James' World 2

Hmmmmm… Hood->Robin Administration?

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CLIMATEWIRE | Lawmakers and officials from Western states are warning that President Donald Trump’s firings and funding freezes will leave the region woefully unprepared for the coming wildfire season, just two months after blazes ravaged Los Angeles.

The new administration’s moves to terminate nearly 10 percent of Forest Service personnel and pause grants intended to reduce the risk and intensity of fires have left states scrambling to make sure they don’t lose valuable preparation time. The uncertainty is coming during a period when the Forest Service and state governments would normally be doing crucial work such as creating fire breaks, carrying out controlled burns, thinning trees and clearing brush.

“These cuts are clobbering rural Oregon,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “This is going to make it extraordinarily difficult to get a balanced approach on natural resources.”

The pullbacks represent a major change from the Biden administration, which poured more than $3 billion into wildfire prevention. They are also notable given that Trump has repeatedly faulted Western officials for not doing enough on forest management dating back to his first term.

Record drought, heat waves and sluggish forest management in both state and federal forests have exacerbated fires in recent decades: An average of 3 million acres burned nationwide each year in the 1990s, but now, the average is nearly 7 million, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.

While the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, now appears ready to unfreeze some wildfire mitigation funding, cuts have stalled active forest management projects, delayed wildfire training, and raised concerns that bipartisan legislation already passed this Congress could fail to help. And even though direct firefighters are exempt from the Forest Service cuts, many of the 3,400 workers fired at the agency supported in trail maintenance, fuels reduction and other forestry projects just as summer hirings would start in preparation for wildfire season.

“The threat of these changes is significant,” said Vicki Christiansen, who served as Forest Service chief during Trump’s first term. “$40 million in savings now just to have an additional $4 billion in wildfire expenses is crazy.”

The Forest Service is responsible for some 193 million acres of forests and grasslands — the majority of it in the West. Federal reductions could force states with large swaths of Forest Service land to do more to manage or respond to incidents.

State and local officials in Nevada, California, Utah and Washington state said they are now looking to their own state budgets to cobble together resources. Utah and Oregon already are working to expand state forest management funding. Other states, like Washington, are trimming their own budgets and have no surplus to use to make up for a gap in federal funding. Every state said there is no way they can fully patch the hole left by the federal government.

Nevada State Forester and Firewarden Kacey KC said a big worry is staffing emergency management teams with dispatchers, technicians and GIS workers, none of whom would likely qualify for the exemption for direct firefighters but are still a vital part of wildfire prevention and mitigation. KC, who was appointed by former Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval and works in a state where 86 percent of the land is federally owned, is already talking about a “Plan B” to exercise her agency’s authority to make emergency hires.

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Hmmmmm… Hood->Robin Administration?

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Gender expression can come in many forms, but for a kid I’ll call Sarah, it first came in the form of a pair of owl pajamas. They were soft cotton, with wide-eyed owls cavorting on a pink background, and at 18 months old, Sarah would wriggle her way out of her “boy” clothes and into the pajamas as soon as she got home from preschool, toddling back into the living room pleased as punch with herself. “She was so, so determined,” says Sarah’s parent Ingrid (who has asked in this article to go by her middle name). “Like, ‘No, this is actually what I want.’”

At age two, Sarah came across a rack of dresses hanging outside a store and tried to put one on right there on the sidewalk (“You look beautiful,” an older woman said in passing, to Ingrid’s relief). At three, according to Ingrid, Sarah began to “socially transition herself,” asking to grow her hair out, gravitating in the aisles of Target toward sparkly dresses in hues of Pepto-Bismol pink and to anything having to do with unicorns. In kindergarten, Sarah said she wanted to change her pronouns. In first grade, she said she wanted to change her name. Somewhere along the way, her parents went to see some specialists to ask for advice on how to handle what was clearly not just a phase: “We were like, ‘Well, this thing seems to be a thing. What do we do to not mess her up?’ And they were like, ‘Just give her space, make sure she’s safe, and let her lead.’ And so that’s what we’ve [done].” 

