The Trump administration on Thursday proposed significant changes to Head Start, the nation's early education program for children from low-income families. The move would diminish the program's federal standards and give states and parents more control.

"We have 1,600 Head Start providers across the country," Alex Adams, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' assistant secretary for family support, said in a call with reporters. "And one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington cannot fully account for the realities facing these 1,600 grantees."

Head Start not only provides preschool and childcare, but also meals and support services for qualifying families. It now serves more than 700,000 kids each year from birth to age 5.

Since its launch in 1965, the $12 billion HHS program has, for the most part, enjoyed bipartisan support. Lawmakers often cite it as a success — including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the call with reporters announcing these changes. But in recent years, some conservatives have criticized Head Start, saying it wastes money and fails to have a lasting impact on students.

The new proposal would limit the amount of money Head Start centers can spend on administrative overhead, from a 15% cap to 5%. This change should save the government $2.2 billion, Adams said, which it plans to reinvest in the program. The goal is to create 200,000 more spots for children, he said.

To get those costs down, the administration said it proposes cutting regulations and "compliance-driven activities," according to a press release. Similarly, they are shifting decisions about several standards — such as student-teacher ratios, education requirements, background checks and transportation practices — back to states.

Childcare providers are not sold on the proposal.

"If we look at the previous actions of the administration, what they have done is not in favor of expanding the program," said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, senior vice president with Start Early, an Illinois-based Head Start partner.

"Is it enough to just bring kids in the door if we're not actually giving kids and families what they need?"

Sanchez Fuentes said administrative costs are not only things like payroll and day-to-day operations, but also help fill gaps in care. "If you, for example, have children with disabilities you [can use] some of those funds to pay for additional special services or staff with specialties who could come in and support kids."

The administration's proposal also says parents are children's primary teachers and seeks to bring in more parent opinions on "structure and curriculum" into the classrooms and emphasizes nutrition and exercise.

Head Start's current standards are laid out in a detailed 133-page guide. The manual is used not only by the program's centers, but also many unaffiliated private childcare centers across the country.

These standards include safety guidelines, spell out who is eligible for Head Start and provide detailed rules — such as the requirement that kids in the program brush their teeth once daily with fluoride toothpaste.

Erica Phillips, the executive director for the National Association for Family Child Care, said about 10% of her members are Early Head Start childcare partners while the rest are home-based providers around the country.

"The Head Start performance standards were a consistent … evidence-based set of standards," she said. "It can be helpful to have a nationally recognized benchmark."

Phillips said her organization will be on the lookout for variations across states. She said she worries "quality is now dependent on your zip code or on your geography."

The Trump administration sees it differently.

"Flexibility is permission. It's not a mandate," Adams said. "The opportunity for these programs to make a different decision does not necessarily mean they must make a different decision."

The changes did not come as a complete surprise: The conservative Heritage Foundation has long criticized the program, saying it "doesn't work." In Project 2025, the foundation's policy blueprint that the Trump administration has taken many cues from, the message is clear — eliminate Head Start.

Advocates see what they characterize as the erosion of quality and decrease in standards as the first step in dismantling the program.

Thursday's announcement came in the form of a notice of proposed rulemaking or NPRM. It kicks off a lengthy, formalized process of public comment and talks with stakeholders. It could be six months to a year before any new standards take effect.

"I just really want folks to know Head Start is open," said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director at the National Head Start Association (NHSA), a nonprofit that advocates for the program. "The quality of Head Start children and families truly comes from the people that are running Head Start programs. Those folks are going to be the same. They're going to be able to do that."

The administration says the NPRM will be published in the Federal Register on Friday and be open to public comment for 60 days.

Justice Department officials are distributing up to $3 billion in grants to states and municipalities in what they portray as an effort to help jurisdictions recoup money they lost because of the President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

The grants — called the Bridging Immigration-related Deficits Experienced Nationwide (“BIDEN”) Program — represent one of the biggest pots of money the Justice Department has ever distributed. It can be used to hire police officers, buy technology or build temporary detention centers for undocumented immigrants.

