President Joe Biden has been making his case for re-election to voters by telling them he is good for their pocketbooks, including at the pharmacy counter.
During his State of the Union address, Biden said legislation he signed gave Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices.
“That’s not just saving seniors money and taxpayers money,” Biden said, a reference to the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022. “We cut the federal deficit by $160 billion because Medicare will no longer have to pay those exorbitant prices to Big Pharma.”
Biden added, “This year Medicare is negotiating lower prices for some of the costliest drugs.” He called for giving Medicare the power to negotiate prices for 500 drugs over the next decade.
In August, the federal government announced the first 10 drugs that it will negotiate for lower prices as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. A respected source of legislation analysis projects the change will save the government a lot of money, but those dollars haven’t been realized.
There is a reason Biden touted this legislation during his address: Polling by KFF shows people, regardless of their political leanings, overwhelmingly support the idea of allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. But most people don’t know that such negotiations are underway.
The impact of the Inflation Reduction Act will take many years
In August 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which will allow the federal government to negotiate prices with drugmakers for Medicare. Biden kept his promise to repeal the law that barred Medicare from negotiating prices.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects 10-year cumulative savings of $161.7 billion from two provisions of the Iaw: a phased-in effort to negotiate with drugmakers for lower prices and a rebate for price increases above the overall inflation rate. (The White House has previously pointed to this analysis.)
However, not all of the savings will be permanent. Some $44.3 billion over 10 years will be funneled into related provisions that expand access and lower out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries.
“Negotiations are still ramping up, so the savings generated by the Inflation Reduction Act negotiation provisions are still in the future,” said Matthew Fiedler, a Brookings Institution expert on the economy and health studies. “The Congressional Budget Office did expect the inflation rebate provisions of the IRA (which are encompassed in the $160 billion) to begin generating modest savings during 2023 and 2024, but there, too, most of the savings are in the future.”
The legislation involves price negotiations for 10 brand-name medications that lack generic equivalents. Those drugs include the blood thinners Eliquis and Xarelto; the diabetes drugs Januvia, Jardiance and NovoLog; Enbrel, for rheumatoid arthritis; the blood-cancer drug Imbruvica; Entresto, for heart failure; Stelara, for psoriasis and Crohn’s disease; and Farxiga, a drug for diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease.
The CBO has estimated that the negotiated prices will translate to nearly $100 billion in federal savings between 2026 and 2031.
“Biden is jumping the gun on claiming savings for seniors,” said Joe Antos, an expert on health care at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Price negotiations haven’t been completed; the new prices for selected drugs aren’t in place until 2026.”
Biden said the legislation is “saving seniors money and taxpayers money,” which could be interpreted to mean it is saving them money now on prescription drugs.
But the negotiations for these drugs would define the prices to be paid for prescriptions starting in 2026. For 2027 and 2028, 15 more drugs per year will be chosen for price negotiations. Starting in 2029, 20 more will be chosen a year.
That said, there are other provisions in the legislation that have already led to savings for seniors, said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president at KFF:
Certain recommended adult vaccines covered under Medicare Part D such as shingles are covered at no cost.
The act established a cap on Part D spending that begins phasing in this year. This year, Part D enrollees will pay no more than $3,300 on brand-name drugs. In 2025, the cap for all covered Part D drugs drops to $2,000.
The Inflation Reduction Act also included the $35 per month insulin cap, improvements in coverage for low-income beneficiaries, and the inflation rebate.
When we pressed the White House to provide examples of savings that have already occurred, a spokesperson also pointed to the insulin cap.
Meanwhile, Antos said although the Part D rebate has kicked in, the savings come from a small subset of Part D drugs taken by older Americans and the savings goes to the government, not to older Americans.
“There is no reason to expect that seniors will see significant savings since there’s no obligation for the feds to distribute savings to Part D enrollees,” Antos said.
Our ruling
Biden said, “We cut the federal deficit by $160 billion because Medicare will no longer have to pay those exorbitant prices to Big Pharma.”
Biden’s statement omits the timeframe; the savings have not been realized. The CBO projected 10-year cumulative savings of $161.7 billion from two provisions of the legislation. And as for saving older Americans money on their prescriptions, that hasn’t happened yet. The federal government is negotiating the first 10 drugs with the new prices set to take effect in 2026.
We rate this statement Half True.
RELATED: Fact-checking Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address
RELATED: For the most part, the US pays double for prescriptions compared with other countries, as Biden says
RELATED: Fact-checking Joe Biden on inflation, the deficit and consumer confidence in the State of the Union
Delivering the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, U.S. Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., told the harrowing story of a woman who was sex trafficked by drug cartels when she was 12. In the same breath, Britt blamed Biden for not only creating but inviting a crisis at the U.S. southern border.
Britt listed actions Biden took in his first 100 days in office and said she took a different approach, traveling to the U.S.-Mexico border when she took office in 2023.
“That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12,” Britt said. “She told me not just that she was raped every day. But how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room and they certainly run through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end.”
“We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America,” Britt continued. “And it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace. This crisis is despicable. And the truth is it is almost entirely preventable.”
But the woman Britt was speaking about was trafficked in the 2000s in central Mexico, not in the U.S. or during Biden’s presidency. The survivor has said it was not a drug cartel that trafficked her, and PolitiFact found no evidence that she was attempting to migrate to the U.S. when it happened.
Jonathan Katz, a freelance journalist and former The Associated Press reporter, posted a video March 8 on TikTok fact-checking Britt’s retelling of the events — notably that this did not happen during Biden’s presidency, or in the United States.
@katzonearth This isn’t going to make her like TikTok more. #katiebritt #sotu #stateoftheunion #lies #politicians #biden2024 #trump2024 #immigration #traffickingawarenes #mexico #bordersecurity #fyp ♬ original sound – Jonathan M. Katz
On “Fox News Sunday,” Britt told host Shannon Bream that she was contrasting Biden’s first 100 days with hers, during which she visited the southern border.
“I very clearly said I spoke to a woman who told me about when she was trafficked when she was 12… She was a victims’ rights advocate who was telling this is what drug cartels are doing, this is how they’re profiting off of women and it is disgusting,” Britt said.
A Britt spokesperson did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment, but confirmed to The Washington Post that Britt was talking about Karla Jacinto Romero, a Mexican woman in her thirties and an activist against sex trafficking. She has told her story about surviving sex trafficking in Mexico at various forums, including before the U.S. Congress in 2015.
Britt met Jacinto in Del Rio, Texas, during a discussion about human trafficking.
Here’s a look into Britt’s misleading framing of Jacinto’s story, and the facts she got wrong.
The facts behind Jacinto’s sex trafficking story
Jacinto’s trafficking happened in the 2000s: Jacinto was sex trafficked at 12 years old, as Britt said. But this didn’t happen during Biden’s administration. Jacinto was trafficked decades before, from 2004 to 2008, during President George W. Bush’s administration, according to Jacinto’s bio in U.S. House records.
Britt used Jacinto’s story to illustrate the dangers of migration through the U.S.-Mexico border under Biden.
“We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America,” Britt said. (The term “third world country” is an outdated label often used to describe developing, low-income countries.)
Jacinto’s trafficking happened in Mexico: Jacinto’s trafficking occurred in central Mexico, not in the United States.
While retelling her story on a Mexican government agency’s YouTube page, Jacinto said she grew up in an abusive home and at 12 fell in love with a man. She eventually left her home and went to live with him in central Mexico near a city called Puebla.
