Category: Fact Check

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In addition to extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, one of his signature achievements in his first term, President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a long list of tax cuts, from eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits to lowering the corporate tax rate. Altogether, they could cost upwards of $8 trillion to $10 trillion over a decade.

The high-end estimate of $10 trillion is double the amount of all federal COVID-19 relief spending.

But implementing tax changes requires Congress to act. The TCJA’s individual income tax provisions are set to expire at the end of 2025, making an extension of those measures a legislative priority next year.

“The expiring individual provisions of the TCJA will be extended sometime in 2025,” Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, wrote in a Nov. 6 post predicting what would happen with Trump’s wish list on taxes. As for a “lengthy list of highly targeted tax cuts” — including a corporate tax cut to 20% or 15%; the elimination of taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits; and providing tax credits for car purchases and family caregiving — “[i]t remains to be seen which of these he’ll really pursue,” Gleckman wrote.

Trump also has proposed new or higher tariffs on goods imported from other countries, and he could impose at least some tariffs without congressional action. Those would bring in government revenue, but act as a tax increase on Americans, as the cost of tariffs are typically passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, as we’ve reported. Tax experts include the impact of higher tariffs when analyzing Trump’s tax plans.

In the days leading up to the election, Trump repeatedly cited his call for no taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. Often, he added that he supported “a tax credit for family caregivers who take care of their parent or loved one.” In North Carolina on Nov. 2, he called for expanding the child tax credit.

“My plan will massively cut taxes for workers and small businesses,” he said the day before the election in Pennsylvania, echoing a line in many of his speeches.

We’ll look at Trump’s tax proposals, their cost and what impact they could have on taxpayers.

TCJA

Details and cost: Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law on Dec. 22, 2017. It wasn’t the largest tax cut in history, as Trump has repeatedly claimed, but it was sizable: a $1.5 trillion price tag over 10 years at the time. For individual income taxes, the law changed the marginal tax rates and associated income thresholds, increased the standard deduction and eliminated the personal exemption, increased the child tax credit, limited deductions for state and local taxes as well as mortgages and home equity lines of credit, and increased the threshold for estate taxes, among other measures.

But to get the bill to Trump’s desk, Republicans in Congress used reconciliation, a process that allows the Senate to pass a bill with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes normally needed to break a filibuster and move legislation forward. With reconciliation, the tax plan had to meet a set target for spending and revenue, and it couldn’t add to the deficit after 10 years.

In order to meet that budget requirement, Republicans wrote the law so that most of the individual tax cuts expire at the end of 2025 (including all of the provisions mentioned above). That’s why Congress needs to act again in order to extend the cuts. Now, extending sunsetting provisions in the law would add about $4 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, according to estimates from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Tax Foundation and the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO projected the cost at $4.6 trillion including interest payments.

When including economic effects of the tax cuts, PWBM estimated the cost at $3.83 trillion, while the Tax Foundation put it at $3.5 trillion.

Trump also has called for allowing the TCJA’s cap on deducting state and local taxes to expire. Not extending that limit on the so-called SALT deduction would add another $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion to deficits over a decade, according to the Tax Foundation and CRFB.

Republicans will hold 53 seats in the Senate in 2025, so they may need to use reconciliation again to pass a tax bill. The Tax Policy Center’s Gleckman wrote in a Dec. 4 post that “if lawmakers are not able to agree on deep, longer-term spending cuts or tax increases, GOP lawmakers may be forced to extend all the individual provisions of the TCJA only temporarily, instead of making those 2017 tax cuts permanent.”

Gleckman noted that Sen. Mike Crapo, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee come January, has said that extending the 2017 provisions wouldn’t need to be paid for under Senate rules, because it would be a continuation of current policy. “It would hardly be the first time Congress treats a tax cut extension as costing nothing, but it violates the spirit, if not the letter, of congressional budget rules,” Gleckman wrote. “Besides, whatever gimmick Congress may invent to make it look like extending the TCJA is costless, Treasury still will have to borrow at least $4 trillion more over 10 years than if it does not extend the TCJA.”

Other Republican senators have voiced support for Crapo’s “current policy” method, which would bypass the need for reconciliation. At a Dec. 18 GOP press conference, Sen. Rick Scott called it a “logical way” of avoiding “massive tax increases,” and Sen. Ron Johnson called it “common sense.” But Scott also embraced spending cuts, saying that lawmakers “expect significant reductions in the cost of government. We don’t have a choice. … We have got to get to a balanced budget now.”

There’s also the possibility of Congress increasing tariffs, as Trump has proposed, to pay for the TCJA extension though reconciliation. “But Trump doesn’t appear to want to wait for congressional action,” Gleckman wrote. “And if he imposes the tariffs unilaterally, using them as an offset may not be so easy since congressional scorekeepers normally don’t count administrative actions in their budget estimates.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a budget watchdog group, has an online tool that shows how Congress could pay for at least some of the TCJA extension by modifying the tax law’s provisions. “Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path already requires tough choices against current law, choices that would become much more challenging with an extension of the TCJA because it would worsen the fiscal outlook significantly,” CRFB said in a Dec. 3 post. “Delaying action will result in taxpayers bearing the consequences of interest on a growing government debt load and slower economic growth.”

CRFB also has noted that while some politicians will claim that tax cuts pay for themselves by spurring economic growth, “analyses from across the political spectrum have found that the economic effects of extending the expiring parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) would offset 1 to 14 percent of the revenue loss – falling well short of the 100 percent needed to pay for itself.”

Impact on taxpayers: The Tax Policy Center estimated that about 75% of households get a tax cut with a TCJA extension, and 10% pay more in taxes. Nearly half of the benefits — 45% — are reaped by households earning $450,000 and above in 2027.

That year, on average, middle-income earners would get a tax cut of about $1,000, or about 1.3% of after-tax income because of the extension, compared with the current law, under which the cuts expire at the end of 2025. In other words, taxpayers may not experience this as a new tax cut, but rather a continuation of the current tax structure. Those earning $1 million or more (the top 1%) would get an average tax cut of about $70,000, or 3.2%. Those earning $5 million and above (the top 0.1%) save about $280,000 in taxes, or 3%.

According to the Tax Foundation’s estimates of making the TCJA permanent, the bottom quintile of earners would get an average 2.2% boost in after-tax income, while the middle quintile gets 1.9% and the top quintile gets 3.4% in 2026. The top 1% would get a 4.8% boost.

Tips

Details and cost: At a June 9 rally in Nevada, home to many service industry workers, Trump proposed eliminating federal taxes on tips.

Under current law, tips are taxed just as hourly or salaried wages are: Workers must pay income tax on their tips; in addition, both employers and workers pay payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare. Trump hasn’t released details on his no-taxes-on-tips policy, but in another Nevada rally, on Aug. 23, he suggested he wanted to eliminate both income and payroll taxes on tips, saying workers would be able to keep 100% of their tip income. (That would mirror a House Republican bill introduced in June.)

The cost of eliminating all taxes on tips would be about $150 billion to $250 billion over 10 years, according to CRFB’s estimate, and significantly more if workers and employers shifted more income to tips. “The magnitude of that behavioral effect is uncertain and would depend significantly on the regulatory guardrails that accompany the policy,” CRFB said in June. “As an illustrative example, if tips were increased by 10 percent, the policy would reduce revenue by $165 to $275 billion, and if they doubled it would increase deficits by $300 to $500 billion.” (If the TCJA provisions are extended, the base price of the tips proposal drops by 10% to 15%.)

While some politicians are in favor of this idea — including Vice President Kamala Harris, who also proposed it, limited to income taxes up to a certain threshold — economists and tax experts have roundly criticized it as inequitable for low-wage workers who don’t earn tips, potentially harmful to tipped workers and an incentive for other workers — from lawyers to plumbers — to adopt tipping.

Impact on taxpayers: About 4 million people were tipped workers in 2023, according to an analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale. That’s about 2.5% of all workers, and 5% of workers in the bottom quarter of earners, which are those earning less than $18 an hour.

A good portion of those tipped workers already don’t pay federal income taxes because they earn so little: about 37% in 2022 were below the federal tax threshold, the Budget Lab estimated.

For tipped workers who do pay federal income taxes, the impact would vary, depending on total income and the percentage of income coming from tips. But a hypothetical example from the Tax Foundation shows that the savings could be substantial, particularly when compared with those who earn the same amount of money but only in the form of wages.

Senior policy analyst Alex Muresianu at the Tax Foundation wrote in a July post: “Consider two individuals: a cashier named Tracy and a waitress named Susan. Tracy and Susan each earn $34,000 in income. Tracy receives all of her income in wages, while Susan receives $19,000 in wage income and $15,000 in tips. Under the status quo, they each take the standard deduction and end up paying around $2,100 in taxes.”

But if Susan didn’t pay taxes on her tips, she would owe $440, a savings of more than $1,600.

Muresianu wrote that “if the goal is to deliver tax relief to lower- and middle-income taxpayers, raising the standard deduction (which effectively serves as a 0 percent federal income tax bracket) would achieve that regardless of occupation.”

Eliminating payroll taxes on tips would also reduce tipped workers’ future Social Security benefits, which are calculated based on average earnings.

Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic & Policy Research, also explained in a thread on X that some tipped workers with children could see lower earned income tax credits if they have lower taxable income, which could leave some workers worse off — despite not paying income taxes on tips. The tax credit is a fixed percentage of income, so the amount increases as income rises for eligible low- and moderate-income working families. (See this chart from the Tax Policy Center for more information.)

Social Security

Details and cost: Trump wants to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits for seniors, a proposal he announced in late July and repeated many times on the campaign trail.