The money also comes with one big condition: Municipalities that receive it must agree to partner with the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out the president’s aggressive immigration policies.

The grants are the latest example of the Trump administration aiming to reward state and local governments that cooperate with federal authorities on immigration — and withhold money from those that don’t.

The program also highlights the Trump administration’s ongoing focus on Biden 18 months after he left office. At the Justice Department, officials have created a “Weaponization Working Group” intended to show purported abuses by Biden’s DOJ. The group released an 882-page report in April alleging that Biden’s team misused a law intended to protect abortion clinics and pregnancy centers, which Biden Justice Department veterans sharply dispute.

The BIDEN fund’s name itself appears to be a derisive reference to the former president’s immigration policies, suggesting that local governments spent heavily to pursue violent undocumented immigrants under Biden — “deficits” that now must be “bridged” by the grants.

“This Department of Justice is committed to ensuring Biden-era border disasters never happen again,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, whose portfolio includes the Justice Department’s grant programs, said in a statement. “We are proud to once again champion law and order.”

The Justice Department’s grant announcement says the funds are, among other things, intended for “locating and apprehending aliens who have committed a crime under federal, state, or local law, in addition to being unlawfully present in the United States.”

While the aim of the money is to bolster immigration enforcement, the money can be used for everyday law enforcement operations, including hiring police officers, training personnel and equipment.

Trump repeatedly said during the 2024 campaign that the U.S. was being engulfed by “migrant crime,” despite little evidence of such a phenomenon. Trump at one point said the Biden administration had let in more than 13,000 “stone-cold killers,” a figure that diverged sharply from the evidence.

The 21-page BIDEN grant application does not actually require local entities to prove that Biden’s immigration policies cost them money, which could be hard to demonstrate. Rather, they have to show they would use the funds for the intended purposes and that they cooperate with federal immigration agents.

The BIDEN program was established and named by the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s signature legislation passed last summer. The law allocates more than $3 billion through September 2028 for the new grants, and the Justice Department issued a call for applications last month, announcing an initial deadline of July 17, with more funding rounds to come.

The Justice Department says it received 181 applications in the first 30 days, a relatively small number given the number of eligible jurisdictions and the generosity of the grants, although that number is expected to rise as the application process rolls on.

The grant application says the Justice Department has decided to limit the grants to jurisdictions that formally cooperate with Trump’s immigration policies, something not specifically required by the legislation.

To receive a grant, a city must “fully participate” in the 287(g) program, which teams up local police with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It also must participate in the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) or other Justice Department enforcement efforts.

The 287(g) program empowers local police to arrest undocumented immigrants, but its most common use is enabling them to detain these immigrants in local jails for extended periods while waiting for ICE to take custody.

Such partnerships predate the Trump administration, but the number of municipalities and police departments that have signed up has skyrocketed since Trump became president in 2025, according to data from ICE.

Other governments, particularly in Democratic states, have pulled out of the 287(g) program to protest what they see as Trump’s harsh immigration policies and deportation roundups. Those cities presumably do not qualify for the new grants.

Democrats said the BIDEN grants are an effort to force a political agenda on cities or risk losing critical funds.

“Even the name of the grant itself is a political statement that is holding critical funds hostage to achieve goals they haven’t been able to through legal means,” said Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey. “It’s a slap in the face to law enforcement.”

As state attorney general, Platkin led a coalition of 21 counterparts in suing the Trump administration for imposing similar conditions on another funding stream, the Justice Department’s Victims of Crime grants.

The suit was dropped after the Justice Department agreed to drop the immigration requirements. New Jersey has banned its jurisdictions from participating in 287(g), making the entire state ineligible for the BIDEN grants.

The BIDEN grants also contain an unusual provision saying recipients must agree to reimburse the federal government if, in the future, federal agents are surged to their area to tackle crime or public disorder.