“For years and years I was coerced, intimidated, threatened, beaten, robbed of my children and emotionally and sexually violated time and time again,” Jacinto testified to Congress in 2015. “During those years, I was forced to serve every type of fetish imaginable to more than 40,000 clients. Of those, many were foreigners visiting my city looking to have sexual interactions with minors like me.”
Jacinto said a pimp trafficked her: Britt also claimed it was cartels that trafficked Jacinto. However, PolitiFact listened to multiple videos from different sources of Jacinto telling her story and did not find any where she said it was cartels who trafficked her.
Jacinto wasn’t trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, “but by a pimp that operated as part of a family that entrapped vulnerable girls in order to force them into prostitution,” said CNN Reporter Rafael Romo, who spoke to Jacinto, on March 11.
Jacinto told CNN that Britt did not ask for permission to use her story.
“I hardly ever cooperate with politicians because it seems to me that they only want an image, they only want a photo and that to me is not fair,” Jacinto said, according to CNN’s translation of her interview. “I think Sen. Britt should first take into account what really happens before telling a story of that magnitude.”
No evidence that Jacinto’s trafficking was related to immigration: Britt’s recounting of Jacinto’s story also gave the impression that Jacinto’s trafficking happened as she tried to migrate to the United States. But Jacinto did not say that in her testimony to Congress or various news and podcast interviews.
Our ruling
While speaking about Biden’s immigration policies, Britt said a woman had been “sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12 … We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America.”
Britt was talking about Jacinto, who was sex trafficked when she was 12 years old. But Britt omitted significant facts and context about when and where this happened. It was in the early 2000s in Mexico, not during the Biden administration or in the United States.
Jacinto has said a pimp trafficked her after she left an abusive home and went to live with a man she fell in love with. Jacinto has not said this was related to immigration to the United States.
We rate Britt’s claim False.
RELATED: Fact-checking Katie Britt’s immigration claims in Republican 2024 State of the Union response
RELATED: Fact-checking Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address
Para leer en español, vea esta traducción de Google Translate.
Former President Donald Trump promised to provide a live “play by play” via Truth Social to “correct, in rapid response, any and all inaccurate Statements” made by President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address. But we found many of Trump’s alleged corrections were … factually incorrect.
Under Biden, Trump claimed, “Migrant Violence is leading to the Worst Crime Wave in History!” But homicides and violent crime in general have been trending down the last two years and is nowhere near historic levels.
Trump alleged that Biden “wants to take away everyone’s gun.” Biden has called for a ban on so-called assault-style weapons and large-capacity magazines, but he proposed a voluntary buyback for those already legally owned, and he has never proposed banning or confiscating all guns.
Trump said the bipartisan border security bill that failed in the Senate would have “let at least 5,000 Migrants in a day.” That’s not accurate.
Trump claimed that he “got the NATO Nations to pay up,” and that before he got involved, “NATO was BROKE.” NATO was not “broke” and countries don’t owe money to anyone else if they spend less on defense than other member countries.
Trump claimed that he “took away Nord Stream 2” — the Russian pipeline that would double the export of Russian natural gas to Germany — from Russia and Biden “gave it to them.” Neither of those statements is true.
The former president said that “Biden’s All Electric Car Mandate is a disaster for our Country.” But there is no such mandate.
He claimed that the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters “had no guns” on them. At least five people were charged with or sentenced for carrying a gun on Capital grounds.
Trump claimed that “Republicans have no plan to cut Social Security,” but some Republicans have proposed raising the retirement age for some future beneficiaries. That would reduce scheduled benefits for those affected.
Trump claimed, “We are stronger on IVF than the Democrats!” Most Republicans have said they support in vitro fertilization, or IVF, but some want to leave the issue to the states and have rejected consideration of a federal law to protect access to IVF.
For our article on Biden’s speech, see “FactChecking Biden’s State of the Union.”
‘Migrant Violence’
When Biden referred to the country’s falling violent crime rates, Trump responded on Truth Social, “He’s talking about Violence, but Migrant Violence is leading to the Worst Crime Wave in History!”
Actually, though, there’s been a decrease in violent crime recently.
As we’ve written before, the number of homicides was 10% lower in 2023 than in 2022 in 32 cities, according to a January report from the Council on Criminal Justice, which gathered data from the participating cities. And violent crime nationwide went down in 2022, according to the most recent data released by the FBI.
In our coverage of Biden’s State of the Union remarks, we noted that despite the recent downturn, murder and violent crime rates still have not returned to their pre-pandemic levels. Nonetheless, the spike in violent crime during and after the pandemic never approached anywhere near the record-high violent crime rates during the 1990s.
Although there have been several high-profile violent crimes committed recently by immigrants living in the country illegally, studies have found that migrants are generally less prone to crime than citizens who were born in the U.S.
“Immigration’s crime suppressing impact is most notable for violent crime, especially homicide, and in places where there are well-established immigrant populations and where the social and political environments, and municipal policies, are pro-immigrant,” according to a 2023 book called “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock” by Charis Kubrin, a criminologist at the University of California at Irvine and Graham Ousey, a criminologist at William & Mary.
“At the micro-level, studies consistently document that foreign-born individuals — first-generation immigrants — are less involved in crime as both offenders and victims compared to the native-born, including the children of immigrants,” the book said. “This pattern of findings — negative or null relationships between measures of immigration and crime — is also evident in studies of undocumented immigrants specifically.”
NBC News reviewed “2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ ‘Operation Lone Star,’ which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior,” and found that crime levels dropped in those cities.
“Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles. Crime has risen in Washington, D.C., but local officials do not attribute the spike to migrants,” the NBC report said.
So, violent crime rates have been falling nationally and cities that have received an influx of migrants, specifically, have seen a decline in crime, which means there’s no evidence to support Trump’s claim about a “crime wave.”
Guns
When Biden criticized his “predecessor” for boasting that he “told the NRA he’s proud he did nothing on guns when he was president,” Trump fired back with the claim, “He [Biden] wants to take away everyone’s gun. Remember that when you go to the Voting Booth, because if I’m not elected, your guns are GONE, along with your Freedom!”
That’s not an accurate reflection of Biden’s position. Biden has been a longtime advocate for banning so-called assault weapons and large-capacity magazines.
But even for those proposed gun bans, Biden has talked about voluntary buybacks — not confiscation of any legally purchased weapons — prior to a ban taking effect.
As he has on numerous occasions, Biden recounted an encounter he had at a fundraising event in October with a hunter in Delaware who accused him of wanting “to take my damn guns away from me.”
“I said, ‘I’m not going to take your guns away. I’m just going to take some.’ I said — no, I’m serious. I said, ‘The Second Amendment doesn’t say you can own a cannon. It doesn’t say you can own a machine gun. It doesn’t say’ — I went down the list.”
“They’re trying to make it seem like we’re trying to take everybody’s gun away. Not true,” Biden said while recounting the same anecdote during a fundraiser in June. “But we have to have some rational basis for gun ownership.”
Biden has supported various gun control measures, such as safely storing guns in homes, cracking down on “ghost guns” that are difficult for law enforcement to trace, and requiring enhanced and universal background checks.
But his plans don’t propose banning the purchase or ownership of all guns or confiscating lawfully purchased, so-called assault-style weapons that he does seek to ban.
Biden-Backed Border Bill
When Biden urged Republicans to support a bipartisan border security bill that he said included “the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen,” Trump wrote, “His Border Bill is a Disaster, it would let at least 5,000 Migrants in a day, and that is one of the better aspects of it!” That misrepresents what was in the failed Senate bill.