About 40% of Social Security beneficiaries pay federal income taxes on up to 50% or up to 85% of their benefits, depending on their income. “This usually happens if you have other substantial income in addition to your benefits,” the Social Security Administration explains. “Substantial income includes wages, earnings from self-employment, interest, dividends, and other taxable income that must be reported on your tax return.”

In order to owe taxes on benefits, an individual would need to make $25,000 (or $32,000 for joint filers) in what’s called “combined income.” Combined income is adjusted gross income, nontaxable interest and half of Social Security benefits.

The tax revenue goes to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. According to a September report by the Congressional Research Service, $50.7 billion of that tax revenue in 2023 went to the Social Security trust funds, making up 3.8% of the funds’ income, while $35 billion went to the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund, an amount that was 8.4% of the funds’ income.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimated that ending taxes on benefits would cost $1.2 trillion over 10 years. The cost would be lower if the TCJA is extended, due to lower tax rates compared with current law. The CRFB put the cost higher, at $1.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion over 10 years.

Impact on taxpayers: Those earning $32,000 or less wouldn’t benefit from the tax cut, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis of the impact in 2025. Those earning between $33,000 and $63,000 would get an average tax cut of $90. Middle-income earners, making between about $63,000 and $113,000, would get a $630 tax cut on average, while those earning $113,000 to $205,800 would get a cut of $1,190 on average.

The top 0.1% of taxpayers, earning $4.7 million and up, would get a tax cut of $2,470 on average.

Note that the analysis couldn’t break out only seniors, so it includes Social Security disability and survivor benefits.

Seniors could get fewer Social Security benefits in the future under this tax proposal. Without another source of income to replace the lost tax revenues, the Social Security and Medicare trust funds would become insolvent sooner: more than one year sooner, in 2032, for Social Security, and six years sooner, in 2030, for Medicare, according to CRFB’s estimates.

At the point of insolvency, spending on benefits would be limited to the revenue each year, and benefits would be cut by 25%, compared with 21% under current law. “After-tax benefits would not meaningfully change – though reductions would be larger for lower income seniors and smaller for higher income seniors,” CRFB said.

An October report from CRFB estimated that Trump’s larger agenda, including eliminating taxes on tips, Social Security and overtime, restricting immigration, and increasing tariffs, would speed up Social Security’s trust fund insolvency by three years.

Overtime

Details and cost: In Arizona on Sept. 12, Trump added another tax cut proposal: ending “all taxes on overtime.”

“That gives people more of an incentive to work. It gives the companies a lot — it’s a lot easier to get the people,” he said.

It would encourage people to work more overtime, but it would also “significantly distort labor market decisions,” according to the Tax Foundation. “Employees would be encouraged to take more overtime work, and hourly or salaried non-exempt jobs may become more attractive if the benefit is not extended to salaried employees who are exempt from Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) overtime rules,” Tax Foundation researchers wrote in a Sept. 13 report.

Federal law requires that employers pay certain employees 1.5 times the hourly rate for time worked beyond 40 hours a week.

As employees get more overtime work, employer’s costs increase. “For some employers, the increased attractiveness of overtime work may fit well with their existing operations. For other employers, they may need to be more aggressive to contain overtime requests as total labor costs rise,” the Tax Foundation said.

It estimated the cost of exempting all overtime pay from income taxes at $680.4 billion over 10 years. But if taxes were only eliminated for the 50% bonus paid for overtime, the cost would be $227 billion. If all income taxes plus employees’ payroll taxes were nixed, that would cost $1.1 trillion over a decade, with the cost rising to $1.55 trillion if employers’ payroll taxes also go away.

CRFB looked at several scenarios and found that “no taxes on overtime would reduce revenue by $250 billion to $1.4 trillion on a static basis and by $1 to $5 trillion in the extreme case that all workers eligible for the tax cut switched to hourly.” That’s also over 10 years.

Impact on taxpayers: About 8% of hourly workers and 4% of workers earning salaries regularly work overtime that qualifies for boosted pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Budget Lab at Yale estimated. Occasionally, another 4% of hourly workers and 1% of salaried workers clock in overtime. That means working more than 40 hours a week and getting paid 1.5 times the regular pay for the extra hours.

Most salaried workers and some hourly workers aren’t eligible for such overtime pay under the FLSA. Employees in “executive, administrative, professional and outside sales” jobs, as well as certain computer jobs, are exempt from overtime if they are paid a salary that amounts to at least $684 per week, the Department of Labor explains. Teachers are also exempt. The Budget Lab estimated 70% of salary workers and 7% of hourly workers are ineligible or exempt.

The impact of this kind of tax cut on overtime-eligible workers would depend, of course, on the details of the tax cut, how much overtime someone worked and the pay rate. The Budget Lab provided a couple of scenarios. In one, a medical records technician earning $23 an hour and working 50 hours a week wouldn’t pay taxes on more than $17,700, while a retail store supervisor working the same hours and earning the same at an annual rate wouldn’t qualify for overtime or the tax cut.

“Tax proposals that favor one form of income over others create opportunities for tax avoidance,” the Budget Lab wrote in the September analysis, explaining that employers and employees in overtime exempt jobs could find ways to change their compensation to either save on labor costs or taxes.

Tariffs

Details and revenue: On the campaign trail, Trump proposed a broad 10% or 20% tariff on all imports and a 60% tariff on imports from China.

As we explained in an article on Trump’s tariff proposals from the campaign, several economic analyses say raising tariffs would bring in federal revenue and would increase costs for Americans, acting like a tax.

U.S. importers pay tariffs to U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the form of customs duties at ports of entry. Importers mostly pass on the cost of the tariffs to consumers in the form of higher prices for the goods, economists say.

Trump’s proposal for a universal 10% tariff and 60% tariff on Chinese goods would raise federal revenue by a net $2.8 trillion over 10 years, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis. Increasing the baseline tariff to 20% would bring in a net $4.5 trillion over 10 years.

The Tax Foundation estimated that a 20% universal tariff plus a 50% tariff on Chinese goods would raise $3.8 trillion over a decade.

In its analysis, the Tax Foundation said that using tariffs to pay for tax cuts “comes with major downsides,” calling tariffs “a particularly distortive way to raise revenue” because they can spark retaliation from other countries.

After the election, on Nov. 25, Trump proposed more tariffs, saying in a social media post that he would put a 25% tariff on imports from Mexico and Canada “until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country.”

Impact on taxpayers: The Tax Policy Center found that a 10% universal tariff plus 60% on Chinese goods would reduce after-tax income in 2025 by about $1,800 per household on average. Upping the universal tariff to 20% would lower average after-tax income by about $3,000.

For the 10%/60% scenario, TPC said: “All income groups would see similar percentage declines in after-tax income as a result of Trump’s tariffs, ranging from 1.7 percent to 1.9 percent. … The biggest exception: Those with the highest incomes, whose after-tax incomes would fall by about 1.4 percent.”

Similarly, the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated, conservatively it says, that the 20%/60% scenario would increase a typical middle-income household’s costs by more than $2,600 a year.

Erica York, a senior economist and research director at the Tax Foundation, told the fact-checking website Verify in September that the 20%/60% proposal could raise costs by more than $6,000 on average for all households.

Other Tax Proposals

And Trump has mentioned several other tax changes.

He has proposed lowering the corporate tax rate to 15% for companies who make their products in the U.S. (The rate for all companies is 21% under the TCJA.) That would reduce federal revenues by $200 billion or $361 billion over 10 years, according to CRFB and the Tax Foundation, respectively.

In Michigan in October, Trump called for a tax deduction for interest on car loans, later specifying this would be “only for cars made in America.”

For taxpayers with qualifying car loans, the bottom 90% of income earners would save an average $200 to $300 on their taxes, if taxpayers wouldn’t have to itemize deductions in order to get the tax benefit (only 10% of taxpayers itemize), according to the Budget Lab at Yale’s analysis. “But the savings would be largest for those at the top, since deductions create larger savings for those with higher tax rates and the income tax is progressive,” the Budget Lab said. “The average benefit for those in the top 1% would be closer to $1,500.”

Trump said he would repeal clean energy tax incentives signed into law by Biden, which include credits for electric vehicles, solar and wind energy, as well as home energy improvements, a move that would raise $921 billion over 10 years, the Tax Foundation said. The TPC, which didn’t include the EV incentives in its analysis, said this would “modestly increase taxes at all income levels.”

He called for ending “double taxation” of some Americans living abroad, who must file U.S. tax returns. Alan Cole, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, wrote in October that only a few million Americans would be affected. “For most, the burden is not the payment of tax: it is the filing of tax. Most Americans abroad likely owe nothing, or relatively little,” he said. Cole explained that even those with low incomes are required to file their taxes, which can be complex, but there’s a large exemption for income earned abroad: $120,000 in 2023.

Trump also has floated a tax credit for family caregivers, a deduction for newborns and mandated coverage for in vitro fertilization treatment, which altogether could cost about $150 billion to $300 billion over 10 years, depending on the details, CRFB said.

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Q: Who is flying the drones that are appearing over the East Coast?

A: On Dec. 17, four federal agencies said they followed up more than 5,000 reported drone sightings and determined that they were lawful private and law enforcement drones and other aircraft “mistakenly reported as drones.” The agencies said the drones do not pose a security threat.

FULL QUESTION

Are there currently drones from China in Atlanta, GA?

FULL ANSWER

Over the past month, beginning Nov. 18, New Jersey residents have reported a number of drone sightings in at least 10 counties. The sightings initially sparked concern over their proximity to Picatinny Arsenal, a military research facility in Morris County.

Timothy Rider, a spokesperson for Picatinny Arsenal, confirmed in a Nov. 21 email to the War Zone, a military news site, that the drones were not theirs. “We remind everyone that it is unlawful to fly UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] over Picatinny Arsenal and any other federal military installation without prior authorization,” Rider said.