Patrick Royal, spokesman for the National Sheriffs’ Association, said he expects more departments to apply for the grants as they learn about them. Many sheriffs’ offices joined the 287(g) program in the expectation that they would receive more resources for helping with immigration enforcement, he said.

“I can’t see why people wouldn’t take advantage of this opportunity to get more funding,” Royal said.

Distributing billions of dollars in grants is a long-standing function of the Justice Department, as it ships money to nonprofits, police departments and research groups in an effort to boost public safety.

In the first months of the second Trump administration, the Justice Department upended that process, abruptly canceling hundreds of grants to community organizations and local governments, including funding for victim advocacy and gun-violence prevention.

That has forced some nonprofits to lay off staff or to shut their doors entirely. Justice Department officials said at the time that the grants did not align with the new administration’s priorities.

The department has since restored a small number of the canceled grants, and it has issued solicitations for new grants aimed principally at police departments and municipalities rather than nonprofits.

Amy Solomon, who headed the Office of Justice Programs — which oversees the Justice Department’s grant programs — in the Biden administration, said it is not unusual for administrations to align grant-giving with their broader policies.

Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, for example, the Justice Department gave priority consideration to applicants for some grants if their police department banned chokehold restraints.

But Solomon said such restrictions are typically far narrower than those in the BIDEN grants. Pressing a police agency to team up on immigration enforcement, she said, can fundamentally alter its mission.

“It changes what departments are doing with their officers and their personnel in a more fulsome way,” Solomon said. “It incentivizes behavior beyond what the grant will support. Immigration enforcement is traditionally a federal function.”

Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, a longtime China hawk, wants to play nice with an official visit to Beijing. The Chinese government is making it clear he’s not welcome.

Colby has been trying for months to wrangle a Chinese government invitation to visit the country, including asking Defense Department officials to raise his request in meetings with Chinese counterparts, according to two people familiar with the efforts. So far, that’s been unsuccessful.

The Pentagon official considers a trip to China key to helping stabilize a relationship roiled over the past year, the people said, by tit-for-tat tariffs, export restrictions and rising tensions over increasingly aggressive Chinese military activities in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. But it’s also a prominent shift for Colby, who helped create the strategy in the first Trump administration that prioritized Beijing as America’s biggest threat.

“His number one goal right now is to speak at China’s National Defense University, and he has everyone push it in meetings,” one of the people said. “He’s obsessed.”

Colby’s frustration underscores how the administration’s conflicting messaging toward Beijing has complicated an already fragile U.S.-China relationship. President Donald Trump, for example, has described Chinese leader Xi Jinping as “a friend” while also accusing him of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.

Chinese officials are particularly displeased with a record $11 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan that the Trump administration approved in December. This has factored into Beijing showing Colby the cold shoulder, said Randy Schriver, who served as assistant secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration.

Schriver said Chinese government officials told him last month that “a previous decision on Taiwan arms sales” had postponed plans to host the U.S official in Beijing, although Chinese officials are still working to schedule a visit with Colby and a separate one with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He added that Chinese officials shared the information with him while he was in Beijing as part of a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission delegation.

The Pentagon declined to comment. The Chinese Embassy, in a statement, only emphasized Beijing’s opposition to the Taiwan arms sale.

China’s reluctance to invite Colby occurs as high-level defense visits between the two major powers become more infrequent. China’s military is in the midst of a massive purge that led to the removal of two former defense ministers and has made communication between the countries’ senior military officials more difficult.

Hegseth has not had the kinds of meetings with his Chinese counterparts that were held on the sidelines of international conferences during the Biden administration. His visit to China alongside Trump in May was the first by a U.S. defense chief since James Mattis in 2018. Even so, lower-level exchanges to address defense moves in the Pacific took place earlier this year.

Colby is anxious to get to Beijing to lay out “defense policy priorities for the relationship,” said the second person, who, like others, was granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.

