to disarm Hezbollah, reportedly in exchange for critical financial aid after a six-year economic crisis. Aoun’s government is the first in the country’s history to make progress in disarming Hezbollah’s strongholds near the Israeli border — a basic condition for Israel to withdraw from five military outposts it still occupies in southern Lebanon.

Hezbollah is not a group that will go quietly — not if it has any other option. But it’s because Israel destroyed it as an effective fighting force last year that it’s now possible for the Lebanese state to again possess the most basic form of sovereignty, a monopoly on the use of force within its borders. And it’s only because of Israel’s victory that there’s a realistic prospect of a peace agreement between Jerusalem and Beirut as part of an expanded Abraham Accords.

There’s a similarly hopeful story in Syria, where last week the Trump administration lifted sanctions on the government of President Ahmed al-Shara. The United States has been a step ahead of Israel in warming to al-Shara, who once led a branch of Al Qaeda and whom some Israeli leaders still see as a closet jihadist. Now there are reports of talks between Jerusalem and Damascus aiming at a de facto peace agreement.

Where that goes remains to be seen. But it’s unlikely that al-Shara’s insurgents could have come to power if Israel hadn’t first destroyed Hezbollah, depriving the regime of Bashar al-Assad of one of its most effective military arms. And neither Jerusalem nor Damascus might have been amenable to talks if Israel hadn’t first destroyed many of Syria’s remaining weapon stockpiles in December, giving al-Shara an incentive to seek a diplomatic outcome and Israel confidence that it wouldn’t face another menace to its north.

Then there’s Gaza. After President Trump’s White House dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel on Monday, Israeli officials suggested they were close to a deal that would pause the fighting in exchange for Hamas’s release of more hostages. Trump has speculated that an agreement could happen this week.

This is happening not because the Netanyahu government or what remains of the leadership of Hamas has suddenly realized that there’s been far too much devastation and suffering in Gaza. There has been, and it’s in everyone’s interest to see it end. But humanitarian calls, however sincere, or moral hectoring, however loud, have contributed next to nothing to stopping the fighting. Wars don’t end because Greta Thunberg gets on a boat.

What has counted is the calculus of force. On Hamas’s side, its growing diplomatic flexibility is almost entirely a result of its proximity to total defeat. According to the BBC, one Hamas official has privately described a situation in which 95 percent of the leadership is dead and Hamas has lost control of 80 percent of its territory. Many Gazans have turned against Hamas, looting the offices of its security headquarters and increasingly turning to local clans for food and protection. These are the conditions under which Hamas’s remaining members may finally agree to lay down their arms and go into exile, at last creating the possibility for a permanent end to fighting, new governance and badly needed reconstruction.

On Israel’s side, diplomatic flexibility has three authors. The first is the Israeli public’s understandable exhaustion with 21 months of fighting. The second is pressure from Trump to reach a deal — and Netanyahu’s eagerness to please him.

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But neither factor would have been sufficient if Israel hadn’t achieved its military success over Iran, crowned, from an Israeli point of view, by America’s participation in the campaign.

At a stroke, Israel humiliated its most formidable adversary (and Hamas’s principal patron), demonstrating not only its capacity but also its courage to take on the mullahs directly and survive their reprisals intact. It advertised its capabilities to Saudi Arabia, which may now be more amenable to joining the Abraham Accords — not out of a softhearted desire for peace but out of a hardheaded interest in cementing military, economic and technological ties with the Jewish state. It created at least the possibility that Iran might choose to forgo its nuclear ambitions out of fear of seeing them destroyed again. And its victory gave Netanyahu the upper hand over his far-right coalition partners, allowing him to sign a deal that probably wouldn’t cause his government to collapse.

Critics of Israeli policy have argued that the cost of its military victories lies in its isolation on the world stage or in the contempt in which it is held by people like Zohran Mamdani and Tucker Carlson. There’s also no doubt that hatred of Israel has done much to contribute to growing antisemitism, although it’s equally true that antisemitism lies at the root of much of the hatred of Israel.

Then again, Israel doesn’t exist to placate the feelings of its detractors and defamers. It exists to protect Jewish life and uphold Jewish dignity in a world too intent on destroying both.

Lawrence Summers: This Law Made Me Ashamed of My Country


July 8, 2025

Credit...Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times

By Lawrence H. Summers
Mr. Summers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a former Treasury secretary.


Last week, Robert Rubin and I warned of the many macroeconomic risks created by the domestic policy bill President Trump signed into law on Friday. I stand by our judgment that it will most likely slow growth, risk a financial crisis, exacerbate trade deficits and undermine national security by exhausting the government’s borrowing capacity. This is more than ample reason to regret its passage.

I want to return to the topic after conversations with health professionals, including my daughters, who practice medicine and social work in rural New Hampshire. They made me realize that a focus on macroeconomics, while valid, misses the human brutality that I now see as the most problematic aspect of the legislation. I don’t remember on any past Fourth of July being so ashamed of an action my country had just taken.

Over the holiday weekend, while the president was celebrating tax cuts that over 10 years will deliver an average of more than $1 million to families in the top 0.1 percent of the income distribution, medical professionals were considering questions like these:

What should they say to seriously disabled patients, who can live at home only because Medicaid pays for rides to their medical appointments, now that those people could lose that coverage?


What should they recommend to the relatives caring for poor patients at home, who will no longer be able to work when payments for home-health aides are no longer available?