Rider told us in a phone interview that while it was difficult to pinpoint the location of the drones, they had been seen “over or near” Picatinny.

The Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary flight restriction on Nov. 25, expanding the no-fly zone to areas within two nautical miles of Picatinny Arsenal, effective until Dec. 26. On Dec. 4, the FAA issued an additional temporary flight restriction, effective until Dec. 20, for Bedminster, New Jersey, where one of President-elect Donald Trump’s golf courses is located.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy posted on X about the drones on Dec. 5, saying, “We are actively monitoring the situation and in close coordination with our federal and law enforcement partners on this matter. There is no known threat to the public at this time.”

On Dec. 18 and 19, the FAA added flight restrictions on unmanned aerial vehicles over 22 other cities and towns in New Jersey until Jan. 17, referring to the locations as “national defense airspace” and “critical New Jersey infrastructure.”

Drone sightings have raised concerns and prompted actions in other states — including New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia and Georgia.

In New York, runways at the New York Stewart Airport were closed for about an hour because of drone activity near the airport.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, closed its airspace for about four hours on Dec. 13 to 14 when “small unmanned aerial systems” were seen in the base’s restricted airspace, an Air Force spokesperson told a local news station. Authorities “determined none of the incursions impacted base residents, facilities, or assets,” the spokesperson said.

In Boston, two men were arrested on Dec. 14 and faced trespassing charges for flying a drone too close to Logan International Airport’s airspace, police told NBC10 Boston. An officer was able to determine the drone operators’ location on Long Island in Boston Harbor.

Drones also were reportedly seen over neighborhoods in Cobb County in the Atlanta metro area. FBI Atlanta officials told Fox 5 in a Dec. 15 statement, “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”

Floating Unsupported Theories

Politicians and social media users have spread various theories about the origin of the drones.

New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew said on Fox News on Dec. 11 that the drones were launched from an Iranian “mothership” located “off the East Coast of the United States,” and said his information came from “high sources” in the government.

Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh responded to Van Drew’s remarks in a press briefing the same day. “There is not any truth to that,” Singh said. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”

A day later, Van Drew returned to Fox News and restated his claims, calling his sources “dependable, credible individuals that have security clearance.” But he sounded less definitive about Iran’s involvement.

“They were, in essence, whistle-blowers and said, look, they believe there’s a real possibility it could be Iran, that there could be a ship out [there],” Van Drew said. He also suggested that the drones might have been sent by China, referencing the spy balloon incident from January 2023.

Social media users have echoed Van Drew’s claims that Iran was responsible for the drones. Others have suggested aliens or the U.S. military itself are the source of the drones.

President-elect Donald Trump claimed during a wide-ranging press conference on Dec. 16, “The government knows what is happening.”

“Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it’s a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don’t want to comment,” Trump said, adding, “Our military knows and our president knows, and for some reason they want to keep people in suspense.”

No Evidence of Foreign Involvement

Four days prior to Trump’s press conference, John Kirby, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications at the White House, did provide comment regarding the drones, saying on Dec. 12 that the Coast Guard found “no evidence of any foreign-based involvement from coastal vessels.”

In a Dec. 16 interview on Fox News, Kirby said that a government analysis of the drones found they are “lawful, legal, commercial hobbyist and even law enforcement aircraft activity.”

“Some of it’s manned, some of it’s unmanned. We absolutely acknowledge that a lot of these are probably drones, but they’re flying legally. And it is legal to fly drones in non-restricted airspace as long as you’re registered with the FAA and there’s thousands of these kinds of flights every single day,” Kirby said.

Kirby also said in a Dec. 17 CNN interview that “thousands upon thousands [of drones] fly in U.S. airspace legally every single day, including in the northeast corridor. In fact, that’s one of the busiest areas.”

He later added, “people are right to see these things and be concerned about it. I mean, I think what you’re seeing, honestly, is the huge ecosystem of drones now really coming to light. … [M]aybe people just didn’t appreciate how many of these things are flying in U.S. airspace every single day, and it’s only going to get more,” Kirby said. “The numbers are only going to increase as the utility of these drones for commercial and law enforcement purposes, in particular, become apparent.”

More than a million drones were registered with the FAA as of Dec. 2, including 403,000 commercial drones and 387,000 recreational drones.

On Dec. 17, the FBI released a joint statement with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense and the FAA saying they had followed up the “more than 5,000 reported drone sightings” over recent weeks with “advanced detection technology” and “trained visual observers.”

“Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens,” the statement said, “we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones. We have not identified anything anomalous and do not assess the activity to date to present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast.”

Pramod Abichandani, an associate professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Applied Engineering and Technology, told CBS News on Dec. 13 that he reviewed some of the “eyewitness videos” of reported drone activity and consulted with other experts. “Some of them are not drones, some of them are just straight-up your helicopters and manned aircrafts. It’s just air traffic,” he said.

“On the other hand,” said Abichandani, who is also director of the Robotics and Data Lab at NJIT, “there are drones that look like the kind of drones you would purchase off a vendor’s website. Those are big drones, but they still display the characteristics of a commercially available drone. And then there are some videos … that it’s hard to ascertain whether these are really like small aircraft that are being piloted by somebody in them or are these like slightly bigger-type drones that are being remotely piloted.”

Of the size and range of the drones being reported, Abichandani said: “It is true that these are not the recreational drone types, but it is also true that, you know, they’re not like massive, sort of the bigger drones that you see with long-range endurance that usually the military uses.”

Juan Alfonso, director of the Aerospace Design Laboratory at Stanford University, told us in an email that general aviation aircraft, such as Cessna jets, which are smaller than commercial planes and fly at lower altitudes, and military cargo and observation planes are “easily confused” with drones.

“It is not easy to tell whether an aircraft … is manned or unmanned,” Alfonso said.

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Sources

Alfonso, Juan. Director, Aerospace Design Laboratory at Stanford University, Email to FactCheck.org. 18 Dec 2024.

Ali, Ayesha and Clara McMichael. “FAA temporarily bans drones in parts of New Jersey, notice threatens ‘deadly force’ for ‘imminent security threat.’” ABC News. 19 Dec 2024.

Altman, Howard. “Army Arsenal Seeking Info On Mysterious Drone Flights Over Installation.” The War Zone. 20 Nov 2024.

Becker, Kaitlin McKinley, and Mary Markos. “Two men arrested for hazardous drone operations near Logan Airport.” NBC10 Boston. 16 Dec 2024.

Carnahan, Ashley. “Drones flying over the country are ‘lawful,’ nothing indicates a ‘public safety risk,’ says top WH official.” Fox News. 16 Dec 2024.

CBS. “Drone expert on mysterious sightings as officials call for answers.” Video. 13 Dec. 2024.

CNN. “Interview with John Kirby, White House National Security Communications Adviser.” CQ Transcriptions. 17 Dec 2024.

Department of Defense. “Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh Holds a Press Briefing.” Transcript. 11 Dec 2024.

Department of Defense. “DHS, FBI, FAA & DoD Joint Statement on Ongoing Response to Reported Drone Sightings.” Press release. 17 Dec 2024.

Dukes, Joi. “Mysterious drones spotted in Atlanta among hundreds of sightings nationwide.” Fox 5 Atlanta. 15 Dec 2024.

Federal Aviation Administration. “Drones by the Numbers (as of 12/2/24).” Faa.gov. Accessed 18 Dec 2024.

Goldman, Jeff. “Drones banned for a month in parts of over 2 dozen N.J. towns, cities, FAA says.” NJ.com. 19 Dec 2024.

Kube, Courtney, and Carol E. Lee. “U.S. intelligence officials determined the Chinese spy balloon used a U.S. internet provider to communicate.” NBC News. 28 Dec 2023.

McFadden, Alyce. “Are Those Drones Over New Jersey? Despite Sightings, U.S. Is Skeptical.” New York Times. 11 Dec 2024.

Rev. “Donald Trump Press Conference With SoftBank CEO 12/16/24.” Transcript. 16 Dec 2024.

Rider, Timothy. Public affairs officer, Picatinny Arsenal. Phone interview with FactCheck.org. 18 Dec 2024.

Robledo, Anthony. “‘This has gone too far’: Drones temporarily closed runways at NY airport, governor says.” USA Today. 14 Dec 2024.

Shalal, Andrea, and Ryan Jones. “FBI, White House find no evidence of security threat in New Jersey drone sightings.” Reuters. 13 Dec 2024.

Sottile, Zoe, et al. “What we know about mysterious drone sightings.” CNN. 16 Nov 2024.

Wallace, Amanda. “Timeline: When drone reports first appeared in NJ and what’s happened since.” NorthJersey.com. 13 Dec 2024.

Westhoven, William. “FBI to frustrated Congress: ‘We just don’t know’ who is behind mystery drone flights in NJ.” NorthJersey.com. 10 Dec 2024.

WHIO. “Drones force airspace blockage for multiple hours at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.” 15 Dec 2024.

Source

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

President-elect Donald Trump announced his nominations to lead key offices tasked with delivering his campaign promise of cutting fossil fuel regulations and increasing oil and natural gas production to lower energy prices and inflation.

During his campaign, as we’ve detailed, Trump vowed to exit the “horribly unfair” and “disastrous” Paris Agreement, which he will be able to do more quickly the second time around. His agenda also includes reversing environmental rules limiting carbon emissions and other pollution from vehicles and power plants.