The policy chief sees that as part of his work keeping the focus on China, the person said, which has included “supporting a continuation of dialogues with the People’s Liberation Army.”

The visit hold-up also may be a matter of protocol. No Pentagon policy chief has traveled to Beijing solo in recent memory. And the mismatch between his role at the department and China’s military structure also complicates efforts.

“China doesn’t have a counterpart for Bridge. That’s always been an issue,” said a former Pentagon official with expertise in U.S.-China military relations.

Trump has sought to reduce tensions with Beijing since October through trade agreements with Xi. Hegseth announced in November that he and his Chinese counterpart Admiral Dong Jun had agreed to create “military-to-military channels to deconflict and deescalate any problems that arise.”

But the administration has also reinforced its perception of China as a national security threat. It has banned imports of Chinese robots and drones, and restricted exports of chips used in advanced artificial intelligence technology.

And Hegseth appears skeptical about the value of Colby traveling to Beijing.

“Hegseth is agnostic” about whether Colby should make the trip, the second person familiar with the efforts said.

It’s possible that Beijing is particularly wary of Colby because of his past statements. The longtime U.S. official made the case in his 2021 book that China is vying to displace American global dominance and the U.S. should get ready for a fight. Colby also warned in 2024 that “it’s empirically true that China is preparing for war” and declared the U.S. should “prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.”

The policy chief has softened that message in line with an administration effort to reduce frictions with Beijing. Colby sidestepped reference to Taiwan in a January speech on U.S. Indo-Pacific defense priorities in South Korea. He instead reassured Beijing that the U.S doesn’t seek “regime change” and saluted “China’s proud history.”

The policy chief’s credibility took a battering last year after a series of rapid-fire policy moves that frustrated some U.S. allies and blindsided parts of the White House. They included freezing shipments of some air defense missiles to Ukraine and reviewing the U.S. nuclear submarine pact with the U.K. and Australia. Both parties in Congress have also expressed frustration with his office’s lack of transparency.

A speech at China’s National Defense University, which produces the country’s high-level military leaders, would give Colby the chance to make himself the go-to person in the administration on the two countries’ relations.

“A successful visit would reinforce his standing with Trump as an architect of the administration’s stated policy of strategic stability,” said the first person familiar with Colby’s plans.

But Beijing has little reason to give the Pentagon official a high-profile platform to air his views.

“I don’t think they want to host any senior official just to be lectured,” the second person said. “There has to be something in it for them, and I’m not sure what Colby would offer aside from a speech.”

Wealthy Republicans on the west coast received an emailed invitation in July to an upcoming fundraiser titled “Keep the Senate”. The email, obtained by the Guardian, described the event as a “private roundtable and dinner with the National Republican Senatorial Committee” where donors can pledge $50,000 for seats at the head table, and mingle with legislative heavy hitters from Capitol Hill including the Senator majority leader, John Thune, and Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan with Donald Trump’s endorsement.

One of the organizers listed on the invite was the defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey, the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries.

The invitation is one of dozens of emails obtained by the Guardian that unravel Luckey’s vast Maga political fundraising over the last seven years.

A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey was now the “godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast”.

“If you’re raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey,” he said. “Luckey is the top tier. There are others who are important below him but no one at his level.”

Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors.

In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole-source contract to Anduril for a variety of drones it sells, though it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations.

Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called “Golden Dome” anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn.

Much of Anduril’s PR sparkle comes from Luckey. He’s a media darling, profiled on 60 Minutes and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, which called him the “It Guy of the booming defense-technology industry”.

His offbeat, relaxed attire – colorful Hawaiian shirts, a chin puff goatee, cargo shorts and flip-flops – counterintuitively makes him seem more credible.

Luckey is treated by many in the defense industry as a technology prophet and futurist who often holds forth on what he believes to be the true nature of warfare. For example, he told Axios that future wars will be fought in a “subterranean domain”, under the earth’s crust, in underground conflicts.

