Science & Health

Over recent weeks, speculation has grown about US President Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour during the US-Israel war on Iran.

In a video posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday, April 21, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Defense Department was "discarding" the military's "mandatory flu vaccine requirement, effective immediately." Hegseth's announcement was applauded by MAGA anti-vaxxers but drew a scathing response from liberal podcaster and former MS NOW (then MSNBC) host Keith Olbermann, who bluntly tweeted, "You couldn't do more to harm our troops if you attacked them, you drunken m– –."

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling examines the military's new flu vaccine policy in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on April 22, warning that the Trump Administration is putting members of the U.S. Armed Forces in danger by increasing their chances of being infected with the flu.

"Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently announced that he is discarding mandatory flu vaccinations for U.S. service members," explains Hertling, who served as commander of U.S. Army Europe under former President Barack Obama. "It may appeal to an anti-vax political base, and it may sound minor in the abstract — part of what Secretary Hegseth described as 'restoring freedom to the joint force.' But 'freedom' also comes with civic and community obligation, especially in a profession built on individual and group responsibility. In military units and on military bases, individual choices have immediate and cascading consequences for the health and readiness of others."

Hertling adds, "Consider how other high-performance organizations or facilities with throngs of people in close contact handle contagious illnesses. If a professional sports team has a player with the flu, that athlete often isn't welcomed into the locker room or told to push through practice. He's isolated to prevent the spread of the virus."

The former U.S. Army Commander warns that the flu can easily spread on military bases.

"Many soldiers live in barracks, train in formation — or share tight crew quarters in a tank, submarine, or aircraft — eat in shared dining facilities, and operate in close quarters every day," Hertling notes. "Additionally, troops who are married have families who live in base housing, send their kids to base schools and child care, attend religious services, and interact in a closed environment where exposure compounds quickly. What spreads in one unit rarely stays there."

Hertling emphasizes that in the military, "routine vaccinations" are a matter of "military readiness."

"In civilian life, getting the flu is usually an individual inconvenience — missed work, a few days of recovery, perhaps a ripple effect within a household or office," the veteran observes. "In the military, illness spreads rapidly across formations. One soldier shows up sick to morning physical training, and within days, an entire unvaccinated platoon would likely be degraded. Maintenance slows. Training schedules slip. Leaders spend time managing symptoms and manning rosters instead of preparing for missions."

Hertling continues, "Scale that to a battalion or brigade, and the impact becomes operational. For units in training, missed days due to illness mean less preparation for the next fight, which could lead to higher casualties or mission failure. For units in combat, the consequences can be even more severe…. Not every flu case is severe, but the cumulative effect of many cases, spreading quickly through formations, creates a predictable and avoidable degradation of capability. Good leaders don't ignore predictable risks; they mitigate them."

A new study featured in Political Psychology revealed that exposure to opposing political views on social media can paradoxically increase polarization by backfiring, as people double down on their beliefs when encountering disagreement. The research, based on a field experiment with Democrats and Republicans on Twitter, shows that financial incentives to follow bots sharing counter-attitudinal content still led to the reinforcement of partisan attitudes rather than moderation.

Eric Dolan at PsyPost cited the study, noting that identifying those who believe in conspiracy theories can also predict whether an individual endorses specific political rumors, but primarily when those rumors attack their political rivals.

Dolan explained that in previous research, there were two separate ways to predict such beliefs. One is "conspiracy thinking" while the other is belief in their own political wing.

"They usually accept theories that blame their political rivals and reject theories that accuse their own side. The researchers designed this study to see if these two separate factors actually interact with one another," wrote Dolan.

Those who buy into conspiracy thinking have a stronger tendency towards belief when the conspiracy also aligns with the person's own political bias.

"People naturally want to protect the reputation of their own group while assuming the worst about their opponents. Because of this natural bias, the researchers expected that people who are highly prone to conspiratorial thinking would eagerly accept rumors about their rivals," said Dolan.

Study author Omer Yair explained that he has an interest in conspiracy theories within political sects.

“And over the last few years I have read many articles showing that both political preferences, such as party identification, and 'conspiracy thinking' (AKA conspiracy mentality), i.e., people’s tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, independently explain belief in partisan conspiracy theories," he said.

So, he began researching whether a combination of the two could help explain why partisan conspiracy theories became more popular.

"A short search in the literature found no empirical support for such an interaction, so we gathered data from several surveys and found consistent support for our interaction hypothesis," said Yair.

The researchers compared data from six studies, two of which were from the United States political system. It resulted in a sample size of nearly 11,000 participants.

There were 61 conspiracy theories that individuals were asked about, and approximately half were about politics, while 31 dealt with issues like aliens, etc...

The studies all examined a level of conspiracy thinking on a four-question scale. They were asked to rank their agreement with statements such as, "a group of unknown people secretly controls the country," or "major events are the result of hidden plots."

They then used the level of belief in specific theories, combining all of the data to test the relationship between the two.

"The researchers found that general conspiracy thinking strongly predicts belief in political conspiracy theories, but this relationship depends heavily on political alignment. When a theory accused a person’s political rivals of wrongdoing, their underlying tendency to believe in conspiracies strongly activated. In these situations, highly conspiratorial individuals were very likely to believe the rumor," summarized the report.

So, when a conspiracy theory challenges the person's own political party, they're less likely to believe it.

Yair said that there could be future research done that examines ideas in a more social context that looks specifically at race, gender or nationality.

Futurism reports “a tranche of psychological studies found something startling about Donald Trump’s most loyal soldiers: they each turn to a grim coping mechanism to make sense of the real estate mogul’s laundry list of lies and documented sexual abuse.”

Three separate research papers, published together in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, each point to the same conclusion, say analysts. Psychologists surveyed 128 U.S. adults in October 2019, who indicated a preference for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Asked how they justified their support for the GOP candidate given allegations of his sexual misconduct, over half the group said they relied simply on denial and chose to not believe the charge.

“Those results were reproduced in a second study, started in December 2019, two days after federal lawmakers voted to impeach the president,” reports Futurism. “This time, 173 MAGA diehards largely either denied the accusations, or demurred by changing the topic to Trump’s policy decisions. In that study, the majority of supporters denied the accusations outright, while 15 percent declared they simply don’t care.”

Meanwhile, the most recent study, a 2022 survey taken immediately after Trump was arraigned for his role in the January 6 riots, found that of 187 participants, over 60 percent felt the accusations against the president were a lie, despite video footage of the violence at the Capital being readily available.

“While each study is highly complex in their own right, together they reinforce the finding that denial of factual information — Trump’s seedy misdeeds, basically — is a direct response to anxiety caused by cognitive dissonance,” said Futurism.

“I was motivated by real-life experiences,” said study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, senior lecturer in psychology at Western Sydney University. “I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him.”

Harmon-Jones says she is also interested in cognitive dissonance outside the Trump-related breakdown.

“Would supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton react similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them? That remains to be tested,” she said.

Editor’s note: The following letter was sent to the bipartisan leadership of Congress on Monday, April 13, 2026 in regard to recent rhetoric and actions taken by US President Donald J. Trump.

Senator John Thune
Senate Majority Leader, US Senate

Senator Charles E. Schumer
Senate Minority Leader, US Senate

Representative Mike Johnson
Speaker of the House, USHouse of Representatives

Representative Hakeem Jeffries
House Minority Leader, US House of Representatives

Dear Senate Majority Leader Thune, Senate Minority Leader Schumer, Speaker Johnson, and House Minority Leader Jeffries:

We write to you today with a sense of urgency that we do not use lightly. The behavior and rhetoric of President Donald Trump have crossed a threshold that demands the immediate and bipartisan attention of Congress. This is not a partisan assessment. It is a judgment grounded in observable fact, consistent professional assessment, and the constitutional responsibilities that your offices carry.

