Category: Fact Check

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Days before he ordered, and then paused, new tariffs on U.S. imports from Canada and Mexico, President Donald Trump argued that the U.S. does not need imported products such as crude oil and lumber from those countries.

Experts told us that, in theory, if the U.S. stopped importing crude oil and lumber from Canada and Mexico, it still would be able to meet domestic demand using natural resources available in the U.S. But, in reality, they said, the transition would be costly and take some time to implement, among other complications.

On Jan. 30, while talking with reporters about the tariffs he would announce two days later, Trump said: “Look, Mexico and Canada have never been good to us on trade. They’ve treated us very unfairly on trade and we will be able to make that up very quickly because we don’t need the products that they have. We have all the oil you need. We have all the trees you need, meaning the lumber. We have more than almost anybody in those two categories, and oil we have more than anybody and we don’t need anybody’s trees.”

A week earlier, while delivering virtual remarks to the World Economic Forum on Jan. 23, Trump singled out Canada specifically.

“Canada has been very tough to deal with over the years, and it’s not fair that we should have a $200 billion or $250 billion deficit,” Trump said. “We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests, et cetera, et cetera. We don’t need their oil and gas. We have our — we have more than anybody.”

In fact, the U.S. had a roughly $41 billion trade deficit in goods and services with Canada in 2023, according to the most recent annual data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. If Trump was only referring to the deficit in goods with Canada, it was about $72 billion in 2023, still significantly lower than what Trump said.

And while the U.S. is producing the most crude oil in its history – and more than any country ever – there are several reasons why the U.S. currently needs crude oil imports from Canada, Mexico and other countries. Without those imports, refiners that rely on them to make gasoline and other refined products would have to make infrastructure changes that experts said would take time and significant financial investments.

Rejecting imports of lumber would pose other issues, such as higher prices and environmental concerns, experts said.

Trump announced new 25% tariffs on imported products from Canada and Mexico via executive order on Feb. 1, with a lower 10% tariff on Canadian oil. But a few days later, on Feb. 3, the president agreed to pause the tariffs for 30 days.

Crude Oil

On paper, it may appear that the U.S. does not need imports of oil from Canada or Mexico. But the imports are of heavier crude oil than what the U.S. mostly extracts.

In 2023, the U.S. produced a record of more than 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day, which increased to a new high of more than 13.2 million barrels per day in 2024, according to estimates from the Energy Information Administration. The country also has tens of billions of barrels of proven oil reserves that are likely recoverable, according to the EIA, and Trump has said he wants American companies to “drill, baby, drill” to boost production further.

Carey W. King, a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and assistant director of its Energy Institute, also told us in an email that the U.S. “extracts more ‘crude oil’ and natural gas liquids than it consumes as refined oil products.” And he noted that the U.S. also exports crude oil — almost 4.1 million barrels per day in 2023, according to the most recent annual EIA data.

“So it seems the U.S. doesn’t need oil from other countries,” King said.

But in a report updated this month, the Congressional Research Service explained that, generally, U.S. oil trade with Canada and Mexico “is motivated by factors including geographic proximity, refinery configurations, crude oil quality, and an integrated pipeline network.” Not all crude oil is the same, the CRS noted, nor are the refineries that process the crude into consumable products such as transportation fuels and heating oil.

That’s why eliminating imports from those countries may be easier said than done.

The U.S. got about 3.9 million barrels per day from Canada in 2023, while Mexico was the source of about 733,000 barrels per day. Combined, they accounted for more than 70% of all U.S. imports of crude oil that year.

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“The U.S. could, if necessary, become self-sufficient,” David Gantz, a fellow in trade and international economics at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in an interview. However, he said “it would require significant and expensive modifications” to U.S. refineries.

Changes would be required because, as the EIA has written, the U.S. mostly produces lighter, or less dense, forms of crude oil. In contrast, many refineries in the U.S. have been configured to process the heavier crude oils, which the EIA says are generally cheaper and are produced in Canada, Mexico and other countries. Most American refineries were built decades ago, before the U.S. “shale boom” in the 2000s led to greater production of more light crude. 

That makes imports vital to the U.S. refining industry.

“From a practical standpoint, oil refiners have made capital investments that have tuned their refineries to take a certain mix (within a range) of crude oil inputs as feedstocks,” King said in his email to us. “If this crude oil mix changes, their refinery is not as well configured for that new crude oil mix.”

He said this is also one of the reasons why U.S. companies export crude oil, because oil refiners in other countries are better configured to use the lighter crude oils extracted from drilling in the U.S. Meanwhile, “more than 70% of U.S. refining capacity runs most efficiently with heavier crude,” according to the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, a trade group that represents fuel makers.

Retooling American refineries to use more U.S.-sourced oil, in addition to potentially taking years to complete, “would cost billions,” the AFPM said in an explainer on the issue, posted to its site on Jan. 24. Also, transporting oil products across the U.S. would be an issue, the AFPM said, because “[w]e lack the infrastructure (like pipelines) needed to cost effectively supply U.S crude oil and refined products to every region” of the country.

For example, in an August post about Canadian crude oil’s “increasingly significant role in U.S. refineries,” the EIA said: “Geographic proximity allows Canada’s pipelines to transport crude oil from the western provinces, mainly from Alberta’s large crude oil production region, to refineries in the United States. Inland regions of the United States, particularly the Midwest … and Rocky Mountains …, are closely connected to Canada’s oil markets via pipeline and rail networks.”

Still, “theoretically,” Gantz said, Trump’s claim that the U.S. could do without oil imports from Canada and Mexico is “true” – if refineries are retrofitted and companies come up with a transportation plan.

On the other hand, “in a practical matter, it’s not true at all,” he said of Trump’s claim.

“In the short and medium term, the refineries are set up to use a particular grade of crude oil, and they can’t easily or quickly switch,” Gantz explained.

He said the fact that Trump initially ordered a lower 10% tariff on imports of crude oil from Canada – compared with a 25% tariff on all other products – “suggested somebody in the Trump administration understands that this is not a product which can be easily replaced.”

Lumber

The situation with lumber is similar, experts said.

“Sure: we could probably meet most of our lumber needs domestically,” Marc McDill, an associate professor of forest management at Penn State University, told us in an email. “The reasons why we don’t basically boil down to two things: 1) sometimes imports are cheaper than our own suppliers, and 2) we value our forests for a lot of other things besides producing lumber.”

He added that without lumber from Canada, which is the largest source of U.S. imports of forest products, “we would adjust in three ways: 1) prices would go up (which would increase housing costs), 2) we would harvest more of our own trees (which might have negative environmental consequences), and 3) we would import more from countries other than Canada.”

As for Mexico, it’s “our fourth largest trading partner when it comes to lumber or wood products, in general, including paper,” McDill said in an interview. “So, they’re important, but considerably smaller” in terms of imports than Canada.

In 2023, the U.S. imported $51.5 billion worth of forest products, 40.5% of which came from Canada and 6% came from Mexico, according to data from the U.S. International Trade Commission.

JensPeter Barynin, an economist and a former executive at the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, had a take similar to McDill’s.

“In theory,” what Trump said “is true,” Barynin wrote in a Jan. 27 opinion piece published by the Financial Post. “U.S. forests could meet domestic demand. In 2024, the southeastern U.S. harvested nearly twice as much timber as Canada, primarily due to the region’s productive Southern Yellow Pine plantation forests. Add in the untapped state-owned forests of Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and self-sufficiency becomes a plausible goal.

“However, ramping up harvesting from publicly owned forests, most of which are currently protected, would provoke fierce public backlash, conflict with the Environmental Protection Act and clash with the interests of both large and small private timberland owners,” he said. “Even if Trump were to push for increased harvesting, the U.S. lacks the logging and mill capacity to process the trees into lumber.”

In addition, C. Rhett Jackson, a professor of water resources at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia, told us that differences in the lumber produced in the U.S. and Canada may be problematic.

“US lumber is comprised largely of loblolly pine, slash pine, and Douglas Fir,” he said in an email. “Canadian softwoods come from different species with different properties. Depending on what you are building, you might prefer the Canadian softwood lumber choices. Also, depending on where you are in the country, the haul distances for Canadian lumber can be much shorter.”

Putting tariffs on imports from Canada would be troublesome for U.S. businesses and consumers, Jackson said, adding that prices on all lumber would increase and the selection of available lumber would decrease.

“So, the President’s statement is not wrong but still misleading,” he wrote. “All lumber is not created equally.”

The White House did not address our questions about how Trump planned to supplement any lost imports from Canada and Mexico.

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As President Donald Trump’s administration targets the U.S. Agency for International Development for closure or major downsizing, the White House and social media posts have highlighted four projects as examples of the agency’s “waste and abuse.” But only one was funded by USAID.

We’ll explain the programs and provide context on USAID’s total budget.

Trump’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE — led by billionaire Elon Musk — swung its focus to USAID in late January. The agency was created in 1961 and charged with carrying out foreign social and economic development projects. It “provides assistance to strategically important countries and countries in conflict; leads U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, disease, and humanitarian need; and assists U.S. commercial interests by supporting developing countries’ economic growth and building countries’ capacity to participate in world trade,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

“USAID is a criminal organization,” Musk wrote on his social media platform, X, on Feb. 2. “Time for it to die.”

The following day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was appointed the acting administrator of USAID. The agency’s website was taken down, and on Feb. 7, it showed a notice that said: “On Friday, February 7, 2025, at 11:59 pm (EST) all USAID direct hire personnel will be placed on administrative leave globally, with the exception of designated personnel responsible for mission-critical functions, core leadership and specially designated programs.”

In response to a lawsuit filed by organizations representing USAID workers, a federal judge on Feb. 7 temporarily blocked the Trump administration from immediately placing more than 2,000 workers on administrative leave. As of Feb. 8, the website was blank.

It is unclear what the future of USAID will be. The Congressional Research Service wrote in a Feb. 3 memo that the agency was created as an independent establishment within the executive branch and “the President does not have the authority to abolish it.”

More than 100 House Democrats signed a letter dated Feb. 4 raising the same point to Rubio. “By law, USAID is an independent entity separate from the State Department, and any changes to that structure would require legislative approval from Congress,” it said.

The White House has publicized claims about the agency to justify its action. In a statement issued on Feb. 3, it listed several programs it claimed were funded by USAID and said, “For decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight.”

Later that day, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt highlighted four that she said were emblematic of “the waste and abuse that has run through USAID over the past several years”: “$1.5 million to advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces, $70,000 for production of a DEI musical in Ireland, $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, $32,000 for a transgender comic book in Peru.”

“I don’t know about you, but as an American taxpayer, I don’t want my dollars going toward this crap,” Leavitt said. “And I know the American people don’t either. That’s exactly what Elon Musk has been tasked by President Trump to do, to get the fraud, waste, and abuse out of our federal government.”

A clip of that portion of her comments was shared widely on social media — the version shared by the White House’s “Rapid Response 47” account on X garnered more than a million views, alone. Other posts shared lists of projects that included the four highlighted by Leavitt.

But some of those projects weren’t described accurately. And only the first was funded by USAID; the rest were funded by the State Department. Each of the projects highlighted represents a relatively small amount of money — the entire amount managed by USAID was about $40 billion in fiscal year 2023 (the most recent year with complete data), according to a Congressional Research Service report. That amount is less than 1% of the total federal budget.