How should they advise the hospital to handle patients who can’t afford rehab or nursing facilities and can’t live at home, but who currently occupy rooms desperately needed by acutely ill patients?


Should they still feel proud of and committed to the work of giving comfort to the lonely, poor and elderly, when their country’s leaders have decided that more money for the most fortunate is a higher priority?


How can they face patients who will be evicted from the hospital with perhaps as little as a cab voucher when their stays end?

After we talked about these questions, it occurred to me to think about precedents in American history — other moments when the social safety net was cut — to see what followed. Did the feared consequences materialize? Were errors corrected?
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I am plenty negative about this president and this moment. Even I was unpleasantly surprised by what I learned.

This round of budget cuts in Medicaid far exceeds any other cut the United States has made in its social safety net. The approximately $1 trillion reduction, over 10 years, represents about 0.3 percent of gross domestic product. Previously, the most draconian cuts came with President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax law. But they were far smaller — $12 billion over 10 years and 0.03 percent of G.D.P. The Trump law will remove more than 11 million people from the rolls, compared with about three million under the Reagan cuts. Other noteworthy reductions to the social safety net, such as the Clinton-era welfare reform, were even smaller.

Because Medicaid is a state-level program and varies widely across the country, economists can evaluate the impact of alternative policies. A number of studies suggest that removing one million people from the rolls for one year could result in about 1,000 additional deaths. It follows that removing more than 11 million people for a decade would probably result in more than 100,000 deaths. Because this figure fails to take account of the degradation of service to those who remain eligible — fewer rides to the hospital, less social support — it could well be an underestimate.

The administration claims its policies, such as adding work requirements for Medicaid eligibility, bear only on the able-bodied. I have supported the general idea of work requirements for cash welfare based on a common-sense idea of fairness. But a careful evaluation of an experiment in Arkansas confirms what common sense also suggests — imposing work requirements on a population in need of health insurance does not increase work and does inhibit necessary care.

The cruelty of these cuts is matched only by their stupidity. Medicaid beneficiaries will lose, but so will the rest of us. The cost of care that is no longer reimbursed by Medicaid will instead be borne by hospitals and passed onto paying patients, only at higher levels, because delayed treatment is more expensive. When rural hospitals close, everyone nearby loses. Hospitals like the one where my daughters practice can no longer accept emergencies by air because those beds are occupied by patients with chronic diseases and no place to go.

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Because of the congressional instinct for political survival, the Medicaid cuts are backloaded beyond the 2026 midterms. Cynicism may have a silver lining. As more people realize what is coming, there is time to alter these policies before grave damage is done. TACO — Trump always chickens out — is a doctrine that should apply well beyond financial markets.


July 3, 2025

Racketeering was a ‘stretch’ in Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs trial, legal experts say



A federal court jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case rejected the government’s theory that he ran a criminal enterprise that helped him carry out serious crimes.
July 2, 2025

By Shayna Jacobs and Salvador Rizzo 


NEW YORK — A federal court jury in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case rejected the government’s theory that he ran a criminal enterprise that helped him carry out serious crimes including sex trafficking and drug distribution.

Some legal experts following the criminal trial said Wednesday that it was not a surprise that the music mogul beat the racketeering conspiracy count in the indictment. It required prosecutors to establish that Combs led an operation involving employees who facilitated illegal sex and drug-related behavior in an organized manner akin to a mafia crime ring.


“Even reading the indictment, it did seem like a stretch to charge Combs with the RICO statute,” said Anna Cominsky, who heads New York Law School’s Criminal Defense Clinic. RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

New York lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, who represented mafia scion John Gotti Jr. and Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, described Combs as “a guy that lived a questionable lifestyle and ran a music empire” but said “the RICO charges were so out of place here.”

Combs also was acquitted of two counts of sex trafficking charged as individual crimes. He was convicted on two counts of transporting his accusers for the purpose of prostitution. On the racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking counts, he faced up to life in prison.

Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Ricky Patel, special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations’ New York field office, issued a statement addressing the impact of sex crimes on victims and on society but did not address the outcome of the case specifically.

“Sex crimes deeply scar victims, and the disturbing reality is that sex crimes are all too present in many aspects of our society,” the statement said.

The RICO statute has been used in recent years in other cases that involved allegations of sexual violence. Singer R. Kelly was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in federal court in Brooklyn in 2021 for 30 years’ worth of allegations of abuse related to women and minors. In 2019, NXIVM cult leader Keith Raniere was convicted of racketeering and sex trafficking in a case that involved a minor and forced labor from within the self-help organization he headed.

Those cases differed from Combs’s, according to Lichtman, because the accusers in Combs’s case were adults in consensual relationships with the producer and had the ability to leave and see other partners. While they may have suffered abuse, the evidence did not show they were forced into sex, he said, and they sought out more and more sexual experiences and time with Combs.

Unlike in other RICO cases, the Combs case did not include a witness who testified that a distinct organization was committing crimes.

Prosecutors were required to prove that members of the enterprise agreed to commit two racketeering acts from a list of alleged crimes. In summations, prosecutor Christy Slavik said that crimes such as drug distribution and sex trafficking were easily proved and that his two alleged trafficking victims, singer Cassie Ventura and a woman called Jane, a pseudonym, clearly didn’t want to participate in “freak-offs.”

Federal prosecutors often bring racketeering cases against gangs and gang members, including in recent years against the MS-13 organization.