They also began to join listservs for the families of transgender children, tapping into a network of fellow New York City parents who had experience navigating some of the parenting concerns specific to raising a trans child. There were meetups and playdates and support groups. There was also information about medical providers and timelines. It was understood that not every trans child would want or require medical care — especially when it comes to a generation of children that, more than previous generations, understand gender to be both a spectrum and a construct. But it was also understood that trans kids were significantly more likely than their cisgender peers to die by suicide. A national 2022 study conducted by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention, found that more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered suicide in that year alone. Another study, published this past September in the journal Nature Human Behavior, linked those rates not to something inherent in trans identity but instead to trans acceptance in the broader culture: In states that passed anti-trans legislation, including bans on gender-affirming care, suicide attempts by transgender teenagers could increase by as much as 72 percent in the years after the ban went into effect. It stood to reason that for children who experience gender dysphoria, or distress over the disconnect between their biological sex and their gender identity, even offering them possibility of not having to grow into an unwelcome body could buttress their mental health. Sarah’s parents had noticed that each step she took in transitioning seemed to calm her, to make her more “settled,” as Ingrid puts it. As Sarah approached the age of puberty, they began to carefully broach the subject of what she could expect. “I mean, who wants to talk about puberty with their parents?” asks Ingrid. “We were just like, ‘You’re going to enter this thing called puberty pretty soon. Right now, your puberty will have you end up in a boy body, but there’s these different options. If you want to, we can pause it until you figure out if you want a girl body or a boy body.’” Sarah was adamant that she already knew: She was not a boy; she did not want to end up in a boy body. Her parents booked an informational appointment with the Transgender Youth Health Program at NYU Langone’s children’s hospital, one of the world’s most well-regarded gender-affirming-care practices at one of the world’s premier medical institutions.

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Lindsey Wasson/AP

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Hmmmmm… Hood->Robin Administration?

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Good morning. Hallam Bullock here, writing to you from London. Our US team is observing Presidents’ Day, so I’m bringing you a shorter version of the newsletter.

In case you missed it, Jamie Dimon’s comments on work-from-home last week went viral. In a leaked recording, the JPMorgan CEO explained to staffers why remote work is a detriment to his company — using language that was at times colorful and confrontational.

However, copies of the audio obtained by BI suggest that remote work was just a sliver of the conversation. Dimon also addressed a wide range of issues, including the impact of AI, reducing corporate bureaucracy, and the bank’s fintech failings.

In today’s big story, many federal workers have expressed outrage and despair at President Donald Trump’s workforce mandates — but what do the ones who voted for him think? BI spoke with four Trump-supporting federal workers to find out.

The big story

Trump’s workforce blitz

“It shouldn’t have come to this.”

That’s what one federal worker who voted for Trump told BI amid the president’s ongoing efforts to reduce the federal workforce. And no, they haven’t changed their stance on supporting Trump.

As of last Thursday, about 75,000 federal employees had accepted the president’s buyout offer. That’s about 3.75% of the federal workforce, inching closer to the White House’s goal of reducing the federal staff count by 5 – 10%.

It’s a strange position to imagine yourself in: voting for a president who, weeks into his new administration, places your livelihood at risk.

But this is the exact scenario some federal workers are now facing.

Four of those workers spoke to BI’s Ana Altchek and Ayelet Sheffey about how they’re feeling.

“I voted for Trump. I wanted to see some positive change,” one federal employee of 17 years said. But they didn’t know that change could put their job in jeopardy.

Some of the workers BI spoke with are still standing by the overall mission to reduce government waste.

“They’re uncovering a lot of waste and abuse there,” one worker said. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that they’re finding which is a total waste of taxpayer money.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE has been targeting federal agencies it deems wasteful to lower government spending. In the weeks since Trump took office for the second time, DOGE has applied Silicon Valley’s “slash and burn” mentality to multiple agencies, including USAID.

Some of the workers BI spoke with are still standing by the overall mission to reduce government waste.

“They’re uncovering a lot of waste and abuse there,” one worker said. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that they’re finding which is a total waste of taxpayer money.”

Elon Musk’s DOGE has been targeting federal agencies it deems wasteful to lower government spending. In the weeks since Trump took office for the second time, DOGE has applied Silicon Valley’s “slash and burn” mentality to multiple agencies, including USAID.

Read everything the workers said here.

Many federal workers have expressed outrage and despair at President Donald Trump’s workforce mandates — but what about those who filled in the bubble next to his name on the ballot?