To achieve his promise to “drill, baby, drill,” Trump plans to expedite the approval of federal permits and leases, open new public land for drilling, approve natural gas pipeline projects and undo a temporary pause on approvals for new liquefied natural gas projects. He has also said he would claw back any unspent funds from President Joe Biden’s signature climate change law, the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides billions to boost clean energy production, improve energy efficiency and encourage electric vehicle adoption.

Reuters reported on Dec. 16 that Trump’s transition team recommends undoing many of the Biden administration’s plans to support EVs. This includes ending requirements that federal agencies purchase EVs, redirecting money away from building charging stations and terminating the IRA’s $7,500 EV tax credit. The team calls for rolling back fuel economy and vehicle emissions standards to 2019 levels, among other policy recommendations.

Trump’s picks to accomplish many of these goals — Lee Zeldin for the Environmental Protection Agency, Doug Burgum for the Department of the Interior and Chris Wright for the Department of Energy — will need to go through confirmation hearings in the Senate, a process that can begin before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

We reviewed what each has said about climate change and the environment. 

Lee Zeldin, EPA

On Nov. 11, Trump announced Lee Zeldin, an attorney, Army veteran and former congressman, as his choice to head the EPA, the agency responsible for protecting human health and the environment. If confirmed, he would be in a position to relax the agency’s vehicle emissions standards and rollback the Biden administration’s more stringent regulations on power plants, which particularly target coal-fired plants.

A native of New York, Zeldin represented areas of Long Island, first as a state senator, from 2011 to 2014, and then as a House representative from 2015 to 2023. While he has supported some legislation that protects the environment, particularly for his home district, he has limited experience in environmental policy and his record on climate change issues has been described as mixed. 

While in Congress, Zeldin participated in bipartisan efforts to preserve and restore the Long Island Sound, an estuary between New York and Connecticut important for commercial fishing, tourism and other economic development. He also worked to prevent the sale and development of Plum Island, an 840-acre federal island in the Sound. In 2018, he opposed a proposal by Trump’s Interior Department to open up coastlines, including Long Island, to oil and gas drilling. 

Zeldin did not get involved in House committees working on environmental policy (he was part of the Foreign Affairs and Financial Services committees). Still, he participated in some related caucuses, including the Congressional Estuary Caucus, the Long Island Sound Caucus, the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and the Conservative Climate Caucus. The latter, created in 2021, acknowledges on its website that the “climate is changing” and that “decades of a global industrial era that has brought prosperity to the world has also contributed to that change.” The group further states that with innovation, “fossil fuels can and should be a major part of the global solution,” and aims to “fight against radical progressive climate proposals.”

In 2014, Lee told the editorial board of Newsday, a Long Island newspaper, that he was “not sold yet” on climate change being a serious problem and that it “would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real.”

Zeldin’s involvement in environmental issues in Congress was reportedly the result of efforts from his constituents following Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Areas he represented in Long Island were hit hard by the storm. Long Island’s coastal communities, which include popular beaches on Fire Island, the Hamptons and Montauk, have and will continue to be impacted by sea level rise, coastal erosion, warmer temperatures and severe storms — all of which can affect local businesses and the economy. 

In a 2016 episode of a climate change docuseries — in which Zeldin verbally committed to joining the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus — he acknowledged that the threat of climate change was “very real” for his district. “I think that there is more of an awareness and a willingness to recognize that climate change is real,” Zeldin said, “and Congress is more and more open-minded toward identifying those solutions.”

Zeldin’s involvement in these efforts didn’t necessarily translate into support for bills protecting the environment. In his eight years in Congress, he cast 203 “anti-environment” votes and 32 “pro-environment” votes, according to the environmental group League of Conservation Voters, which gave him a lifetime score of 14%.

Among many other votes, Zeldin voted against the Inflation Reduction Act; against creating an office of climate resilience in the White House; in favor of cutting environmental funding, including to the EPA; and in favor of removing the U.S. from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Exiting the U.N. framework — which failed in 2022, but may resurface in a second Trump administration – goes beyond the act of withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and would make it much harder to rejoin the accord.

The League of Conservation Voters’ scorecard included two of Zeldin’s votes in favor of actions designed to protect people from pollution caused by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, so-called “forever” chemicals that break down very slowly in the environment. One of those bills would have required the EPA to set a drinking water standard for certain PFAS, although Zeldin did vote against an amendment to that bill that would have prohibited companies from releasing unlimited amounts of PFAS into bodies of water. (The Biden EPA has since taken additional action on PFAS, including finalizing a drinking water standard for six of the chemicals in April.)

Zeldin got Trump’s attention by becoming one of his more loyal defenders during the president-elect’s 2019 impeachment. In 2022, backed by Trump, Zeldin ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York. During that campaign, he proposed to lower energy costs and create jobs by reversing a state ban on fracking and approving new pipelines. He also opposed a 2021 law that set a goal for all new passenger cars and trucks sold in the state to be zero-emissions by 2035.

In a statement announcing the nomination, Trump praised Zeldin’s legal background and his loyalty to his “America First” policies. “He will ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American businesses, while at the same time maintaining the highest environmental standards, including the cleanest air and water on the planet,” Trump wrote. 

In response to Trump’s intention to nominate him, Zeldin pledged in a Nov. 11 post on X to “restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs,” adding, “We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.” (It’s worth noting, however, that the number of motor vehicle and parts manufacturing jobs under Biden, as of November, were higher than at any point under Trump.)

“Day 1 and the first 100 days, we have the opportunity to roll back regulations that are forcing businesses to be able to struggle,” Zeldin told Fox News later the same day. “There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that ends up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction.”

Doug Burgum, Department of the Interior

On Nov. 15, Trump announced former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, who has close ties to fossil fuel industry executives, as his pick to lead the Interior Department, which is responsible for managing federal lands, minerals and waters, including leases for oil and gas drilling.

Burgum is also slated to lead Trump’s National Energy Council, created to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape,” and regulations, according to Trump’s statement. The new council will work with all agencies and departments involved in energy permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation and transportation, Trump added.

Burgum, a software investor and former Microsoft executive who had a short run as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2023, doesn’t deny that the planet is warming, but has downplayed the problem and argued that innovation alone will solve it.

In an interview with CNN in July 2023 he acknowledged “the climate is changing” but avoided answering whether he believed it was caused by human activity or the burning of fossil fuels. (He also remained quiet when a similar question was asked during the first debate for the Republican primary.) 

“It’s not about climate change that we need be worried about,” he said during the second Republican presidential primary debate in September 2023. “It’s about the Biden climate policies that are actually the existential threat to America’s future.” 

North Dakota ranks third nationwide in crude oil reserves and production and relies on the industry for jobs and revenue. During his two terms as governor, which started in 2016, Burgum built alliances with oil and gas companies that supported him financially and politically. He has a longstanding relationship with Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire chairman of Continental Resources, a giant oil company and the largest leaseholder in the Bakken oil field in North Dakota and Montana. Hamm has contributed to Burgum’s campaigns for governor, his company donated to the super PAC that supported Burgum’s run for president and he invested $250 million in a pipeline project championed by Burgum. Burgum’s family also leases 200 acres of land to Continental for oil and gas extraction, which has resulted in up to $50,000 in royalties since late 2022, according to a CNBC report, based in part on Burgum’s financial disclosure statement.

These ties have been useful for Trump. In April, Burgum, who endorsed Trump in January, helped put together a dinner with oil and gas executives at Mar-a-Lago. Based on anonymous sources, the Washington Post reported that during the dinner, Trump suggested the group should raise $1 billion for his campaign — a “deal” for helping the industry, including by reversing drilling restrictions in Alaska and offering more oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico.

In 2017, Burgum created North Dakota’s first Department of Environmental Quality to protect the environment. “Preserving our natural resources for current and future generations is a top priority,” he said at the time. And in 2021, during a conference with the oil industry, he announced a goal for the state to be carbon-neutral, or to offset all CO2 emissions, by 2030.

He often summarizes his approach to climate change with the phrase “innovation over regulation,” casting carbon neutrality as an economic opportunity that allows for the continued use of fossil fuels. He is particularly supportive of carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies, which trap carbon dioxide emissions before they are released into the atmosphere and either use the gas or store it deep underground. (Other technologies can remove CO2 directly from the air.)

“We can reach carbon neutrality in the state of North Dakota by 2030 without a single mandate, without any additional regulation. We can get there just through the innovation and the different geology that we have,” Burgum said in an event with the secretary of energy in 2021, noting that his state has 252 billion tons of underground storage capacity.

When the CO2 is stored, carbon capture technologies can reduce emissions and combat climate change. But the technology remains expensive and is not used yet at scale. According to a 2023 Congressional Budget Office report, only 15 carbon capture facilities existed in the U.S, as of September of that year, capable of capturing up to about 0.4% of the nation’s annual CO2 emissions, with nearly all of the captured CO2 pumped into oil wells to enhance oil recovery. Even if all of the 121 other facilities in development came to fruition, the report added, carbon capture would account for only about 3% of the country’s emissions.

Scientists view carbon capture as an important tool for cutting emissions from the hardest-to-decarbonize industries, such as steel and cement. But given the high costs and other challenges, it’s not considered a very viable option for reducing the bulk of the world’s carbon emissions.

The former governor championed an $8 billion pipeline project backed by Republican megadonors that include Hamm’s Continental. The pipeline would go through five states, capture CO2 from ethanol plants and bring it to North Dakota to be stored. This and two other underground pipeline projects have faced concerns from landowners, who resist having CO2 flowing under their property or fear losing their lands by eminent domain.

Burgum says he supports an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy that includes both fossil fuels and renewable sources, but he often criticizes funding for alternative fuels. He has said, for example, that funds for electric vehicles included in the IRA subsidize China, even though the investments are designed to build out American capacity. The IRA, notably, also provided significant support for carbon capture and storage.