President Trump exhibits what forensic mental health experts have, across dozens of independent assessments, identified as the “Dark Triad” of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Rather than constituting a clinical diagnosis, this trait-based assessment is grounded in behavioral observation and is particularly useful for assessing the level of danger an individual poses in a political leadership position. We do not offer this as a clinical verdict. We offer it as the considered judgment of a substantial body of professional opinion, based on well-researched evidence that is consistent, accumulating, and impossible to dismiss.

What makes this more than an academic matter is what predictably happens when this personality structure collides with immovable obstacles. The clinical literature is clear: individuals with Dark Triad profiles, when confronted with situations they cannot control or escape, do not recalibrate. They escalate. The psychological imperative to relieve narcissistic collapse overrides strategic calculation, concern for consequences, and ordinary self-restraint. Rage surges to domination. Impulsivity overrides caution. The urgent need to extinguish psychological pain eclipses every other consideration.

We are watching this dynamic unfold in real time.

The President’s recent public communications have been, by any normal standard of political discourse, alarming. His posts demanding that Iran “open the f------’ strait, you crazy b------” and his threat to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages,” adding that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” are not the rhetoric of calculated geopolitical pressure. They are the expressions of a man in profound psychological distress who is reaching for the most extreme retaliatory threats available to him. That these statements were addressed to an adversary in the context of an active military confrontation makes them not merely shocking but profoundly dangerous.

President Trump has now ordered a US naval blockade of Iran — an action that has sent world oil prices soaring and placed the United States in direct opposition to the international community. His ongoing actions carry the potential to trigger a global economic catastrophe, draw in regional and great powers, and ignite a wider conflict with consequences that no one can bound. These orders are being issued without adequate deliberation, without congressional authorization, and in a context in which the President’s judgment is, by every visible measure, severely compromised.

We urge three specific actions.

First, Congress must immediately retake its constitutional authority over war. The bombing of Iran and the initiation of a naval blockade — acts of war under both US and international law — cannot be authorized by presidential fiat. Article I of the Constitution vests in Congress the sole power to declare war and to regulate commerce with foreign nations. The Framers intended Congress to deliberate upon and be accountable for precisely such consequential actions. Congress must assume its constitutional authority now, before further escalation renders the question moot.

Second, congressional leadership — on a bipartisan basis — must convene urgent consultations with senior administration officials, including the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of State, and the Director of National Intelligence. The purpose is not routine oversight. It is to create a circuit breaker capable of preventing escalation toward catastrophe, including the potential use of nuclear weapons. Those officials have their own constitutional and statutory obligations. Congress should insist on those obligations and provide a forum in which they can be exercised.

Third, Congress should formally initiate consultation with the Vice President and Cabinet regarding the President’s fitness for office under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. We do not prejudge the outcome. We are not calling for the President’s immediate removal. We are calling for the process that the Constitution itself provides for this contingency: when a President’s capacity to discharge the duties of office is in question and poses a potential imminent danger to the nation. The Amendment exists because those who drafted it recognized that the question of presidential incapacity would occasionally arise, and that it required a constitutional answer rather than a political improvisation.

He is a constitutional emergency. The mechanisms for addressing such an emergency exist. They were placed in the Constitution and its amendments for moments precisely like this one.

We recognize the gravity of what we are asking. We ask it because the gravity of the situation demands it.

A President who publicly threatens to destroy a foreign civilization, who launches a bombing campaign and then imposes a naval blockade without congressional authorization, and who shows every behavioral sign of a personality in acute crisis is not merely a political problem. He is a constitutional emergency. The mechanisms for addressing such an emergency exist. They were placed in the Constitution and its amendments for moments precisely like this one.

The war with Iran will not wait. The escalation dynamics of this active military confrontation will not wait. The psychological conditions driving the President’s decisions will not improve under pressure — they will worsen.

We urge you to act without delay. The Constitution gives you the tools. Your oath of office assigns you the responsibility.

Respectfully,

James Gilligan, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, New York University School of Medicine
Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University School of Law
Former Faculty of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Former President, International Association of Forensic Psychotherapy

Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D.
Former President, American Psychoanalytic Association
Former Vice President, World Mental Health Coalition

Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div.
President, World Mental Health Coalition
Co-Founder, Preventing Violence Now
Former Faculty of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Former Faculty of Law and Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine

James R. Merikangas, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, George Washington University
Research Consultant, National Institute of Mental Health
Co-Founder, American Neuropsychiatric Association
Former President, American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists

Jeffrey D. Sachs, Ph.D.
University Professor, Columbia University

President Donald Trump supporters have stood by him despite his documented abuses of power, rhetorically violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election and numerous alleged instances of sexual misconduct. To those outside the so-called Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, this is mystifying — yet a recent study reveals the surprising reason why.

Three studies conducted between 2019 and 2022 examined hundreds of Trump supporters to establish how they reconcile negative information about him with their positive impressions, according to a recent analysis published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology. The first found that a majority of 128 Trump supporters refused to believe sexual misconduct accusations against him and praised his handling of the economy, supposed competence, abnormal communication style and perceived outsider status; roughly a third said that they were so happy with his policies that they could disregard his personal behavior, while another third implied they were indifferent as to his potential guilt because they are cynical about elites like Trump.

The other two studies reinforced the trends in the original. One included 173 participants and the other included 187 participants, and both were taken after Trump-related legal hearings: His first impeachment, over an attempt to coerce Ukraine into discrediting then-Vice President Joe Biden, and his arraignment after the January 6th coup attempt. On the first occasion, Trump supporters again refused to accept evidence that the president attempted to force Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy to obtain anti-Biden dirt in return for military aid; they similarly praised Trump’s handling of economic issues, although 15 percent admitted they did not care even if Trump had coerced Ukraine. On the second occasion, a majority (60 percent) simply refused to accept that Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, although researchers noted participants did this with great emotion and while indicating distress at the accusations, suggesting they were motivated by a psychological reaction to unpleasant information rather than a calm dismissal of facts.

All of the studies found that Trump supporters use disbelief, compartmentalization and false equivalence — to resolve the mental tension between their positive views and negative reports about Trump. They also turn to their economic self-interest as a rationalization for ignoring conduct they might otherwise publicly deplore.

“I was motivated by real-life experiences. I’ve been puzzled and confused by the continuing support and admiration that Donald Trump’s supporters hold for him, despite the many accusations that he has engaged in sexual assault, corruption, and other immoral and illegal activities. I wanted to give those supporters a chance to explain in their own words why they support him,” study author Cindy Harmon-Jones, a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at Western Sydney University, told PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan in an interview about her study.

“I also wanted to take a cognitive dissonance perspective to understanding their answers. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that when people hold beliefs that are in conflict, meaning that both ideas cannot be true at once, they feel uncomfortable. This discomfort motivates them to do cognitive work to bring their beliefs closer in alignment. I was interested in how people justify their support for Trump when reminded of the accusations against him.”

She also noted that (a) the studies reinforce the notion that Trump supporters engage in cognitive dissonance and (b) it is unclear whether this trend applies only to Trump or to other popular presidents.

“Some people might think that these findings aren’t due to dissonance and that the participants simply did not believe the information,” Harmon-Jones told Dolan. “However, in Study 3 was asked people whether the information about the accusations of Trump’s misconduct conflicted with their beliefs and if so, how bothered were they by the information. The more bothered they said they were, the more likely they were to say they didn’t believe the accusations. We interpreted this to mean that those participants were experiencing dissonance and not just coolly disbelieving the information.”

Harmon-Jones also told Dolan that “our findings only apply to supporters of Donald Trump. However, we don’t know whether this is the case. Would supporters of Barack Obama or Bill Clinton react similarly if they learned of similar accusations against them? That remains to be tested.”