“I voted for Trump. I wanted to see some positive change,” a federal employee of 17 years told Business Insider, adding that they didn’t know that change would put them at risk of losing their job.

While some of the hot-button issues Trump is tackling, such as eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and cutting spending, may resonate with right-leaning workers, policies such as remote work and cutting the government’s head count haven’t traditionally been partisan matters.

As of Thursday, about 75,000 federal employees had accepted the president’s buyout offer. That’s about 3.75% of the federal workforce, inching closer to the White House’s goal of reducing the federal staff count by 5% to 10%.

Four federal employees who said they voted for Trump spoke with Business Insider about their feelings on his approach to the federal workforce. BI granted their requests for anonymity and verified their identities.

Trump supporters said they stood by the cost-cutting mission

While the federal workers BI spoke with said they didn’t fully support certain policies affecting them, some stood by the overall mission to reduce government waste.

One federal worker said they didn’t understand why some government agencies had so many employees.

“They’re uncovering a lot of waste and abuse there,” the worker said about the Department of Government Efficiency. “I just can’t believe some of the stuff that they’re finding which is a total waste of taxpayer money.”

Elon Musk, who leads DOGE — a Trump-created commission aimed at slashing government waste — has vowed to target a range of existing federal programs, including expired spending authorization that goes to veterans’ healthcare and NASA.

“This is the reason why people voted for Trump,” the worker said. “Because what is the government doing? Why aren’t they forthcoming? Why? People want answers.”

While the worker said they understood why some people might be annoyed to return to the office full time, they said that “somebody needs to put their foot down.”

Another federal worker said they disagreed with focusing on federal workers without better understanding the various programs and the need for federal employees to keep them going. That said, they added that they saw value in looking at where money was being spent and that they were overall supportive of Trump.

For example, the worker said they supported the administration’s approach with the US Agency for International Development. Trump and Musk have both called USAID out over wastefulness and supporting liberal causes. A federal judge blocked Trump’s funding freeze on the agency and his attempt to put thousands of workers on leave.

USAID spent $32.5 billion in global aid in 2024. About a quarter of the money went toward humanitarian efforts, another quarter went to health and population initiatives, and additional funds were directed toward governance and administrative expenses.

“I think overall we’re going to end up better off with him as a president,” the worker said.

Some had concerns about targeting the federal workforce

The 17-year federal employee said they voted for Trump thinking he would help the economy and struggling Americans. Now, the worker said, they feel as if the president is making things worse by putting federal workers’ livelihoods at risk.

“Do Trump and Musk know the whole situation of every federal building? I don’t think they’re making proper choices,” the worker said.

They added that while they agreed with Trump’s goal to cut government waste, they didn’t agree that cutting the federal workforce and requiring all employees to return to the office full time was an effective approach.

Another federal worker said they voted for Trump twice and “had hope that he would fulfill his promises,” but that hope disappeared after the administration’s deferred resignation offers. The Office of Personnel Management offered federal employees the option to resign and receive pay through September, but this offer is now on pause because of ongoing litigation.

One worker said the way they’d gone about the federal workforce changes was a “little disconcerting.” The worker said that while they understood Musk was only there for so long, it seemed as if they were “getting rid of people very quickly.”

The worker also had concerns about returning to work in person because they moved out of DC, saying it would be a financial burden to return to the office.

A federal worker said they reached out to their senators and congressman and told them that “demonizing the federal workforce is not good.” They said federal workers have performance reviews, meet with supervisors, and act in compliance with their mission.

“Don’t take it out on us just because of the bad behavior of the prior administration,” the worker said, adding that they hadn’t changed their stance on supporting Trump because “it shouldn’t have come to this.”

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President-elect Donald Trump said he is not concerned about the potential conflicts of interest posed by Elon Musk’s work on DOGE. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

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Few voters likely expected President Donald Trump in the first weeks of his administration to slash billions of dollars from the nation’s premier federal cancer research agency.

But funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health were presaged in Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership,” a conservative plan for governing that Trump said he knew nothing about during his campaign. Now, his administration has embraced it.

The 922-page playbook compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, says “the NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken” and calls for capping payments to universities and their hospitals to “help reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas.”