The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has prosecuted dozens of gang members under the RICO statute in recent years, and it usually uses insiders with deep knowledge of the gang to narrate the case for the jury from the witness stand, often relating gruesome crimes that they committed with others.

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Raj Parekh, a former acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who is now at the firm Sparacino PLLC, said: “RICO can be a powerful storytelling vehicle about structure: who gives the orders, who follows them and how the operation runs as a coordinated system. The strongest cases are those where the story is clear, the enterprise is well-defined, and the criminal acts are tightly woven into the enterprise’s structure and purpose.”

He added: “These [insider] witnesses often come with baggage, such as criminal records, plea deals and inconsistent statements. The key is not only to confront these issues directly, but most critically, to ensure the testimony clearly explains to the jury how the witness’s firsthand knowledge supports the charges in the case.”

Virginia defense lawyer Joseph Flood, who has handled RICO cases, also noted that the government did not have a key witness to walk the jury through operations at the alleged organization — one potentially fatal flaw in the government’s strategy in the Combs case. Witnesses who worked for Combs spoke of involvement in drug deliveries and described their role in setting up their boss’s hotel rooms for sex parties but did not discuss a broad scheme or hierarchy.

“I think they had a real uphill climb. … Maybe crimes were committed, but they were sort of ad hoc and done to serve a sexual purpose. … The primary goal here was to pleasure him, not to make money,” Flood said.
Flood said that while the conduct may have been repulsive, “I was shocked that this was going forward as a RICO conspiracy. They just didn’t seem to have it.”



ICE agents now snatching migrants with open court cases; NYC officials, lawyers say it’s ‘utterly unlawful’



Federal agents patrol the halls of an immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

By Emma Seiwell | eseiwell@nydailynews.com |

New York Daily News July 3, 2025 at 6:50 AM EDT

In a sudden escalation in President Trump’s mass deportation efforts, ICE agents are snatching and detaining migrants with pending immigration court cases at lower Manhattan courthouses, a move which city officials and attorneys blasted as “utterly unlawful.”


In the past month, Department of Homeland Security attorneys have routinely moved to dismiss asylum seekers’ cases in court, in hopes that the judge will grant the dismissal, rendering those individuals’ asylum cases nonexistent and making them subject to expedited removal.

Federal agents have been seen sitting inside, or just outside of courtrooms, and staging themselves in the hallways to ambush and arrest these migrants as they step foot outside the courtroom.

More recently, ICE agents are detaining migrants regardless of whether the judge tossed their case or not, according to city Comptroller Brad Lander and several immigration attorneys.

“What’s happening now, is that people who clearly have status as asylum seekers, either a motion to dismiss is not being made or not being granted, they have pending asylum applications, the judge is granting them a hearing to present their credible fear,” Lander told reporters last week. “And nonetheless, ICE without any rationale whatsoever is disappearing with them. It is an utterly unlawful process.”Brad Lander arrives at the Ted Weiss Federal Building on Friday, June 20, 2025 in Manhattan, New York, to observe federal agents outside an immigration court. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)

Lander said he observed asylum hearings at 290 Broadway on Thursday, including one case where the judge gave a Guatemalan woman another hearing for her case in February 2027.

“Nonetheless, in the hallway on her way out of the courtroom, masked ICE agents detained her,” he said. “When I ask, ‘Do you plan to produce them for the February 2027 hearing? Or are you processing them for deportation, of course they refuse to answer questions.”

Lander said he also watched two brothers break down crying in the courtroom, saying “they are certain they will be killed,” as their father had been, if they were to be deported back to Colombia.

Because the pair’s private immigration attorney was a no-show, the judge granted them another hearing in February 2027. ICE agents arrested them both anyway when they left the courtroom, Lander said.

“I can’t imagine what the legal ground here could be if they were not stripped of status,” Lander said. “They have status as asylum seekers. The federal government accepted their asylum applications and a federal immigration judge granted them a hearing on those asylum applications. So what grounds there could be for their arrest and removal, I have no idea. And I’m pretty sure the ICE agents who removed them have no idea, either.”A woman cries after her husband was detained by federal agents following an Intensive Supervision Appearance Program office hearing on June 4, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Benjamin Remy, an immigration attorney with New York Legal Assistance Group, has been at 26 Federal Plaza nearly every day since courthouse arrests began, giving legal advice to migrants on their way into court, and as they’re being hauled away by federal agents.

Remy and his NYLAG colleague, attorney Allison Cutler said they had previously seen federal agents detaining people whose cases had not been dismissed when courthouse arrests began in late May. For several weeks this appeared to be less common, but in the past week they said they have seen numerous people get detained despite having open cases.

“I tell these ICE guys, this really just boils down to getting people their day in court. The judge denies their case, that’s that. The judge grants their case, that’s that,” Remy told The News. “But people deserve to have that opportunity to go into court, present evidence, testify and let the chips fall where they may. And basically everyone we’re seeing detained is being robbed of that.”

Cutler, chimed in, emphasizing that asylum is a right.

“We are obligated under international law to hear asylum applications. If someone expresses fear of returning to their country, we must hear their asylum case,” she said. “The reason those laws were created was because of the holocaust, and the genocide, and so to avoid that again, this is what this government decided to do. And this administration is refusing to follow that.”