Scientific research also finds another motive for Trump supporters to back him: Because when he is perceived as “winning,” they feel good. Earlier this month a study by researchers Deborah J. Wu, Kyle F. Law, Stylianos Syropoulos, and Sylvia P. Perry in the journal Advances in Psychology found that mental wellness corresponds closely to believing the government shares your values.

"Across all five weekly waves (Feb–Mar 2025), Republicans reported higher life satisfaction and happiness than Democrats,” the authors explained. Specifically they noted that "Republicans increased in well-being over time, whereas Democrats showed both linear and quadratic change, as initial decreases in well-being were followed by increases in well-being."

This means that ultimately "alignment with government actions may provide short-term psychological comfort, while opposition—though vital for democratic resilience—may carry psychological costs." Hence after Trump’s second inauguration “at all timepoints, Republicans reported greater life satisfaction over the past week, in comparison to Democrats.”

When President Donald Trump was reelected in 2024, he gave his supporters an immense psychological boon — but at the expense of the people who see Trump’s values as dangerous to their own.

At least that’s the result of a recent study by researchers Deborah J. Wu, Kyle F. Law, Stylianos Syropoulos, and Sylvia P. Perry in the journal Advances in Psychology. Analyzing the mental health of hundreds of Democrats and Republicans in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s second inauguration, the scientists quickly learned that mental wellness is closely linked to sensing one’s government shares your values.

"Across all five weekly waves (Feb–Mar 2025), Republicans reported higher life satisfaction and happiness than Democrats,” the authors wrote. Specifically they noted that "Republicans increased in well-being over time, whereas Democrats showed both linear and quadratic change, as initial decreases in well-being were followed by increases in well-being."

As a result, they concluded that "alignment with government actions may provide short-term psychological comfort, while opposition—though vital for democratic resilience—may carry psychological costs." Indeed, as a result of Trump’s re-inauguration “at all timepoints, Republicans reported greater life satisfaction over the past week, in comparison to Democrats"

Overall "these findings underscore how the psychological costs of political misfit may become especially salient in times of democratic decline,” the authors wrote. Reviewing their data, they concluded that “greater support for administration actions was associated with higher well-being, whereas greater support for oppositional actions was correlated with lower well-being."

Speaking to Psychology Post, Wu pointed out that “politics has become increasingly polarized in the United States, which can affect people’s well-being. Additionally, there is growing concern about democratic backsliding, which occurs when governments weaken democratic norms or institutions.”

This is not the first study to measure quantifiable neurological and psychological differences between Trump supporters and Trump opponents. In a Politics and the Life Sciences study titled “Differential brain activations between Democrats and Republicans when considering food purchases,” authors Amanda S. Bruce, John M. Crespi, Dermot J Hayes, Angelos Lagoudakis, Jayson L. Lusk, Darren M. Schreiber and Qianrong Wu used fMRI images to correctly trace people’s political leanings based on seemingly non-political choices like grocery shopping.

“While the food purchase decisions were not significantly different, we found that brain activation during decision-making differs according to the participant’s party affiliation,” the authors explained. “Models of partisanship based on left insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal gyrus, or premotor/supplementary motor area activations achieve better than expected accuracy.”

Similarly Trump supporters have recently embraced an actively anti-intellectual agenda, at least according to a recent report by The Nation’s Elizabeth Spiers.

“As the historian Richard Hofstadter noted, a fierce anti-intellectual spirit has long animated American culture, but it has typically targeted the knowledge elite from below,” Spiers, a digital media strategist and writer living in Brooklyn, wrote earlier in April. “What’s striking about today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is that it infuses the American knowledge elite; it stems from the bedrock conviction among tech oligarchs that they have mastered everything and have nothing left to learn. In this cloistered vision of tech-driven learning, they believe that deep intellectual work—the kind you do when you author a complex piece of music, for example—has little or no inherent value.”

Spiers concluded, “Their disdain for it has fueled their attacks on higher education, the humanities, and learning for its own sake, which they believe has no purpose beyond its inevitable digitization and monetization.”

President Trump is positioning the upcoming Artemis II moon mission as a potential centerpiece of his second-term legacy, according to a New York Times report by Peter Baker. The mission, scheduled to launch this week, will send four astronauts farther from Earth than any humans have traveled since the Apollo program ended more than 50 years ago.

Trump's enthusiasm for space exploration marks a dramatic reversal from his 2015 campaign stance. When asked about space during a New Hampshire campaign stop, Trump dismissed the subject, saying: "Right now, we have bigger problems — you understand that? We've got to fix our potholes." By the time he entered office, however, he had embraced space exploration as integral to American greatness, and no president since Kennedy and Johnson has pushed NASA as aggressively.

Trump's ambitions extend well beyond Artemis II. Shortly after Jared Isaacman became NASA administrator in January, Trump called to ask about Mars missions and nuclear rockets, inquiring: "Are we doing something in the 2028 window for Mars? What do you think about the nuclear rocket?" Isaacman indicated that Trump envisions sustained lunar presence and infrastructure rather than brief visits. Trump emphasized: "We better be doing more than getting rocks this time."

Trump's public attention to the Artemis II launch has been notably limited. Though the four astronauts were seated in the gallery during his February State of the Union address, Trump did not acknowledge them or mention the mission. He has said little about it in recent days despite the launch's imminence.

Trump's space agenda faces fiscal constraints. The Trump administration proposed cutting NASA funding by 24 percent last year, a reduction that would have terminated more than 40 missions. Though Congress protected the Artemis program through budget legislation, nearly 4,000 NASA employees are departing through federal workforce reductions.

Questions remain about Trump's sustained commitment to the long-term program. Retired astronaut Cady Coleman expressed concerns about losing experienced personnel, while Apollo 17 moon walker Harrison H. Schmitt stressed the importance of presidential leadership. Schmitt noted: "You have to have the White House and the president acting as the spokesman for it. There's just no question about that."

Last summer, Lorena Alvarado Hill received a series of unexpected medical bills.

A teacher’s aide in Melbourne, Florida, Hill is a single mom who works shifts at J.Crew on the weekends to send her daughter to college. Hill and her mother, who lives with her, had been enrolled in an insurance plan through HealthFirst.

Hill paid nothing toward the premiums for the government-subsidized plan, which previously had covered her scans and other appointments.

Then the bills came.

Hill was on the hook for a $2,966.93 MRI, as well as more than half a dozen doctor visits costing about $200 or $300 each. Without that kind of money on hand, Hill said, she put a few of the bills on payment plans and tried to figure out what had gone wrong.

She discovered, to her surprise, that her insurance had been canceled for “non-payment of premiums.”

The Medical Service

A health insurance plan purchased through the Affordable Care Act federal exchange, healthcare.gov.

The Bill

A monthly premium bill for 1 cent, which in the following months increased incrementally to 5 cents.

The Billing Problem: Small Bill, Big Consequences

Premium subsidies for ACA plans are automatically recalculated every time coverage is changed because of a life event, such as marriage, a change of job, or a child turning 26. In June, Hill removed her mother from the family’s group plan because she turned 65 and became eligible for Medicare and Medicaid.

The change triggered a recalculation of Hill’s monthly premium contribution, increasing it from $0 to 1 cent. She said she thought the amount was so small that she couldn’t pay it with her credit card.

Hill acknowledged she had received some bills that noted, “You may lose your health insurance coverage because you did not pay your monthly health insurance premium.”

But she said that her doctors collected the usual copayments during subsequent visits and that her insurance broker told her not to worry, reassuring her that the plan was “active.” Hill figured the 1-cent monthly premium was probably a rounding error that couldn’t result in termination, she said.

On Nov. 22, she got a letter marked “Important: Your health insurance coverage is ending.” It listed the last day of coverage as July 31, nearly four months before.

“I panicked,” Hill said. “I didn’t sleep that night.”

She made an appointment the next day with her broker, who called HealthFirst for clarification. The news was even worse: Not only had her insurance been canceled, but the 5-cent bill could be sent to a collection agency.