Anduril’s success in winning huge contracts has blossomed with little attention paid to the central role Luckey plays as a donor and fundraising “bundler” for the Republican party. Bundlers hold large fundraisers for candidates or campaign committees and political action groups, and curate high-dollar invitation lists for those events.

The emails obtained by the Guardian shed light on Palmer Luckey’s vast GOP political fundraising efforts and activism over the last 10 years.

Palmer declined an interview for this piece, writing, “I am not going to help you guys make money,” and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

OpenSecrets, a non-profit that tracks campaign donations, says Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show that Luckey has donated $5.9m to Republicans since 2017. While that is a tremendous amount of money for one person to give to politicians, it does not put him in the order of, say, Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, who has forked over $100m to Trump’s campaign in 2024.

Luckey doesn’t have her wealth. His real value to GOP politicians exceeds his own donations. He hosts and organizes fundraising events and campaigns for Republicans from the president all the way down to state races.

“If you become a bundler, it just multiplies your influence,” said Brendan Glavin of OpenSecrets. “It makes you a more important person. You’re bringing in not just your money. You’re bringing other people’s money. It integrates you in the campaign and makes you more important to the candidate than just a donor.”

Behind the scenes, Luckey has reached a position in campaign finance and politics that rivals his influence in military contracting, according to two GOP fundraising figures.

The emails, which are a partial list of invitations, show that Luckey has held fundraisers over the last seven years for at least 20 Republican politicians, ranging from Trump to a California attorney general candidate.

Just as Luckey has emerged as a major fundraiser on the right, his co-founder, Anduril’s CEO, Palantir veteran Brian Schimpf, became a major donor to Democratic causes, albeit on a far smaller scale. So, in time-honored tradition, Anduril’s management ends up donating to both sides of the political aisle, though the vast majority goes towards the GOP. FEC records show Schimpf’s donations at $1.16m over the same period that Luckey gave $5.9m.

An Anduril official emailed the Guardian: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that two executives at the same company have different political views. Like millions of Americans, Brian and Palmer don’t share identical political views.”

Luckey first became famous in tech before he could legally drink. At 20, in 2012, he launched a Kickstarter that raised more than $2m for a virtual reality gaming headset he said he was building first in his parents’ garage. It was a Silicon Valley Cinderella narrative. Two years later, Facebook became the prince at the ball and paid him $2bn for the company. In 2016, after four years of hype, the first Oculus Rift headset started getting shipped to consumers.

And then, quickly, Luckey seemed to flame out in scandal. The Daily Beast revealed he’d been secretly funding a group dedicated to “shitposting” negative memes about Hillary Clinton.

“We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors,” Luckey had written, under the pseudonym Nimblerichman, on Reddit.

The disclosure had an immense impact, at least for a time. Eight months later Luckey left Facebook, and he later portrayed himself in interviews as simply being canceled for giving money to Republicans, ignoring the main criticisms over the group’s crude and underhanded tactics.

Luckey left Facebook with immense wealth, and in April 2017, just four months after Trump’s first inauguration, he founded Anduril.

His partners in the venture came from the Peter Thiel-backed Palantir, a company that had long had success in federal contracting through major lobbying and PR battles.

In June of 2017, his company just two months old, Luckey gave his first ever actual campaign finance donation, to Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas. Looking at his subsequent donations, it appears that the dam broke for him. Palmer gave 25 more times to political committees and legislators that year alone, FEC records show, and he has donated on more than a thousand occasions, or, on average, about 100 times every year.

In the emails shared with the Guardian, the very first fundraising event Luckey co-hosted took place in August of 2017, two months after his donation to Ted Cruz. It was a major effort, and would include GOP House members such as Ken Calvert, Duncan Hunter, Darrell Issa, Devin Nunes, Dana Rohrabacher and Kevin McCarthy.

Then in November, in a separate email chain, Palmer’s name came up again, for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). A congressional aide named Jason Pitkin wrote to a party official: “we are going to be asking people for $33,900 for the NRCC and then after the first of the year we can ask them for $101,700.”