Universities, now slated to face sweeping cuts in agency grants that cover these overhead costs, say the policy will destroy ongoing and future biomedical science. A federal judge temporarily halted the cuts to medical research on Feb. 10 after they drew legal challenges from medical institutions and 22 states.

Project 2025 as Prologue

The rapid-fire adoption of many of Project 2025’s objectives indicates that Trump acolytes — many of its contributors were veterans of his first term, and some have joined his second administration — have for years quietly laid the groundwork to disrupt the national health system. That runs counter to Trump’s insistence on the campaign trail, after Democrats made Project 2025 a potent attack line, that he was ignorant of the document.

“I have no idea what Project 2025 is,” Trump said Oct. 31 at a rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, one of many times he disclaimed any knowledge of the plan. “I’ve never read it, and I never will.”

But because his administration is hewing to the Heritage Foundation-compiled playbook so closely, opposition groups and some state Democratic leaders say they’re able to act swiftly to counter Trump’s moves in court.

They’re now preparing for Trump to act on Project 2025 recommendations for some of the nation’s largest and most important health programs, including Medicaid and Medicare, and for federal health agencies.

“There has been a lot of planning on the litigation side to challenge the executive orders and other early actions from a lot of different organizations,” said Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group. “Project 2025 allowed for some preparation.”

The plan, for example, calls for state flexibility to impose premiums for some beneficiaries, work requirements, and lifetime caps or time limits on Medicaid coverage for some enrollees in the program for low-income and disabled Americans, which could lead to a surge in the number of uninsured after the Biden administration vastly expanded the program’s coverage.

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A few years ago, my mother’s home was flooded and very badly damaged. During a cold New England weekend, a pipe burst in the attic. Water made its way through the entire house, soaking the carpets and the walls. Water found its way into the kitchen cabinets and seeped into pictures and paintings. As I  frantically rummaged through my childhood bedroom to see what I could save, I was amazed at how many things I had once carefully wrapped away. Childhood charm bracelets, my prized Benetton t-shirt, a small wooden jewelry box, a seashell necklace, two porcelain dolls, and a box of other items.

While we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, I valued whatever we received. Every gift I received was cherished like a priceless item I could never find again. Every toy, chachki, and knick knack felt like that giant blue pendant necklace tossed into the ocean in the movie Titanic because I knew my parents wouldn’t have the money to buy me another one if it was lost or broken.

My children are growing up in a different world. “Mom, this broke,” my kids will say. “I need another one ordered on Amazon.” 

As a dual career household, trying to manage traveling to a client, making sure there are string cheeses stocked in the fridge, finishing that work proposal, searching for a sports jersey for school, responding to emails from the boss, and helping with the science fair project that becomes your own—I often relent and just give up. My husband will try to give them a lecture on the value of

money (and the belongings money buys) as I race onto the next thing to do. I will quickly order whatever they have broken, lost, or need another of, as I race around looking for the right sized poster board for another school project.

As a child, I knew my parents often lived in survival mode. My dad was the primary breadwinner and worked as a mechanical engineer. My mother stayed home and was our chef, teacher, Uber driver, nurse, cleaning service, and more. She was also the bookkeeper, watching our finances carefully, cutting up dozens and dozens of coupons, paying only in cash for what we could afford, standing in line in cold weather with her best friend for hours to get the best deals on toys for Christmas. 

My Indian immigrant parents had left everyone and everything they knew behind for a life in a strange new land. They had no support system in the U.S. If they couldn’t pay their bills, there was no one to help them. They hustled, sometimes living paycheck-to-paycheck, and sacrificed a lot for my younger brother and I. There were times when my dad almost lost his job, we moved a number of times (I went to four different high schools), and we knew when finances were tight. While my parents were transparent with us about finances, and sometimes I felt anxiety over it. But it also set expectations, taught us the value of things, and established in us a strong understanding of money. 

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CLIMATEWIRE | A number of safety documents containing the word “diversity” were removed from the Department of Labor website. But they weren’t the kind of racial and gender diversity programs that the Department of Government Efficiency has been targeting.

Instead, they dealt with the diverse size and shape of firefighters — a detail that helps them properly fit into safety equipment like ventilator masks. Another document that was taken down pointed to the diverse set of situations that first responders might be working in.