Those who are detained with open asylum cases will have to fight their case from detention, often in faraway states like Texas and Louisiana, where many are shipped off to, Cutler added.Federal authorities detain a man after attending a court hearing at immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

Paige Austin, an attorney with Make the Road New York said she has seen judges write detailed written decisions denying the government’s motions to dismiss in some migrants’ cases, and still witnessed ICE detain them.

“We totally think that is not legal,” Austin said plainly. “It feels like they’re just grabbing people, snatching people, even the people that can’t be removed. They’re just trying to funnel them into this system.”

Austin noted that fighting a case from detention, often across the country, becomes logistically complicated.

“What are they supposed to do? Their families [are] in New York, right? They may have trouble affording counsel. It’s hard to gather evidence,” Austin said.

Data gathered by the American Immigration Council analyzing over 1.2 million deportation cases decided between 2007-2012 found that only 3% of detained migrants without legal representation avoided deportation, compared with 32% of detained migrants who had legal representation.Federal law enforcement officers detain a man at 26 Federal Plaza Tuesday, June 10, 2025 in the Manhattan, New York. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)

As for migrants who were never detained, 78% with legal representation avoid deportation, versus only 15% for those without representation.

Austin said she has seen many migrants decide to give up and self-deport just to avoid possible detention, despite being in the middle of a legal court process to obtain asylum.

“That includes a lot of people who remain scared to go to their country. So they’re saying, ‘I’m going to get deported, and then I’m going to flee again,'” Austin said.

When asked to explain why ICE agents are detaining migrants whose cases had not been dismissed, a DHS spokesperson did not address the question directly.

In a statement attributed to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, they stated that most “aliens” who “illegally” entered the U.S. in the past two years are subject to expedited removals.

“Biden ignored this legal fact and chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including violent criminals, into the country with a notice to appear before an immigration judge,” the statement said. “ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens in expedited removal as they always should have been.”

July 2, 2025

At Glastonbury, Left-Wing Politics Are Shocking Again. As Are Israeli Atrocities in Gaza.

June 30, 2025

Credit...Christopher James Hoare for The New York Times

By Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist


The notion that conservatism is “the new punk rock” has been a common trope of the Donald Trump era, repeated by alt-right college kids, thirsty politicians and headline writers. Progressives, the argument went, had become the uptight enforcers of taboos, while right-wingers were impudent insurgents pushing the bounds of permissible expression. As people on the left increasingly valorized safety and sensitivity, members of the new right reveled in transgression and cast themselves as the champions of free speech.

This idea was always disingenuous; when they gain authority, American conservatives almost inevitably use the force of the state to censor ideas they don’t like. But it took hold because it contained a grain of truth.

Left-wing culture, especially online, could be censorious, leaving many who interacted with it afraid of saying the wrong thing and resentful of its smothering pieties. The right, by contrast, offered the license to spout off without inhibition. That is almost certainly part of what drew so many alienated men into Trump’s orbit. In 2018, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West said that wearing a MAGA hat symbolized “overcoming fear and doing what you felt, no matter what anyone said.” This year, his id fully liberated, he put out a track titled “Heil Hitler.”

Increasingly, however, it’s the left that is rediscovering the cultural power of shock, largely because of horror over the massacres in Gaza and the minefield of taboos around discussing them. Consider the international uproar over the performance of the punk rap duo Bob Vylan at Britain’s Glastonbury music festival this weekend. The act’s singer led a teeming crowd — some waving Palestinian flags — in chants of “Death, death to the I.D.F.,” the Israel Defense Forces. Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, criticized Bob Vylan for “appalling hate speech” and demanded answers from the BBC for why it aired the set. The police are reviewing footage of the show to see whether any criminal laws were broken. Bob Vylan was set to tour the United States this year, but the State Department has revoked its members’ visas.

The band was not the only one at Glastonbury to cause a scandal. Even before the festival started, Starmer criticized it for featuring the Irish rap group Kneecap on the lineup. In April, Kneecap led crowds at Coachella in chants of “Free, free Palestine” and displayed messages accusing Israel of genocide, prompting the sponsor of their U.S. visas to drop them. Footage later emerged of one member of the band, Mo Chara, displaying a Hezbollah flag, leading to a terrorism charge. (He’s said the flag was thrown onstage and he didn’t know what it represented.) The police are also investigating Kneecap’s appearance at Glastonbury for possible public order offenses.
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Both these bands intended to be inflammatory, and they succeeded. “What happened at Glastonbury over the weekend is part of a coordinated, ideological insurgency against the Jewish people,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote in The Free Press. “The level of depravity displayed at #Glastonbury2025 was astonishing, one that should prompt serious self-reflection and soul searching among British society,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League. It’s hard to remember the last time musicians managed to cause such outrage.

I understand why supporters of Israel are frightened and disgusted by the spectacle at Glastonbury. Many see no reason other than antisemitism for growing progressive hostility to Zionism. They’ve witnessed Jews being attacked, demonized and ostracized in the name of justice for the Palestinians. They find it especially bitter to see violence against Israel cheered at a music festival less than two years after a music festival in Israel was attacked by Hamas.

But while antisemitism surely drives some animus toward Israel, it’s not nearly enough to explain why so many idealistic young people have become so deeply invested in the cause of Palestine and so sickened by the pulverization of Gaza. To understand why, you need to grasp what Israel’s war in Gaza looks like to them.