Hill takes out loans to pay her daughter’s college expenses. “I couldn’t have my credit ruined,” she said.

Others have lost their coverage over owing small amounts, said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University. “This woman’s situation is not so unusual with the enhanced subsidies,” she said.

The American Rescue Plan, passed in 2021, increased the amount of government assistance available to ACA plan holders. Those enhanced subsidies, which Congress let expire at the end of last year, meant enrollees with lower incomes had to pay little or nothing toward their premiums.

The Biden administration found that, in 2023, about 81,000 subsidized ACA insurance policies were terminated because the enrollee owed $5 or less. Nearly 103,000 more were canceled for owing less than $10.

To prevent that kind of coverage loss, most likely hitting people with little income, Biden administration health officials gave insurers the flexibility to allow ACA enrollees to retain coverage if they owed less than $10, or less than 95% of premium costs.

Insurers were required to keep insurance active for a 90-day “grace period” to give enrollees time to respond. That’s why Hill’s doctors initially took her copayments and sent no bill, as if nothing had changed.

That Biden administration “flexibility” rule took effect Jan. 15, 2025, though not every insurer opted to offer leniency to those owing small amounts.

The Trump administration removed the rule on Aug. 25, eliminating the protection entirely in the name of combating fraud and abuse.

The Resolution

Alarmed by the cancellation, the thousands of dollars in bills, and the threat of collections over 5 cents, Hill researched insurance law and fought back.

She filed a complaint in December with HealthFirst and the Florida Department of Financial Services asking for a write-off of her 5-cent balance and retroactive restoration of her policy, citing state and federal laws that seemed to apply to her situation.

In particular, she wrote, “creditors are not required to collect, and consumers are not required to pay, credit-card balances of $1.00 or less,” adding that “all major insurers and payment processors in Florida follow a 1-cent write-off policy.”

She noted that HealthFirst’s policy was to respond to complaints in 30 days.

Thirty days came and went, but Hill said she heard nothing in response — and new bills from her canceled policy kept coming.

Despite her frustration, Hill said, all her doctors were contracted with HealthFirst, so she reenrolled for 2026.

Lance Skelly, a spokesperson for HealthFirst, initially said the case “is still in the appeals/grievance process.” In a follow-up email, he said HealthFirst had followed the law in canceling Hill’s policy.

“Stepping back from what’s legal, this is just ridiculous,” Corlette said.

Weeks after a reporter’s query to the insurer, Hill said she looked at her billing statements for all the medical services she received in 2025 and was pleasantly surprised that the balances owed had been adjusted to $0.

But she said she would also like HealthFirst to cover what she had paid and still owed toward the bills she’d put on payment plans.

The Takeaway

Even small bills can have major consequences.

With the automation of more health billing decisions, irrational results have become increasingly common.

“One cent?!” Hill said. “No human would do this!”

It can be tempting to dismiss the notice of a tiny debt, but it’s important to take it seriously. Contact the insurer and get a human involved.

And while insurance policies have grace periods allowing coverage to remain in place if you miss a payment, some are not very long. For subsidized ACA marketplace plans, the period is 90 days, but others last just 30 or 45.

Missing one payment can mean losing coverage. So it’s important to keep a close eye on premiums to make sure they’re paid.

Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KFF Health News and The Washington Post’s Well+Being that dissects and explains medical bills. Since 2018, this series has helped many patients and readers get their medical bills reduced, and it has been cited in statehouses, at the U.S. Capitol, and at the White House. Do you have a confusing or outrageous medical bill you want to share? Tell us about it!

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

President Donald Trump’s first surgeon general denounced his latest pick for surgeon general, MAHA influencer Casey Means, on the grounds that she “doesn’t meet” the basic requirements for the job — an assessment seemingly shared by every living previous surgeon general.

“The role of surgeon general has centuries of precedent and requirements, and she doesn’t meet them,” Trump’s first surgeon general Jerome Adams told The Washington Post in an article published Sunday. Describing his objections as “operational, not personal,” Adams pointed out that if confirmed Means would not even be a member of the physicians corps but rather would be appointed through a provision that applies to health service workers. That alone would be unprecedented for a surgeon general, and perhaps explains why no previous surgeon general has come to Means’ defense.

“The irony would be the nation’s doctor wouldn’t even be in the corps as a doctor,” Adams told the Post.

For these and other reasons, Means’ appointment has not moved forward despite the social media influencer having been nominated almost 11 months ago.

“She doesn’t have the experience, she doesn’t have the background, she doesn’t have the credibility, she has no public health background,” Richard Carmona, who served as surgeon general under President George W. Bush, told The Washington Post.

Ironically Trump’s original pick to be surgeon general in his second term, Janette Nesheiwat, was pressured into withdrawing her nomination because some questioned whether she had embellished her credentials. Yet Nesheiwat also supported vaccines, leading to pressure against her from supporters of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. which ultimately caused her to withdraw her nomination.

“I thought [Nesheiwat] was sufficiently qualified for the role,” Adams told The Post. In response to Adams’ criticisms, Means’ brother and White House official Calley Means denounced Adams as “a lightweight” lacking in intelligence, then adding with a misspelling that Adams’ supposed lack of intelligence is “obvious to litterally [sic] everyone.” Adams replied to the Post by saying, “We can and should have vigorous debates about how to improve America’s health. But lowering the discourse to crass ad hominem attacks comes across as childish and defensive.”

Although Means is being embraced by the Christian right for her opposition to established medicine, she is not a traditional Christian fundamentalist. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote in May, “Trump's new pick for the nation's top doctor, though she does not have a medical license, favors the occult-speak popular in the 'wellness' influencer world where she makes her money. As Kiera Butler and Anna Merlan at Mother Jones documented, Means veers 'in a more new age direction' in her 'medical' writing." Yet although Means is not explicitly affiliated with the Christian right, they embrace her because of her anti-feminist politics.

"Along with her shrines-and-moons talk, Means also wrote that she had shed 'my identity as a feminist,' giving up on wanting 'equality in a relationship' to instead embrace 'a completely different and greater power: the divine feminine," Marcotte wrote. "It's woo-woo, but ultimately no different than the message promoted by conservative Christians: that a woman's role is as a man's helpmeet, not his equal."

With such passionate backing, Means’ confirmation has been particularly contentious, prompting a sharp exchange of words last month between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) about the larger role of liberal policies in American health care.

"No, I support a national healthcare program which would cut the —" Sanders said shouting over Mullin as Mullin attacked Sanders for supporting President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

"I'm sorry, it's my time," Mullin told Sanders.

"But you're attacking me!" Sanders replied

"Nah, I'm pointing' out facts!" Mullin retorted. "You can say what you want I'm just pointing' out facts."

Sanders shot back, "No. You're pointing out lies.” Later, when Mullin apologized for having “ranted too long” and Sanders said “Yes you did,” Mullin replied “I'm sorry, I didn't ask your opinion on that. If I cared about your opinion I would ask you. But I don't care about your opinion. You're part of the system. You're part of the problem.”

If you think people with opposite political ideologies are wired differently than you, a recent study in the scientific journal Politics and the Life Sciences reveals you may be correct.

In a study titled “Differential brain activations between Democrats and Republicans when considering food purchases,” authors Amanda S. Bruce, John M. Crespi, Dermot J Hayes, Angelos Lagoudakis, Jayson L. Lusk, Darren M. Schreiber and Qianrong Wu studied 65 politically engaged adults in the Kansas City area. The University of Kansas Medical Center and the University of Exeter professionals analyzed the 40 Democrats and 25 Republicans with an fMRI scanner as they had to spend $50 on groceries like varieties of milk and eggs differentiated by price, production method or both. As the patients pondered their choices, the fMRI measured concentrations of blood flow to different brain regions, thereby determining which ones were activated as people made their selections.