Whether or not these programs demonstrate “waste and abuse,” as described by the Trump administration, is a matter of opinion. We’ll lay out what we know about each one.

Serbian ‘DEI’ Project

An LGBTQ advocacy organization in Serbia — a country that fares poorly compared with other European countries on measures of LGBTQ rights, according to data from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights — hosted a three-year program aimed at improving the inclusion of LGBTQ people in the workplace.

From February 2023 to October 2024, USAID committed to spending about $1.5 million — in three roughly $500,000 installments — to support the program.

At a program conference in September 2023, mission director for USAID in Serbia, Brooke Isham, said, “At USAID, we know that inclusive development is important for driving economic growth and also for creating a healthier democracy.”

A ‘DEI Musical’ in Ireland

The State Department committed to provide $70,844 in September 2022 to an Irish organization called Ceiliuradh, which is part of the Irish South Wind Blows production company. The money wasn’t for a “musical,” but rather a musical event.

That company’s musical component, called Other Voices, put together a program called “Other Voices: Dignity – Towards a More Equitable Future” for the U.S. Embassy in Dublin on Sept. 15, 2022.

The announcement for the event said it “will showcase the very best of American and Irish talent with a diverse programme which aims to fulfil the U.S. Embassy Dublin’s mission to promote diversity, inclusion, and equality.”

The event was streamed live on YouTube and featured several Irish and American artists.

USAID isn’t listed as providing any money for the event.

A ‘Transgender Opera’ in Colombia

On April 28, 2022, the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, put on a performance of the opera “As One.” The show, which was written in the U.S. and debuted in 2014, features a transgender protagonist.

A program for the university’s production of the opera said the show had the support of the university, the Bogotá Philharmonic Orchestra and the “Small Grants Program of the Embassy of the United States in Colombia.”

The Department of State committed $25,000 to fund the project, and the website USAspending.gov also noted that there was $22,020 of “non-federal funding” for the project, making a total of $47,020 listed on the site. The federal funding for this project also came from the State Department, not USAID.

A ‘Transgender Comic Book’ in Peru

In 2021, the U.S. Embassy in Peru introduced a comic book called “The Power of Education,” which it used to promote education and exchange programs in the U.S.

The following year, the embassy commissioned a second volume.

“The Embassy asked us to introduce a gay student in #2 to show his personal struggle coming out to his parents, but that has zero to do with being transgender,” David Campiti, who owns the company that produced the comic book, told us in an email. “The comics were about scholarships and furthering education.”

The series ended up including three comic books, each one showing an aspect of cultural exchange and education. View them here, here and here.

The second one is what was highlighted by the Trump administration as a “transgender comic book.” But volume 2 of “The Power of Education” does not include a transgender character. Rather, as Campiti said, it featured a hero who was gay.

The writer of the comic, David Lawrence, said the same thing in a post on his Facebook page on Feb. 4, explaining why the embassy had requested an LGBTQ character. “The US embassy in Peru requested that as a small response to anti gay prejudice in the country,” he wrote.

We reached out to the embassy for comment and were referred to the State Department, which did not respond to us.

Like the first volume, the second one was used to promote education and exchange programs. And, incidentally, it won two awards in 2023, including comic of the year, from a Peruvian organization called Chronicles of Diversity.

The funding for this project didn’t come from USAID, either, but, again, from the State Department.

So, funding for three of the four projects highlighted by the White House came from the State Department for funding cultural activities on behalf of various embassies.

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As justification for dismantling the federal Department of Education, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that U.S. schools are “ranked 40 out of 40” in educational outcomes compared with other countries, while the U.S. “ranked No. 1 in cost per pupil.” Neither claim is accurate.

U.S. high school students performed above average in science and reading, and a bit below average in math, according to the latest data compiled by the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And in other international assessments, elementary students in the U.S. scored above average in math, science and reading.

During the campaign, Trump made no secret of his desire to dismantle the federal Department of Education. As president, Trump said that remains his goal.

Trump told reporters on Feb. 4 that he had said to Linda McMahon, his nominee to be Education secretary, “‘Linda I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.’”

Trump said he wants to “let the states run schools,” and that he would funnel most of the funding for the Department of Education to states. As a technical matter, states and local communities already run the schools — setting the curriculum and teacher certification standards. As the Department of Education explains, “the Federal role in education [is] as a kind of ’emergency response system,’ a means of filling gaps in State and local support for education when critical national needs arise.” In practice, FindLaw explains, “the federal government focuses on providing supplementary support and coordination at the national level. For instance, it implements programs and provides crucial services to disadvantaged populations” and it recommends teaching strategies.

According to the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, federal government funding made up about 11% of the revenues for elementary and secondary public schools in the 2020-21 school year. The rest of the revenues come from state and local funding. Trump has said his plan is to effect a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington” and instead give federal education funds directly to states.

In response to a reporter’s question on Feb. 4 about whether he intended to shutter the Department of Education, Trump repeatedly came back to his false claims about the U.S. ranking in educational achievement and the country’s per pupil spending.

“We spend more money per pupil than any other nation in the world, and yet we’re rated No. 40,” Trump said. “The last rating just came out, you saw them. So they talk about 40 countries, we’re rated No. 40. … We have to tell the teachers union, we’re rated last in the world in education, of the Top 40. … The thing just came out. That’s under [former President Joe] Biden, remember that.”

We should note that Trump has been making these same claims for years, as far back as when he was running for president in 2016. As we wrote in May 2016, he was wrong on both counts, as he is now. His campaign at the time did not respond when we asked for a source for the claims, and neither did the White House press office when we made a similar request this week.

Educational Outcomes

We could find no international ranking of education outcomes that has the U.S. dead last, as Trump claimed.

When Trump mentions 40 peer countries, he appears to be talking about the 37 OECD countries that participate in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which the NCES conducts in coordination with the OECD every three years in reading, math and science for 15-year-old students. The latest results are from 2022.

In no PISA category, however, does the U.S. rank last. Rather, the U.S. scored above average among OECD countries in reading and science (subjects in which the U.S. ranked 6th and 12th, respectively). The average U.S. score in math was lower, but not significantly, than the OECD average. The U.S. ranking in math was 28th.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the PISA results:

• In reading, the U.S. average score of 504 was higher than the OECD average score of 476. Compared with the other 36 participating OECD members, the U.S. ranked 6th. Ireland and Japan were tied for the top ranking with an average score of 516, and Colombia was lowest with a score of 409. Looking at all of the 81 countries in the dataset, including non-OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 9th.
• In science, the U.S. score of 499 was higher than the OECD average of 485. Among the 37 participating OECD countries, the U.S. ranked 12th. Japan was highest with a score of 547, and Mexico was lowest with a score of 410. Looking at all 81 countries in the PISA study, the U.S. ranked 16th.
• In math, the U.S. average score of 465 ranked 28th out of 37 OECD countries. The U.S. score was lower than the OECD average of 472, though the difference was not statistically significant. The country with the highest average score was Japan (536), and the lowest was Colombia (383). Looking at all of the 81 countries in the PISA data, the U.S. math literacy score ranked 34th.

Notably, the situation was very similar in the 2018 PISA assessment during Trump’s first term in office. As in 2022, the U.S. performed above the OECD average in reading and science, and below the OECD average in math.

We should also note that U.S. scores in math, science and reading in 2022 were all lower than in 2018. But the U.S. ranking compared with other OECD countries was relatively the same or better, because scores around the world dipped post-pandemic.

From 2018 to 2022, the OECD average in PISA dropped by almost 15 points in math (it dropped by 13 points in the U.S.), by about 10 points in reading (though by just 1 point in the U.S.) and “remained stable” in science (though it dropped by 3 points in the U.S.). According to the OECD, “The unprecedented drops in mathematics and reading point to the shock effect of COVID-19 on most countries.”

A second international assessment of students is known as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which is given every four years to fourth- and eighth-grade students.

In 2023, with an average score of 517 in math, U.S. fourth graders scored 14 points above the international average, and ranked 28th out of 63 countries. In science, the U.S. average score of 532 was also above the international average, by 38 points, and the U.S. ranked 15th out of 63 countries.

For eighth graders in the TIMSS assessment, the U.S. average in 2023 in math (488) was 10 points above the international average and ranked 24th out of 45 countries. In science, U.S. eighth graders’ average score (513) was 47 points above the international average and ranked 16th out of 45 countries.

The third and final assessment we reviewed is the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, which is administered every five years to fourth-grade students. In 2021, the latest data available, the U.S. had an average score of 548, which was 48 points above the median, and the U.S. ranked 6th out of 33 countries. Ireland (577) was tops, and South Africa (288) was lowest.

In short, the U.S. was not last by any of these measures.

Spending Per Pupil

Trump was also wrong to say that the U.S. spends the most per pupil.

The cost of higher education — college-level education — is very high in the U.S. According to the OECD, U.S. expenditures for tertiary education (post-high school, including college) were the highest among OECD countries in 2021. At $36,274 per pupil, that was 77% higher than the OECD average. According to the OECD, 39% of U.S. spending for higher education was public expenditure (compared with an OECD average of 68%).

But a handful of other countries spent more than the U.S. on primary and secondary schooling.

For example, while the total spending per pupil at the primary level — elementary school — in the U.S. ($15,270) was 28% higher than the OECD average ($11,902), the U.S. ranked 6th behind Luxembourg ($25,584), Norway ($18,037), Iceland ($16,786), Denmark ($15,598) and Austria ($15,415). According to the OECD, 93% of total expenditure on primary institutions comes from public sources in the U.S.

Looking at secondary education — high school — the U.S. per pupil expenditure ($16,301) was 22% higher than the OECD average but below Norway ($19,831), Austria ($19,049), South Korea ($19,299), the Netherlands ($17,909), Belgium ($17,525), Germany ($17,077) and Australia ($16,498).

Another way to look at education spending is as a percentage of gross domestic product. By that measure, according to OECD data, the U.S. again is nearly tops for postsecondary education. But at the primary and secondary school levels, U.S. per pupil spending in 2021 was below that of more than a dozen countries, including Israel, Iceland, Norway, the United Kingdom, Belgium and Costa Rica.

“The U.S. spends a lot on education if you include all the money spent on higher education,” Andrew Crook, press secretary for the American Federation of Teachers, told us via email. “If you only consider K-12 education, U.S. expenditures are very close to the OECD average.”

OECD data indicate that while the U.S. prioritizes higher education, “other countries invest more comprehensively across all levels of education,” Crook said.

Crook also warned that international spending comparisons “aren’t always straightforward.”

“Many services that American schools provide are not part of other countries’ educational expenditures,” Crook said. “For instance, many countries provide universal healthcare, which is funded separately from their education budgets, whereas in the U.S., healthcare costs for students and staff may be partially covered within school funding. Additionally, expenditures on services like student transportation, social programs, and other support systems vary widely across countries, further complicating a one-to-one comparison of education spending.”

Regardless, U.S. spending per pupil is not — as Trump repeatedly claims — higher than all other nations, nor does the U.S. rank last in educational outcomes.

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In our earlier coverage of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s confirmation hearings to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, we focused on his familiar claims about vaccines and chronic disease, along with his citation of a flawed paper that claimed to identify a link between vaccines and autism.