The $118 billion bill, called the Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, would have provided emergency authority to the administration to “summarily remove” people who cross into the U.S. illegally between ports of entry, even those seeking asylum, when certain metrics were reached. The bill stated that temporary border emergency authority would be automatically activated by the Department of Homeland Security secretary if there is an average of 5,000 or more migrant encounters a day over seven consecutive days — or if there are 8,500 or more such encounters on any single day.
But as we have written it wouldn’t have “let in” 5,000 unauthorized migrants a day until the emergency authority kicked in.
“It’s not that the first 5,000 [migrants encountered at the border] are released, that’s ridiculous,” one of the architects of the bill, Republican Sen. James Lankford, said on the Senate floor. “The first 5,000 we detain, we screen and then we deport. If we get above 5,000, we just detain and deport.”
“The reason we’re doing that [providing emergency authority] is because we want to be able to shut down the system when it gets overloaded, so we have enough time to process those asylum claims,” Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who helped craft the bill, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Feb. 4.
NATO
When Biden praised NATO as “the strongest military alliance the world has ever seen,” and welcomed its newest member, Sweden, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “NATO only became strong, because of ME, I got the NATO Nations to pay up. They were almost all delinquent. The United States was paying for them all!” At another point, Trump claimed that before he got involved, “NATO was BROKE.”
As we wrote recently when Trump made similar comments, he is mischaracterizing what he calls “delinquent” payments from alliance members to NATO. Although NATO countries pay direct costs for NATO’s common fund based on a formula, Trump is referring to the indirect costs countries pay toward their own defense. Countries don’t owe money to anyone else if they spend less on defense than other member countries.
“That’s not how NATO works,” James Goldgeier, a former dean of the School of International Service at American University who teaches at the university and sits on the State Department’s International Security Advisory Board, told us in an email. “There is a common budget that countries pay into, but most of what we think of as NATO defense spending refers to individual country defense spending and preparedness to be able to operate as a military alliance.”
In 2006, NATO countries made a commitment to aim to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on their own defense. A NATO spokesman at the time said: “Let me be clear, this is not a hard commitment that they will do it. But it is a commitment to work towards it. And that will be a first within the Alliance.”
A 2014 NATO declaration after a summit in Wales again said that countries that weren’t meeting the 2% goal would “aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade.”
According to NATO, 11 countries, including the U.S., are spending at least 2% of their GDP on their defense. Nineteen other countries do not meet that threshold, but with the exception of Croatia and Turkey, all are estimated to be spending more on defense as a percentage of their GDP in 2023 than they did in 2014.
Alliance members also pay money for NATO’s commonly funded budget. That’s a direct cost. The U.S. currently pays about 16.2% — the same as Germany — of NATO’s “principal budgets” that are funded by all alliance members based on a cost-sharing formula that factors in the gross national income of each country. The principal budget categories include the civil budget, the military budget and the NATO Security Investment Programme. But, again, when Trump is referring to NATO spending, he is referring to the indirect costs each country spends on its defense.
It’s also not true that NATO was “broke” until Trump stepped in. As we have written, after years of decreases, combined defense spending by non-U.S. NATO members has increased every year since 2015 — two years before Trump assumed office. Combined NATO defense spending increased about 11.5% between 2016, the year before Trump took office, and 2020, Trump’s last year in office, according to NATO. The amount paid by NATO members other than the U.S. increased by about 19.8% over the same period.
Nord Stream 2
In his speech, Biden accused Trump of “bowing down” to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Specifically, Biden criticized Trump for saying at a Feb. 10 rally that he would allow Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO member country that is “delinquent” in its payments to NATO.
Former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally on March 9 in Rome, Georgia. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.
On Truth Social, Trump responded by once again falsely claiming that he “took away Nord Stream 2” from Russia and Biden “gave it to them.” Nord Stream 2 is a Russian natural gas pipeline to Germany that was completed in September 2021, but has never received the approval it needs from Germany to operate.
“[Biden] said I bowed down to the Russian Leader,” Trump wrote. “He gave them everything, including Ukraine. I took away Nord Stream 2, he gave it to them!”
Nord Stream 2 runs under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, and would have doubled the export of Russian natural gas to Germany. It runs parallel with Nord Stream 1, which has been operational since 2011, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.
As we have written, Trump signed legislation in December 2019 that imposed sanctions against companies that were building Nord Stream 2. Pipeline construction was temporarily suspended in response to the sanctions, but resumed a year later while Trump was still in office, CRS said in its report.
When construction was suspended, the pipeline was already about 90% completed.
After assuming power, the Biden administration, like past administrations, opposed the Nord Stream 2, but suggested that its “ability to prevent the pipeline from becoming operational was limited, even with additional sanctions,” the CRS report said.
Biden waived sanctions against those involved in the Nord Stream 2 project in May 2021 — which is what Trump is referring to when he says that Biden “gave it to” Russia.
But, as we said, construction of the pipeline had resumed under the Trump administration, so Trump didn’t take it away from Russia. And, contrary to Trump’s claim, Biden didn’t give the pipeline to Russia. In fact, only Germany can approve the project, and that country’s chancellor has blocked its approval.
Nord Stream 2 “must receive certification from German regulators before it becomes operational,” another CRS report said. But German Chancellor Olaf Scholz stopped the certification process on Feb. 22, 2022 — the day that Putin recognized two separatist territories in eastern Ukraine as independent states and sent Russian troops into the Donbas region of Ukraine.
No Federal Electric Car Mandate
Trump continued to falsely suggest that Biden is requiring manufacturers to sell only electric vehicles.
“Biden’s All Electric Car Mandate is a disaster for our Country, but great for China,” Trump wrote in a social post.
There is no such federal mandate. As we’ve written, the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation under Biden have proposed new vehicle emissions and fuel standards that are expected to greatly increase the number of electric vehicles sold in the U.S. To comply, the EPA estimates, EVs “could account for 67% of new light-duty vehicle sales and 46% of new medium-duty vehicle sales” in 2032.
But the proposals do not ban cars and trucks that run on gasoline and other fuels. Experts told FactCheck.org that carmakers could still produce and sell some vehicles with internal combustion engines to meet the proposed requirements for tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency.
“Requiring vehicles to be more efficient and emit less is something that regulators in the US have done for decades, and automakers are free to comply with those standards in whatever strategy works best for them,” John Helveston, a George Washington University assistant professor of engineering management and systems engineering, told us in an email.
Some Capitol Rioters Had Guns
In another post, Trump responded to Biden’s description of Trump supporters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “insurrectionists.”
“The so-called ‘Insurrectionists’ that he talks about had no guns, they only had a Rigged Election. The only gun was that used on Ashli Babbitt, who sadly, is no longer with us!” Trump wrote.
Babbitt, a military veteran, died after she was shot by a Capitol Police officer as she was forcing her way into an area of the Capitol that leads to the House chamber. But Trump is wrong that no one protesting his 2020 election loss at the Capitol had a gun. Some did, even if they didn’t use them.
In March 2021, we wrote about Christopher Alberts, who was convicted of carrying a loaded 9mm semi-automatic handgun on Capitol grounds. In addition, the Jan. 6 committee report released in December 2022 mentioned three other men – Jerod Bargar, Guy Reffitt and Mark Mazza – who were convicted of carrying a firearm during the Capitol breach.
The Washington Post reported that in a video played at his trial, Reffitt said he saw four other people at the Capitol with guns, including two people, a couple he met, with five of them.
Then, last week, on March 8, John Banuelos was arrested on felony and misdemeanor charges for his actions during the Capitol riot, including discharging a firearm. The Justice Department said video footage allegedly shows Banuelos pulling a gun from his waistband and firing two shots in the air.
