What happened under the Trump administration this week that you may have missed.
Here’s what happened under the Trump administration this week that you may have missed.
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One of President Donald Trump’s messages to his supporters as he tries to get them to vote in November’s midterm elections is that the high gas and diesel prices are a “small price to pay” for stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. (He bungled his words this week and made it seem like he was okay with Iran taking out a major city in California as a “small price to pay” before the White House clarified.)
But the prices are high enough that Republicans are worried about losing the Senate, governor and House races in normally Republican states such as Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska.
Trump has tried to address Americans’ concerns about high beef prices by temporarily bringing in imported beef (which enraged ranchers). Another step has been to let farmers use tax-exempt diesel through the end of the year, which he announced in Nebraska this week after a behind-the-scenes push from Vice President JD Vance. It’s a small change: Diesel costs in the Midwest have risen nearly $4 in a year, and this plan would lower them by about 24 cents.
Even as Trump takes short-term measures to try to bring down prices, he’s also telling his supporters that all is well with the economy.
“We were a dead country a few years ago,” he said in Nebraska this week, talking about border security and the economy. “Now we’re the hottest country ever on that.”
The Trump administration has hollowed out science and health agencies, withheld or threatened to withhold billions in government funding for scientific and medical research, and steered money away from universities, accusing the existing research process of being politicized for liberal purposes. The cuts are closely tied to the president’s immigration policies: Trump has also said that too many foreigners lead STEM careers.
This week, Trump announced a large investment in artificial intelligence companies to guide scientific research and $100 million to fund American students who want a career in AI or science and technology, The Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski and Dan Diamond report.
As Cat and Dan report, critics say the Trump administration is focusing too much on AI as the U.S.’s reputation as a leader in scientific and medical innovation has rapidly deteriorated — at China’s benefit.
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“If we continue to discredit and defund the scientific method, the U.S. risks becoming an innovation desert, reliant on China for new medicines and technologies,” Noubar Afeyan, CEO of the life-science venture capital company Flagship Pioneering, wrote this year.
There’s also a broader concern that the Trump administration is creating a silo of research that it can more closely control.
“Research can document harms a government might prefer to minimize,” writes Brynn Paulsen with the Stand Up For Science Foundation, a grassroots organization that formed in the wake of Trump’s cuts to scientific staff.
The nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is launching a program to research vaccine injuries, the New York Times reported this week. Scientists told the Times that while vaccine safety should always get more research, they worry that Kennedy will use this to keep trying to undermine established science on vaccines that have been in use for decades.
The Trump administration under Kennedy is also pushing to allow people to buy peptides. Those are used in GLP1s but also touted by some influencers as a miracle health drug for everything from insomnia to healing, and haven’t been regulated by the government.
A Washington Post investigation found that the government has struggled to keep up with the proliferation of peptides, and Kennedy says he’s a “big fan” of them and wants to see more on the market. But federal scientists worry that opening the gates will lead to fake or even tainted products being sold, presumably approved by the government.
Amber Phillips writes The 5-Minute Fix newsletter, a quick analysis of the day’s biggest political news. Send her an email here, or ask a question that could be featured in an upcoming newsletter.