The finding was astonishing: When they broke down their food selection data using statistical models that predicted participants’ party affiliation, they found that their models succeeded between 76 percent and 94 percent of the time, far more than usual methods for prediction. Even though Democrats and Republicans did not differ widely in the actual groceries they chose to purchase, the underlying brain activity that went into the decision-making process diverged considerably between the two groups.

“While the food purchase decisions were not significantly different, we found that brain activation during decision-making differs according to the participant’s party affiliation,” the authors wrote. “Models of partisanship based on left insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, precuneus, superior frontal gyrus, or premotor/supplementary motor area activations achieve better than expected accuracy.”

Covering the story for PsyPost, journalist Karina Petrova explained that the data also managed to surprise the scientists.

“The researchers pointed out a few unexpected absences in the brain data,” Petrova wrote. “They did not see any differences in the amygdala, an emotion-processing center of the brain that has featured prominently in older studies of political ideology. The team suggested this is likely because choosing eggs or milk provides cognitive information but does not trigger the intense emotional reactions seen in experiments involving political faces or physical threats.”

This is not the first study to suggest deep psychological underpinning behind individuals’ political choices. In a 2021 paper in the scientific journal Political Psychology, researchers from Cal Poly Pomona and Eureka College conducted two studies to ascertain any links between a person’s political ideology and their openness to non-expert opinions on science. Their goal was to assess how people feel not just toward scientists but also “nonexpert” voices. To do this, surveyed individuals were shown a spectrum of opinions ranging from credible to non-credible and asked to either rate one higher than the other or deem “both sides” equally believable. They found that conservatives were more likely to either equate expert and non-expert opinions and to hold less favorable views of non-experts than experts.

“From my understanding traditional conservatism is all about individualism, so more weight is given to an individual’s experience with any given phenomenon,” Dr. Alexander Swan, assistant professor of psychology at Eureka College and a co-author of the paper, told this journalist when he interviewed him by email for Salon Magazine at the time. “This experience is fueled by our innate sense of intuition — what feels right to me? What makes sense?” While liberals also sometimes succumbed to this mindset, Swan argued that modern conservatism often requires adherents to reject ideologically inconvenient science; climate change denial is rampant, for example, because acknowledging that it is man-made “would impact the capitalistic pursuit.”

Dr. Randy Stein, assistant professor of marketing at Cal Poly Pomona and another co-author of the paper, had a similar observation to this author.

“Keep in mind, political ideology is something you can pick,” Stein told this journalist for Salon. “Trumpist/populist conservatism is pretty open as far as pushing ‘don’t believe what the media tells you’ and ‘don’t believe experts’ type thinking, so it’s going to be more attractive to those who think that way.”

By contrast, earlier this month liberal commentator Amanda Marcotte speculated to The New Republic’s Greg Sargent on his “Daily Blast” podcast that Trump supporters stick by him despite his numerous flaws and failures out of a “sunk cost fallacy” mindset.

"I think at the end of the day, the most important psychology that keeps these people on board is just that admitting that Trump is bad or wrong or a failure is admitting that all those people who, for a decade, have been telling you that you made a mistake were right,” Marcotte told Sargent. “And what's weird is the longer this drags on, the harder it is for them to let go without some kind of offramp. And I will say, if there ever was an offramp, I do kind of think the Iran war might be it — because again, they don't want another [George] Bush."

In January, the Trump administration announced that it had completed its dismantling of yet another Biden-era climate program. This time, the target was the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, which Democrats had injected with almost $400 billion to support ambitious new clean energy projects.

The Biden administration pursued climate policy primarily by having Congress pass massive subsidies for solar power, wind energy, and electric vehicles. But much of the infrastructure needed to push the U.S. further away from fossil fuel dependence — like new nuclear power plants, high-voltage transmission lines, and battery factories — needed more than the tax credits at the core of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to get off the ground. The Loan Programs Office was meant to fill that gap by making prudent loans to ambitious projects that the private sector saw as too risky. With its $400 billion windfall, the once-obscure office became the largest energy lender in the world.

That ambition apparently put the office in the crosshairs of Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright. He said the Biden administration “rushed [loans] out the door in the final months after Election Day,” and said he had rooted out projects that “do not serve the best interest of the American people.” Wright claimed to have scrubbed or “revised” around 80 percent of the Biden administration’s $100 billion loan portfolio, and he teased plans to advance new loans that would support President Donald Trump’s anti-renewable-energy agenda. He even rechristened the office as the “Energy Dominance Financing” program — a reference to Trump’s catchphrase for his fossil-fuel-friendly energy policy.

The truth, however, bears little resemblance to Wright’s combative rhetoric. Former federal officials and sources who have worked with the Loan Programs Office say that the program has survived the Trump-era purge in something close to its Biden-era form — and that it is still supporting the buildout of clean energy. Wright has vastly overstated his revisions and left untouched projects that will support emissions-free energy at the country’s utilities, including major transmission upgrades and nuclear power plants.

(The anonymous sources quoted below requested anonymity to avoid retaliation or because they have ongoing work with the federal government; the Department of Energy declined to answer questions or make Wright and other program leaders available for interviews.)

Republicans finally pushing back against 'problematic' signature Trump issue

Republicans finally pushing back against 'problematic' signature Trump issue

The quiet about-face by the Trump administration may signal a recognition that carbon-free energy can play a major role in managing the electricity price hikes that have angered voters in recent years.

“It sounds like the Trump administration seems to be responding to the energy affordability politics in a way that is, if not constructive, at least acknowledges that steel needs to get in the ground,” said Advait Arun, a policy analyst at the Center for Public Enterprise, a nonprofit that supports government-led economic development. “There are ways to reframe all these projects for their agenda.”

Here’s how the Loan Programs Office typically works: A utility or startup approaches the Department of Energy proposing to build a new power plant, transmission line, or battery factory. Once the applicant is approved, it borrows money from the U.S. Treasury at a lower rate than it could get from private banks, and the Department of Energy guarantees the loan. If the project falls through, the Department pays back the Treasury with the money appropriated by Congress. If the project succeeds, the government grows its pool of funding for future loans.

This program was first established during George W. Bush’s presidency in 2005, to help spur clean energy development. But under Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, the Loan Programs Office became a magnet for controversy. That’s because the authority lent around $500 million to the solar cell manufacturer Solyndra, which later collapsed, leading the government to lose almost its entire investment. Republicans seized on the episode as evidence of the program’s failure — despite the fact that the loan authority also financed success stories such as Tesla, and its overall loss rate of 3 percent is much lower than that of many private sector lenders. The controversy was largely a distant memory by 2022, when Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act gave the office almost $400 billion — around 10 times its initial mandate — in guarantee authority to invest in battery startups, new renewables, and grid upgrades to support a clean energy transition.

But the office was slow to deploy its new authority, and former officials later said it suffered from an excess of post-Solyndra caution and bureaucracy. This led to long negotiations and risk analysis around every individual loan. A report from three former Energy Department staffers later found that the “executive branch machinery … defaulted to caution, process, and reactive strategies.” It took more than a year for the office to develop a fast-track process for major utility loans, and many deals weren’t completed until after Trump’s 2024 win. The projects that Wright claimed were “rushed out the door” had in fact suffered from too much due diligence, in the eyes of many observers, rather than too little.

When Secretary Wright arrived in D.C., he jammed up the program even more. The Loan Programs Office had three different leaders in the first six months of the Trump administration, lost more than half its staff to Elon Musk’s workforce reduction efforts, and halted almost all communication with borrowers.

“Moving any application through any milestone would require political appointee approval as part of a new consolidation of decision rights, and approvals were not granted,” said Jen Downing, who served as a senior adviser at the Loan Programs Office under the Biden administration and stayed on for the first few months of the Trump administration, in a letter to Congress last summer. Downing, who left the office last May and is now a partner at the clean tech investing firm Ara Partners, told lawmakers that the new Trump administration leadership spent months examining almost every loan made under Biden, in an apparent search for wrongdoing or poor lending decisions.