Many of these people feel helpless watching a war that has created, as of January, the largest number of child amputees per capita in the world. On social media, they’re seeing desperate Palestinians address them directly from the rubble. Some followed the teenage TikTok star Medo Halimy, who once went to high school in Texas and who made viral videos about his “tent life” before being killed in an Israeli airstrike. Maybe they’ve seen video of a sobbing, starving child eating sand. Hirsi Ali blames social media for creating a cultural movement against Israel: “The algorithm is the accelerant,” she wrote. She’s not entirely wrong, but she fails to consider Israel’s role in creating the content feeding that algorithm.

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I’ve heard Israelis and their partisans mock pro-Palestinian activists as ignorant of the region’s history and geography. But many of these activists have developed an intimate familiarity with the intolerable misery of life in Gaza right now, a level of human suffering that Israel’s defenders too often wave away.
And they know how regularly attempts to protest this suffering, or even merely describe it, are dismissed as antisemitic incitement.

In a deeply disturbing article last week, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that I.D.F. soldiers have shot hungry Gazans as they rush toward aid distribution sites. Some soldiers apparently call these shootings “Operation Salted Fish,” after the Israeli version of the children’s game “Red light, green light.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in his limitless cynicism, accused Haaretz of propagating an antisemitic “blood libel.”

An Israeli state that behaves this way is going to be reviled for reasons that have nothing to do with antisemitism. Clumsy attempts by Israel and its allies to stamp out this revulsion by throwing around accusations of bigotry only lend it the frisson of forbidden truth. That doesn’t justify the provocations of Bob Vylan or Kneecap; they meant to offend, and they did. Sometimes, however, radicalization is born in the gap between what people feel and what they feel they can say.

IN ONE CHART: IMMIGRATION ARRESTS INCREASE

 

Immigration arrests rose sharply after Trump took office. In May, Trump’s top immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, met with immigration officials to set a target of 3,000 arrests a day. After that meeting, arrests rose sharply again:

A charts shows the average daily number of arrests by ICE from September 2024 through June 10, 2025. After May 21, the date Stephen Miller met with ICE officials, arrests reached about 750 per day, then continued to rise to a peak of 1,200 per day in early June.
Source: Deportation Data Project | Data is through June 10. | By The New York Times

Most arrests are in states with large immigrant populations, like Florida and Texas. But the pace is faster than it was last year in every state. See data from across the U.S.

How much is $3.3 trillion?



The National Debt Clock in New York, in April. Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that Trump’s domestic policy bill will add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That number is so large that it’s difficult for most people to comprehend. Our writer Evan Gorelick did the math.

Say you start playing the lottery the day you’re born. If you somehow managed to win every game in every U.S. state, every single day — we’re talking everything from scratch-offs to Powerball jackpots — it would still take you around 75 years to rack up $3.3 trillion (assuming, of course, that you pay taxes on your winnings).

Here are five other ways to think about $3.3 trillion:

It’s enough to buy every piece of real estate in Manhattan — all 1.1 million residential and commercial properties — twice, based on recent valuations.

It’s more than the combined wealth of Musk, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and the next 18 richest people in the world.

If distributed evenly, it would be enough to give every U.S. household more than $25,000.

Broken into $100 bills, it would create a stack 2,200 miles high — far beyond the orbit of the International Space Station. Laid end to end, those bills could wrap around the Equator 128 times.

If you spent $1 every second without stopping, it would last more than 104,000 years. If you spent $1 million every day, it would last more than 9,000 years.

What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Really Means




Credit...Ad Nuis/Transworld, via Redux

By Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist


Zohran Mamdani got three chances to repudiate the expression “globalize the intifada” in a weekend interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker. It would have been easy, and politically smart, for the Democratic candidate for New York mayor to say that he’d been educated about the phrase’s violent connotation and that he regretted not rejecting it sooner. Instead, he ducked each time, saying that although he does not use those words himself, he would decline to “police” the language of others.

So give Mamdani credit for this: He has the courage of his convictions. Now he ought to bear the responsibility for them, too.

I was a journalist living and working in Jerusalem when I got a taste of what the word “intifada,” Arabic for “shaking off,” means in practice. I had just moved into an apartment in the Rehavia neighborhood when in March 2002 my local coffee shop, Café Moment, was the target of a suicide bombing.

My wife, whom I hadn’t yet met, was due to be in the cafe when it blew up but had changed plans at the last minute. Eleven people were murdered and 54 were wounded that night. Multiple perpetrators, members of Hamas, were arrested and then released nine years later, in an exchange for the Israeli hostage Gilad Shalit.

Two weeks later, I was at the Passover Seder of a friend in central Israel when the news filtered in that there had been a bombing of a Seder at a hotel in Netanya. Thirty civilians were murdered there and 140 were injured. Among the dead were Sarah Levy-Hoffman, Clara Rosenberger and Frieda Britvich, all of them Auschwitz survivors.
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Two days after that there was an attack on a Jerusalem supermarket. Two were murdered: a security guard named Haim Smadar, a father of six, who stopped the bomber from coming into the store, and a high school senior named Rachel Levy. Rachel would have been about 40 now had she only not been at the wrong place at the wrong instant.

Life in Jerusalem was punctuated over the following months by suicide bombings that occurred with almost metronomic regularity. Among those I’ll never forget: The Hebrew University campus bombing, which left nine murdered and 85 injured, and the bombing of Café Hillel, another neighborhood favorite of mine. Seven people were murdered there, including David Applebaum, an emergency-room doctor who had treated scores of terrorism victims, and his 20-year-old daughter Nava. She was going to be married the next day.