But in his more than six hours of testimony, Kennedy made other incorrect or misleading claims, including on obesity treatments for kids and National Institutes of Health funding.

• Sparring with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, Kennedy claimed that research backed up his earlier assertion that Black people need a different vaccine schedule than whites “because their immune system is better than ours.” Scientists say he’s distorting that work.

• Kennedy impossibly claimed that his 2021 petition to pull authorization of the COVID-19 vaccines was filed because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the vaccines for 6-year-olds “without any scientific basis.” The CDC did not recommend vaccines for that age group until months after the petition was filed — and did so based on positive clinical trial results.

• He claimed GLP-1 weight loss drugs were being used as the “first front-line intervention” to treat obesity in 6-year-old kids. They’re not. Guidelines recommend intensive behavioral therapy for children that age.

• Kennedy accused the National Institutes of Health of spending “almost nothing” on research investigating the causes of chronic diseases because the “money is going to infectious disease.” Each year, billions in NIH funds are devoted to chronic conditions.

• Defending his false claim that the COVID-19 vaccine “was the deadliest vaccine ever made,” Kennedy cited an increased number of unvetted reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Increased reporting to VAERS was expected with a new, widely distributed vaccine and doesn’t mean a vaccine is unsafe.

• He incorrectly said that 12-step programs were a “gold standard” approach for treating opioid addiction.

On Feb. 4, after Kennedy won the support of Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician who had previously said he was “struggling” with the pick, the Senate Finance committee voted 14-13 along party lines to advance the nomination. 

After the vote, Cassidy spoke on the Senate floor, saying that he had spoken with Kennedy repeatedly over the weekend and had received commitments from him and the administration that Kennedy would “work within the current vaccine approval and safety monitoring systems,” maintain the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee “without changes” and would not take down CDC webpages that state vaccines don’t cause autism.

Kennedy also pledged to meet regularly with and “have an unprecedently close collaborative working relationship” with Cassidy.

With that hurdle cleared, Kennedy’s nomination heads to the full Senate. If all Democrats oppose him, he can afford to lose three Republican votes and still be confirmed with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President JD Vance.

Studies Don’t Support Claim That Black People Need Different Vaccine Schedule

In a contentious exchange with Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, of Maryland, during his second confirmation hearing, Kennedy insisted that scientific research, including by Mayo Clinic vaccinologist Dr. Gregory Poland, supported his previous claim in 2021 that “we should not be giving Black people the same vaccine schedule that’s given to whites because their immune system is better than ours.” When making that claim, Kennedy alleged that vaccines were “overloading” Black boys and causing autism. Kennedy, however, misinterpreted the research.

“There’s a series of studies, I think most of them by Poland, that show that to particular antigens that Blacks have a much stronger reaction,” Kennedy said, when Alsobrooks asked him to explain his earlier remarks. “There’s differences in reaction to different products by different races.”

Alsobrooks, who is Black, then asked Kennedy which “different vaccine schedule” she should have received.

“Well, I mean, the Poland article suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens than — for,” Kennedy said, before Alsobrooks cut him off to say that his comments were “so dangerous.”

“Well, it’s the truth. It’s the science,” Kennedy fired back. After Alsobrooks said she would not vote to confirm him because his views are dangerous, he added, “Do you think science is dangerous, senator? This is published peer-reviewed studies.”

Kennedy is correct that some research has shown that for certain vaccines and for specific aspects of the immune system, people of African descent have demonstrated a stronger immune response, on average, than other ethnicities. A 2014 study by Poland and others at the Mayo Clinic, for example, found that African Americans, including Somali Americans, produced more neutralizing antibodies after rubella vaccination compared with people of European or Hispanic descent.

But that is very different from Kennedy’s conclusion that it means that Black people “need fewer antigens” or that they need a different immunization schedule to avoid harm from vaccines.

Dr. Janet A Englund, a professor of pediatric infectious diseases at Seattle Children’s Hospital, told us that it was “not correct” that Poland’s research “suggests that Blacks need fewer antigens.”  

“I have never seen data suggesting this in the peer-reviewed literature coming from North America or Africa,” she told us in an email. “I am familiar with Dr. Poland’s work on vaccines, and do not know of Dr. Poland ever stating this.” She added that Black children do not need a different vaccination schedule than other children.

Poland was not available for an interview, but he previously told us for a 2021 story, when Kennedy made similar claims about his 2014 rubella vaccine study in a video discouraging Black people from getting the COVID-19 vaccine, that his study was being distorted.

“We do not have a study that shows African Americans need half the dose,” he said, explaining that his study was “preliminary” and it was not yet clear why people of different ethnicities had different antibody responses. “We do not have a study that shows African American children are being overdosed.”

At the time, Poland described the claim as being “like a good conspiracy theory — it contains a grain of truth with a lot of speculations around it.”

Dr. Richard Kennedy, a Mayo Clinic co-author on the 2014 rubella study who is not related to the HHS nominee, also told NPR that suggesting that Black people should have a different vaccination schedule was “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate.”

Kennedy’s earlier suggestion that Black people have a superior immune system across the board is also incorrect. A 2013 study by Poland, for instance, found that people of European descent mounted stronger immune responses to the smallpox vaccine than people of African or Hispanic descent.

The remarks Alsobrooks highlighted, notably, were made during a 2021 event in which Kennedy first brought up Poland’s research to explain why, in his view, Black children were more likely than whites to be harmed by vaccines and develop autism.

That faulty premise was based on a study he claimed found Black boys who received the MMR vaccine on time were at 336% higher risk of autism than children who did not get it on time. But as we’ve explained before, including when writing about the 2021 video, the cited paper was a reanalysis of a 2004 CDC study that was performed by a known vaccine opponent and was retracted. There is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism.

Kennedy’s False Petition Claims

In both of his confirmation hearings, Kennedy deflected and mischaracterized his 2021 effort to petition the government to remove access to lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. He incorrectly claimed it was related to the CDC’s decision to recommend the vaccines for 6-year-olds. No COVID-19 vaccines were available for that age group until months after the petition was filed.

“We brought that petition after CDC recommended COVID vaccine without any scientific basis for 6-year-old children,” Kennedy said in response to Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden during his first confirmation hearing on Jan. 29. “Most experts agree today — even the people who did it back then — that COVID vaccines are inappropriate for 6-year-old children who basically have zero risk from COVID. That’s why I brought that lawsuit.”

Kennedy filed the petition, along with a colleague, on behalf of the anti-vaccination group he founded, asking the FDA to revoke authorization of all COVID-19 vaccines and to “refrain” from issuing any future authorizations or approvals of COVID-19 vaccines “for all demographic groups.”

In the hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee the following day, Kennedy used nearly the same line again in response to questioning from Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont.

“I filed that lawsuit after CDC recommended the vaccine for 6-year-old children without any evidence that it would benefit them and without testing on 6-year-old children,” he said. “And that was my reason for filing that lawsuit.”

None of those claims is true. In the case of Kennedy’s purported rationale for filing the petition, we cannot know his thinking. But the timeline of events contradicts his account.

Kennedy filed his petition in May 2021, around the time that healthy, non-prioritized people were beginning to gain access to the vaccines in most states. The CDC did not make its recommendation that 5- to 11-year-old children get vaccinated against COVID-19 until Nov. 2. That occurred only after clinical trials testing a pediatric version of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine had been done and the Food and Drug Administration had reviewed the results and decided to authorize the vaccine. In addition, an independent panel of scientists advising the CDC had voted unanimously to recommend the vaccine to children.

Contrary to Kennedy’s claim that the vaccine had not been tested in 6-year-olds, the placebo-controlled trial included 4,600 children ages 5 through 11 years, 3,100 of whom received the vaccine. The trial found that compared with young adults given the adult vaccine, the kids’ vaccine produced a comparable immune response and was 90.7% effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19, with no identified serious safety risks.

It’s possible that Kennedy is thinking of a different CDC decision regarding minors and the COVID-19 vaccine. Six days before he filed the petition, the FDA amended its authorization for Pfizer/BioNTech’s adult vaccine, which was originally authorized for people 16 years of age and older, to include teens ages 12 to 15. Two days later, the CDC recommended that those younger teens get the vaccine.

But here, too, the decision was based on positive clinical trial results — so it was not “without any scientific basis,” as Kennedy claimed. 

It’s worth noting that Kennedy’s petition claimed that the vaccine authorizations should be revoked because of safety issues and because “existing, approved” drugs, including chloroquine drugs and ivermectin, effectively treated and prevented COVID-19. But in fact, at the time, there already were multiple studies showing hydroxychloroquine didn’t work for COVID-19, and there wasn’t good evidence for ivermectin (randomized controlled studies have since shown that it doesn’t work, either). Serious side effects of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines occur but are rare.

The petition also called on the FDA to “amend” its guidance on the unproven drugs and to state that no one should be required to get a COVID-19 vaccine to keep a job or go to school.

The petition further requested that the FDA not allow children to participate in any vaccine clinical trials due to “the extremely low risk” of severe COVID-19 in kids.

As for that notion, which Kennedy repeated in the hearings, it’s true that children are generally at low risk of severe disease. Some children, however, have medical conditions that put them at higher risk, and at the time, COVID-19 was a leading cause of death of children. About a third of children who were hospitalized with COVID-19 had been previously healthy. 

Many experts still recommend that children, including 6-year-old children, get a COVID-19 shot every year, recognizing that it is not as important for most children as it is for higher-risk groups. 

Some experts may have changed or appeared to have changed their recommendations, but part of that is related to the fact that the coronavirus is no longer so new.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia pediatrician and vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, for example, who was a strong proponent of all children receiving a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, previously told us he does not think all children need an annual COVID-19 vaccine, although they can opt for one if they wish. He does, however, think any child who has never received a COVID-19 vaccine should get one.

Medication Is Not Front-line Obesity Treatment for Kids

During an exchange with Sen. Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey, Kennedy falsely claimed that new drugs to treat obesity were being used as the “first front-line intervention” for young children.

“GLP-1 drugs —  the GLP drugs, the class of drugs — are miracle drugs,” he said, referring to the newer class of glucagon-like peptide-1 medications for type 2 diabetes and obesity. “But I do not think they should be the first front-line intervention for 6-year-old kids, for whom they are currently, that is the, that is the standard of practice now.”

But neither the American Academy of Pediatrics nor the US Preventive Services Task Forces, a federally funded panel of independent national experts in disease prevention, recommend the drugs at all in children as young as 6.

The USPSTF recommendations, issued in June 2024, favor “comprehensive, intensive behavioral interventions” over medication for children and adolescents age 6 and up. Such interventions include at least 26 hours a year of counseling, coaching and physical activity sessions supervised by health care providers. 

The task force called the “totality of the evidence” on GLP-1 drugs for kids and adolescents “inadequate,” noting that there was only one trial per medication that was longer than two months, limited evidence on weight maintenance after stopping the drugs and no evidence on the potential harms of using the medications for a long time. It also highlighted the drugs’ known gastrointestinal side effects.

“Therefore, the USPSTF encourages clinicians to promote behavioral interventions as the primary effective intervention for weight loss in children and adolescents,” the recommendation statement reads.