Also, the committee’s report said other people had guns stored elsewhere. For example, members of the Oath Keepers extremist group that participated “left their guns stowed away in their cars or across State lines for easy access should they be needed.”
Jason Dolan, a member of the group who testified at a seditious conspiracy trial, said there was a “quick reaction force ready to go get our firearms in order to stop the election from being certified within Congress,” the report said.
Trump’s focus on guns also ignores the fact that rioters attacked and injured police with other weapons, including flag poles, bats and pepper spray.
Social Security Proposal
Trump took exception to Biden saying in his address that “many of my friends on the other side of the aisle want to put Social Security on the chopping block.”
“Republicans have no plan to cut Social Security, a made up story by Crooked Joe!” the former president wrote in response.
We’re not aware of a Republican proposal that directly calls for cutting Social Security benefits for current recipients. But there is a proposal that would effectively reduce benefits for future beneficiaries.
For years, task force members on the Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative House members, have proposed budgets that would make adjustments to the Social Security program, including raising the retirement age by several years for some workers. The committee argues that without changes to Social Security, benefits will automatically be cut in a few years.
In its proposed budget for fiscal year 2023, the committee proposed increasing the full retirement age to 70 — up from the current age of 67 for people born in 1960 or later. Its most recent proposal for fiscal 2024 doesn’t mention a specific age. But Rep. Ben Cline, the task force chair, reportedly said the plan would spare current retirees and those closest to retirement.
“He said those now aged 59 would see an increase in the retirement age of three months per year beginning in 2026. The retirement age would reach 69 for those who turn 62 in 2033,” Roll Call reported in June.
The Congressional Budget Office previously said raising the full retirement age to 70 “would reduce scheduled lifetime benefits for every affected Social Security recipient, regardless of the age at which a person claimed benefits.”
Workers could still retire early, at age 62, but they would get a reduced monthly payout. Meanwhile, those who wait until the full retirement age would receive those benefits for a shorter period of time than current beneficiaries.
In Vitro Fertilization
When Biden implored Republicans, “don’t keep this waiting any longer, guarantee the right to IVF Guarantee it nationwide,” Trump responded, “IVF was just approved in Alabama, and the Republicans are totally in support of helping women. We are stronger on IVF than the Democrats!”
The controversy over protecting in vitro fertilization came to the forefront when, in February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos used in IVF are children, and that a couple had the right to sue for the wrongful death of a minor when a test tube of frozen embryos was dropped on the floor and destroyed.
Dr. Paula Amato, the president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, told the New York Times that doctors would close fertility clinics in Alabama rather than risk criminal or civil charges.
In a podcast, Joanne Rosen, a practice professor in Health Policy and Management and an expert in reproductive law at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote that bioethicists, legal scholars, and reproductive technology specialists had warned that if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade “and allows states to regulate life from the moment of conception” — as it ultimately did with the help of justices appointed by Trump — “this could indeed have implications for IVF, because IVF creates embryos.”
Ever since the Alabama ruling, most Republicans in Congress have come out in support of IVF, even many who co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which sought protections for “every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”
At a House leadership press conference on Feb. 29, House Speaker Mike Johnson, one of those who co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, said he and his wife “have many close friends who have had trouble with fertility issues and they’ve had beautiful families as a result of IVF. And so it needs to be readily available. It needs to be something that every American supports and it needs to be handled in an ethical manner.”
“I don’t think there’s a single person in the Republican conference who disagrees with that statement,” Johnson said.
In an interview with CBS on March 7, Johnson repeated that position, but said it needs to be handled at the state level.
“There’s this question of embryos,” CBS Mornings co-anchor Tony Dokoupil said to Johnson. “In the process, they are destroyed, disposed of. If you believe life begins at conception, fertilization, and I know you do, do you see that as murder?”
“It’s something that we’ve got to grapple with,” Johnson said. “It’s a brave new world. IVF’s only been invented, I think, in the early ’70s, but there are an estimated eight million Americans who have been born because of that great technology. So we support the sanctity of life, of course, and we support IVF and the full access to it.”
Johnson said the issues of ethics surrounding the handling and disposal of embryos “are unprecedented, and so it takes a lot of thoughtful debate and careful consideration. But we do believe in the sanctity of life and if you do believe that life begins at conception it’s a really important question to wrestle with. It’s not one Congress has dealt with, and it won’t be. I think it’s a states’ issue, and states will have to be handling that.”
Indeed, the Alabama state legislature has, since the state Supreme Court decision, passed a law to protect IVF in the state.
However, in his State of the Union address Biden called on Republicans to guarantee IVF “nationwide.” On Feb. 28, Senate Republicans for the second time blocked a bill from coming to a vote that would have protected access to IVF nationwide.
Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, 202 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.
The stock market has been on a roll, and politicians are vying to take credit for it.
In December and January, the S&P 500, a broad market gauge, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both closed at all-time highs for the first time in about two years.
Even though former President Donald Trump has been out of office for more than three years, he claimed credit in a Jan. 29, all-caps post on his social media platform, Truth Social, saying that his polling advantage over Biden is driving the stock market to new heights because investors are projecting he will win.
On ABC’s “This Week,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg countered that President Joe Biden, not Trump, deserves credit for the stock market rise.
“You know, most of us don’t think that the stock market is an indicator of the economy, but if you do, because I know the former president does, it hit an all-time high under President Biden and not under President Trump,” Buttigieg said March 10.
However, Buttigieg was wrong about Trump’s tenure. Trump saw stock market records set during his term, too.
The stock market can be driven by investor perceptions and crowd psychology rather than by economic data alone, which means that caution is necessary when using it to gauge the broader economy. Still, it usually has some connection to economic reality, and at the very least, many Americans have investments in the stock market, so the market’s health can influence economic perceptions.
The S&P 500 tracks 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the United States. The value rises or falls based on the latest prices for those 500 stocks during weekday trading sessions. Over time, this and other stock metrics tend to rise, although not without periods in which the metric falls.
The S&P 500 regularly reached record highs during Trump’s presidency, even after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. The market gauge hit seven peaks during Trump’s presidency. Leading up to these peaks, the S&P 500 often set records; after the peaks, the level fell, until stocks rebounded and hit the next peak.In Trump’s case, the final peak of his tenure saw the value of the S&P 500 at about 3,800, after starting his term at a little more than 2,200.
The pattern for the Dow Jones Industrial Average was similar, with several new peaks under Trump.
Under Biden, the S&P 500 has also hit new highs.
The metric experienced several new peaks in Biden’s first year in office, 2021, before declining for most of 2022. The market recovered in 2023 — enough to blow past its previous record and set new ones into early 2024.
Currently, the S&P 500 is hovering around 5,100, which, despite the year-long slide in 2022, is well above what it was at the end of Trump’s term. That’s not surprising for the S&P 500: Barring an economic calamity, most presidents see higher stock prices than their predecessor did.
“The stock market hit its highest point ever under President Biden, higher than at any point during the previous administration,” Sean Manning, a Transportation Department spokesman, told PolitiFact.
Our ruling
Buttigieg said the stock market “hit an all-time high under President Biden and not under President Trump.”
The S&P 500 recently hit record highs under Biden, as it did several times in 2021.
But the S&P 500 also set multiple records during Trump’s presidency, even after the coronavirus pandemic hit.
Could a proposed Missouri law imprison teachers as sex offenders for using transgender students’ preferred gender pronouns?