Their removal was prompted by President Donald Trump’s executive order to end federal diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives, as well as White House missives to stop promoting “gender ideology.”

The Trump administration has been searching for those terms in programs, grants, and documents to trigger funding freezes and to shutter initiatives aimed at counteracting discrimination based on people’s race, gender and disabilities.

Larges swaths of government webpages have been taken offline in the past month as a result. That includes a 2015 guide from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, an arm of the Labor Department, about restroom access for transgender workers. The removed document cited OSHA’s sanitation standard requiring employers to provide workers with toilet facilities.

Accessed via the Internet Archive, the 2015 guide notes that OSHA has long interpreted that standard to mean that “employers may not impose unreasonable restrictions on employee use of toilet facilities.” It also explains that “bathroom restrictions can result in employees avoiding using restrooms entirely while at work, which can lead to potentially serious physical injury or illness.”

Other documents that were removed include guidance for first responders when they treat and transport victims of chemical releases and guidance for small businesses about what personal protective equipment, such as respirators, they should use in diverse scenarios.

OSHA did not respond to requests for comment. But emails obtained by the website Popular Information show OSHA public affairs officials announcing to agency staff that the publications were removed from the website and will not be distributed from OSHA’s warehouse. The Feb. 7 email said, “if you have wallet cards that include language, or can be interpreted, on DEIA or gender ideology, please dispose of them as well.”

The purge has caught the attention of lawmakers. House Democrats on the Education and Workforce Committee wrote a letter to Vince Micone, acting secretary of Labor, to raise their concerns last week.

“If erasing these documents relates to President Trump’s executive orders on so-called ‘gender ideology’ and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion,’ DOL appears to be implementing the orders as though there is a list of banned words, without any regard for the context in which the words are used,” they wrote.

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After my daughter was born nearly four years ago, I decided that I wanted to breastfeed for one year. It was a challenging journey for so many reasons, but I can tell you with absolute certainty what made it possible: The fact that at the time, I worked a fully remote job. I never had to squeeze in a cramped room to pump milk at the office or commute to work with painfully clogged ducts. 

These circumstances are among the reasons that some moms and other breastfeeding parents don’t return to their jobs after giving birth—or end up quitting breastfeeding before they are ready so that they don’t lose their jobs. As one mom recently explained, these working conditions are simply unfair and untenable for parents. 

Breastfeeding Mom Finds Herself in Difficult Position at Work

In a rant posted to Reddit, the mom in question wrote that her 7.5-month-old baby has never taken a bottle. It was never a problem for her, as she worked from home. But after her previous manager left the company, she was told she would need to start coming into the office at least twice a week.

The new arrangement has already proved challenging for both mom and baby. She claims the first day she went back into the office, her baby didn’t eat for 10 hours. According to her replies in the comments, she’s tried a straw cup, introducing more solids, and “every sort of bottle and nipple flow out there” without much success. 

The mom now feels like the sudden change in expectations at work is totally unjustified, given that she rarely has meetings and has proven to be an efficient and competent worker who can function without issue from her home. “I’m just so disgusted and fed up with how corporate America treats mothers.”

Multiple commenters agree that the company was “just trying to make you quit,” as one person put it. Others tried offering suggestions, which included leaving that company altogether.

“I’d start putting out some resumes and get ready to leave to a more flexible job. Or look at a daycare near work instead where you can maybe pop over to feed her there,” wrote another commenter. 

Mom doesn’t want to leave her current job, even though her work schedule is so incompatible with her ability to parent, writing that “the thought of trying to get another job with the job market how it is right now sounds absolutely exhausting.” But with being the only full-time income in her family, she has no choice but to work, even though, as she put it, “being back to work with a 6-week-old is just criminal.” 

Why Working Conditions Are Unfair for New Parents

She’s not the first mom to feel pulled impossibly between work and parenthood. The phenomenon that she, and so many other mothers face, is called the motherhood penalty, in which moms returning to work are less likely to get promoted, are paid less than non-parents, and are deemed less competent and committed to their jobs than their counterparts without kids. But as a lot of parents know, parenting is one of the most valuable job skills there is.

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President Donald Trump has long promised to cut excess in the federal government, saving money and dismantling bureaucracy.