The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines, issued in January 2023, recommend that providers consider using medications for weight loss, but only for older children and only in conjunction with intensive health behavior and lifestyle treatment. That latter treatment, which AAP calls “foundational,” is what the group recommends for all children 6 years of age and older with obesity or who are overweight — and can be considered for younger children down to the age of 2.

The AAP guidance says pediatricians “should offer” teens 12 years and older and “[m]ay offer” kids 8 through 11 years of age weight loss drugs, “according to medication indications, risks, and benefits, as an adjunct to health behavior and lifestyle treatment.”

“In particular, children with more immediate and life-threatening comorbidities, those who are older, and those affected by more severe obesity may require additional therapeutic options,” the guidelines read.

NIH Funding for Chronic Disease

In both confirmation hearings, Kennedy misleadingly said that the National Institutes of Health spent “almost nothing” on researching the causes of chronic disease, focusing instead on infectious disease.

Kennedy told Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington, during his first hearing that his previous call for NIH scientists to take “a break” from studying infectious diseases for eight years was because those diseases have “been the principal preoccupation.”

“Almost nothing is studied at NIH about the etiology of our chronic disease epidemic,” he continued, referring to the causes of the conditions. “The money is going to infectious disease.”

Similarly, the next day, during an exchange with Sen. Jon Husted, the Ohio Republican who was appointed to replace Vice President JD Vance, Kennedy said that the NIH “has been diverted … away” from “studying the etiology of chronic diseases.”

“So there’s almost nothing at NIH — very, very little, a low percentage of its budget, a $42 billion budget, that is devoted to … finding out why we’re having this obesity epidemic,” he said. “The focus is on infectious disease,” he added later, “and we almost altogether ignore chronic disease.”

It’s difficult to say how much funding specifically goes to projects that investigate the root causes of chronic diseases. But it’s not true that there isn’t much funding for them.

According to an estimate of NIH funding by research and disease areas published on the agency’s website in May 2024, “infectious diseases” received $8.2 billion in fiscal year 2023 — the eighth largest single category on the list.

For comparison, cancer, a disease the CDC considers a chronic disease, received only a bit less — $7.9 billion. Other chronic diseases receiving $1 billion or more that year included Alzheimer’s disease ($3.5 billion), heart disease ($1.8 billion), obesity ($1.1 billion) and diabetes ($1.1 billion). 

In fiscal year 2023, smaller amounts were spent on other chronic diseases, including chronic pain ($823 million), kidney disease ($703 million), hypertension ($462 million), stroke ($443 million), chronic liver disease and cirrhosis ($447 million), arthritis ($321 million), autism ($306 million), asthma ($274 million), epilepsy ($245 million), inflammatory bowel disease ($199 million), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease ($148 million), and food allergies ($86 million).

Kennedy’s rhetoric also fails to recognize that there is not always a clear distinction between chronic and infectious diseases. Someone living with HIV, of course, is dealing with an infectious disease, but thanks to treatment advancements, it’s now a chronic condition that can be managed.

Cancer can be caused by viruses and bacteria. This includes cervical cancer, which is caused by HPV, and can be prevented with a vaccine that Kennedy has previously opposed. Many other chronic diseases are associated with infections or can be triggered by infections, including autoimmune diseases. Emerging evidence also suggests Alzheimer’s disease may be caused by infections, although that is still far from clear.

“The evidence is mounting, for many of the chronic conditions, that there is an infectious etiology,” Garth Ehrlich, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, told NBC News. “To me, chronic disease and infectious disease almost go hand in hand.”

As we’ve written before, Kennedy has put forth unsupported narratives on the causes of chronic disease in children.

Vaccine Safety and VAERS

During the second hearing, Sanders asked Kennedy if the COVID-19 vaccine “was the deadliest vaccine ever made,” as Kennedy has falsely claimed in the past. 

“The reason I said that, Sen. Sanders, is because there were more reports on the VAERS system, on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System … than any other — than all other vaccines combined,” he said. He then claimed we don’t know if the COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives “because we don’t have a good surveillance system” and “because we don’t have the science to make that determination.”

But a large body of work across the globe has confirmed the overall safety of the COVID-19 vaccines, which only rarely cause serious side effects. VAERS, as we’ve explained numerous times, is an early warning system for vaccines that quickly flags potential safety concerns. The system collects reports of potential side effects, but the reports aren’t vetted for accuracy and they do not mean the vaccine caused a particular problem. Scientists and regulators then follow up on any concerning patterns, using several other safety surveillance systems to identify real concerns.

As we explained back in 2021, when Kennedy’s nonprofit was making the same claim, simply having more reports in VAERS, as the COVID-19 vaccines do, is not evidence of a safety issue. With more people getting vaccinated all at once, with a new vaccine that is under intense scrutiny, it’s expected that there would be an unusually large number of reports to VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines. In addition, the government expanded the reporting requirements specifically for the COVID-19 vaccines.

False Claim About ‘Gold Standard’ Opioid Addiction Treatment

Kennedy replied in the affirmative when Kim asked him whether he supported medications such as buprenorphine and methadone to treat opioid addiction. The drugs help manage withdrawal symptoms and have been shown in numerous studies to reduce opioid use.

But when asked if those medicines are safe and considered the “gold standard” approach, Kennedy demurred.

“The Cochrane Collaboration, which is the most prestigious scientific — or scientific research organization — has said that the … gold standard is 12 step programs,” he said. 

That’s wrong. A 2020 Cochrane review on alcohol use disorder found that Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12‐step programs were similar or more effective at reducing drinking than other psychological clinical interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy. But the review did not compare the strategy to medication — and it did not apply to opioid use disorder.

For the latter, medications are widely recognized as the most effective options, although not everyone wants or needs to use them. On its website, the American Psychiatric Association specifically refers to the medications as “the ‘gold-standard’ of treatment.”

Kennedy, who regularly attends AA meetings and has been in recovery for a heroin addiction for decades, went on to acknowledge that many people “will not respond immediately, at least, to 12 step programs,” and that “suboxone and other and even methadone are critical interventions that save lives, that get addicts off the street, and they should be available as a treatment option.”

“I wouldn’t describe them as gold standard, but I would describe them as medically necessary,” he added.

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Source: FactCheck

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

The U.S. Army identified one of the Black Hawk helicopter pilots killed in the midair crash with a passenger jet on Jan. 29 as Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach. But social media posts have falsely identified two different women to claim the pilot was either a transgender woman or a former White House press aide.

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Full Story

During his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump issued executive orders that placed a freeze on hiring federal employees, banned transgender people from serving in the military and ended any federal programs or policies aimed at diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

As we’ve written, diversity initiatives and Trump’s executive orders have been cited, without evidence, by the president and social media posts as factors in the midair collision of a passenger jet and a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Jan. 29. All 64 people aboard the jet coming from Wichita, Kansas, and the three soldiers in the helicopter were killed.

Partisan politics and references to Trump’s policies have surfaced again in social media posts that have misidentified one of the helicopter pilots killed in the crash.

In the days immediately after the collision, online posts falsely claimed that one of the dead helicopter pilots was a transgender woman named Jo Ellis. “Was this … why Trump said what he said?” a Threads post asked.

Ellis, a helicopter pilot who has served for 15 years in the Virginia Army National Guard, took to social media herself to show that she was not involved in the collision, sharing a “proof of life” video and statement on her Facebook page on Jan. 31. In addition, Ellis appeared in an interview with commentator Michael Smerconish on his news website on Feb. 1.

Also on Feb. 1, the U.S. Army issued a statement identifying a female pilot killed in the helicopter as Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach of Durham, North Carolina. The statement said Lobach had served as an aviation officer in the Army since July 2019 and was assigned to the 12th Aviation Battalion, Ft. Belvoir, Virginia. Lobach’s awards included the Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, National Defense Service Medal and Army Service Ribbon.

The other two soldiers killed in the crash, both men, were identified by the Army as Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O’Hara, a helicopter repairer, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, a pilot.

Misidentified Again Online

Despite the Army’s Feb. 1 statement identifying Lobach and sharing her photo, subsequent social media posts included a photo of another woman and wrongly claimed she was the soldier killed in the crash.

A Feb. 2 Threads post claimed, “It’s being reported that the Blackhawk pilot responsible for killing 64 civilians in DC on Wednesday night is Rebecca Lobach. She worked for Karine Jean-Pierre in the Press shop at the White House during the Biden administration. She was not a full-time pilot.”

The post gets the pilot’s name right, but Lobach did not serve in the White House press office, and she does not appear in a photo in the Threads post that shows former President Joe Biden and White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre with a group of young people.

A Feb. 3 Instagram post shows the same photo of young people with Biden, with a red circle around one young woman. The text on the post says, “BLACK HAWK PILOT: She spent the last two years at the White House instead of flying? Why?”

The photo was indeed included in a Jan. 2 Instagram post by Jean-Pierre, who said, “Here’s to the best team in the business. I couldn’t do it without you. … Let’s run though the tape!”

But the fact-checking website Lead Stories identified the woman highlighted in the Feb. 3 Instagram post photo as Chloe Kellison, whose LinkedIn and Instagram accounts identify her as a press assistant at the White House.

While Lobach is not the woman in the photo shared in the social media posts, she did serve as a White House military social aide. Social aides assist with “diplomatic protocol at state events, at annual meetings with the leaders of Congress and the federal judiciary, and at other significant social events,” according to the White House Historical Association website.

A statement from the Lobach family included with the Army’s Feb. 1 statement said: “Rebecca was a warrior and would not hesitate to defend her country in battle. But she was as graceful as she was fierce: in addition to her duties as an Army aviator, Rebecca was honored to serve as a White House Military Social Aide, volunteering to support the President and First Lady in hosting countless White House events, including ceremonies awarding the Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

The family’s statement also said, “Rebecca began her career in the United States Army as a distinguished military graduate in ROTC at the University of North Carolina, and was in the top 20% of cadets nationwide. She achieved the rank of Captain, having twice served as a Platoon Leader and as a Company Executive Officer in the 12th Aviation Battalion, Davison Army Airfield, Fort Belvoir, Virginia. With more than 450 hours of flight time, she earned certification as a pilot-in-command after extensive testing by the most senior and experienced pilots in her battalion.”

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Sources

CNN. “Trans Army Pilot: ‘I was not surprised by the hate. This is my reality.’” Smerconish. 1 Feb 2025.

Hale Spencer, Saranac and D’Angelo Gore. “No Evidence for the Political Finger-Pointing Over D.C. Plane Crash.” FactCheck.org. 31 Jan 2025.

Raby, John. “What is known about the deadly collision between a passenger jet and Army helicopter.” Associated Press. 4 Feb 2025.

Shapiro, Emily. “DC plane crash live updates: Crews hope to recover cockpit on Tuesday.” ABC News. 4 Feb 2025.

Simmons-Duffin, Selena. “Trump issues order to ban transgender troops from serving openly in the military.” NPR. 28 Jan 2025.

Thompson, Stuart A. “Virginia Pilot Responds After She Is Falsely Targeted Over Black Hawk Crash.” New York Times. Updated 3 Feb 2025.

U.S. Army. “Army identifies Third Soldier involved in Helicopter Crash.” Army Public Affairs. 1 Feb 2025.

White House Historical Association. “White House Military Social Aides.” Accessed 4 Feb 2025.

White House. Presidential Actions. “Hiring Freeze.” Executive Order. 20 Jan 2025.