Wright did nix a few major loans such as the Grain Belt Express, a wind power transmission line in Missouri opposed by Republican senator Josh Hawley. But former Energy Department staffers said that many of the $30 billion in loans that Wright claimed to have shut down were in fact cancelled by the borrowers themselves, which is typical for risky and complex projects. Many withdrew even before Trump’s election, including a battery recycling plant project that fell apart due to market conditions.

“The number is fake,” said Jigar Shah, who led the Loan Programs Office under Biden. “I think in some ways, it’s to convince Trump that they’re shutting down loans.”

Other Biden-approved projects have survived, like a $1.45 billion loan to a solar panel manufacturer in Georgia called QCells, which has continued without interruption. In the case of a loan for a mine at Nevada’s Thacker Pass, which was supposed to produce lithium for electric vehicle batteries, the department doubled down and took an equity stake in the project, rather than cancelling the loan.

The new leader of the loan office is Greg Beard, a former executive at the private equity firm Apollo who also ran a crypto mining company. Thus far, Beard has only advanced projects that began under Biden. That includes the office’s most recent announcement of a massive $26.5 billion loan to Southern Company, the regional utility that serves Georgia and Alabama. The loan will fund upgrades at the utility’s new nuclear power plant in Georgia, new long-duration batteries that can store solar power, and upgrades to 1,300 miles of transmission lines.

That said, the final version of the loan also substitutes 5 gigawatts of new gas power in place of a solar project that was included under the Biden-era version of the deal, according to former Loan Programs Office officials. But this change isn’t as big a deal as it might sound; the utility was always planning to build both solar and natural gas as part of its response to surging power demand, and it will still build both. The only thing that changed between administrations is which power plants will receive low-cost federal financing. The Trump administration’s three other announced loans are also holdovers from Biden. They have little to do with fossil energy, despite Trump’s repeated promises to revive coal and oil. They include a new transmission line and the restart of another nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.

“I do think that it’s in many ways a branding exercise,” said another former Department of Energy official who worked in the loan division.

Beard has said he wants to use the office to “make energy more affordable,” “win AI,” “bolster the grid,” and “get us out from under the China strategy to dominate certain critical minerals.” But it’s unclear how much appetite utilities have for the reconfigured program. The Energy Department has held roadshow meetings with data center developers, courting hyperscalers such as Meta with the promise that they will build nuclear power for data centers on federal land. Beard told CNBC that he has a pipeline of around 80 projects waiting to move forward, but that’s less than half of the 191 projects that were in the pipeline in December of 2024, as Biden prepared to leave office.

Shah said that was in part due to the fact that Beard has applied similar standards to those he maintained in his private sector job at Apollo. Beard has suggested he wants all applicants to provide corporate guarantees for their debt, which makes it hard for many projects to qualify.

“Not only are they sending the signal that they’re canceling loans, but then the other side, they’re sending a signal that they’re only going to approve projects that a New York private equity firm would finance,” said Shah. Sources familiar with the program say that the office has already received at least one major new loan application, which is related to nuclear energy, but it’s still in the early stages. The loan office is also trying to coordinate multiple utilities to purchase nuclear reactor parts in bulk.

Thanks to a change in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the major tax law signed by President Trump last summer, the program can now directly support fossil generation such as natural gas. This federal loan support was illegal under the Biden administration, when projects had to reduce greenhouse gases. But it’s far from clear that Wright and Beard could succeed in repurposing the loan program for pure fossil fuel finance, if that’s their goal. Interest in new coal plants is almost nonexistent, and there is plenty of other capital available for new natural gas generation, including from data center developers themselves. A more likely outcome is that the revamped office will continue to support a handful of deals for “clean firm” energy projects that Trump and Wright find appealing, like nuclear, as well as critical minerals production.

Spokespeople for the Department of Energy and the Energy Dominance Financing office, as the loan program has been renamed, declined to answer questions or make Beard available for an interview.

Experts say that even if the deal flow in the office slows down, there’s still a silver lining for the energy transition. More important than the exact shape of the new loans is the fact that Congress did not slash the program altogether, as it did with other Inflation Reduction Act programs such as the electric-vehicle tax credits and the Environmental Protection Agency’s “green bank.” Still, the long-term future of the program is uncertain. When Republicans in Congress modified the loan office with Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year, they also added an expiration date. Unless lawmakers choose to renew the program, the last date that the office can make loans is September 30, 2028.

Even so, the fact that two presidents with opposite views on climate policy have both made use of the program may bode well for its survival.

“I still think that the program is an important tool,” said a consultant in the energy field who has interacted with the loan office. “The technology areas that the current administration is prioritizing, all of those sort of squarely fit into the boundaries or the authorities that exist.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/energy/trump-biden-chris-wright-loan-programs-office/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

When President Donald Trump appointed Robert Kennedy Jr. as his Secretary of Health and Human Services, the presidential nephew was criticized for his many pseudoscientific beliefs, among them his support for raw milk.

Now an e. coli outbreak in California has been linked to the raw milk-based products made by one of Kennedy’s own allies.

“As of March 13, 2026, seven individuals from three states have been infected with the outbreak strain of Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) O157, including five California residents,” reported the California Department of Public Health on Sunday. “Four illnesses are in children under the age of five. Two individuals have been hospitalized, including one from California. No deaths or cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), a severe complication of STEC infection that can cause organ failure and even death, have been reported.”

The press release added that the people infected with e. coli all indicate “that RAW FARM brand raw cheddar cheese is the likely source of recent infections. A voluntary recall of RAW FARM brand raw cheddar cheese has been recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). However, as of March 18, 2026, RAW FARM has not voluntarily removed the cheese from the market.”

Indeed, Raw Farm president Aaron McAfee posted an Instagram video on Friday in which he declared “this has been a great week. This is the necessary steps we have to take to show the FDA, CDC, CDPH and CDPA that we are not linked to the outbreak they are alleging. And I’m really happy with how things are going.”

He also claimed that his company is cooperating with FDA investigators, insisting that “all the tests are negative” for E. coli in their products such as the raw cheese.

Last year, when Kennedy was being appointed and confirmed to his Cabinet post, his relationship with McAfee garnered increased attention. Critics pointed out that raw milk can contain bird flu virus and other pathogens linked to serious diseases like e. coli and others that cause miscarriages, kidney diseases and even death. Despite these concerns, Kennedy asked McAfee to apply for a job as the FDA’s raw milk standards and policy adviser as well as draft proposals to federally certify raw dairy farms.

“If the FDA says raw milk is now legal and the CDC comes through and says it advises drinking raw milk, that’s a recipe for mass infection,” warned Angela Rasmussen, a virologist and co-editor-in-chief of the medical journal Vaccine and an adjunct professor at Stony Brook University in New York, at the time.

By May of last year, after Kennedy had already assumed office, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wa.) accused Kennedy in a statement of being dishonest and irresponsible with the public’s health.

“RFK Jr. is a shameless liar and, candidly, an insane conspiracy theorist,” Murray wrote on X at the time. “He’s fired the people who monitor bird flu. He’s fired food safety inspectors. He’s firing NIH clinical staff—and he’s cutting cancer research. This grifter is making America LESS healthy & LESS safe.”

Kennedy’s is also a well-known critic of vaccines, including the polio vaccine, a position that baffled that vaccine manufacturer’s son when he spoke with this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2024.

Dr. Peter Salk said his father would be "really puzzled" by anti-vaxxer ideology, especially as his father gave away his vaccine for free because he believed vaccines were a beneficial technology that people should embrace.

"His whole commitment was protecting the population from infectious diseases," Salk told this journalist at the time.