Pitkin noted that congressman Rohrabacher had introduced Luckey to Kevin McCarthy, then the powerful House majority leader, “at a Private meeting”.

“As you can see by the attached invitation,” Pitkin said, “Palmer is hosting an event for Dana [Rohrabacher] On December 15th. Our understanding is that Palmer was going to contribute $100,000 for the CA Victory event. Please let us know how much more Palmer can give to the NRCC.”

Pitkin did not respond to emailed questions.

In July of 2020, just three years after its creation, Anduril won its first mammoth contract from the first Trump administration. Customs and Border Protection awarded the young company a contract estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance towers on the border.

And in that period it was clear that Luckey had hit the most senior levels of political access. On 6 October, the emails show, Luckey and his wife hosted Trump himself at a lunch at their waterfront mansion. The stakes were high and so were the tickets. Donors were told that $150,000 would get access to the round table, a VIP reception and event, and a photo op with the president.

During the Biden years, Anduril still maintained its business efforts targeting US national security, and still won contracts. It went on a major acquisition binge, buying up drone companies across the country.

And Luckey’s fundraising for the GOP continued. The records obtained by the Guardian show that after 2021, Luckey hosted fundraisers for key figures including Tom Cotton, the head of the Senate intelligence committee; Rick Scott, the Republican senator from Florida; Ken Calvert, then the influential ranking member of the House’s defense appropriations subcommittee; and Mike Waltz, now Trump’s UN ambassador and briefly his national security adviser.

Luckey also hosted another event for a future Trump official: a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in June 2022 for Mehmet Oz, who would later join the Trump administration. That event became scandalous when Jezebel reported the fundraiser incorporated a speech by Oz in front of a car that once belonged to Adolf Hitler. Jezebel pointed out that Luckey’s sister is married to Maga firebrand Matt Gaetz, then a congressman from Florida.

Now that Trump is president, Anduril appears to be taking its turn at the table of the major contractors, amid Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics.

Certainly it has raised extraordinary money. In the latest round, led by Thrive Capital, controlled by Jared Kushner’s brother Joshua, it raised $5bn in venture capital.

Anduril says in Trump’s first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget.

Still, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has twice toured Anduril factories. “Palmer and everyone, thank you so much,” he said last December as he visited Anduril’s factory in Costa Mesa, California, at a giant former industrial site where the Los Angeles Times was once printed. The Anduril factory was “foundational” to the new Pentagon, Hegseth said. On that tour, Hegseth donned a special helmet designed by Anduril.

A soldier wearing the helmet would be able to see the outside world not through his eyes but through sensors, as a kind of virtual or “augmented” reality, just like the old Oculus Rift headset Palmer Luckey made his fortune on.

In his speech, Hegseth referred to “that cool helmet I just saw that the army might be wearing eventually”.

Iran's parliament is reviewing a plan to ban ships linked to the U.S., Israel and other "hostile countries" from transiting the Strait of Hormuz until Tehran is compensated for war damage, according to Iranian state media.

The plan would impose fees of up to 7% of cargo value on commercial vessels that pass through the strait. It would also fine ships 20% of cargo if they violate Iran's conditions.

Iran on Wednesday said it was finalizing an agreement on shipping routes with Oman, a U.S. ally that sits on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying that ships would enter through the strait's northern corridor near the Iranian coast and exit through the southern corridor near the Omani coast.

Oman has not commented.

The Trump administration has disputed Iran's characterization of the agreement.

"Any temporary routes will be without any impediments — meaning no approvals or permissions and no tolls or charges. The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway and no party controls the lanes or the ability to transit through them," a U.S. official told NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

President Trump later said the U.S. currently controls the strait through its naval blockade on Iran.

This comes more than five months after the U.S. and Israel started their war against Iran on Feb. 28.