White House. Presidential Actions. “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs.” Executive Order. 20 Jan 2025.

White House. Presidential Actions. “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” Executive Order. 27 Jan 2025.

Source: FactCheck

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

On his first day in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that attempts to slow the growth in the country’s wind generation capacity. 

The order paused all leasing of federal waters for offshore wind and paused new or renewed approvals for onshore or offshore wind projects on federal land until the outcome of a “comprehensive assessment and review of federal wind leases and permitting practices.” The order also suspended a large and previously approved project in Idaho. Although the order described the provisions as temporary, no end date is specified. 

“We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said after his inauguration on Jan. 20 during a rally. “Big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood.” 

Also on Jan. 20, the Department of Interior issued a broader order for a 60-day suspension of “any onshore or offshore renewable energy authorization.”  

That same day, in a separate executive order, Trump declared a national energy emergency based on the nation’s “inadequate energy supply and infrastructure.” While the order discussed the need for “a reliable, diversified, and affordable supply of energy,” it also blamed the previous administration for creating “a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid” – which mirrors some of Trump’s misleading criticisms about wind energy being unreliable.

Trump’s attacks against wind power are not new. We’ve been fact-checking his false and misleading claims for nearly a decade. He has said, for example, that wind energy doesn’t work, either because it’s unreliable or because it needs subsidies. But as we’ve explained, electrical grids are able to manage the variability of wind power due to fluctuations in weather. And while subsidies have played an important role in building the wind industry, onshore wind — the type that makes up the vast majority of wind turbines in the U.S. — is on par with or cheaper than natural gas or coal plants.

We have also explained that there is no evidence to support Trump’s claims on wind energy development killing whales. Scientists link the deaths, which are at unusual rates since 2016, to different factors including an increase of commercial activity in areas where whales eat or migrate.  

He repeated some of these and other claims in a rally right after his inauguration address, as well as in his executive order itself.

For example, the executive order stated that the pause is subject to a review that will consider the environmental impact of wind projects in land and water “upon wildlife, including, but not limited to, birds and marine mammals” and “the economic costs associated with the intermittent generation of electricity and the effect of subsidies on the viability of the wind industry.”

Wind is the largest renewable source of electricity generation in the U.S., providing over 10% of the country’s electricity. More than 73,000 wind turbines generate a total of 153,000 megawatts, which is enough to power 46 million homes, according to American Clean Power, a clean energy trade group. The wind industry invested $10 billion in new projects in 2023, and it employed over 131,000 workers, according to Clean Power and the Department of Energy, respectively.

Trump’s energy emergency executive order excludes wind from its definition of the terms “energy” or “energy resources.” Included are “crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.”

What did the order on wind energy do?

The order stopped new approvals, and renewals, of wind energy projects on federal land and waters. 

It removed “all areas within the Offshore Continental Shelf” for consideration of any wind energy leasing intended to generate electricity or any other related use of wind.

The outer continental shelf consists of more than 3 billion offshore acres along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts; around the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands; and in the Gulf of Mexico (which the federal government is renaming the Gulf of America) and along the coast of Alaska. States have jurisdiction over 3 nautical miles from the coastline, with some exceptions, and the federal jurisdiction extends from there to roughly 200 nautical miles. 

The Department of Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is responsible for all OCS leasing policy, including offshore renewable energy developments in federal waters. 

The order also directed all federal agencies to pause all “new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects” until the secretary of the Interior completes a “comprehensive” review of the federal “leasing and permitting practices.”

As reasons for the directive, the order cited “deficiencies” in the leasing and permitting process that “may lead to grave harm” to the country’s interests and marine mammals, and “potential inadequacies in various environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act to lease or permit wind projects.”

“This concern directly conflicts with the objective of other EOs to potentially accelerate or avoid both NEPA and Endangered Species Act review to spur fossil energy production, including oil and gas development on the Outer Continental Shelf,” Carrie Jenks and Sara Dewey, from Harvard’s Environmental & Energy Law Program, wrote in an explainer. 

In addition, the order placed a “temporary moratorium on all activities and rights” related to the construction and operation of the Lava Ridge Wind Project, a 1,000-megawatt project proposed and approved in Idaho (more on this later).

“The order is extremely expansive,” Matthew B. Eisenson, senior fellow at the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, told us in an email. 

A last provision allows — “and seems to encourage,” according to Eisenson — the attorney general to decide if a court where litigation is pending against onshore or offshore projects should, as the order said, “stay the litigation or otherwise delay further litigation, or seek other appropriate relief consistent with this order” until the completion of the Interior secretary’s review. 

“This suggests that the federal government may change its position in ongoing lawsuits. Instead of continuing to defend the permits issued by federal agencies, the federal government may seek to delay or settle those lawsuits,” Eisenson told us.

How could this impact the industry?

The order could potentially undermine the growth of the industry in the U.S. 

The country’s installed wind power generating capacity has gone from 2.4 gigawatts in 2000 to 150.1 gigawatts in April 2024, when electricity generated from wind established a new record in the U.S. and exceeded coal-fired generation for a second month in a row, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

Yet, the development of wind energy in the U.S. has had a number of challenges in the last years — opposition from local communities who don’t want to see the turbines, misinformation campaigns and increasing costs due to inflation and supply chain disruptions, to name some.  

“It is very disappointing,” Mads Nipper, CEO of Orsted, said of the challenges in recent years, on an investors and analysts call on Jan. 21. 

Orsted is a Danish multinational energy corporation and one of the world’s largest developers of offshore wind power, which owns wind projects in New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware. In late 2023, Orsted canceled two massive offshore projects in New Jersey, Ocean Wind 1 and 2, citing high inflation and problems with supply chains. In a Jan. 20 statement, the company reported a decline in the value of its U.S. portfolio due to rate increases and loss of land value due to “market uncertainties among other factors.” 

During the call, which happened after Trump’s orders, Nipper said the company is still making a profit in the U.S. market and remains “committed to” it, but said he would not comment on Trump’s executive order until Feb. 6, when the company will present yearly results.

“We’ve of course taken note of the executive order,” Nipper said during the call. “We’re in the process of reviewing it to assess the impact of our portfolio,” he said. “I can confirm that both Sunrise and Revolution Wind have all federal permits in place,” he added later in the call. Sunrise Wind, is a 924-megawatt project offshore of New York, while Revolution Wind is a 704-megawatt project offshore of Rhode Island.    

Jeremy Slayton, a press officer for Dominion Energy, whose 2,587-megawatt Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project is projected to produce enough electricity to power up to 660,000 homes and is expected to complete construction by 2026, told us the project “is fully permitted and nearly halfway through construction.”  

“We’re confident CVOW will be completed on-time, and that Virginia’s clean energy transition will continue with bipartisan support for many years to come,” he said in an email. 

According to a report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, as of May 2024 there were offshore projects with 80,000 megawatt capacity in the pipeline, 90% of which were either in the permitting phase or earlier in the process.

Last week, during his confirmation hearing, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said about offshore wind projects in the Gulf of Maine, “I’m not familiar with every project that the Interior has underway, but I’ll certainly be taking a look at all of those, and if they make sense and they’re already in law, then they’ll continue.”

During Biden’s administration, the Interior Department approved 11 commercial offshore wind projects. 

How does the order impact approved wind projects?

While the order said that the withdrawal of the outer continental shelf areas from consideration for new leasing does not affect any rights under existing leases, it directed the secretary of the Interior to conduct a “comprehensive review of the ecological, economic, and environmental necessity of terminating or amending” them and to identify “any legal bases for such removal.” 

“This suggests that we may see future attempts to interfere with rights under existing leases,” Eisenson told us. He added that the provision directing all federal agencies not to issue any “‘new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases, or loans for onshore or offshore wind projects’ is so expansive that it could cause trouble to projects that have received all major approvals if unforeseen circumstances force them to make minor modifications to project design that require approval from federal agencies.”  

How could it impact projects on private land?

Private developers don’t usually need permitting from the federal government, but some projects are required to get federal approvals for studies on the impacts to wetlands and endangered or protected species on private land.

The vast majority of onshore wind projects — about 99% of them — are on private land, according to the American Clean Power Association. 

Overall, including both onshore and offshore projects, the group told us the top state for operating wind capacity is Texas (which is also first in solar capacity), and wind is supplying about half of the electric power in other conservative-leaning states, such as Iowa, Kansas, and South Dakota, and about 40% of the electric power in Oklahoma.

Could it stop the Lava Ridge Wind project?

The proposed 1,000-megawatt project to be developed on federal land in Idaho was approved on Dec. 6 by the Bureau of Land Management. The project has faced significant opposition by some community groups, farmers and Republicans, with one of the loudest criticisms being that the wind turbines would be visible from a historic site where Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. In response, the company behind the project, Magic Valley Energy, committed to reducing the number of turbines and moving them 9 miles away from the Minidoka National Historic Site. 

BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said his decision to approve the project “reflects a comprehensive evaluation of environmental impacts, community input, and the potential benefits of the project” and “represents a rational compromise between important competing interests under a multiple use mandate as it results in the smallest project footprint on public lands and the lowest number of acres disturbed out of all action alternatives and still advances national directives and policy … regarding the promotion and expansion of renewable energy on public lands.”

Trump’s executive order, however, said the decision “is allegedly contrary to the public interest and suffers from legal deficiencies” and directed the Interior secretary to halt “all activities and rights” of the development. It also instructs Interior to review BLM’s decision and “as appropriate, conduct a new, comprehensive analysis of the various interests implicated by the Lava Ridge Wind Project and the potential environmental impacts.”

Following the executive order, Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little signed a complementary executive order titled “Gone with the Lava Ridge Wind Project Act,” which directs state agencies to “fully cooperate” with the new assessment. 

Eisenson told us the abrupt reversal of the decision to permit Lava Ridge Wind could be challenged in court.

Magic Valley Energy told us in an email the company has no comment or statement “[a]t this time.” Lava Ridge Wind could provide power to 300,000 homes. A second project from the company in Idaho could provide an additional 800 megawatts. 

What has Trump said about wind energy?

As we mentioned, Trump’s animosity against wind is not new, nor are the false and misleading claims he mentioned in a rally after his inauguration.  

Trump, Jan 20: We’re not going to do the wind thing. Wind … big, ugly windmills, they ruin your neighborhood, they ruin your — If you have a house that’s near a windmill, guess what? Your house is worth less than half. And did you see up in New England with the whales? You see what’s happening? So, they had two whales killed in about 14 years. Last year and the year before total, they had 28. So, if you’re into whales, you don’t want windmills either. And they’re the most expensive form of energy that you can have, by far. And they’re all made in China, by the way, practically all of them. And they kill your birds, and they ruin your beautiful landscapes. But other than that, I think they’re quite good, right? No, remember when we used to joke and kid — when we were kidding, but we don’t kid anymore —  they want to watch the debates on television, they want to watch your favorite president on television, but the wind isn’t blowing, so we can’t watch television that night, “Gladys, remember? Gladys, I’m sorry, the wind is just not blowing, we’re not watching Trump tonight.” 

We’ve written about some of these claims before. 

Wind and property values: As we wrote when Trump claimed in 2023 that “windmills” lower property values by 65% or 75%, no studies suggest such big declines in property values. According to a 2024 report by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, most studies show no or small changes in property values, and mostly in urban areas.