Burgum supports Trump’s idea of trying to lower energy prices by increasing oil and gas production. As we have explained, this is unlikely to be very effective, especially long term since prices are set in a global market and are subject to global supply and demand. Last year, he joined Republican governors urging Biden to “unleash American energy” and end regulations “restricting domestic production.”

“Our economy is being crushed by Biden’s energy policies, which are raising the cost of every product you buy, not just the gasoline at the pump,” he said during the first Republican presidential primary debate in August 2023. “Our future is unlimited, but we’ve got to focus on innovation, not regulation. We’ve got to cut the red tape.”

As we’ve written, the U.S. has been producing crude oil at record levels for two consecutive years. U.S. presidents, we’ve explained, have little control over the price people pay for gasoline. Gasoline prices increased after the pandemic as global demand for oil increased and as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Chris Wright, Energy Department

Trump announced on Nov. 18 that he had selected Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking and oilfield services company based in Denver, to lead the Energy Department. As energy secretary, Wright would be responsible for the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, oversee energy conservation programs, make decisions about liquified natural gas export permits and lead research at the department’s 17 national laboratories.

Wright, who describes himself as a shale gas pioneer and “tech nerd turned entrepreneur,” trained as an engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley and has been in the fracking business since the early 1990s, which is the source of his fortune. Similar to Burgum, Wright is close to Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental Resources, and serves as a director of a lobbying group Hamm founded.

Wright accepts that climate change is occurring, but argues that its effects are being exaggerated and that the world has a moral imperative to continue using fossil fuels to lift people out of poverty.

“Climate change is a real and global challenge that we should and can address,” he wrote in an introductory letter to a report his company published this year. “However, representing it as the most urgent threat to humanity today displaces concerns about more pressing threats of malnutrition, access to clean water, air pollution, endemic diseases, and human rights, among others.”

“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” he said in a video he posted on LinkedIn in 2023. The “term carbon pollution is outrageous,” he added.

In making his case that people are overly concerned about climate change, Wright has sometimes trafficked in common climate myths and misled about the science. When talking about the increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, for example, his company’s report calls CO2 “plant food” and focuses on its benefits — “increased agricultural productivity and a significant increase in global plant matter, grasses, trees, and plankton.”

As we’ve written, the notion that CO2 is “plant food” is commonly spread by those who deny the reality of climate change or minimize its impact. More CO2 is not good for all plants and some changes that come with it, like drought and heat, are frequently harmful to plants. The argument is also a form of cherry-picking, as it ignores many profoundly negative consequences of climate change.

“Fortunately, to date,” the Liberty Energy report also reads, “there is no observed increase in the key extreme weather events: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and weather-related drought.” Wright recently claimed the same in a LinkedIn post, citing a table from chapter 12 of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

Jim Kossin, a climate scientist and an author of the cited chapter in the IPCC report, told us in an email that focusing on the single table, which describes whether detectable climate change trends have emerged, is “very misleading.”

“The requirements for formal detection are very strict and can only provide a yes or no answer. But the effects of climate change are not described by a binary yes or no answer,” he explained. Detection and emergence can depend more on available data than on actual physical processes, Kossin added. “This is a data problem and does NOT indicate a lack of trend. It merely states that the data aren’t good enough to pass the strict requirements for formal detection,” he wrote.

Indeed, elsewhere in the IPCC report, the overall message about climate change and its effects on extreme weather is very different from what Wright conveys.

“It is an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes since pre-industrial time,” a summary finding in the chapter on extreme weather reads, adding that observed changes and their attribution to human activity has strengthened since the last report in 2014, “in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes (including dry/hot events and fire weather).”

Kossin said that the IPCC reports are “massive” and “can be complicated to navigate,” which “makes it easier to cherry pick from them to suit an agenda.”

“The use of the table without providing any other context is cherry picking in its purest sense,” he wrote.

In written testimony before Congress in April and in his LinkedIn post, Wright again emphasized the perks of global warming, citing a 2021 Lancet Planetary Health paper to argue that increases in heat-related deaths are “more than offset” by a reduction in cold-related deaths. The paper itself, however, cautions that while “global warming might slightly reduce net temperature-related deaths in the short term … in the long run, climate change is expected to increase the mortality burden.” The senior author of the study told us her work was “commonly misinterpreted by climate deniers.”

Wright’s foundation, Bettering Human Lives, preaches that access to fossil fuels, which the website describes as “low-impact, affordable” energy, can provide “a pathway out of poverty.”

It’s true that cheap energy is important and a social good. But as we explained when addressing similar arguments from former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, it’s misleading to suggest fossil fuels are the only or best option, especially now that there are alternatives in wind and solar that are cost effective and have much smaller carbon footprints.

“We know that fossil fuels have all of these other problems that renewable energy doesn’t have. And so for the future, there’s really no reason to continue burning fossil fuels,” Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler told us. That includes not only the heat-trapping carbon emissions that will further warm the planet, but also things such as particle air pollution, which in 2018 accounted for as much as 18% of all global deaths in 2018.

Wright describes renewable energy sources such as wind and solar as “unreliable and costly,” although he has invested in newer forms of geothermal and nuclear energy.

In a commentary piece published before the election, Wright said Republicans should respond to net-zero pledges — which he called “economic suicide” and “unachievable” — with the concept of “zero energy poverty.” This, he explained, “can be realized by unleashing our vast natural resources” to “deliver a future in which no one would struggle to afford their utility bills.”

Echoing arguments used by Trump during the campaign, Wright went on to claim that net-zero “requires curtailing freedom and massively growing government, as evidenced by bans on gas-powered cars, natural gas appliances, and the forced closure of reliable electricity plants – all of which are driving widespread economic pain.”

As we’ve written, while the Biden administration issued new energy efficiency standards for gas stoves and regulations reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants from cars and trucks, there are no bans on gas-powered vehicles or on gas cooking stoves. In terms of closing existing power plants, the Biden administration’s power plant rule only applies to coal-fired plants intending to operate long-term, as we’ve written. Under the regulation, those plants would need to use technology such as carbon capture to cut 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032 to continue running.

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Source

Elon Musk, who has been tapped by President-elect Donald Trump to lead a committee to ferret out government waste, wrongly posted to X that members of Congress are trying to vote themselves a 40% raise.

A continuing resolution put forward by Republicans leading the House Appropriations Committee does attempt to allow an automatic congressional pay increase — which has drawn blowback from some members of Congress — but the maximum possible raise in 2025 would be 3.8%, not 40%.

The continuing resolution, a stopgap measure to keep the government funded for three months, needs to be enacted before midnight on Dec. 20 to avoid a government shutdown.

“How can this be called a ‘continuing resolution’ if it includes a 40% pay increase for Congress?” Musk wrote on X on Dec. 18.

Musk, the Space X and Tesla CEO who along with Vivek Ramaswamy was tapped by Trump to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, linked to a post from “Wall Street Mav” that says Congress was trying to “slip by” a “pay increase for members of Congress from $174,000 to $243,000 per year.”

That’s not accurate.

The bill seeks to allow an automatic cost-of-living increase for congressional pay — which Congress has opted out of since 2009. But the Congressional Research Service said the raise would amount to 3.8% in 2025, not 40%.

It does require some legislative sleuthing to uncover that Congress has proposed a pay increase. (Bloomberg Government first reported it.) Page 15 of the proposed continuing resolution includes a sentence to strike language from a previous appropriations act that had blocked an automatic pay increase from taking effect.

Although the Constitution prescribes that members of Congress set their own compensation rate through legislation, it’s often politically unpopular for members to vote in favor of giving themselves a raise. A law passed in 1989 sought to make it easier, politically, by including an automatic annual cost-of-living pay raise tied to the Employment Cost Index (and limited by the percentage base pay increase for white-collar federal employees).

But as the Congressional Research Service explains, Congress for years has blocked those automatic pay increases from taking effect. Indeed, the pay for rank-and-file members of Congress has been frozen at $174,000 a year since 2009. (Those in leadership positions earn more.)

“If Members of Congress had received every adjustment prescribed by the ECI formula since 1992, and the statutory limitation … regarding the percentage base pay increase for [General Schedule federal] employees remained unchanged, the 2024 salary would be $243,300,” the CRS report said. (Had the automatic cost-of-living adjustments taken effect just since 2009, pay would now be $217,900, the report states.)

That is presumably where the $243,000 figure cited in the X post comes from.

But that’s not how much the continuing resolution would raise congressional pay.

As the CRS report notes, “The maximum potential January 2025 adjustment is 3.8%, which would result in a salary of $180,600, an increase of $6,600.”

Again, some legislators don’t think they should get any raise.

Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat from Maine, vowed to oppose the continuing resolution if it included a raise for members of Congress.

“Congress should be working to raise Americans’ wages and lower their health care costs, not sneaking new member perks into must-pass legislation behind closed doors,” Golden said in Dec. 18 press release. “If members can’t get by on our already generous salaries and benefits, they should find another line of work.” 

But unlike Musk, Golden got the size of potential raise correct.

“Members of Congress currently earn $174,000 annually — more than 90 percent of Americans,” Golden stated. “If enacted, this CR would allow for a 2025 adjustment of 3.8 percent, which would result in a Member salary increase of $6,600.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Summary

President-elect Donald Trump is headed back to the White House in January. But in all the years since he was last president, not once has he been absent from our annual roundup of the worst whoppers. He’s very present on our 2024 list as well.

Several of Trump’s biggest falsehoods over the last 12 months were about immigration, including his bizarre claim that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of people in an Ohio community. In addition, he incorrectly blamed “migrant crime,” as he coined it, for the not-at-all “Worst Crime Wave in History!”