A March 3 Instagram post claimed, “A new bill introduced in the Missouri Legislature would put teachers on the sex offense registry if they ‘contribute to social transition’ of a trans youth — including pronouns, hair cuts, information, and more.”
That post presents a largely accurate summary of the proposed legislation.
The bill, House Bill 2885, would make providing “support … to a child regarding social transition,” while acting in “his or her official capacity as a teacher or school counselor” a Class E felony under Missouri law. What would constitute “support” is not clearly defined in the bill. Legal experts said it could include the use of gender-affirming pronouns or names.
Class E are the lowest level felonies in Missouri, punishable by up to four years in prison. Other felonies in this category include counterfeiting, incest, involuntary second-degree manslaughter and child abduction.
(Screenshot from Instagram)
If teachers were convicted of “contributing to social transition,” the bill would require them to register as Tier 1 sex offenders, the lowest of three tiers on the state’s sex offender registry. Other offenses that require Tier 1 registration include child pornography possession, sex with an animal and sexual abuse of an adult.
Rep. Jamie Gragg, R-Ozark, introduced the bill Feb. 29, one of more than 30 bills filed in Missouri that target LGBTQ+ communities, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Aaron Schekorra, executive director of an LGBTQ+ center in Springfield Missouri, told KYTV, a local TV station that he doubts this bill will become law. But it drew widespread attention amid contentious political rhetoric focused on schools and LGBTQ+ rights.
The law’s scope could include gender-affirming pronouns
The bill defines “social transition” as “the process by which an individual adopts the name, pronouns, and gender expression, such as clothing or haircuts, that match the individual’s gender identity,” and not the sex assigned at birth.
The bill would prohibit support of a student’s social transition, “regardless of whether the support is material, information, or other resources,” and would impose criminal penalties.
The law’s definition of “social transition” lines up with how the medical community defines it. Social transition is the first step that many transgender youth and adults take in the process of recognizing their gender separate from that assigned to them at birth. It is distinct from a medical transition which begins only after puberty’s onset and can involve medications such as puberty blockers, hormones, and in rare cases in older teenagers, surgery.
What constitutes “support” is not defined, and Gragg did not respond to PolitiFact’s questions about its meaning.
Is support restricted to physical materials such as books or pamphlets? Or does it have a plainer meaning — such as offering encouraging words or complying with a student’s request to use specific pronouns?
Marcia McCormick, a Saint Louis University law professor, told PolitiFact in an email that she understands the bill as inclusive of “any support” of a student’s adoption of a name, pronouns, or appearance norms connected with a gender that differs from the student’s sex assigned at birth — meaning using certain pronouns would violate the law.
Chad Flanders, another Saint Louis University law professor, said his reading was less clear. Asked whether the bill applies to teachers who use transgender students’ preferred pronouns, he said, “I certainly don’t think that the language in the statute rules that out.”
Even if a court interprets “support” narrowly to mean information and resources, teachers may be wary, and any speech may be chilled, experts said.
Gragg told KYTV that LGBTQ+ literature and signs would “fall into that same category,” of support, but he did not specifically address using pronouns.
This law is part of a larger, nationwide Republican effort to stop conversations about sexuality and gender identity in schools and classrooms.
“This bill was created and really submitted to help parents and families and to help teachers,” Gragg told KYTV. “I talk to parents every day who are frustrated with things that kids are being taught in school.”
Such legislation is often based on concerns that conversations about sexuality and gender identity are a form of “grooming” or sexual abuse. Grooming, however, refers to a process or behaviors adults use to make it easier to sexually abuse children.
Experts say talking about gender identity and sexual orientation in the classroom, or using gender-inclusive reading material and lesson plans, is not considered “grooming,” because it is done without intent to sexually abuse a child.
“Sex crimes are very serious,” said Elizabeth Jeglic, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies sexual violence. “When we conflate issues regarding gender identity with sex crimes, it really diminishes our ability to advocate on behalf of these children and to develop policies and procedures to protect them.”
Law would expand scope of sex offender registries
In Missouri, Tier 1 sex offenders must remain on the registry for 15 years, but can petition for removal after 10 years. Anyone convicted of a sexual offense in Missouri cannot live within 1,000 feet of a school, or be present within 500 feet of a school unless they are the parent of a student there.
Sex offenders registries date back to the 1940s, instituted primarily as an information tool for law enforcement about who may present a risk to the public, said Andrew Harris, a professor of criminology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Federal laws passed in the 1990s now require that states make some of this information public.
Gragg told KYTV that “there have to be some repercussions of discussing things of a personal nature with students that we shouldn’t be teaching or shouldn’t be talking with them about.”
But experts said the categorization of “support” of social transition as a sexual crime was inappropriate.
Our ruling
An Instagram post claimed a Missouri bill “would put teachers on the sex offense registry if they ‘contribute to social transition’ of a trans youth — including pronouns, hair cuts, information, and more.”
It is accurate that the bill would make it a felony for a teacher to “support” a transgender student’s “social transition.” Teachers would have to be charged with and found guilty of the crime before being required to register as a sex offender.
The bill is unclear whether using gender-affirming pronouns for transgender students would constitute “support” of social transition under the law, though legal experts believe it is possible.
Based on the information available at the time of publishing, the statement is accurate but needs clarification. We rate it Mostly True.
Evangelical minister Eddie Hyatt believes in the healing power of prayer but “also the medical approach.” So on a February evening a week before scheduled prostate surgery, he had his sore throat checked out at an emergency room near his home in Grapevine, Texas.
A doctor confirmed that Hyatt had COVID-19 and sent him to CVS with a prescription for the antiviral drug Paxlovid, the generally recommended medicine to fight COVID. Hyatt handed the pharmacist the script, but then, he said, “She kept avoiding me.”
She finally looked up from her computer and said, “It’s $1,600.”
The generally healthy 76-year-old went out to the car to consult his wife about their credit card limits. “I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than $20 on a prescription,” the astonished Hyatt recalled.
That kind of sticker shock has stunned thousands of sick Americans since late December, as Pfizer shifted to commercial sales of Paxlovid. Before then, the federal government covered the cost of the drug.
The price is one reason Paxlovid is not reaching those who need it most. And patients who qualify for free doses, which Pfizer offers under an agreement with the federal government, often don’t realize it or know how to get them.
“If you want to create a barrier to people getting a treatment, making it cost a lot is the way to do it,” said William Schaffner, a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and spokesperson for the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases.
Public and medical awareness of Paxlovid’s benefits is low, and putting people through an application process to get the drug when they’re sick is a nonstarter, Schaffner said. Pfizer says it takes only five minutes online.
It’s not an easy drug to use. Doctors are wary about prescribing it because of dangerous interactions with common drugs that treat cholesterol, blood clots and other conditions. It must be taken within five days of the first symptoms. It leaves a foul taste in the mouth. In one study, 1 in 5 patients reported “rebound” COVID symptoms a few days after finishing the medicine — though rebound can also occur without Paxlovid.
A recent JAMA Network study found that sick people 85 and older were less likely than younger Medicare patients to get COVID therapies like Paxlovid. The drug might have prevented up to 27,000 deaths in 2022 if it had been allocated based on which patients were at highest risk from COVID. Nursing home patients, who account for around 1 in 6 U.S. COVID deaths, were about two-thirds as likely as other older adults to get the drug.
Shrunken confidence in government health programs is one reason the drug isn’t reaching those who need it. In senior living facilities, “a lack of clear information and misinformation” are “causing residents and their families to be reluctant to take the necessary steps to reduce COVID risks,” said David Gifford, chief medical officer for an association representing 14,000 health care providers, many in senior care.