Wind and the environment: As we recently explained, wind farms do have some negative environmental impacts, but wind energy generation has dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions than energy coming from fossil fuels. 

Wind and whales: There is still “no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and “no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.” As we wrote in 2023, scientists suspect a variety of factors are behind whale strandings on the East Coast, including at an ongoing “unusual mortality event” that goes back to 2016. Climate change has affected the distribution of the prey whales rely on, leading to altered migration routes where there could be more vessel strikes of whales and entanglement with fishing gear.   

Wind and birds: As we explained in 2016 and most recently in 2024, wind turbines do kill a number of birds, but buildings and cats pose larger threats. Estimates vary, but a 2020 report concluded the median was 1.3 bird deaths per megawatt of wind capacity per year. That’s about 200,000 birds per year based on the U.S. total wind power capacity. For context, 600 million birds die annually from collisions against glass buildings; 2.4 billion per year are killed by cats, and 750,000 die per year in pits filled with oil or other fluids in oil production operations, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. 

Cost: As we’ve explained, offshore wind energy is currently very expensive, but nuclear energy is typically the most expensive power type. Power generated from wind turbines on land is cheaper and has a similar cost as natural gas and coal plants, even without subsidies. 

Made in China: It is true that China dominates the wind turbine manufacturing market, but it doesn’t produce all of them. China accounted for 65% of the global wind capacity in 2023, according to Wood Mackenzie. Clean Power’s annual market report shows there are almost 450 wind-related manufacturing facilities in the U.S.

Intermittency: As we‘ve explained several times, wind power does come with an extra variability, since the wind is not always blowing. Intermittency “would be a problem if we were trying to build an energy system that relied 100% on wind power,” Columbia’s Eisenson told us. “But nobody is trying to do that.” People don’t lose power when the wind isn’t blowing because wind is one of many energy sources coming into the electrical grid.

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In his first term, President Donald Trump tried to force TikTok’s parent company to sell its popular app or cease operating in the U.S., citing the need to “take aggressive action … to protect our national security.”

But in his return to the Oval Office, Trump delayed enforcement of a law that would have forced TikTok to shut down in the U.S. on Jan. 19. And, in a Jan. 22 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump downplayed concerns he once raised about TikTok as a national security risk, saying he is “starting to have a very warm spot” for TikTok because he did well with young voters. 

“You know, the interesting thing with TikTok though is you’re dealing with a lot of young people,” Trump told Hannity. “So, is it that important for China to be spying … on young kids watching crazy videos?”

The answer for some members of Congress and cybersecurity experts is a resounding yes. 

“Let’s be clear, TikTok is absolutely a national security threat,” Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Jan. 26. Turner, a former chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, cited the vast amount of data that TikTok collects on U.S. users and Chinese laws that require TikTok to turn over that data to the Chinese Communist Party upon request. 

In the first of two executive orders he issued in August 2020 to address the alleged threat posed by TikTok, Trump explained how TikTok data could be used against the U.S. government, residents and companies.  

“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories,” an Aug. 6, 2020, executive order said. “This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

Others, however, say the U.S. has failed to provide evidence that TikTok poses an actual threat, as opposed to a theoretical threat. They also question how the forced sale of TikTok would protect U.S. user data if China can still purchase it from private data brokers that collect and sell such information.

“China is unquestionably a foreign adversary, and the threats posed by TikTok’s popularity and China’s theoretical ability to demand huge amounts of data about American citizens are real,” Kat Duffy, senior fellow for digital and cyberspace policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a Jan. 17 blog post shortly before Trump delayed enforcement of the TikTok law for 75 days. 

But, she wrote, “[i]f Congress is going to force the sale of a platform used by more than 170 million Americans to share and receive information—which generates billions of dollars in revenue for U.S. small businesses and creators—Americans deserve more than, ‘Trust us!’ and generalized national security warnings.”

Here, we will summarize the facts about TikTok and the national security concerns that some have about a Chinese company operating the app in the U.S.

The Rise of TikTok and Concerns About National Security

ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing, China, first released the TikTok app in September 2016. But it wasn’t available in the United States until August 2018 – nine months after ByteDance acquired Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based video-sharing app that operated in the U.S. and had an office in California, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.   

ByteDance merged Musical.ly and TikTok to form one very popular app known for its addictive short-form videos. It wasn’t long after the August 2018 merger that concerns about TikTok surfaced. 

“I and others were raising alarms in 2019 when we noticed that the popularity of TikTok was growing,” Lindsay Gorman, managing director and senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund’s Technology Program, told us in an interview. 

What concerned Gorman at that time was the curious absence of TikTok videos about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The protests, which started in the spring of 2019, were in response to a bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be extradited to China.  

In September 2019, the Washington Post reported that the pro-democracy hashtag #hongkong was prevalent on social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, but not on TikTok. That raised concerns, the Post wrote, that TikTok was censoring “sympathetic memes and imagery from the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy marchers.”

Days after the Post article, the Guardian reported that TikTok’s content moderation policy “instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong,” citing internal company guidelines. 

The Guardian, Sept. 25, 2019: The guidelines divide banned material into two categories: some content is marked as a “violation”, which sees it deleted from the site entirely, and can lead to a user being banned from the service. But lesser infringements are marked as “visible to self”, which leaves the content up but limits its distribution through TikTok’s algorithmically-curated feed.

Two weeks later, then-Sen. Marco Rubio – who is now secretary of state in the Trump administration – asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, to review “the national security implications” of ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly.

“According to reports, TikTok acquired Musical.ly, a video-sharing platform, without any oversight and relaunched the service for Western markets,” Rubio wrote. “These Chinese-owned apps are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Government and Communist Party. These topics include Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other issues.”

TikTok denied allegations of censorship. “Let us be very clear: TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China,” the company said in a blog post, adding that it is “not influenced by any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”

CFIUS did the review that Rubio had requested. On Aug. 14, 2020, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the committee unanimously recommended to Trump that he force ByteDance to divest from TikTok. On that same day, Trump issued an order requiring ByteDance to divest from TikTok and destroy data it had collected on TikTok users in the United States. It was the second time that month that Trump had issued an executive order calling for action against TikTok’s owners. 

However, as we have written, TikTok and TikTok users successfully challenged Trump’s order, stopping it from taking effect. “The courts ultimately sided with the plaintiffs and issued preliminary injunctions temporarily barring the United States from enforcing the restrictions,” CRS said in a September 2023 report.

After he assumed the presidency in 2021, Joe Biden withdrew Trump’s executive orders on TikTok, and the lawsuits were dismissed, CRS said in its report. But TikTok would continue to grow in popularity, and the effort to force the sale of TikTok would continue. 

In March, the House overwhelmingly passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act by a vote of 352 to 65. A month later, it became law as part of an emergency supplemental bill that Biden signed April 24. 

The new law gave ByteDance 270 days, or nine months, to sell TikTok, and an extension of no more than three months if it can show “significant progress” toward complying with the law.

Instead of initiating a sale, TikTok went to court to argue that the law violated the constitutional right to free speech. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law in a Jan. 17 decision.

If TikTok continued to operate beyond Jan. 19, U.S. companies that provide services to TikTok, such as those that host TikTok’s data and distribute its app, could be fined $5,000 for each TikTok user in the U.S. Although it briefly shut down its app on Jan. 19, TikTok was back online after gaining assurances from Trump that he would not enforce the law.

On Jan. 20, his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order that instructed the U.S. attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days “to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.”

On Feb. 3, Trump signed an executive order directing the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments to create a sovereign wealth fund. At the signing, Trump said the government-owned investment fund might be used to purchase TikTok.

“We’re going to be doing something perhaps with TikTok, perhaps not,” Trump said. “If we make the right deal, we’ll do it. Otherwise, we won’t. … Or if we do a partnership with very wealthy people, a lot of options. But we could put that, as an example, in the fund.”

TikTok Data Collection

Asked if TikTok poses a national security threat, Gorman, the German Marshall Fund senior fellow, told us that the app poses “two key threats.”

The first, she said, is about data – a massive collection of information that has grown in size since Trump last held office. In 2020, TikTok had about 49 million U.S. users. Since then, TikTok says it has more than tripled its number of U.S. users to more than 150 million. 

“TikTok collects a range of user information, including location data and internet address, keystroke patterns, and the type of device being used to access the app,” CRS said in a June 2023 report. “The app also collects and stores a user’s browsing and search history within the app, as well as the content of any messages exchanged using the app.

“Additional information can be collected based on user permission: phone number, phone book, and social-network contacts; GPS data; user age; user-generated content (e.g., photos and videos); store payment information; and the videos ‘liked,’ shared, watched all the way through, and re-watched,” the CRS report said.

CRS said TikTok’s data collection “appears to be comparable to what other social media companies gather and use,” but it noted that the Cybersecurity Law of the People’s Republic of China “requires Chinese companies to cooperate with government intelligence operations if so requested.”

Gorman said the fact that TikTok must give China its user data upon request is a national security concern. 

“In the U.S.,” she said, “there has to be a court order,” backed by evidence and signed by a judge, before a company is forced to turn over such data to the government. 

In its June 2023 report, CRS said, “TikTok forcefully states that it does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government.” But the report added that “TikTok did admit that employees in China had accessed the data of a few U.S. journalists in 2022.”

In that case, four ByteDance employees who were investigating internal leaks to the media improperly accessed TikTok data on reporters for BuzzFeed and Financial Times. After an internal investigation, ByteDance fired four employees, including two based in China, and imposed tougher restrictions on access to user data, CNN reported.

BuzzFeed said ByteDance’s targeting of its reporter “comes in the wake of a series of reports by BuzzFeed News that exposed major issues within its parent company, from employees accessing American users’ data from China to ByteDance’s attempts to push pro-China messaging to Americans.” The Financial Times said its reporter had written stories about a staff exodus at TikTok’s London office over working conditions. 

Is TikTok a Propaganda Threat? 

The second threat to U.S. national security, Gorman said, is the potential for the Chinese Communist Party to use TikTok data for covert or overt propaganda campaigns aimed at U.S. citizens.

Although Trump dismissed TikTok users as “kids watching crazy videos,” Gorman cited a rise in the percentage of U.S. residents who get their news from TikTok and an increase in politicians using the popular app to reach voters.

In two surveys taken in the last two years, Pew found that most younger adults in the U.S. use TikTok and a growing percentage of younger adults say they get their news from the app.

“TikTok use is especially prevalent among younger adults – 56% of all U.S. adults ages 18 to 34 say they use the platform,” according to a Pew Research Center survey taken in August 2023.

In a separate survey last year, Pew Research Center found that 17% of U.S. adults regularly get their news from TikTok, including 39% of young adults under 30 years old who cited TikTok as their news source. By comparison, Pew found that only 3% of all U.S. adults and 9% of adults under 30 years got their news from TikTok in 2020.

“More and more people are getting their news on TikTok – 30% of Americans under a certain age get news from TikTok,” Gorman told us. “At the height of the Cold War, I don’t think we would have allowed the Soviet Union to own a social media site that delivers news to 30% of Americans.”