He also took historical revisionism to new levels when he claimed that “all legal scholars” had long wanted the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling overturned, and he continued to greatly minimize the impact of climate change by repeating his old — and absurd — prediction that oceans will rise just “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.”

But Trump wasn’t alone in misinforming the public. His political foes did so as well.

Our jaws dropped when President Joe Biden claimed that the annual rate of inflation, which spiked during his administration, already “was 9%” when he took office. And the Democratic presidential ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz kept calling the conservative Project 2025 playbook Trump’s “agenda,” and Walz falsely claimed that it calls for a federal registry to monitor “all pregnancies.”

Read on to see the full list of claims, which are in no particular order.

Analysis

‘They’re eating the dogs.’ While we don’t rank our Whoppers of the Year, Trump’s claim during his lone debate with Harris about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — “They’re eating the dogs. … They’re eating the cats. … They’re eating the pets of the people that live there” — deserves a place high on our list. As we wrote in our debate coverage that night, Springfield’s city manager and police chief both said there were “no credible reports” of pets being harmed. In media interviews, Mayor Rob Rue dismissed the claim, saying that “your pets are safe” in Springfield.

Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, who first thrust the claim into the national dialogue, later acknowledged that it’s “possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

The claim about eating the pets of local townspeople was just one of numerous falsehoods Trump and Vance spread about Haitian migrants who have settled in Springfield. Vance twisted data to make the unfounded claim that immigrants are responsible for an 81% increase in the city’s murders. And both he and Trump grossly inflated the immigrant population in Springfield and wrongly claimed the Haitian immigrants in the city were there illegally.

Biden’s inflation distortion. With American voters’ frustration over inflation near the top of the list of their concerns, Biden tried to flip the script, falsely claiming that he had inherited 9% inflation. “It was 9% when I came to office, 9%,” Biden said in a CNN interview on May 8 and repeated in an interview with Yahoo Finance on May 14.

As we wrote, the U.S. annual rate of inflation was 1.4% when Biden took office in January 2021. After that, inflation increased almost every month until reaching 9.1% in June 2022 – its highest level in about 40 years. From there, the annual rate of inflation has been trending down, and was at 2.7% in November. Nonetheless, over the entirety of his presidency, though November, the Consumer Price Index has risen 20.5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Although Trump repeatedly blamed Biden and Harris for the high inflation, experts told us the primary driver was the unprecedented circumstances created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which triggered inflation around the globe. While pandemic stimulus spending under Biden also contributed to inflation, experts explained that the root cause was economic fallout from the pandemic, which created issues with supply and demand, as well as labor, and inflation was further exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and subsequent sanctions the U.S. (and other countries) put on Russian oil.

Trump’s bogus claim of legal consensus on abortion. Fulfilling a 2016 campaign promise, Trump in his first term appointed three conservative Supreme Court justices, enough to win a 5-4 ruling in 2022 in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The ruling in the case, which concerned a Mississippi law, effectively overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion.

Justifying his role in overturning that landmark case, Trump posted a video in April in which he falsely claimed, “All legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” that Roe v. Wade “be ended.” It became a regular line in Trump’s stump speeches. But as we wrote, legal scholars told us that was “utter nonsense” and “patently absurd.” In fact, many legal scholars wrote amicus briefs in that case supporting Roe and opposing the state law.

False FEMA claims. In the aftermath of devastation from Hurricane Helene, Trump falsely and repeatedly claimed that the Biden administration “stole” money for hurricane recovery and spent it on housing for people in the U.S. illegally. FEMA quickly debunked Trump’s claim, releasing a statement that explained, “FEMA’s disaster response efforts and individual assistance is funded through the Disaster Relief Fund, which is a dedicated fund for disaster efforts. Disaster Relief Fund money has not been diverted to other, non-disaster related efforts.”

Trump’s claim hinged on federal funding for the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, which makes payments to state and local entities that provide housing and other services to migrants processed and released by DHS. FEMA helps administer the grants for the Shelter and Services Program, but the funds come from the budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a different agency.

The claim about money “stolen” from FEMA for immigrant services was just one of several misleading or unsupported claims Trump made while criticizing the Biden administration’s hurricane relief efforts.

Trump on Harris’ race. A week after Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Trump turned his attention to the Democrats’ quickly emerging replacement, Harris, with an eyebrow-raising comment at the annual convention of the National Association of Black Journalists on July 31.

Trump claimed that Harris “was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black? … I respect either one. But she obviously doesn’t, because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”

As we wrote, there is ample evidence that Harris had for decades identified as both Indian American and Black, reflecting her biracial parentage. Among other things, she attended Howard University, the historically Black university in Washington, D.C., and joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, which bills itself as “America’s premier Greek-letter organization for African American women.”

The Harris campaign’s Project 2025 abortion distortions. A common refrain from both Harris and her running mate, Walz, this year was that Trump planned to ban abortion nationwide and force states to not only track abortions, but miscarriages, too. The claims were based on some of what’s in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s roadmap for “the next conservative President.”

But as we’ve explained on numerous occasions, Trump has distanced himself from the project, explicitly saying he would not do any of those things. He said monitoring pregnancies would be up to “the individual states.”

Setting that aside, the two Democrats were still sometimes wrong about what Project 2025 said. At one point, Walz took it so far as to claim that Project 2025 called for the tracking of “all pregnancies” and would require people “to register with a new federal agency” upon getting pregnant. The playbook says no such thing. It does advise that miscarriages and abortions be reported, but does not stipulate the monitoring of all pregnancies.

Trump’s false suggestion that vaccines might cause autism. Two decades after a National Academies report reviewed the evidence and rejected the idea that certain vaccines or vaccine ingredients cause autism, the president-elect has brought the issue back to the fore. From a leaked phone call with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal anti-vaccine advocate, in July, to Trump’s announcement in mid-November to select Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Trump and his allies have breathed new life into old claims that scientists have considered settled for years.

In a “Meet the Press” interview earlier this month, Trump repeatedly pointed to the rising autism rate and suggested vaccines might be a cause. “Go back 25 years. Autism was almost nonexistent,” he said, incorrectly. Later, referring to whether vaccines cause autism, he said, “I think somebody has to find out.” Trump did much the same in his “Person of the Year” interview with Time, which was published on Dec. 12. He claimed his administration would go “all out” and “do very serious testing” to determine if vaccines cause autism.

But as we’ve written, scientists have already gone “all out” — and failed to find any links. There’s also a lack of biological plausibility, since autism begins to develop before a child receives any vaccines. As easy as they are to quote, autism statistics themselves are also a bit of a red herring. While the autism rate in the U.S. has dramatically increased over time, this does not necessarily mean that more children actually have the condition. Instead, scientists think that most of what is going on is that autism is better diagnosed, including less severe cases that before would not have been identified as autism.

Trump’s extreme lowball estimate of sea level rise. In another example of how far Trump can stray from established science, one of the president-elect’s campaign lines this year was the false claim that the oceans will rise just “one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years.” Event to event, Trump changed the numbers slightly, but that amount is much too low. According to NASA, the sea level is already rising a little more than one-eighth of an inch each year. So much for four centuries.

Given just how far off they are, it’s never been clear if Trump is serious when he gives these sorts of figures. But quip or not, the effect has been to downplay climate change.

Misleading chart on illegal immigration. It’s the chart that Trump says saved his life, because he turned to gesture to it at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13 when an assassin’s bullet hit his ear. It’s also highly misleading. At virtually all of his rallies, Trump would point to the chart on apprehensions of immigrants at the southern border as evidence that he had solved illegal immigration by the end of his presidency.

“See that arrow on the bottom?” Trump said at a rally in Lancaster. “That arrow is my final day in office, and we had the lowest illegal immigration that we have had, I guess probably in history, certainly in recorded history.” Except that’s not where the arrow points. Despite how the chart is labeled, the arrow actually points to apprehensions in April 2020, when apprehensions plummeted during the height of the pandemic. They rose every month after that. In Trump’s last months in office, apprehensions had more than quadrupled and were higher than the month he took office.

Not the ‘worst crime wave in history.’ Among his live social media responses to Biden’s State of the Union address in March, Trump falsely claimed, “Migrant Violence is leading to the Worst Crime Wave in History!” Similar claims would become a defining theme of his campaign. But it’s not true. The U.S. violent crime rate peaked in the early 1990s and has dropped in recent years to less than half those rates, according to estimates from the FBI. Crime statistics from several sources show a spike in violent crime, particularly murders, in 2020, Trump’s last year in office, and a decline since then.

It’s also not true that FBI data that show homicides and other violent crimes trending down since Trump left office are “fake numbers,” as Trump has alleged. Crime statistics experts say data do not back up Trump’s claims about a wave of “migrant crime.” And the Biden administration did not release into the U.S. more than 13,000 “murderers” who entered the country illegally, as Vance and Trump falsely claimed.

For more, read our full stories on these claims:

FactChecking the Harris-Trump Debate, Sept. 11

FactChecking Biden on Inflation, Other Claims, May 10

Trump’s False Claim About Roe, April 9

Trump’s False Claim of Stolen Disaster Relief Funds, Oct. 8

Trump’s False Claims of ‘No Help’ or Helicopters Sent for Helene Victims, Oct 11

FactChecking Harris’ and Trump’s Fox News Appearances, Oct 18

Harris Has Always Identified as Indian American and Black, Aug. 1

Trump’s Misleading Chart on Illegal Immigration, April 4

FactChecking Trump’s ‘Fact Check’ of the State of the Union, March 11

FactChecking Trump’s ‘Meet the Press’ Interview, Dec. 9

Trump’s Bogus Attack on FBI Crime Statistics, May 3

Third Night of the Democratic Convention, Aug. 22

A Guide to Project 2025, Sept. 10

Walz’s False Project 2025 Pregnancy Monitoring Claims, Oct. 1

Final Night of the Democratic National Convention, Aug. 23

Trump Embraces RFK Jr.’s Views on Vaccines, Fluoride, Nov. 4

Sen. Mullin’s Misleading Vaccine Testing Claim, Dec. 6

Trump Revives — and Further Decreases — His Absurdly Low Estimate of Sea Level Rise, Aug. 23

Trump Clings to Inaccurate Climate Change Talking Points, Sept. 9

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In a Fox News interview, House Speaker Mike Johnson was spinning the facts when he claimed Republicans would have won a larger majority in the House in the 2024 election if not for Democrats’ gerrymandering of districts.