The anti-vaxxers spreading falsehoods about vaccines have targeted Paxlovid as well. Some call themselves anti-paxxers.
“Proactive and health-literate people get the drug. Those who are receiving information more passively have no idea whether it’s important or harmful,” said Michael Barnett, a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an associate professor at Harvard, who led the JAMA Network study.
In fact, the drug is still free for those who are uninsured or enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, or other federal health programs, including those for veterans.
That’s what rescued Hyatt, whose Department of Veterans Affairs health plan doesn’t normally cover outpatient drugs. While he searched on his phone for a solution, the pharmacist’s assistant suddenly appeared from the store. “It won’t cost you anything!” she said.
As Hyatt’s case suggests, it helps to know to ask for free Paxlovid, although federal officials say they’ve educated clinicians and pharmacists — like the one who helped Hyatt — about the program.
“There is still a heaven!” Hyatt replied. After he had been on Paxlovid for a few days his symptoms were gone and his surgery was rescheduled.
About That $1,390 List Price
Pfizer sold the U.S. government 23.7 million five-day courses of Paxlovid, produced under an FDA emergency authorization, in 2021 and 2022, at a price of around $530 each.
Under the new agreement, Pfizer commits to provide the drug for the beneficiaries of the government insurance programs. Meanwhile, Pfizer bills insurers for some portion of the $1,390 list price. Some patients say pharmacies have quoted them prices of $1,600 or more.
How exactly Pfizer arrived at that price isn’t clear. Pfizer won’t say. A Harvard study last year estimated the cost of producing generic Paxlovid at about $15 per treatment course, including manufacturing expenses, a 10% profit markup, and 27% in taxes.
Pfizer reported $12.5 billion in Paxlovid and COVID vaccine sales in 2023, after a $57 billion peak in 2022. The company’s 2024 Super Bowl ad, which cost an estimated $14 million to place, focused on Pfizer’s cancer drug pipeline, newly reinforced with its $43 billion purchase of biotech company Seagen. Unlike some other recent oft-aired Pfizer ads (“If it’s COVID, Paxlovid”), it didn’t mention COVID products.
Connecting With Patients
The other problem is getting the drug where it is needed. “We negotiated really hard with Pfizer to make sure that Paxlovid would be available to Americans the way they were accustomed to,” Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra told reporters in February. “If you have private insurance, it should not cost you much money, certainly not more than $100.”
Yet in nursing homes, getting Paxlovid is particularly cumbersome, said Chad Worz, CEO of the American Society of Consultant Pharmacists, specialists who provide medicines to care homes.
If someone in long-term care tests positive for COVID, the nurse tells the physician, who orders the drug from a pharmacist, who may report back that the patient is on several drugs that interact with Paxlovid, Worz said. Figuring out which drugs to stop temporarily requires further consultations while the time for efficacious use of Paxlovid dwindles, he said.
His group tried to get the FDA to approve a shortcut similar to the standing orders that enable pharmacists to deliver anti-influenza medications when there are flu outbreaks in nursing homes, Worz said. “We were close,” he said, but “it just never came to fruition.” “The FDA is unable to comment,” spokesperson Chanapa Tantibanchachai said.
Los Angeles County requires nursing homes to offer any COVID-positive patient an antiviral, but the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees nursing homes nationwide, has not issued similar guidance. “And this is a mistake,” said Karl Steinberg, chief medical officer for two nursing home chains with facilities in San Diego County, which also has no such mandate. A requirement would ensure the patient “isn’t going to fall through the cracks,” he said.
While it hasn’t ordered doctors to prescribe Paxlovid, CMS on Jan. 4 issued detailed instructions to health insurers urging swift approval of Paxlovid prescriptions, given the five-day window for the drug’s efficacy. It also “encourages” plans to make sure pharmacists know about the free Paxlovid arrangement.
Current COVID strains appear less virulent than those that circulated earlier in the pandemic, and years of vaccination and COVID infection have left fewer people at risk of grave outcomes. But risk remains, particularly among older seniors, who account for most COVID deaths, which number more than 13,500 so far this year in the U.S.
Steinberg, who sees patients in 15 residences, said he orders Paxlovid even for COVID-positive patients without symptoms. None of the 30 to 40 patients whom he prescribed the drug in the past year needed hospitalization, he said; two stopped taking it because of nausea or the foul taste, a pertinent concern in older people whose appetites already have ebbed.
Steinberg said he knew of two patients who died of COVID in his companies’ facilities this year. Neither was on Paxlovid. He can’t be sure the drug would have made a difference, but he’s not taking any chances. The benefits, he said, outweigh the risks.
KFF Health News reporter Colleen DeGuzman contributed to this report.
After losing her California Senate bid on March 5, Rep. Katie Porter, a Democrat, used language reminiscent of election denialism to cry foul.
Thanking her supporters in a March 6 X post, Porter wrote: “Because of you, we had the establishment running scared — withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.”
Thank you to everyone who supported our campaign and voted to shake up the status quo in Washington. Because of you, we had the establishment running scared — withstanding 3 to 1 in TV spending and an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election. (1/)
Facing criticism of her use of the term “rig” — including from Democrats — Porter later elaborated.
“‘Rigged’ means manipulated by dishonest means,” she wrote in a statement posted to X. “A few billionaires spent $10 million+ on attack ads against me, including an ad rated ‘false’ by an independent fact checker. That is dishonest means to manipulate an outcome.”
In that statement, she wrote, “I said ‘rigged by billionaires’ and our politics are — in fact — “manipulated by big dark money.”
“At no time have I ever undermined the vote count and election process in CA, which are beyond reproach,” she added.
When contacted for comment, a Porter campaign spokesperson pointed us back to her statement on X and to Merriam-Webster’s definitions of the verb “rig,” one of which reads, “to manipulate or control usually by deceptive or dishonest means.” Another of the definitions says “rig” is “to fix in advance for a desired result.”
Porter’s posts landed in a fraught political environment in which former President Donald Trump and his supporters have consistently asserted that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged.” The allegations have been widely rebutted by the courts. PolitiFact has repeatedly rated false and misleading claims about “rigged” U.S. elections.
Sometimes Democrats have joined in with similar language. In 2019, after Democrat Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 Georgia governor race to Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, Abrams claimed the “system is rigged” and repeatedly suggested the election was stolen. (PolitiFact found no proof that voter suppression kept Abrams from winning the 2018 governor’s contest.)
Rigging an election might refer to buying votes, tampering with voting machines or stuffing a ballot box.
In Porter’s case, she faced an onslaught of opposition spending, some of it by wealthy entities with little or no disclosure required. However, spending unlimited amounts of money to buy ads is legal, as long as the spenders do not coordinate with candidates.
Democracy and elections experts said people might disagree about whether such tactics should be legal, but this spending did not assure Porter’s loss or amount to a “rigged” election.
California’s Senate primary
California uses an unusual top-two primary system in which the candidates who finish in first and second place both advance to the general election — regardless of their party affiliation.
Although votes are still being counted, Porter is headed toward a third-place finish behind Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff and Republican Steve Garvey, a former Major League Baseball player.
Garvey entered the race in October, following months of rumors about his possible candidacy. Garvey often polled below Schiff and close to Porter, according to FiveThirtyEight data.
Some news reports before the election characterized the race as one for second place between Porter and Garvey.