Behind many of these moves is a new government group — the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

This new department was created when Trump renamed the previously existing United States Digital Service, appointing Elon Musk as a senior adviser to the president. Though Musk has often been seen as leading DOGE, new court filings claim he doesn’t work for the group.

This redefining of Musk’s role with Trump came after lawsuits challenging his authority. Several Democratic state attorneys general argue that his enormous power violates the Constitution’s “Appointments Clause,” which requires Congress to approve officers in the executive branch.

Here’s everything to know about DOGE, including where it came from, what it has done, and how its work is being tracked.

What is DOGE? What does DOGE mean in politics?

DOGE, which stands for Department of Government Efficiency, is mainly focused on finding ways to cut spending and regulations. The name refers to a cryptocurrency called dogecoin.

Musk was named the head of the organization by Trump shortly after he won the election. Trump made the department official with an executive action on his first day in office.

Recent court filings have called into question Musk’s role with DOGE, stating that Musk is a “senior advisor to the president” rather than leader of DOGE. The court filings also stated that the department is distinct and separate from the White House.

“In his role as Senior Advisor to the President, Mr. Musk has no greater authority than other senior White House advisors,” Joshua Fisher, director of the White House Office of Administration, wrote. “Like other senior White House advisors, Mr. Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Mr. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the President’s directives.”

How much money has DOGE saved so far?

The DOGE website (doge.gov/savings) claims to track what it has done and how it has saved money.

As of Feb. 19, the site indicates that it has saved $55 billion through a “combination of fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.”

What has DOGE done?

The DOGE website claims to post receipts of its budget-slashing efforts, but most items listed are contracts canceled at various federal departments and agencies.

More than 10,000 federal employees have been fired and more cuts are expected. A recent executive order directs heads of federal departments and agencies to make “large-scale reductions in force.”

In many cases, probationary employees and the government’s newest hires are losing their jobs.

DOGE’s actions have fostered confusion and some false steps. For example, the administration rescinded the firings of hundreds of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation’s arsenal of nuclear weapons. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is scrambling to rehire “several” fired employees who play a key role in the agency’s response to bird flu, an agency spokesperson has acknowledged.

The cuts, which include employees with USAID, the Federal Aviation Administration, Internal Revenue Service, the National Park Service, and Department of Education, have prompted legal challenges and other pushback.

There also has been backlash over what data DOGE can access. Several agencies, including the Department of Education and Treasury Department, have attempted to block DOGE’s access to data due to its sensitive nature.

DOGE is also seeking access to IRS data that includes extensive information about taxpayers and allows IRS employees to research accounts, request returns, enter transactions and collection information, and generate “notices, collection documents, and other outputs,” according to the IRS.

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President Zelensky says he would step down if Ukraine can join NATO

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For all the extraordinary upheaval Donald Trump promises for America — mass deportations, mass layoffs of federal employees, the revoking of birthright citizenship — we will start to learn, in the coming months, how effective he’ll really be. Executive orders can be rescinded by later administrations, or get snagged in the courts, as has already happened over the past month. Yes, Trump can inflict tangible pain by himself. But becoming a dictator is easier said than done, even with the DOGE boys sowing chaos at the Treasury and IRS.

In Congress, Trump will have his chance to go much bigger. It’s there where his greatest ambitions, if he rounds up the votes, can become laws — which, unlike executive actions, are very difficult to undo. Joe Biden did not unravel Trump’s corporate tax cuts or save affluent households in the Northeast from the tighter SALT (state and local taxes) cap. Trump, in turn, will strain to do significant damage to the industrial policy Biden set into motion under the Inflation Reduction Act. If social conservatives ever felt they wanted to try to outlaw same-sex marriage again, they’d need to jam new legislation through Congress. Other than stacking the courts, leaving a policy legacy at the federal level means passing enormous omnibus legislation when your party is in power and daring rival successors to reverse it all.

When Trump turns his attention to legislation, what comes out of his administration might be, by modern Republican standards, rather conventional. On the agenda will be vicious attacks on the social safety net, the likes of which were waged, with limited success, in Trump’s first term. This is Trump’s version of populism; while he does not, like past Republican standard-bearers, want to privatize Social Security or gut Medicare, he is happy to aim at slashing other programs that the working class and poor rely upon.