On Jan. 29, 2004, at 8:48 a.m., I was fussing over my newborn daughter in her crib when I heard a loud boom and saw a plume of black smoke rise from Azza Street, behind my apartment. I was at the scene within three minutes and wrote down what I saw later that evening.


The ground was covered in glass; every window of the bus had been blasted. Inside the wreckage, I could see three very still corpses and one body that rocked back and forth convulsively. Outside the bus, another three corpses were strewn on the ground, one face-up, two face-down. There was a large piece of torso ripped from its body, which I guessed was the suicide bomber’s. Elsewhere on the ground, more chunks of human flesh: a leg, an arm, smaller bits, pools of blood.

In the carnage, I failed to spot a reporter who worked for me, Erik Schechter. His injuries were described as “moderate,” meaning shrapnel wounds, vascular damage and a shattered kneecap. He spent months in recovery.

There were many more atrocities in Israel over following years, culminating in the orgy of murder, rape and kidnapping that was Oct. 7, 2023. But the intifada also was globalized. One woman murdered and five others injured at the Jewish Federation office in Seattle in 2006 by an assailant who told eyewitnesses he was “angry at Israel.” Six Jews murdered by terrorists at the Chabad House in Mumbai, India, in 2008. Four Jews murdered in a kosher market in Paris in 2015. A young couple murdered in May after leaving a reception at Washington’s Capital Jewish Museum by a killer yelling “Free Palestine.” An elderly American woman, Karen Diamond, who died of burn wounds last week after being the victim, with at least 12 others, of a firebombing attack in Boulder, Colo., by another assailant also yelling “Free Palestine.”

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There are rich and legitimate debates to be had about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and U.S. policy toward it. None of us should look away at the devastating toll the war in Gaza exacts on Palestinian civilians. And nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue: Those who want to condemn Israeli policy are fully within their rights.

But a major political candidate who plainly refuses to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” isn’t participating in legitimate democratic debate; he is giving moral comfort to people who deliberately murder innocent Jews.

There are liberals and progressives who’ll continue to make excuses for Mamdani. They will argue that his views on “globalize the intifada” are beside the point of his agenda for New York. They will observe that he has a predictable share of far-left Jewish supporters. They will play semantic games about the original meaning of “intifada.”

To those supporters, one can say only good luck. They’re making Donald Trump’s case about the radical direction of too much of the Democratic Party better than he ever could.

There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.


Beijing is selling clean energy to the world, Washington is pushing oil and gas. Both are driven by national security.

By David Gelles in New York; Somini Sengupta in Brasília and in Tirunelveli, India; Keith Bradsher in Beijing; and Brad Plumer in Washington. June 30, 2025

In China, more wind turbines and solar panels were installed last year than in the rest of the world combined. And China’s clean energy boom is going global. Chinese companies are building electric vehicle and battery factories in Brazil, Thailand, Morocco, Hungary and beyond.

At the same time, in the United States, President Trump is pressing Japan and South Korea to invest “trillions of dollars” in a project to ship natural gas to Asia. And General Motors just killed plans to make electric motors at a factory near Buffalo, N.Y., and instead will put $888 million into building V-8 gasoline engines there.

The race is on to define the future of energy. Even as the dangers of global warming hang ominously over the planet, two of the most powerful countries in the world, the United States and China, are pursuing energy strategies defined mainly by economic and national security concerns, as opposed to the climate crisis. Entire industries are at stake, along with the economic and geopolitical alliances that shape the modern world.

The Trump administration wants to keep the world hooked on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which have powered cars and factories, warmed homes and fueled empires for more than a century. The United States is the world’s largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas, offering the potential for what Mr. Trump has called an era of American “energy dominance” that eliminates dependence on foreign countries, particularly rival powers like China.

China is racing in an altogether different direction. It’s banking on a world that runs on cheap electricity from the sun and wind, and that relies on China for affordable, high-tech solar panels and turbines. China, unlike the United States, doesn’t have much easily accessible oil or gas of its own relative to its huge population. So it is eager to eliminate dependence on imported fossil fuels and instead power more of its economy with renewables.

The dangers for China of relying on politically unstable regions for energy were underscored recently when Israel attacked Iran, which sells practically all its oil exports to China.

While China still burns more coal than the rest of the world and emits more climate pollution than the United States and Europe combined, its pivot to cleaner alternatives is happening at breakneck speed. Not only does China already dominate global manufacturing of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, E.V.s and many other clean energy industries, but with each passing month it is widening its technological lead.

Lack of New U.S. Sanctions Allows Russia to Replenish Its War Chest

President Trump has issued no new restrictions on Russia this year, in effect allowing Moscow to acquire the money and materials it needs in its conflict with Ukraine.

The Trump administration’s halting of new sanctions has created an opening for companies to funnel funds and components to President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times


By Aaron Krolik
July 2, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET
The DealBook Newsletter Our columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin and his Times colleagues help you make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them. Get it sent to your inbox.

Since President Trump returned to office in January, the United States has issued no new sanctions against Russia related to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In some cases, the administration has eased restrictions. And without new ones, analysts say, existing measures lose their force.

The result has created an opening for new dummy companies to funnel funds and critical components to Russia, including computer chips and military equipment that would otherwise be cut off to the Kremlin, trade and corporate records show.