The effect of California Senate race spending
In February, Schiff’s campaign released a television ad contrasting him with Garvey. This tactic was expected to accomplish two goals for Schiff: to burnish his image for Democrats, and to make Republican voters aware of Garvey, potentially vaulting him above Porter and making the general election contest easier for Schiff in the solidly blue state.
Outside money played a role, too.
A pro-Schiff political action committee bankrolled a 30-second ad in February that criticized Garvey for his conservative views and noted his past support for Trump. Around the same time these ads appeared, polling showed Garvey’s support increasing.
Polling showed that after the ads aimed at boosting Garvey began airing, Porter saw a modest increase in support.
In her post-election comments, however, Porter highlighted a different example of outside spending.
Fairshake, a political action committee linked to cryptocurrency industry leaders, paid for the campaign ad Porter called “dishonest” and that she alleged “rigged” the election against her.
In the 2024 election cycle so far, Fairshake has spent $11.2 million on federal elections, with about $10 million of that spent opposing Porter, according to data from Open Secrets, a nonpartisan research group that tracks federal money in politics.
Fairshake’s ad claimed Porter accepted donations “from Big Pharma, Big Oil and the Big Bank executives” — a claim The Sacramento Bee fact-checked and rated “mostly false,” describing it as “misleading to viewers.”
Spending such as this is legal under the 2010 Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
“That’s a fact, whether we like it or not,” said Daniel Weiner, director of the Elections and Government Program at New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, a group that advocates for expanding voting rights. Billionaires spending unlimited amounts of money on ads opposing Porter would not be considered “illegal acts designed to change the outcome of the election,” he said.
Political action committees cannot be financed by prohibited sources such as foreign groups and cannot coordinate with campaigns, Weiner said. He characterized the Federal Election Commission’s rules for what constitutes coordination as “pretty weak.”
Other political experts said that what occurred fell well short of rigging.
They agreed that Porter’s failure to secure one of the top two spots owes more to Schiff’s yearslong cultivation of California voters and Porter’s political shortcomings than rigging.
“If a well-endorsed established politician beats a relative newcomer, that’s politics,” said Robin Kolodny, a Temple University political scientist.
In American politics, experts say, money is a necessary component of a winning campaign but it is not the only one. In 2022, eight of the 10 congressional candidates with the most self-funding lost. In California, it is not uncommon to see well-financed candidates lose.
Voters cast their ballot on Super Tuesday, at the Ranchito Elementary School polling station March 5, 2024, in Los Angeles’ Panorama City section. (AP)
Some Democrats, democracy experts didn’t support Porter’s term
Experts said Porter’s use of “rigged” echoes rhetoric she’s used against financial institutions during her political career.
“Populist candidates and activists are especially prone to blaming the system, because it maintains their belief that the system needs radical change for justice and social justice to prevail,” said Wayne Steger, a DePaul University political scientist.
Democrats, including Sens. Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Alex Padilla of California, a former California secretary of state, criticized Porter’s use of the term “rigged.” Steve Schale, a longtime Democratic strategist based in Florida, also rebutted Porter’s statement in an X post.
Schale told PolitiFact he believes it’s unhealthy rhetoric.
“All you are doing is playing into the narrative that nobody actually loses,” Schale said. “One thing that makes our democracy work is people acknowledge they lose elections. There is nothing more important to our democracy than people acknowledging they lose elections.”
Michael Thorning, structural democracy director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, agreed with Schale, calling Porter’s comment that billionaires spent money to rig the election “completely irresponsible and unserious” in a March 7 X post.
The Brennan Center’s Weiner said Porter was calling attention to a “very real structural problem” that can disadvantage voters and candidates with less money. But he said he would not have used the term “rig” to discuss the issue because in the current political environment false claims about election rigging are “designed to delegitimize our democratic institutions.”
Our ruling
Porter said billionaires “rigged” the California senate primary election through “dishonest means,” citing outside funding that supported attack ads against her.
Outside funding for ads is legal and is not equivalent to predetermining a particular result. Rigging typically refers to things such as vote buying, ballot box stuffing or tampering with voting machines. It is based on limiting voter choice, and in the California race voters were free to choose among the candidates as they saw fit.
We rate this claim False.
PolitiFact Senior Correspondent Amy Sherman contributed to this report.
RELATED: Trump’s new ‘evidence’ that Biden lost in 2020 is ridiculously wrong (and dusty). We reviewed it.
Is President Joe Biden the first U.S. president ever who will not detain immigrants in the U.S. illegally? That’s what Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said.
“Well, the realistic path forward if we want to end this crisis begins by Joe Biden reversing the executive orders that he made,” Rubio said March 3 on “Fox News Sunday.”
“Every single one of them was designed to reverse a Trump policy. All those executive orders that are basically for the first time in American history we have a president who will not detain the people who enter this country illegally.”
PolitiFact contacted Rubio’s office to ask which executive orders he was referring to but received no reply. We found a January opinion article Rubio published in the Miami Herald where he referenced specific executive actions.
“Within days of his inauguration, President Biden placed a 100-day moratorium on deportations, halted construction of the border wall, dismantled Remain in Mexico and ended the Asylum Cooperative Agreements,” Rubio wrote. Rubio also noted that in 2022, Biden ended the use of Title 42, a pandemic-era policy that permitted rapid expulsions. That change, Rubio wrote, “signaled an unwillingness to deter cartels and coyotes, so more migrants headed north.”
Immigration experts said Rubio mischaracterized Biden’s actions, ignoring the number of migrants detained and deported during Biden’s presidency and the actions of previous presidents.
Since 1996, federal immigration law has generally required that people who enter the U.S. illegally be detained as they await court proceedings. However, because of lack of detention space, no administration has been able to detain every migrant.
“Every president in the last century has released some migrants who crossed the border,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights advocacy group.
Millions of migrant releases occurred under former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, Reichlin-Melnick said. By comparison, Biden released a lower percentage of migrants in his first two years in office than Trump did in his last two years, according to a November 2023 report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
“As of February, (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had approximately 39,000 migrants in detention nationwide,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, an associate policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Putzel-Kavanaugh said the U.S. doesn’t have enough detention space for the record number of migrants at the border.
“It is the U.S. Congress that determines and funds the number of detention beds that ICE has at its disposal,” she said. “And while the administration can set priorities on who to detain, once ICE capacity is overwhelmed, immigration authorities must adjust priorities.”
We’ll examine each of the Biden actions Rubio highlighted.
100-day deportation moratorium
On Biden’s first day in office, the Department of Homeland Security published a memo pausing for 100 days the removal of certain people illegally in the U.S. Federal courts quickly banned the pause’s enforcement.
The memo specified that the pause meant to divert resources to the border to carry out more expulsions and deportations of recent border crossers. People who posed a national security or public safety threat, or who entered the U.S. after Nov. 1, 2020, would be prioritized for expulsion.
The memo said it did not prohibit the apprehension or detention of anyone who wasn’t part of a priority category.
In September 2021, DHS released a second memo with similar guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize removing people who crossed the border in recent years or who threaten public safety. Courts also banned enforcement of those guidelines that year. They were reinstated in 2023 after a Supreme Court decision.
There were more than 3.6 million removals, returns and expulsions from February 2021, Biden’s first full month in office, to September 2023, based on Department of Homeland Security estimates.
Halted border wall construction
On his first day in office, Biden issued a proclamation terminating the national emergency Trump had used to divert Defense Department funding to build additional border barriers. However, in October 2023, the Biden administration resumed barrier construction using money Congress had previously appropriated. The Biden administration also has spent millions of dollars on barrier repairs.
Immigration experts have questioned barriers’ effectiveness at reducing illegal immigration and pointed out that the wall has been breached thousands of times.