It’s the House that will decide the fate of Trump’s legislative ambitions. Republicans have their smallest majority there since 1931, and Speaker Mike Johnson may only be able to spare a single vote. The majority itself is fractious, a mix of hard-right fiscal conservatives who’ve sought to topple Johnson and a small but influential number of moderates who carried swing districts. For many Republicans, aggressively reducing spending is the watchword, and that will carry with it especially destructive goals: bleeding out Medicaid with up to $2 trillion in reductions; slashing student-loan aid; cutting $250 billion from food stamps. The idea, in essence, is to balance out tax cuts for the rich by punishing the poor. MAGA and Reaganomics aren’t so different here.

Several days ago, Johnson got the House Budget Committee to approve a resolution that will allow the House to vote on a bill to address Trump’s aspirations for the border, energy, and taxes. The Senate, unlike the House,

wants to advance two separate bills rather than one, and the government could be shut down in a month if Congress can’t agree. The Senate, with its 53-member Republican majority, has far more leeway to back social safety nets and tax cuts than the House, where relative moderates in swing districts, like Mike Lawler in the Hudson Valley, may balk at any reconciliation bill that does significant damage to Medicaid or SNAP. Lawler wants to run for governor against Kathy Hochul next year, and the House bill that conservatives long for could do significant damage to his political prospects. Lawler would like to join suburban Democrats in getting Trump to lift the SALT cap, which the president imposed in 2017. Trump has signaled he is open to a SALT compromise, if conservatives in rural states still do not want to bail out the higher-tax states in the Northeast. Some progressive Democrats are fine with the SALT cap, too.

Republican leaders are now privately considering a continuing resolution to fund the government at current levels through the end of the fiscal year, along with wildfire aid and other provisions, according to Politico. To do this, the GOP would probably have to get the Democrats to play ball. So far, none of the Democratic leaders are eager to bail out Republicans if they can’t pass reconciliation legislation along a party-line vote or hunt up support for a stopgap bill.

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Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

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Our teenagers are in trouble.

Headlines have been ringing loud alarms around adolescent mental health, and the data are sobering. In 2023, 40 percent of high school students surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said they persistently felt hopeless or sad in the past year. Nine percent had attempted suicide.

Some of it is because of COVID. Some of it is related to social media. Then there is bullying, the pressure to succeed academically, the pressure to fit in. Being a teenager in the U.S. is hard.

So it’s perhaps heartening to see President Donald Trump address mental health in a recent executive order (EO) targeting chronic health issues in children, one released as soon as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was confirmed as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services.

But nestled in this directive, which creates an RFK, Jr.–chaired commission to “Make America Healthy Again,” are words that speak to the doubt that he and Trump have tried to sow around established science. This includes suggestions that the research funded by the National Institutes of Health and other agencies isn’t “gold standard” and assertions that doctors are overprescribing medicines for conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and

depression and that “medical treatments” might be part of the pediatric chronic disease problem. Perhaps most troubling is the language the administration uses to describe prescription medications for mood and behavior disorders—they are a “threat.”

That language stigmatizes families who choose prescription medication to treat their struggling children. It undermines the expertise of medical professionals. And it opens the door for unproven, improperly studied treatments to gain legitimacy.

The next era of snake oil dawns. Won’t anyone think of the children?

According to the CDC, in 2021 and 2022, more than half of U.S. teens talked to a health care provider about their mental health. About 14 percent of teens reported taking medication to manage their emotional state or for concentration and behavior. Yet 20 percent said they have unmet mental health needs.

The Affordable Care Act, and before it, the federal parity law, introduced a lot of Americans, including perhaps these teens’ parents, to parity in mental health coverage—in theory, insurance plans can’t deny mental health coverage, charge ridiculous rates for coverage that included mental health or put limits on the amount of mental health coverage a plan allows.

But even if you have insurance, depending on where you live, finding mental health care for children can be incredibly difficult. Many providers, whether therapists or psychiatrists, don’t take insurance, or don’t take certain plans. This includes Medicaid but also large commercial plans. Many primary care doctors, including pediatricians, have limits on what aspects of mental health care they are comfortable managing, including medication. In rural parts of the U.S., there are hundreds of counties that do not have a single child psychiatrist.

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