Gorman also said a report she co-authored last year found that 27% of all candidates in 2024 for Congress and two statewide races (gubernatorial and secretary of state) had TikTok accounts — an increase from 23% in the 2022 campaigns. “It’s no longer just this fun, viral thing,” she said of TikTok.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told an audience at the University of Michigan’s Ford School in December 2022 that the Chinese government has the potential to control TikTok’s algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content and, if they want to, to use it for influence operations [that] are a lot more worrisome in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party than whether or not you’re steering somebody as an influencer to one product or another.”

Gorman recalled how Russia’s Internet Research Agency carried out a covert propaganda campaign on Facebook to support Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Now, just imagine if Russia owned Facebook,” she said.

A more recent example may have occurred in Romania, but this time on TikTok. 

“Romania just set aside its entire presidential election because of concerns that TikTok has manipulated data and propaganda with respect to its presidential election,” Turner said on “Face the Nation.”

The Ohio congressman was referring to Calin Georgescu’s surprising victory on Nov. 24 in the first round of Romania’s presidential election, which has been tossed out by Romania’s Constitutional Court. Romanian officials claim that the far-right, pro-Russia candidate benefited “from a Russia-style booster campaign involving TikTok, according to declassified Romanian intelligence documents,” Politico reported. A new election will take place in May, Politico said.

Both TikTok and Russia have denied interfering in the election to help Georgescu.

Mark Scott, a senior resident fellow at the Democracy + Tech Initiative at the Atlantic Council, agreed with Gorman that “[d]ata that falls into the hands of an adversarial country may pose a direct national security threat, including via data brokers.”

“What we’ve seen, based on what information can be collected, including people’s geolocation, contacts, and data about their devices, is that such data can help adversarial countries garner an in-depth understanding of American citizens,” Scott told us in an email. “Such insight can then be fed into efforts, either via overt propaganda or covert influence campaigns, that target Americans.”

However, Scott wrote in a Jan. 9 post on the Atlantic Council website that forcing ByteDance to sell or shut down TikTok in the U.S. won’t “make Americans’ data more private and secure.”

“While US officials have raised concerns about how Americans’ data may be accessed by Chinese government officials via TikTok, such personal information—from people’s phone numbers and home addresses to internet activity to consumer purchasing history—is already available commercially, via so-called domestic data brokers,” he wrote. “The outgoing Biden administration tried to tackle that problem with the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act and prohibitions placed on these data brokers from transferring such sensitive data to foreign adversaries like China.”

The House unanimously passed the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act in March, but the bill did not come up for a vote in the Senate.

Gorman agreed that Congress should pass that legislation, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to solve what we can.” Forcing TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell the app is a good first step in protecting user data, she said.

“These are two separate problems. They are not at all the same,” Gorman said, referring to data brokers and a Chinese company owning TikTok. “The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need a data broker if it has TikTok.” 

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Source: FactCheck

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

After the deadly collision between a passenger plane and a U.S. Army helicopter in Washington, D.C., politicians and political commentators were quick to cast blame. President Donald Trump suggested diversity initiatives within the Federal Aviation Administration were at fault for the crash, and his critics pointed to a hiring freeze that Trump instituted on Jan. 20.

But neither side has evidence that those actions contributed to the crash.

The midair collision on Jan. 29 near Reagan Washington National Airport left no survivors. A total of 67 people reportedly died — 64 who were on the plane coming from Wichita, Kansas, and three soldiers who were in the helicopter.

The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation into what caused the crash. In a press conference on Jan. 30, leaders stressed that the case was just beginning, and they had no answers yet.

Trump Blames His Predecessors

At a press conference on Jan. 30, Trump told reporters, “We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions.”

The president then went on to suggest that diversity hiring programs were to blame. He referred to a memo he signed on Jan. 21, eight days before the crash, titled “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation.”

The memo incorrectly attributed a long-standing policy of the FAA only to former President Joe Biden’s administration, saying that “the prior administration sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties.”

At the press conference, Trump, again, made the same claim. He read aloud a headline that had been published by the New York Post and Fox News a year earlier. The headline said, “The FAA’s diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.” The president added, “They can be air traffic controllers — I don’t think so.”

That story was published in January 2024, following an incident in Oregon when an emergency exit door flew off of a Boeing 737 while it was in flight. Trump wrongly indicated that the story was published in January 2025, weeks before he took office.

The Fox News story had linked to a page on the FAA website about diversity and inclusion initiatives that had been active since at least 2013, according to the Internet Archive, and as Snopes discovered last year. Notably, that page had also been active — and carried the same language — through Trump’s first administration.

“The initiative is part of the FAA’s Diversity and Inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel,” Trump read at the press conference, adding: “I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.”

Citing the FAA website, Trump said the federal government had identified certain disabilities “for special emphasis in recruitment and hiring,” saying they included “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis” and more. All of that language was on the FAA’s website during Trump’s first term.

The Washington Post Fact Checker also noted that during Trump’s first administration, in 2019, the FAA announced a new program “to help prepare people with disabilities for careers in air traffic operations.”

In his Jan. 21 memo, however, the president said that “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring … penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.”

At the press conference, when a reporter asked Trump why he thought the reason for the crash was diversity among air traffic controllers, the president said, “Because I have common sense.”

Later on Jan. 30, a reporter asked if Trump was saying that “race or gender played a role in this tragedy.” Trump said: “It may have. I don’t know. Incompetence might have played a role. We’ll let you know that, but we want the most competent people. We don’t care what race they are. We want the most competent people especially in those positions.”

Critics Blame Trump

Meanwhile, on social media, some critics of Trump are claiming or suggesting — also without proof — that he is the one responsible for the deadly crash.

An account belonging to Trill Clinton, whose bio says he worked for the Department of Housing and Urban and Development during the Obama administration, published a Jan. 30 post on X saying, “You dont get to: 1. Fire the head of the TSA, and the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. 2. Freeze hiring of all Air Traffic Controllers. 3. Fire 100 top FAA security officers. And then claim a plane crash a week later is ‘a tragic accident.’”

Sawyer Hackett, a democratic strategist and consultant, similarly wrote on X, “If a Democrat fired 100 FAA employees and put a freeze on hiring air traffic controllers 8 days before an airport plane crash, there would be a right-wing and media frenzy for weeks.” In another post, Hackett said, “The plane crash in DC was Trump’s fault.”

But there is no evidence that any recent executive actions taken by Trump played a role in the incident.

On his first day back in office as president, Trump did sign an executive order putting a temporary freeze on the hiring of federal civilian employees.

“As part of this freeze, no Federal civilian position that is vacant at noon on January 20, 2025, may be filled, and no new position may be created except as otherwise provided for in this memorandum or other applicable law,” the order said.

However, the order also said that the hiring freeze does not apply to “military personnel of the armed forces or to positions related to immigration enforcement, national security, or public safety.” The White House told us in an email that the freeze did not apply to air traffic control specialists because of the public safety exemption. A spokesperson also said that no air traffic controllers were fired.

On Jan. 30, the New York Times, citing an internal FAA report on safety, reported that staffing at Reagan National Airport’s air traffic control tower was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic.” But an Associated Press source later contradicted that FAA report, telling the AP that staffing was normal the night of Jan. 29.

But the Reagan airport tower “has been understaffed for years” and “was nearly a third below targeted staff levels,” as of September 2023, the Times said in its report.

It’s also true that after he took office, Trump removed the heads of the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard and eliminated members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee — although it’s not clear that those decisions had a direct connection to the Jan. 29 crash, either.

In a story addressing claims that Trump is at fault, PolitiFact quoted Jim Cardoso, a former U.S. Air Force colonel and pilot who directs the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute, as saying that “the actions by President Trump would not have led to such an immediate impact.”

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Q: Did former President Joe Biden issue a statement saying that he thought the Equal Rights Amendment should be considered part of the Constitution?

A: Yes. On his last full day in office, Biden published a statement supporting the ERA, but it has no legal effect.

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

FULL ANSWER

In one of his final acts before leaving office, former President Joe Biden issued a statement asserting that the Equal Rights Amendment should be considered part of the Constitution.

The ERA — which would add a 28th amendment to the Constitution saying, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” — has now amassed more than a century of history, often reflecting the culture of the moment.

It was first proposed in 1923 following the success of the women’s suffrage movement and was revived in the 1970s with the rise of the women’s rights movement. In 1972, it passed a two-thirds majority of Congress, but then faltered on the other requirement for becoming enshrined in the Constitution — ratification by three-quarters of the states.

It arguably reached that threshold — ratification by 38 states — in 2020, but that was decades after a congressionally set 1982 deadline had passed. In recent years, the ERA has taken on urgency from both supporters and opponents for its potential to impact abortion rights.

In his Jan. 17 statement, Biden said, “I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: the 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”

This caused confusion on social media, with some understanding it to mean that the ERA had been officially added to the Constitution, and it prompted one reader to ask us, “Is this real?”

Yes, the statement from Biden is real. But it has no practical effect.

It’s easy to think that the statement — which says, “I agree with the [American Bar Association] and with leading legal constitutional scholars that the Equal Rights Amendment has become part of our Constitution” — could mean that some action would be taken to establish the amendment as part of the Constitution. But the president doesn’t have the authority to do that.

In fact, Article V of the Constitution — which lays out the amendment process — doesn’t assign any role to the president, legal experts explained to us.

“While presidents have a lot of power, they’re conspicuously absent from Article V,” Wilfred Codrington, a professor at Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, told us in a phone interview.

Julie Suk, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law who has written a book on the ERA, made the same point in an email to us. She also said, “Constitutional law experts have reasonable disagreements about whether or not the ERA’s unique and unprecedented ratification trajectory makes it a valid amendment under Article V.”

We’ll lay out the context for Biden’s statement amid the ERA’s complicated path to ratification.

Do Deadlines Matter?

As Biden noted, the American Bar Association is among the organizations that have endorsed the implementation of the ERA as the 28th Amendment. But others, including the conservative Heritage Foundation, oppose its implementation, citing the expiration of the 1982 deadline and the further complication that at least five states rescinded their ratifications.

On the timing issue, the joint resolution adopted by Congress in 1972 that proposed the ERA as an amendment said that it would be valid “when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years.” That would have been in 1979. But by 1977, only 35 states had ratified the amendment — three states short of the requirement — so Congress extended the deadline to 1982.

No states ratified the ERA in those intervening years. But from 2017 to 2020, Nevada, Illinois and, lastly, Virginia ratified it. That brought the total number of states to 38, which meets the constitutional requirement that three-quarters of the states must ratify an amendment — albeit 38 years after the extended deadline set by Congress.

But those who support the passage of the ERA argue that there is nothing in the Constitution that limits the time frame for ratification. The ABA’s resolution noted the extraordinary case of the 27th Amendment, which became law in 1992 and tempers the ability of members of Congress to increase their pay, that took more than 200 years to be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

However, Congress has imposed a seven-year deadline on every proposed amendment (except for the 19th) since the 18th Amendment. And, in a 1921 opinion, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’ authority to do so.

Adding to the ambiguous legal landscape for the ERA is the fact that at least five states have rescinded their ratifications. Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota and Tennessee had each rescinded their ratifications by 1978, according to a Congressional Research Service report. In 2021, North Dakota’s Legislature rolled back its ratification, passing a resolution that specified its ratification was valid only through March 22, 1979 — the original deadline set by Congress.