Dismantled ‘Remain in Mexico’
The Biden administration announced in January 2021 it would stop new enrollments in the Migrant Protection Protocols program, also known as “Remain in Mexico,” which sent certain people who arrived at the southern U.S. border back to Mexico to await asylum claim proceedings.
The program was stopped and restarted several times because of court decisions until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June 2022 that it could be terminated. The program, which formally ended in October 2022, had enrolled 81,000 migrants.
But immigration experts said the program was effectively defunct by the time Biden took office and had been almost completely replaced by Title 42.
“Remain in Mexico was barely operational in January 2021 and Biden returned vastly more people to Mexico using Title 42 than were removed under Remain in Mexico,” said David Bier, a Cato Institute immigration expert. “He then cooperated with the court order to restart and for several months in 2022 was returning more people than at any point in 2020.”
Ended the Asylum Cooperative Agreements
The Asylum Cooperative Agreements had already been suspended since March 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Biden officially terminated the agreements shortly after taking office.
The agreements, signed with El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, allowed U.S. officials to deport people seeking asylum to these countries with certain conditions. But the U.S. had implemented only one of the agreements, with Guatemala, experts told us.
“Not a single person was subject to an (Asylum Cooperative Agreements) after March 20, 2020,” said Reichlin-Melnick, from the American Immigration Council.
Ending Title 42
Biden allowed Title 42 — a pandemic-era public health policy that prevented many migrants from applying for asylum and permitted rapid expulsions — to expire in May 2023. Bier said data shows that ending the program hasn’t increased migration, and instead increased security by reducing the number of “gotaways” who evade border patrol.
The Department of Homeland Security replaced Title 42 “with a system of incentives for asylum seekers arriving at ports of entry and disincentives for those crossing between ports of entry without authorization, among other changes,” the Migration Policy Institute wrote in a January report.
Immigration experts also said the program was automatically terminated when the COVID-19 public health emergency expired.
“It was not an immigration policy,” Reichlin-Melnick said, “and Biden kept it around long past the point that anyone was seriously arguing that it was being used for public health reasons.”
Our ruling
Rubio said Biden’s executive orders meant “for the first time in American history we have a president who will not detain people who enter the country illegally.”
Rubio’s claim ignores detentions and deportations under Biden, and the millions of releases under previous presidents. Experts said the U.S. doesn’t have enough detention space for all migrants.
Experts said Rubio overstated the effects Biden’s executive actions had on illegal immigration. Some of the actions terminated already defunct or suspended programs; other actions were temporary or had questionable effect on migration numbers.
The orders also didn’t prevent detention of migrants. As of February, ICE had about 39,000 migrants in detention nationwide, an expert said.
We rate Rubio’s claim False.
RELATED: As Chinese immigration to U.S. rises, Republicans and Trump use ‘military age men’ scare tactic
PolitiFact Staff Writer Maria Ramirez Uribe contributed to this report.
In the U.S Senate race in Wisconsin, Republican challenger Eric Hovde has laid out an extensive case against Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, including her record on foreign policy.
Among other things, he takes aim at Baldwin’s vote on the Iran nuclear deal, which he frames as support for terrorism.
“Despite Iran’s long history of financing terrorism, my opponent Senator Baldwin was one of the staunchest supporters of the Iran deal which sent billions of dollars and plane loads of cash to Iran,” his campaign website says.
Did Baldwin support the Iran deal? And did it do what Hovde claims it did?
Yes. And not so much.
Baldwin did support Iran deal, but rest of claim falls short
We have addressed similar claims against Baldwin twice, so we are quite familiar with this line of attack. In both cases, we rated the claim Mostly False.
The first part, looking at how Baldwin voted on the deal, is the most straightforward part of the claim – and nothing about it is really in dispute.
In 2015 Baldwin did vote with other Democrats against a Republican effort to block then-President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Republicans failed to get the 60 votes needed to block the deal.
Likewise, a 2020 report from the federal Bureau of Counterterrorism notes the U.S. has designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism, including support of “Hezbollah, Palestinian terrorist groups in Gaza, and various terrorist and militant groups in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.”
When we asked Hovde’s campaign for backup, it included that link among many others – but none of the information provided really goes beyond what we have seen when we rated such claims in the past.
So, let’s turn to what we said in a June 29, 2018 fact-check.
At the time, we were checking Republican Kevin Nicholson’s claim that the Iran deal “handed billions of dollars of cash on cargo planes, sent it to a state sponsor of terror, and Tammy Baldwin was one of the first U.S. senators to get on board and support that.”
Nicholson was running in the GOP primary, but lost and Leah Vukmir went on to face Baldwin. In that item we noted:
The deal, struck in July 2015 under Obama, was with Iran, the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union. It was aimed at making it harder for Iran to make a nuclear bomb. The deal restricted certain Iranian nuclear activities for periods between 10 to 25 years, and allowed for more intrusive, permanent monitoring. It also prohibited Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons in the future.
As part of the deal, Iran did get access to tens of billions of dollars in assets — but the vast majority of those assets are Iran’s own money.
And what cash was delivered on a plane was far less than billions.
Let’s pause here, and apply that to what Hovde said.
Hovde implies the money was simply given to Iran, or at least makes no mention of the context around it and the fact it was largely money Iran was owed. Worse, there is no mention of the fact it was a nuclear deal that called for Iran to halt work toward a nuclear weapon.
Former President Donald Trump undid the deal in 2018.
Hovde’s spokesman, Ben Voelkel, also sent us a CNN story detailing how the U.S. sent a plane with $400 million to Iran on the day it released four American prisoners – which was also the day the nuclear deal was formally implemented.
This is what our earlier Nicholson fact-check said about that money and the apparent single plane (not the planes plural Hovde described):
The deal released Iranian assets frozen under a variety of sanctions. The assets, cash in the bank, real estate or something else, belonged to Iran in the first place. The total value — worldwide — of freed Iranian assets was about $56 billion, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
According to the U.S. State Department, Iran received about $1.7 billion from the United States — $400 million plus interest. The payment was indirectly linked to the nuclear deal. The money was legally due to Iran. The country had paid America for military equipment in 1979, but the Iranian revolution came and the hardware was never delivered.
Many news organizations reported the delivery of the $400 million in an unmarked cargo plane after American officials were certain that three Americans held in Iran were on their way home. It is not known how the remaining $1.3 billion made its way to Iran.
So, while Hovde started with an element of truth, his claim veered widely from there, just as past claims have.
Our ruling
Hovde said Baldwin “was one of the staunchest supporters of the Iran deal which sent billions of dollars and plane loads of cash to Iran.”
Baldwin said she voted for the deal because it was in the best interest of America’s security to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. Thirteen Democrats announced support before her.
Beyond that, the deal itself contained no provisions to send money to Iran. It did lift some sanctions, freeing up reserves already held by the country. As far as the plane load of cash, it was sent separately from the deal, to deliver money that was legally due to Iran.
Our definition of Mostly False is a statement that “contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.”
A video clip of President Joe Biden speaking about the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol is being wrongly characterized as “new remarks.”
“Joe Biden: New remarks on Jan 6,” text over the video says in a March 6 Instagram post.
Biden says: “One Capitol police officer called it a medieval battle. He said he was more afraid in the Capitol of the United States of America in the chambers than when he was fighting as a soldier in the war in Iraq.”
This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)
The footage is authentic, but it’s not new. It’s from Jan. 5, 2024, when Biden spoke on the eve of the attack’s third anniversary.