Sanctions became the center point of the Western-led effort to isolate the country after it invaded Ukraine in 2022. The effort evolved into an international game of cat-and-mouse, as evasion schemes regularly sprang up around the world.

During his presidency, Joseph R. Biden Jr. imposed thousands of so-called maintenance sanctions targeting new schemes. But this year, those actions have come to a standstill, according to a New York Times analysis of restrictions on trade, financial transactions and other activities connected to Russia and its president, Vladimir V. Putin.

“Trump’s approach to economic statecraft is to impose pressure and get leverage and try to get the best deal possible,” said Edward Fishman, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “For whatever reason, with Russia, he doesn’t want to have any leverage over Putin.”

The Biden administration placed, on average, over 170 new sanctions a month on entities linked to Russia from 2022 to 2024. The targets included oil and weapons production, tech procurement and banking.

In total, the Biden administration imposed more than 6,200 blocks on individuals, companies, vessels and aircraft linked to Russia. In Mr. Biden’s final weeks in office, the United States ramped up pressure even further, issuing nearly three times the monthly average, according to a Times analysis of data from the Treasury Department.

The effects of that pressure are already beginning to erode. A Times review of trade records, online listings and corporate filings identified more than 130 companies in mainland China and Hong Kong that are advertising immediate sales of restricted computer chips to Russia. None of the companies is under sanctions.

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If one company is targeted with restrictions, many others are ready to take its place.

One of these firms, HK GST Limited, advertises chips essential to Russian cruise missiles, including the Kh-101, which was recently used in a strike on Kyiv that killed 10 civilians. The firm was incorporated in Hong Kong nine months ago, and its website was set up in February. An analysis of website hosting data, domain ownership, code patterns and contact details links the company to a network of four similar electronics distributors, including Singaporean-based ChipsX and Carbon Fiber Global, a high-performance drone part manufacturer based in China. All of these companies were set up within the last three years.

Replica Websites

Similar looking websites, often built with the same code and with the same addresses in the domain registries, suggest that the same players are spinning up new businesses to evade sanctions.

How to Wreck the Nation’s Health, by the Numbers

By Steven H. Woolf

Dr. Woolf is a physician and a professor of family medicine and population health at Virginia Commonwealth University.

After decades as a physician studying the factors that determine our risks of getting sick and how long we live, I am convinced that the actions of the Trump administration will cost lives. Researchers like me know the data. For years we have warned that Americans have shorter life expectancies and higher disease rates than people in other high-income countries.

Now, the poor health of Americans is about to get worse.

While Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s health secretary, makes a spectacle of his plans to make America healthier (a laudable goal), in actuality, the administration is kneecapping the very infrastructure that would make that feasible and is instead enacting policies that will compromise health.

The Department of Health and Human Services has terminated thousands of grants, including funding for pandemic prevention, and research grants related to cancer, vaccines and chronic diseases. The loss of research funding will delay medical discoveries. Though the agency publishes a weekly list of terminated grants, the full scope of funding cancellations has been obscured, especially at the National Institutes of Health, the major funder of medical research. A database created by Harvard researchers, Grant Watch, has helped to fill in the gaps.

Grants terminated by the Department of Health and Human Services

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention $5.8 billion

National Institutes of Health $3.2 billion

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Adminstration $543 mil.

Food and Drug Adminstration $3 mil.Administration for Children and Families $401k

Since President Trump has taken office, H.H.S. has cut over $9.5 billion in grant funding that had been approved but not yet distributed to programs and researchers.

The largest grant cuts were at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation's nerve center for tracking diseases and preventing premature deaths. The administration also gave out pink slips to some of the country's top epidemiologists and effectively ended C.D.C. programs on core issues ranging from chronic diseases and lead poisoning to reducing deaths from drug overdoses, maternal deaths, childhood injuries, smoking and more.

The administration cut over $4.6 billion in grants related to pandemic response, both for Covid and future pandemics. It laid off experts on imminent health threats, such as widespread transmission of bird flu to humans, leaving the country dangerously unprepared for the next emergency.

Mr. Kennedy fired all 17 members of the panel that produces the nation's vaccination guidelines, replaced them with multiple vaccine critics and cut $1.1 billion in funding for vaccinations, including support for a program that helps provide free shots for low-income children. High levels of vaccine coverage are important to maintain herd immunity, and making it harder to get vaccines could lead to a resurgence in vaccine-preventable diseases.

Over 2,600 grants were terminated at the N.I.H., eliminating $3.2 billion in promised funds and threatening the nation's position as the world leader in biomedical research.

The administration claimed it was cutting N.I.H. funding to target research tied to "diversity, equity and inclusion" and "radical gender ideology." This included studies on reducing health disparities among people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ communities and efforts to lower pregnancy complications among minority women. (Mr. Trump's policy was recently ruled illegal by the courts.) But research in these targeted areas only accounts for around 7 percent of the total cuts.

Around $170 million in cuts were for studies of cancer, which remains the second leading cause of death in the United States, claiming more than 600,000 lives each year. Cuts in cancer research will cost lives by delaying the discovery of cures and better methods to slow cancer progression.

Over 170 grants were cut for research into H.I.V. prevention and treatments, threatening the 1.2 million Americans and almost 40 million people worldwide who are living with H.I.V.

Mr. Kennedy has promised to tackle the burden of chronic disease, but around 390 cut grants were for studies of the most prevalent chronic diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and obesity.

The administration is cutting funding for training programs for the next generation of doctors and scientists by over $578 million, forcing many young people either to abandon their careers or pursue them overseas.