Johnson failed to mention that many states with Republican legislative majorities also gerrymander districts for partisan advantage. The net effect of redistricting did not give the Democrats a large advantage, experts told us, with most of them saying the Republicans benefited more than Democrats.

Redistricting is based on the decennial census, which counts the nation’s population every 10 years, as required by the Constitution. After the 2020 census, states with more than one congressional seat redrew some of their district lines to reflect population changes.

During a Dec. 4 interview on Fox News, Johnson blamed partisan redistricting for the Republican’s slim majority in the House, telling host Martha McCallum, “The House would have a larger majority, but redistricting and gerrymandering in the blue states made that almost impossible.” Republicans went into the 2024 election with a 221-214 majority in the House, but emerged with one fewer seat and a smaller 220-215 majority. (The GOP majority will be even smaller, at least temporarily, as Trump tapped three Republican members of Congress to join his administration and a fourth has resigned.)

We asked statisticians to gauge the effects of partisan redistricting on the 2024 congressional elections since the 2020 census. Depending on the methodology they used, these experts largely reached one of two conclusions — that Republicans derived a significant advantage from partisan redistricting, or that partisan gerrymandering had little net effect on the outcomes of the 2024 congressional elections, with either the Democrats or Republicans deriving a slight advantage. None of the experts we interviewed told us that gerrymandering provided Democrats with a large advantage. 

As described by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project, each state redraws its electoral districts every decade to account for population changes determined by the census. While some states put independent commissions or courts in charge of the redistricting process, most states put the legislature in charge of drawing new electoral maps. 

All About Redistricting, a site managed by University of Colorado Law Professor Doug Spencer, reported that legislatures in 39 states primarily control congressional redistricting, with most able to approve redistricted maps through a majority vote in each legislative chamber. Nine draw federal districts through independent commissions.

This redistricting process creates opportunities for gerrymandering, or the redrawing of electoral districts to favor a political party. The Campaign Legal Center describes that two primary tactics used in gerrymandering are “cracking” and “packing.” Cracking refers to splitting up a district possessing majority support for the opposing party into other districts, causing the opposing party to garner minority support from each newly drawn district. Conversely, packing refers to heavily concentrating the opposing party’s voters in a small number of districts such that it wins a few districts by very large margins instead of winning a larger number of districts by relatively smaller margins.

That’s how you end up with districts that look like Ohio’s 15th Congressional District, on the left, and Illinois’ 13th district, on the right, as illustrated below using MapChart:

Importantly, states also differ in the extent to which laws and other requirements prevent partisan legislators from seeking political advantage through redistricting. In June 2019, the Supreme Court ruled that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts,” leaving each state in charge of its own redistricting process. However, the court maintains that racial gerrymandering, or “redistricting in order to dilute minority voting power,” remains unconstitutional under the 15th Amendment. 

As a result, Michael Li, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, told NPR in May 2023 that the extent of partisan gerrymandering varies considerably across the country. “In some states, you can get away with it. In some states, you can’t,” he described. This patchwork of differing restrictions on gerrymandering throughout the country creates an environment where both parties can carve out partisan electoral advantages in states where they control the redistricting process.  

What Redistricting Experts Say

Each of the experts we spoke to agreed that both parties make efforts to gain partisan advantages from redistricting. However, when asked to quantify the extent to which gerrymandering altered electoral outcomes in 2024, we received diverging answers — though none agreed with Johnson’s claims that Democrats gained large seat advantages from redistricting. 

David Niven, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati who was once a speechwriter for former Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland of Ohio, strongly disagreed with Johnson’s claim, telling us in an email that “the Republican majority is entirely dependent on Republicans having gerrymandered far more seats in their own favor.” To quantify the effects of gerrymandering on the election, Niven compared each party’s congressional vote shares in a state to the party’s most recent presidential vote share.

“With presidential votes as a base, you can then simulate outcomes in each district by varying the lines and then tallying the results,” Niven said. “When maps drawn to be fair produce different partisan outcomes than the actual map, it is attributed to gerrymandering.” 

While he agrees that both Democrats and Republicans engage in partisan redistricting, he concluded that Republicans’ gerrymandering efforts have been more frequent since the 2020 census. As a result, he argued that “Speaker Johnson’s comment is akin to Blackbeard saying he’d have more treasure if there weren’t so many thieving pirates out there.”

Employing a similar methodology, a report authored by Li, Peter Miller and Madison Buchholz from the Brennan Center found evidence of “extreme partisan bias … in 19 states: 11 where Republicans drew maps, 4 where Democrats drew maps, 2 where commissions drew maps, and 2 with court-drawn maps.” In particular, Li told us in an email response that “Texas and Florida have especially big skews” favoring the Republicans.

To explain this difference, the authors wrote, “This decade, as last, Republicans disproportionately controlled the redistricting process, drawing 191 (or 44 percent) of the districts that will be used in this year’s elections. By contrast, Democrats fully controlled the drawing of only 75 districts. The rest were drawn by commissions, courts, or divided governments.”

Overall, they found that these partisan maps generated 23 extra seats for Republicans compared to seven for Democrats — a net advantage of 16 seats for the Republican Party. 

Importantly, Niven explains that the strategy he and the Brennan Center employ is “based largely on the premise that everyone behaves as a pure partisan” — that is, the baseline maps used to represent a hypothetically unbiased election result assume that everyone who votes for a Republican for president will also vote for a Republican in Congress. However, this assumption does not play out perfectly in the real world. For example, NBC News reported “that there are now more than a dozen Democrats in districts Trump carried, with just three Republicans in districts Vice President Kamala Harris won,” attributing the figures to Rep. Richard Hudson, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Jonathan Cervas, assistant teaching professor in political science at Carnegie Mellon who was a nonpartisan consultant on redistricting in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York, told us in an email that he agreed with Niven and the Brennan Center’s findings. While “the net effect of gerrymandering is difficult to gauge,” partisan redistricting “created a substantial advantage for Republicans nationwide,” making it “pretty clear that the Republicans have the advantage in terms of how the districts lines were drawn to favor a party,” he said.  

Cervas, Nevin, and the Brennan Center’s report all pointed to North Carolina as an example of partisan gerrymandering affecting the 2024 election. In 2023, the state Supreme Court reversed an earlier ruling that had prevented the implementation of a Republican-drawn map in the 2022 election, with the court now concluding that they could not rule on cases concerning partisan redistricting. As a result, the Republican-controlled state legislature redistricted the state to favor their party. In what Cervas termed “textbook gerrymandering,” the Democrats lost three congressional seats in North Carolina between 2022 and 2024 under the newly drawn map, despite what he says were similar statewide Democratic vote shares in both elections.

However, Cervas also argued that the Republican advantage through gerrymandering has decreased in recent election cycles. The “Great Gerrymander of 2012,” as experts called it, created significant partisan advantages for Republicans in the aftermath of the 2010 census. But Cervas told us that shifting political control and interventions to courts and independent commissions have lessened the Republican Party’s advantage in recent election cycles. For example, Niven and Cervas both said that recent court rulings enforcing redistricting changes in Alabama and Louisiana favored Democrats over Republicans. 

Alternatively, other experts used differing methodologies to quantify the effects of gerrymandering and found a smaller net effect from partisan redistricting.

In a 2023 study, Kosuke Imai, professor of government and statistics at Harvard University and the leader of the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology Project, found — along with his team — that Republicans possess a net advantage of only two congressional seats from partisan gerrymandering. 

Similar to Cervas, Imai told us in an email that partisan redistricting efforts largely favored Republicans over Democrats after the 2010 census. However, he said that “in the 2020 redistricting cycle, some states had a partisan bias toward Democrats. As a result, even though there was widespread gerrymandering in 2020, the partisan biases were mostly canceled out at the national level.” 

In the 2023 study, Imai and his team identified gerrymandering by “comparing potential electoral outcomes under enacted district plans to those under a set of alternative plans that are created by simulation.” After sampling a series of nonpartisan simulated maps that abide by each state’s specific requirements, the team determined that “any differences in the partisan outcomes between the enacted plan and the simulated, nonpartisan baseline demonstrate the partisan effects of redistricting.” 

Importantly, Imai told us that the two-seat Republican advantage calculated by his team “is not specific to the 2024 Congressional election. Rather, you can think of it as a general partisan bias of the enacted redistricting plan,” he explained.

Overall, Imai said that “about half of 2020 redistricting plans are biased in one way or another” in that they possessed “deviation from non-partisan plans that comply with redistricting rules.” However, because both parties engaged in partisan gerrymandering, he concluded that the Democrats and Republicans mostly canceled each other out.

Imai’s team summarized the results of their analysis in the figure below:

Lastly, the evaluation offered by Ellen Veomett, associate professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco, most closely aligns with Johnson’s claim that nationwide gerrymandering benefits Democrats. In a 2022 analysis published in the Washington Post, Veomett and her team concluded that Republicans were “at a slight disadvantage compared to where they could be” leading up to the 2022 midterm congressional elections. Describing the results of her study in an email response, she explained, “By our estimation, if you were to tally the additional seats that each party ‘unfairly’ were predicted to win [in 2022], Democrats had slightly more.”