Whether or not those states can still be counted among the 38 for passage of the ERA remains an open question. A federal court in 1981 ruled that Idaho could rescind its ratification, concluding that the founding fathers intended for the will of the people to be reflected in the choice of whether or not to amend the Constitution.

“Until the technical three-fourths has been reached,” the judge wrote, referring to the constitutional rule that three-quarters of states must ratify an amendment, “a rescission of a prior ratification is clearly a proper exercise of a state’s power granted by the article V phrase ‘when ratified.’”

But that ruling was vacated by the U.S. Supreme Court the following year, and the case was dismissed as moot since the 1982 deadline had then passed.

The question of whether or not states can rescind ratification hasn’t been settled since.

The Supreme Court has, though, indicated that it’s a political question for Congress to address, rather than the courts.

In a 1939 opinion, the court noted an earlier example — the adoption of the 14th Amendment, for which three states had first rejected and later ratified and two states had ratified and later rescinded.

The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868, including the ratifications from the two states that had rescinded.

“We think that in accordance with this historic precedent the question of the efficacy of ratifications by state legislatures, in the light of previous rejection or attempted withdrawal, should be regarded as a political question pertaining to the political departments, with the ultimate authority in the Congress,” the court wrote.

Those who support the passage of the ERA argue that since there is no provision in the Constitution that mentions rescission, it doesn’t matter that some states have rescinded.

“Article V refers to ratification but says nothing about rescission, and there is no implied power to rescind,” the ABA wrote.

But there is no conclusive answer to either the deadline or rescission issue.

Why Now?

Biden’s statement followed a push from Democratic lawmakers for him to act before the end of his term.

“With Republicans set to take unified control of government, Americans are facing the further degradation of reproductive freedom,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York wrote in a Dec. 15 op-ed published in the New York Times. “Fortunately, Mr. Biden has the power to enshrine reproductive rights in the Constitution right now. He can direct the national archivist to certify and publish the Equal Rights Amendment.”

Under federal law, the archivist of the United States — who is in charge of the National Archives and Records Administration — is tasked with publishing and certifying new amendments to the Constitution.

Letters from both House and Senate Democrats in late November and mid-December urged Biden to direct the archivist to complete the process and publish the ERA as the 28th Amendment.

But the archivist, Colleen Shogun, issued a statement with her deputy on Dec. 17 saying that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”

She cited two opinions from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that found the deadline set by Congress was valid.

What’s Next?

“I don’t think much has changed practically,” Codrington, the professor from Cardozo School of Law, told us. “Amending the Constitution is inherently a political endeavor,” he said, since Congress is the gatekeeper and state legislatures must ratify.

So the political climate can, at times, be welcoming, or not. “After this election, it’s hard to imagine that the climate is any warmer for the ERA,” Codrington said.

Given Biden’s statement, we emailed the White House to ask about President Donald Trump’s position on the ERA, but we didn’t receive a response.

Even if the ERA is not recognized in the Constitution, though, it has already had an effect, said Suk, the Fordham University professor.

“On the ground, the ERA has already shaped constitutional law, even without being formally pronounced as ‘the law of the land’ by anyone,” she said. “In 1973 the Supreme Court changed the way it approached women’s rights and sex equality in its Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence, deriving legitimacy from the fact that Congress had adopted the ERA and many states had ratified it.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In his second day of confirmation hearings, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, refused to say that vaccines do not cause autism — despite a large body of evidence showing there is no link. He also pointed to a flawed paper to suggest that there is credible evidence to claim vaccines cause the disorder.

Unlike his Jan. 29 hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, in which Kennedy was queried about his views about vaccines, but was not forced to speak much about his beliefs about vaccines and autism, significant portions of the Jan. 30 Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing focused on the issue. 

As we’ve detailed, Kennedy has regularly repeated long-debunked claims about vaccines and autism, including as the founder and former chairman of Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that spreads vaccine misinformation.

Recently, however, he has tempered his statements on vaccines, insisting he is not anti-vaccine — and, as he said in the hearings — is “pro-safety.”

In the HELP committee hearing, Kennedy declined to disavow a link between vaccines and autism, despite pressure from lawmakers, including from the committee chairman, Sen. Bill Cassidy, a physician from Louisiana.

“Will you reassure mothers unequivocally and without qualification, that the measles and hepatitis B vaccines do not cause autism?” Cassidy asked. 

“If the data is there, I will absolutely do that,” Kennedy said, after being pressed to give a yes or no answer. 

Cassidy assured him it was. “If you show me data,” Kennedy continued, “I will be the first person to assure the American people … that they need to take those vaccines.” He also vowed in that case to “apologize for any statements that misled people otherwise.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont and ranking member of the committee, continued Cassidy’s line of inquiry, noting “dozens of studies done all over the world that make it very clear that vaccines do not cause autism,” and asking if Kennedy agreed with that.

“As I said, I’m not going to go into HHS with any preordained,” Kennedy said, before Sanders interrupted to ask again. Kennedy again said that he would need to be shown the data.

Other senators appeared to support Kennedy in arguing that he was correct to question whether vaccines might cause autism.

“There’s an issue that I have as a father of six, that when my kids come out from getting their vaccines, they look like a freaking pin cushion,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a Republican from Oklahoma, said. “I think there’s a reason we should be questioning this.”

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, who is an ophthalmologist, argued that because “we don’t know what causes” autism, investigation of vaccines should continue.

But as we’ve explained, and as several senators pointed out, data demonstrating that there is no link between vaccines and autism already exists. Different vaccines and vaccine ingredients have been repeatedly tested, showing no connection. 

One particularly large 2019 study of the MMR, or measles, mumps and rubella, vaccine, for example, covered all children born in Denmark to Danish-born mothers between 1999 and 2010 with at least several years of follow-up. It found no increased risk of autism among vaccinated children, including in kids with siblings with autism and other risk factors.

The original 1998 study that sparked the vaccine-autism concern was found to be fraudulent, and it was retracted. On top of that, there is a lack of biological plausibility, as research now shows that autism begins to develop before childhood vaccines are given.

Flawed Paper

Near the end of the more than three-hour hearing, Cassidy confronted Kennedy with a 2014 meta analysis, reminding him of his promise that he would say vaccines do not cause autism if shown the data.

“The title tells it all,” Cassidy said of the study, which was published in the journal Vaccine by researchers in Australia. “Vaccines are not associated with autism: An evidence-based meta-analysis of case-control and cohort studies.”

“You show me those scientific studies, and you and I can meet about it,” Kennedy said. “There are other studies as well, and I’d love to show those to you. There’s a study that came out last week of 47,000 9-year-olds in the Medicaid system in Florida — I think a Louisiana scientist called Mawson — that shows the opposite. There are other studies out there. I just want to follow the science.”

Contrary to Kennedy’s claim that “there are other studies out there,” the literature on vaccines and autism is not mixed, unlike many other scientific topics. As David Mandell, a psychiatric epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, previously told us, “Every single rigorous study we have” shows “no association” between autism and vaccination.

The specific paper Kennedy cited — which claims to have found that “[v]accinated children were significantly more likely than the unvaccinated to have been diagnosed” with autism and a variety of other neurodevelopmental disorders — is not rigorous.

“I have read this paper carefully, and it has so many severe methodological issues, it clearly should not have passed any legitimate peer review,” Jeffrey S. Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, told us.

The paper was published on Jan. 23 in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, an outlet that claims to be a peer-reviewed journal, but as we have noted before, is not available on PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health’s database of biomedical research, nor indexed on MEDLINE, which requires some evaluation of journal quality. The editor-in-chief and other board members, including the section editor for the paper, are well-known spreaders of vaccine misinformation. 

The two authors, including lead author Anthony Mawson, are affiliated with Chalfont Research Institute in Mississippi, which does not have a website and appears to use a residential home as a mailing address, based on IRS records. Both authors have previously published work on vaccines that has been retracted. The paper was funded by the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine group.

Using Florida Medicaid claims data, the paper compared how common certain neurodevelopmental disorders, or NDDs, including autism, were in 9-year-old children born between 1999 and 2002 who were considered vaccinated with those who were not.

Children were counted as vaccinated if they ever had a health care visit with a billing code for a vaccine in their Medicaid claim records. The authors did not have information on which vaccines were administered or whether children might have been vaccinated outside of the Medicaid system.

The authors reported finding that about 28% of vaccinated kids had been diagnosed with at least one NDD, compared with 11% for unvaccinated children. For autism specifically, the authors said vaccinated kids were about 2.7 times more likely to have a diagnosis than those who never had a vaccine billing code in their Medicaid records.

Morris, however, said several features made the paper’s primary analysis “severely flawed from a biostatistical standpoint.” 

One of the biggest issues, he said in an email, is that the analysis “ignores all confounding factors that might influence both propensity to [be] vaccinated and propensity to be identified with a NDD, and treats the 90% of the population who were vaccinated by age 9 as equivalent in every way except vaccination to the 10% who remained unvaccinated at age 9 (according to Medicaid records).”

Of these confounding factors, Morris said, “by far the most important one” is a person’s health care utilization status, which he said should have been available in the data. People who use more health care are more likely to get vaccinated and to have a condition diagnosed and treated. 

Other factors, he said, include: race, since there are known disparities in autism diagnoses; and genetics and family, because parents are likely to vaccinate their children similarly and autism can run in families.

In addition, Morris said the authors didn’t “even check whether the NDD diagnosis occurred before or after the first vaccination record.”

“The authors’ ignoring of all current literature going against their hypothesis is another severe flaw,” he said, “as is their citation of their own previous paper that was retracted.”

Other scientists have also noted many of these problems and others with the Mawson paper.

In contrast, Morris pointed to the 2019 Danish study, which he said “was much more rigorously done.” That study, he explained, used actual medical records; pulled from a much wider population, rather than the Medicaid population of one state; adjusted for many confounders, including an autism risk score; and used time-varying vaccination status to properly classify a person as unvaccinated until after their first vaccine.

Cassidy, who briefly took a look at the Mawson study after Kennedy mentioned it, said during the hearing that it “seems to … have some issues.” He then said that he was “struggling” with Kennedy’s nomination.

“Does a 70-year-old man, 71-year-old man who spent decades criticizing vaccines and who is financially vested in finding fault with vaccines,” Cassidy said, “can he change his attitudes and approach now that he’ll have the most important position influencing vaccine policy in the United States?”

Despite the Mawson paper’s dubious origin and many flaws, its purported results have been widely shared on social media. “Pro-Vaxxers Need to WAKE UP,” declared one Instagram post.

Children’s Health Defense, the nonprofit Kennedy led until last month, also plugged the paper in a story on its website, calling it “jaw-dropping” in the headline and quoting one of its own scientists as saying that it “is unignorable simply by the soundness of its methods.” 

CHD also quoted an epidemiologist we have previously fact-checked — and who had a paper retracted and then republished in the same outlet as the Mawson paper — as saying that the study’s results “warrant further study by the new U.S. administration.”

“I’m coming in here to get rid of the conflicts of interest within the agency, make sure that we have gold-standard evidence-based science,” Kennedy said in the hearing, asking senators to “show me where I’m wrong … show me a single statement I’ve made about science that is erroneous.” He was wrong to deny the science about vaccines and autism, and the study he cited is anything but the gold standard.

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