President Donald Trump directed the Pentagon and other federal agencies to begin releasing government files related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena – called UAP – in February 2026, following years of pressure from Congress, military whistleblowers and the public.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is fielding pressure from the White House to relax his controversial approach to vaccine policies as the midterms near, but his most steadfast supporters are pressing for more aggressive action — like restricting covid-19 vaccines and pesticide use — to carry out the Make America Healthy Again agenda.

The tensions risk fraying Kennedy’s dynamic MAHA coalition, potentially driving away critical supporters who helped fuel President Donald Trump’s 2024 election win.

The movement’s grassroots membership includes suburbanites, women, and independents who are generally newer entrants to the GOP and laser-focused on achieving certain results around the nation’s food supply and vaccines.

Promoting healthy foods tops their list and will be at the center of the White House’s pitch to voters during the midterm election cycle.

“President Trump’s mass appeal partly lies in his willingness to question our country’s broken status quo,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement. “That includes food standards and nutrition guidelines that have helped fuel America’s chronic disease epidemic. Overhauling our food supply and nutrition standards to deliver on the MAHA agenda remains a key priority for both the President and his administration.”

At the same time, with most Americans opposing efforts to undermine vaccines, the White House has cooled on Kennedy’s aggressive policies to curb vaccines and MAHA’s interest in tamping down environmental chemicals that are linked to disease.

The result: Republicans are realizing just how demanding the MAHA vote can be. Moms Across America leader Zen Honeycutt warned that Republicans are facing their biggest setback yet with the MAHA movement, after Trump signed an executive order to support production of glyphosate, a herbicide the World Health Organization has linked to cancer.

“It has caused the biggest uproar in MAHA,” Honeycutt said during a CNN interview in late February.

A White House Warning

Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, cautioned in December that an embrace of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policies could cost politicians their jobs this year.

Eight in 10 MAHA voters and 86% of all voters believe vaccines save lives, his poll of 1,000 voters in 35 competitive districts found.

“In the districts that will decide the control of the House of Representatives next year, Republican and Democratic candidates who support eliminating long standing vaccine requirements will pay a price in the election,” a memo on the poll stated.

The White House has since shaken up senior staffing at HHS, including removing Jim O’Neill from the deputy secretary role and his job as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in which he curtailed the agency’s childhood vaccination recommendations. Ralph Abraham, a vaccine skeptic who as Louisiana’s surgeon general suspended its vaccination promotion program last year, stepped down as the CDC’s principal deputy director in late February.

Jay Bhattacharya, a doctor who said in congressional testimony that he doesn’t believe vaccines cause autism, is now running the CDC in addition to directing the National Institutes of Health.

Though Trump himself has frequently espoused doubts and mistruths about vaccines, polling around anti-vaccine policy has undoubtedly shaken the White House’s confidence during a tough midterm election year, said former U.S. Rep. Larry Bucshon, an Indiana Republican and retired doctor who left Congress last year.

Bucshon said Republicans can’t risk alienating voters, especially parents of young children who might be moved by Democratic attack ads on the topic at a time when hundreds of measles cases are popping up across the U.S.

“That’s the reason you’re seeing the White House get nervous about it,” Bucshon said. “This is just the political reality of it.”

Kennedy built some of his MAHA following with calls to end federal approval and recommendations for the covid vaccines during the pandemic. The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a federal panel of outside experts who were handpicked by Kennedy to develop national vaccine recommendations, is expected to review and possibly withdraw its recommendation for covid shots. Its February meeting was postponed and is now scheduled for March 18-19, when the panel plans to discuss injuries from covid vaccines, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon confirmed on March 11.

“I’m not deaf to the calls that we need to get the covid vaccine mRNA products off the market. All I can say is stay tuned and wait for the upcoming ACIP meeting,” ACIP Vice Chair Robert Malone said on MJTruthUltra, a conservative account on the social platform X, before the meeting was postponed. “If the FDA won’t act, there are other entities that will.”

No Fury Like Scorned MAHA Moms

Bipartisan support is also extremely high — above 80% — for another core tenet of the MAHA agenda: eliminating the use of certain pesticides on crops.

But MAHA leaders were incensed when Trump issued a Feb. 18 executive order promoting the production of glyphosate, a chemical used in weed killers sprayed on U.S. crops and which Kennedy has railed against and sued over because of its reported links to cancer.

“There’s gonna be ups and downs, and there is zero question that this week was a down,” Calley Means, a senior adviser to the health secretary and a former White House employee, told a MAHA rally in Austin, Texas, on Feb. 26. “I am not going to gaslight or sugarcoat it: This glyphosate thing was extremely disappointing. Bobby’s disappointed.”

Despite deep unhappiness from MAHA followers, Kennedy endorsed Trump’s executive order defending access to such pesticides.

“I support President Trump’s Executive Order to bring agricultural chemical production back to the United States and end our near-total reliance on adversarial nations,” Kennedy wrote on social media.

Without offering policy changes, Kennedy promised a future agricultural system that “is less dependent on harmful chemicals.”

White House officials are now trying to downplay the executive order.

“The President’s executive order was not an endorsement of any product or practice,” Desai said in a statement.

But that’s done little to dampen criticism from leading MAHA influencers who had hoped, with Kennedy’s influence in the administration, that the chemical would be banned.

Some Democrats see an opening.

Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine earned cheers from MAHA loyalists for co-sponsoring legislation with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to undo the executive order.

“The Trump Admin. cannot keep paying lip service to #MAHA while propping up Big Chemical like this and choosing corporate profits over Americans’ health,” Pingree said on X.

Vani Hari, a prominent MAHA influencer who promotes healthy eating, responded on X with a “HELL YES.”

‘Eat Real Food’

The White House and Kennedy are refocusing their messaging to emphasize one of the most popular elements of the MAHA platform: food.

At the start of the year, Kennedy unveiled new dietary guidelines that emphasize vegetables, fruits, and meats while urging Americans to avoid ultraprocessed foods.

Kennedy has leaned into his new “Eat Real Food” campaign, launching a nationwide tour in January. Ahead of the late-February MAHA rally, he stopped at a barbecue joint in Austin where he took photos with stacks of smoked ribs and grilled sausages. Large “Eat Real Food” signs have been provided for crowds of supporters to hold up during major announcements at HHS’ headquarters this year.

Focusing on nutrition will please MAHA moms, suburban swing voters, and conservatives alike, said Michael Burgess, a physician and former Republican representative from Texas.

“They keep them happy by talking about the food pyramid,” Burgess said. “That’s an area where there is broad, bipartisan support.”

Indeed, Fabrizio’s poll shows equal support — 95% — among respondents who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris and those who voted for Trump for requiring labeling of harmful ingredients in ultraprocessed foods.

Trump is keenly aware that Kennedy’s MAHA movement is key to his political survival. At a Cabinet meeting in January, Kennedy rattled off a list of his agency’s efforts researching autism and tackling high drug prices.

Trump leaned in at the table.

“I read an article today where they think Bobby is going to be really great for the Republican Party in the midterms,” Trump said, “so I have to be very careful that Bobby likes us.”

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Psychologist Mary Trump, Donald Trump's 60-year-old niece and the daughter of his late brother Fred Trump Jr., often argues that the president suffers from poor mental health and is pushing destructive policies because of it. Other Donald Trump critics, meanwhile, are arguing that the president not only has mental health issues — he is also causing the mental health of others to suffer.

In an article published by The Guardian on March 8, journalist Ash Sanders details the link between feelings of depression and Trump's second presidency.

Author Ann Cvetkovitch, Sanders notes, is warning that "political depression" is on the rise in the United States.