Veomett and her team used the Geography and Election Outcome, or GEO, metric to evaluate the effects of gerrymandering on the 2022 midterm elections. As described in a paper published by Veomett and her team, the GEO metric incorporates both “election outcome data … [attempting] to measure the ‘packing and cracking’” and geographic “data about a map to identify irregularly shaped districts and flag them as potential gerrymanders.”

Veomett hasn’t yet updated her analysis to reflect districting changes since the 2022 midterms (such as the changes in North Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana), inhibiting her ability to evaluate Johnson’s claim “with significant accuracy.” Asked to evaluate if the net effects of gerrymandering had shifted since 2022, she told us, “I’m guessing it’s similar for the 2024 election.”

When we asked Johnson’s office about his claim, his spokesperson referred us to a New York Post article published on Nov. 16. The article, which primarily cites GOP consultants, says that redistricting in states such as Illinois, New Jersey, Nevada and Michigan after the 2020 census created electoral advantages for Democrats. In the story, reporter Jon Levine wrote that “ultra-gerrymandered districts around the country have made it close to impossible for Republicans to make even bigger gains in the House.”

Johnson’s office also pointed us to New York, where they argue that recent redistricting made at least three districts in the state “safer for Democrat incumbents.” Because of these changes, Johnson’s office argued that “the overall impacts of redistricting and gerrymandering since the 2020 census … have contributed to Democrat wins and cut down the size of potential Republican House victories.”

Many of the expert analyses we cite above, including the studies conducted by the Brennan Center and Imai’s team, agree that some of these states (particularly Illinois) did engage in partisan gerrymandering that favored Democrats. Similarly, Dave Wasserman, senior editor and elections analyst at the Cook Political Report, told NBC News in February that New York’s redistricting changes did constitute “a mild gerrymander” that favored Democrats.

However, singling out gerrymandering by Democrats, as Johnson did, considers only one side of the equation. Both parties engage in partisan redistricting, and on aggregate, experts said that these nationwide gerrymandering efforts either significantly advantage Republicans or have little overall effect — making it dubious to claim that gerrymandering made a larger Republican victory “impossible.”

The divergence in findings between the experts we spoke to underscores that precisely quantifying the effects of gerrymandering on a specific election is far from straightforward. However, Johnson’s remarks blaming Democrats for biasing election results through gerrymandering, without recognizing his own party’s efforts to shape elections through partisan redistricting, amounts to misleading political spin. 

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Quick Take

President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter Biden from serving time for gun- and tax-related crimes. But contrary to claims on social media, Hunter Biden’s gun charges did not stem from a 1994 “crime bill authored” by then-Sen. Joe Biden.

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Full Story

President Joe Biden kept his son Hunter Biden from serving time for gun- and tax-related charges and other offenses “which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024,” when he issued a pardon on Dec. 1.

The pardon — which was a reversal of the president’s previous commitment not to offer his son clemency — sparked condemnation and some misleading claims online.

For example, Kim Klacik, a conservative commentator who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2020 and 2024, posted on X and Instagram, “In 1994, a crime bill authored by @JoeBiden locked Black men up for years for the same gun charge he just pardoned Hunter Biden for today.”

Another post on Facebook similarly said, “In 1994, a Crime Bill authored by Joe Biden passed Congress becoming a law that locked up 10’s of thousands of Black Men for years for the same crime he just PARDONED HUNTER BIDEN FOR!”

But Hunter Biden’s gun charges didn’t stem from the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Rather, he was charged and convicted under the Gun Control Act of 1968, Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law, told FactCheck.org in an interview.

Biden, who was the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman at the time, played a key role in the drafting and passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. That law “increased mandatory minimum sentences for a number of criminal offenses, including some involving the use of firearms, and instituted a federal assault weapons ban,” Willinger said. “I’m not aware that it made any changes to the sentencing minimums or guidelines for Hunter Biden’s offenses of conviction.”

Hunter Biden hadn’t yet received a sentence for his gun-related convictions when the pardon was issued. Sentencing had been scheduled for Dec. 12. He faced up to 25 years in prison for the gun charges, according to the New York Times, although adding that he would likely “serve, at most, a small fraction of that time.”

In June, a federal jury in Delaware convicted Hunter Biden of three felony counts related to lying about using drugs on a form to purchase a gun.

He had been charged under sections 922, which lays out criminal acts related to gun possession, and 924, which lays out associated penalties, of Title 18 of the United States Code. Each was enacted in 1968, following the passage of the Gun Control Act.

“Generally, these charges are quite rare,” Willinger said. He noted that the primary charge for Hunter Biden was made under section 922(g)(3), which prohibits those who are addicted to drugs from possessing a gun, and is particularly rare.

According to a 2022 report from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, in fiscal year 2021 there were 6,549 people who were sentenced for convictions under section 922(g) and only 5.3% of them, or less than 350 people, had been convicted under the drug addiction subsection, 922(g)(3).

It’s usually difficult for prosecutors to prove that a person has been using or is addicted to drugs, unless they have prior convictions or admitted their drug use to police, Willinger said, explaining why the convictions are rare.

So, the lead charge that Hunter Biden was convicted of is rarely pursued and did not come from the 1994 crime bill that his father shepherded into law.

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Sources

Farley, Robert. “What Biden Left Out of Pardon Statement.” FactCheck.org. 6 Dec 2024.

White House. Press release. “Statement from President Joe Biden.” 1 Dec 2024.

U.S. Congress. H.R.3355 – Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. As adopted 13 Sep 1994.

Public Law 90-618. Gun Control Act of 1968. 22 Oct 1968.

Robertson, Lori. “Biden on the 1994 Crime Bill.” FactCheck.org. 12 July 2019.

Norwood, Candice and Mariel Padilla. “The complicated legacy of the 1994 crime bill.” The 19th. 16 Sep 2024.

Willinger, Andrew. Executive director, Duke Center for Firearms Law. Interview with FactCheck.org. 6 Dec 2024.

U.S. v. Robert Hunter Biden. Case no. 1:23-cr-00061. Jury verdict. U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. 11 Jun 2024.

U.S. v. Robert Hunter Biden. Case no. 1:23-cr-00061. Indictment. U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. 14 Sep 2023.

18 USC 922: Unlawful acts. uscode.house.gov. Accessed 10 Dec 2014.

18 USC 924: Penalties. uscode.house.gov. Accessed 10 Dec 2014.

United States Sentencing Commission. “What Do Federal Firearms Offenses Really Look Like?” Jul 2022.

Source

Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

Quick Take

President Joe Biden granted pardons and commutations to more than 1,500 individuals on Dec. 12. Social media posts wrongly claim those pardoned included a Chinese national, Shanlin Jin, imprisoned for child pornography. Jin was granted clemency as part of a prisoner swap last month that freed three Americans held for years in China.

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Full Story

On Dec. 12, President Joe Biden granted 39 pardons and 1,499 commutations, less than two weeks after granting his son Hunter “a full and unconditional pardon” for any crimes “he has committed or may have committed” from Jan. 1, 2014, through Dec. 1, 2024.

Hunter Biden’s pardon dealt with three felonies related to his purchase and possession of a gun in 2018 as an active drug user, and lying about his drug use on a federal form necessary to purchase the gun. The sentencing for the case was scheduled for Dec. 12. The president’s son also pleaded guilty in September in federal court to nine tax-related charges, including three felonies and six misdemeanors, and faced sentencing in that case on Dec. 16.

Separately, the White House said the Dec. 12 act of clemency was for people “who were placed on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic and who have successfully reintegrated into their families and communities. He [Biden] is also pardoning 39 individuals who were convicted of non-violent crimes. These actions represent the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.”

But as social media users responded to Biden’s flurry of clemency actions that day, some have misrepresented one unrelated clemency issued last month. A Dec. 12 Instagram post from conservative commentator Benny Johnson said, “BREAKING: Joe Biden pardoned 39 people today including Chinese spies and an individual convicted of possessing child p*rnography. Oh, and the White House says they were individuals convicted of ‘non-violent’ crimes.”

A similar post on Instagram on Dec. 12 said, in part, “BREAKING NEWS Joe Biden just provided a Chinese national with clemency who was convicted of having 47,000 child p*rnography images in his possession. Shanlin Jin was sentenced to 97 months in prison after pleading guilty.”

But Jin’s clemency was not part of the pardons issued by Biden on Dec. 12, and his name does not appear on the list of clemency recipients announced that day.

Rather, Jin had been part of a widely reported prisoner swap with China that was announced by the U.S. on Nov. 27. In exchange for Jin and two other Chinese nationals, three Americans — John Leung, Kai Li and Mark Swidan — were released to the U.S. following months of diplomatic efforts, the New York Times reported. Leung had been imprisoned in China for three years, Li for eight years, and Swidan for more than 10 years.

The social media posts make no mention of the prisoner swap, leaving unanswered why Biden gave clemency to Jin.

The Financial Times identified Jin in a Nov. 29 article as one of the Chinese nationals released by the U.S. in the prisoner exchange. Jin had been a doctoral student at Southern Methodist University in Texas, and was sentenced in 2022 for possessing child pornography, the Dallas Morning News reported.

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Sources

Bruggeman, Lucien. “Hunter Biden’s sentencing on gun charges pushed back 1 more week.” ABC News. 26 Sep 2024.

Chase, Randall, et al. “President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is convicted of all 3 felonies in federal gun trial.” Associated Press. 11 Jun 2024.

Executive Grant of Clemency. Shanlin Jin. 22 Nov 2024.

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