Other grants were caught in the terminations as well, including cuts to basic science research to understand the causes of diseases. Many researchers whose work has been terminated say they still don't know why their studies were targeted. (The N.I.H. has been directed not to cancel more research projects for now.)

Although approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, the administration canceled 129 grants from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The Trump administration made massive staffing cuts to the Administration for Children and Families and has closed down several offices that oversee Head Start, which since 1965 has been the government's flagship program to help low-income children. Head Start-funded preschools have reported delays in getting grant funding.

The damage done by slashing the nation’s research infrastructure — the loss of knowledge to save lives and the loss of scientific talent to other countries — will have lasting consequences. But torpedoing research is only one way the administration is putting our health at risk.


Sources: HHS TAGGS; Grant Watch
Note: Data as of June 29.

The 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. Regulations to protect health and safety are being lifted. Experts who monitor health threats have been fired. Medical schools are threatened. Congress is poised to make huge cuts to Medicaid, which would leave millions of Americans without health care coverage and force closures of health clinics, many in rural areas.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not defending the status quo. There is plenty of waste and inefficiency to fix in health care and research, and fresh approaches can help. But dismembering health agencies won’t improve efficiency. Real change comes from streamlining programs to better serve the public, not from closing programs and walking away.

The ripple effects of the havoc at health agencies will eventually reach you. The air you breathe could become more polluted because the administration is permitting factories to resume emitting toxins. Your drinking water could contain lead because the administration is closing lead abatement programs. Bacterial contamination of your food may increase since food safety workers have been fired. There may be fewer primary care doctors in your community because the administration is cutting funding for training programs. Cutting-edge treatments may be unavailable because the N.I.H. has terminated clinical trials.



Out of the 356 drugs that were approved from 2010 to 2019 ...
N.I.H. funding contributed to 354 of them, totaling $187 billion.
Only 2 were privately funded.
Source: Cleary et al., JAMA (2023)


The logic is baffling. Even though the United States faces a mental health crisis, especially among youth, the Trump administration is slashing funding for programs on mental illness, addiction, domestic violence and suicide prevention. It’s no longer offering specialized support to L.G.B.T.Q. callers to the national suicide prevention hotline, and it’s cutting nearly 600 contracts for the Department of Veterans Affairs. It canceled funding for a desperately needed program that expanded the number of mental health professionals in our children’s schools, which had won bipartisan support in Congress after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death in children, but the administration has all but eliminated the injury prevention center working on efforts to prevent deaths from poisoning, car accidents and drownings.

Diseases that are preventable and rare in modern countries may now pose a threat in the United States. The measles outbreak is our first warning. Other vaccine-preventable diseases will increase if politicians like Mr. Kennedy continue to cast experts aside, roll back immunization guidelines and sow doubt about their safety.

All this under the banner of “Make America Healthy Again.” In a dangerous sleight of hand, Mr. Kennedy goes before cameras to make a big deal about food dyes and bizarre claims about autism while his department erases programs to address the nation’s leading chronic diseases. For example, smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in the United States. If this administration’s goal is truly to make America healthier, why has it effectively shuttered the nation’s top office on smoking? Mr. Kennedy rightly promotes the importance of healthy eating, but the administration is cutting funding for food assistance. He warns about the dangers of pesticides, but the administration is reportedly reconsidering a ban on asbestos and is moving quickly to relax other regulations meant to protect Americans from toxins.

Planned cuts by the Trump administration would defund research on the leading causes of death

cause of deathannual deathsprimarily researched byproposed funding cutHeart disease 681,000 National Institute on Body Systems* -39%
Chronic lower respiratory diseases 145,000
Diabetes 95,000
Cancer 613,000 National Cancer Institute -37%
Stroke 163,000 National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research* -40%
Alzheimer's 114,000 National Institute on Aging -40%
Drug overdoses 97,000 National Institute of Behavioral Health* -38%
Suicide 49,000
Covid, flu and pneumonia 95,000 National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -36%
Sources: HHS.gov; CDC WONDER

Note: Annual deaths as of 2023. Proposed funding cut figures are based on the difference between 2025 and 2026 budget proposals. Institutes with asterisks are proposed consolidations of existing N.I.H. institutes.

Organizations like the American Medical Association are beginning to speak out, but their comments are largely restricted to specific issues such as Medicaid or immunization guidelines. The threat to the health of Americans is larger than one issue. It’s about more than Medicaid. It’s about more than vaccines. It’s about the totality of the administration’s agenda. It’s the cumulative effects of the entire basket of policies that put Americans at greatest risk.

Physicians like me know from the data that lives will be lost as a consequence. More than 6,000 health professionals (myself included) have warned the public about their concerns in an open letter. Yet institutions of all kinds seem to be cowering to Mr. Trump, afraid of being punished or prosecuted for questioning his wishes. The administration has defied the courts and gone after law firms and universities, and is unlikely to spare medicine. Just as it has pressured the media to alter the news, the government is now challenging medical journals to alter what they publish.

Times like these call on us to speak the truth. On matters of life and death, physicians like me have an added duty to warn patients and the public. People may feel that a shakeup in Washington is long overdue. But too many Americans, including our leaders, take their health for granted, assuming that the infrastructure to prevent disease and save their lives will always be there, that America will always lead the world in science and that systems to keep their children safe will always exist. None of this can be counted on, especially now.
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