"Political depression might look like traditional depression — the same hopelessness, despair and shutdown — but its source is different," Sanders explains. "It doesn't come from within, at least not primarily, Cvetkovitch wrote in her 2012 book, 'Depression: A Public Feeling.' It comes from the violence, collapse or unjustness of the world around us. In recent years, political depression has infiltrated the public discourse, the private consciousness and the therapist's office. Two-thirds of respondents in a 2024 LifeStance Health survey said they talk about politics or elections with their therapists. Therapists, too, are noticing an influx of clients seeking support for political stress…. In recent years, political depression has infiltrated the public discourse, the private consciousness and the therapist's office."

Sanders continues, "Two-thirds of respondents in a 2024 LifeStance Health survey said they talk about politics or elections with their therapists. Therapists, too, are noticing an influx of clients seeking support for political stress…. Studies show political stress takes a very real toll on people’s mental and physical health."

Sanders points to Utah resident Rebecca McFaul, who has family in Minneapolis, as an example of someone experiencing "political depression." McFaul described her response to recent violence during Minneapolis immigration raids as "a certain kind of terror and horror at it all."

According to Brett Ford, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto in Canada, politics are a source of chronic stress.

Ford told The Guardian, "Chronic stressors are large-scale, they don’t have clear endpoints, they feel out of your hands, and they reliably evoke negative emotions…. Negative emotions are a really consistent predictor of political engagement and action."

Last month, Justin and Amy Miller packed their vehicles with three kids, two dogs, a pet bearded dragon, and whatever belongings they could fit, then drove 2,000 miles from Wisconsin to British Columbia to leave President Donald Trump’s America.

The Millers resettled on Vancouver Island, their scenic refuge accessible only by ferry or plane. Justin went to work in the emergency room at Nanaimo Regional General Hospital, where he became one of at least 20 U.S.-trained nurses hired since April.

Fear of Trump, some of the nurses said, was why they left.

“There are so many like-minded people out there,” said Justin, who now works elbow to elbow with Americans in Canada. “You aren’t trapped. You don’t have to stay. Health care workers are welcomed with open arms around the world.”

The Millers are part of a new surge of American nurses, doctors, and other health care workers moving to Canada, and specifically British Columbia, where more than 1,000 U.S.-trained nurses have been approved to work since April. As the Trump administration enacts increasingly authoritarian policies and decimates funding for public health, insurance, and medical research, many nurses have felt the draw of Canada’s progressive politics, friendly reputation, and universal health care system.

Additionally, some nurses were incensed last year when the Trump administration said it would reclassify nursing as a nonprofessional degree, which would impose strict federal limits on the loans nursing students could receive.

Canada is poised to capitalize. Two of its most populous provinces, Ontario and British Columbia, have streamlined the licensing process for American nurses since Trump returned to the White House. British Columbia also launched a $5 million advertising campaign last year to recruit nurses from California, Oregon, and Washington state.

“With the chaos and uncertainty happening in the U.S., we are seizing the opportunity to attract the talent we need,” Josie Osborne, the province’s health minister, said in a statement announcing the campaign.

Fears Realized

Amy Miller, a nurse practitioner, said she and her husband were determined to move their children out of the country because they felt Trump’s second term would inevitably spiral into violence.

First, the Millers got nursing licenses in New Zealand, but when the job search took too long, they pivoted to Canada.

Justin was offered a job within weeks.

Amy found one within three months.

So they moved. And just a few days later, the Millers watched with horror from afar as their fears came true.

As federal immigration forces clashed with protesters in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, federal agents fatally shot an ICU nurse, Alex Pretti, as he filmed a confrontation and appeared to be trying to shield a woman who was knocked down. Video of the killing showed border agents pinning Pretti to the ground before seizing his concealed, licensed handgun and opening fire on him.

The Trump administration quickly called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who intended to kill federal agents. That allegation was disputed by eyewitness videos that circulated on social media and spurred widespread outrage, including from nurses and nursing organizations, some of whom invoked the profession’s duty to care for the vulnerable.

“I don’t want to say it was expected, but that’s why we are here,” Amy Miller said. “Even our oldest kid, she was like: ‘It’s OK, Mom, because we are not there anymore. We are safe here.’ So she recognizes that, and she’s not even in middle school yet.”

Both the U.S. and Canada have a severe need for nurses. The U.S. is projected to be short about 270,000 registered nurses, plus at least 120,000 licensed practical nurses, by 2028, according to recent estimates from the Health Resources and Services Administration. In Canada, nursing job vacancies tripled from 2018 to 2023, when they reached nearly 42,000, according to a recent report from the Montreal Economic Institute, a Canadian think tank.

When asked to comment, the White House noted that industry data shows the number of nurses licensed in the U.S. increased in 2025. It dismissed accounts of nurses moving to Canada as “anecdotes of individuals with severe cases of Trump derangement syndrome.”

“The American health care workforce is the finest in the world, and it continues to expand under President Trump,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said. “Employment opportunities in the American health care system remain robust, with career advancement and pay that far exceed that of other developed nations.”

‘A Sense of Relief’

It is unknown precisely how many American nurses have moved north since Trump returned to office, because some Canadian provinces do not track or release such statistics.

British Columbia, which has done the most to recruit Americans, approved the licensing applications of 1,028 U.S.-trained nurses from when the province’s streamlined application process took effect in April 2025 through January, according to the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives. In all of 2023, only 112 applicants from the U.S. were approved, the agency said. In 2024, it was 127.

Increased interest from American nurses was also confirmed by nursing associations in Ontario and Alberta, as well as by the nationwide Canadian Nurses Association.

Angela Wignall, CEO of Nurses and Nurse Practitioners of British Columbia, said American nurses used to move north because they had fallen in love with Canada (or a Canadian). But more recently, she said, she had met nurses who feared the White House would spur violence and vigilantism, particularly against families that included same-sex couples.

“Some of them were living in fear of the administration, and they shared a sense of relief when crossing the border,” Wignall said. “As a Canadian, it’s heartbreaking. And also a joy to welcome them.”

Vancouver Island, which has a population of about 860,000, has gained 64 U.S.-trained nurses since April, including those at Nanaimo Regional, said Andrew Leyne, a spokesperson for the island’s health agency.

One of the nurses was Susan Fleishman, a Canadian who moved to the U.S. as a child, then worked for 23 years in American emergency rooms before leaving the country in November.

Fleishman said hateful rhetoric from Trump has fueled an angry division that has permeated and soured American life.

“It wasn’t an easy move — that’s for sure. But I think it’s definitely worth it,” she said, happily back in Canada. “I find there is a lot more kindness here. And I think that will keep me here.”

Brandy Frye, who also worked for decades in American ERs, said she moved to Vancouver Island last year after waiting to see whether Mark Carney would become Canada’s prime minister. Carney’s rise was widely viewed as a rejection of Trumpism.

Meanwhile, Frye said, the California hospital where she worked had been stripping words associated with diversity and equity out of its paperwork to appease the Trump administration. She couldn’t stand it.

“It felt like a step against everything I believe in,” Frye said. “And I didn’t feel like I belonged there anymore.”

Like many of the American nurses who have moved to Vancouver Island, Frye was first wooed to the area by a viral video that was meant to attract tourist dollars but ended up doing much more.

About a year ago, Tod Maffin, a social media content creator and former CBC Radio host, invited Americans to the port city of Nanaimo for a weekend event designed to offset the impact of Trump’s tariffs on the local economy.

Maffin said about 350 people attended the April event.

“A lot of them were health care workers looking for an escape route,” Maffin said. “They were there to help support our economy but also to look into Canada.”

Maffin saw an opportunity. He repurposed the event website into a recruiting tool and launched a Discord chatroom to help Americans relocate.

Maffin said he believes the campaign helped about 35 health care workers move to Vancouver Island. Volunteers in more than 30 other Canadian communities have since duplicated his website in an effort to attract their own American nurses and doctors.

“There are communities across Canada where the emergency room closes at night because one nurse is out. That’s how thin staffing is,” Maffin said.

“One new nurse in a small town, or in a midsized city like Nanaimo,” he said, “makes a difference.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.