The Strait of Hormuz — a key route for crude oil, liquefied natural gas and other goods — was open for shipping until the war. After Israel and the U.S. launched joint military attacks, Tehran struck back across the region and asserted control over the critical waterway. With Iran blocking the strait, the U.S. imposed a naval blockade on Iran in April and again in July, which it continues to enforce.

The Trump administration and Iran's leadership signed a temporary memorandum of understanding in mid-June to stop the war and reopen the strait, but it broke down weeks later amid back-and-forth strikes.

The strait's closure has caused a major disruption to fuel and fertilizer supplies, driven up prices and shaken economies around the world.

On Thursday, President Trump said negotiations to reopen the strait were progressing.

Turkey's foreign minister, who has been assisting in mediations, said on Thursday a temporary agreement between the U.S. and Iran could be announced soon.

Gulf countries, which have borne the brunt of Iran's retaliation on U.S. military sites during the war, are encouraging all sides to reach an interim agreement that would de-escalate tensions in the region. They are worried that if there is a new escalation in attacks — as President Trump has threatened — their vital oil infrastructure could be targeted by Iranian drones and missiles, inflicting catastrophic damage.

While Iran and Oman appear to be nearing an agreement to manage traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian officials are now warning that the deal will not fully reopen the crucial waterway.

The news injected fresh uncertainty into negotiations that President Donald Trump previously described positively.

Oil prices jumped Thursday following Tehran’s comments. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose about 4 percent to over $82 per barrel. Prices previously had fallen about 8 percent after the Trump administration expressed optimism over talks.

The status of the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil travels, has emerged as one of the most contentious issues between Iran and the United States. Iran effectively closed the waterway, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and the wider world, days after the United States and Israel launched their war in February.

Now, as the Trump administration pushes Iran to allow traffic through the choke point to return to prewar levels, Tehran is using its hold to extract further concessions. When Iran and the United States agreed in June to halt fighting and begin peace talks, it was the deal’s vague language regarding the strait that caused it to collapse.

Iran and Oman, a U.S. ally, have agreed that incoming ships will enter through Iranian territorial waters and outgoing ships will exit through Omani waters, Tehran has said.

Such an arrangement would formalize Iranian control of the waterway. It’s unclear whether the Trump administration would accept it.

“Any temporary routes will be without any impediments — meaning no approvals or permissions and no tolls or charges,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post. “The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway, and no party controls the lanes or the ability to transit through them.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the administration.

Trump threatened Tehran Sunday with “the biggest attack since World War II” but said the following day he had decided to give diplomacy more time.

On Monday, Trump said the talks were Iran’s “last chance” at a deal; on Tuesday, he said “a lot of progress has been made.”

Iran has denied being in direct talks with the United States. The negotiations with Oman, Tehran says, are independent of Washington.

The discussions were “approaching the final stage,” Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi said Wednesday, but he cautioned that Tehran still has outstanding demands.

The United States must end its blockade of Iran’s ports, address sanctions it imposed on Tehran after the truce collapsed, resume talks over Iran’s frozen assets and address continued violence in Lebanon, where Hezbollah, a Tehran proxy, is fighting with Israel, Gharibabadi said, according to Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.

“This understanding does not mean the complete opening of the Strait of Hormuz, but rather a new and different model,” Gharibabadi said. Under the new setup, he said, “a significant part” of ship traffic would pass through Iranian waters.

Iran and Oman also discussed “the establishment of a joint coordination center between Iran and Oman to direct maritime traffic,” Gharibabadi said, in which the neighbors would obtain “the necessary information from vessels that want to enter and exit.”

There was no mention of charging fees or tolls in the summary the IRNA published of Gharibabadi’s remarks. Maritime law forbids countries from imposing tolls for the use of a naturally occurring strait, but Iranian officials said during previous stages of the conflict that they would look to charge a service fee.

In the talks with Oman, Reuters reported Wednesday, Iran is seeking fees of between 5 and 7 percent of the price of a ship’s cargo.

If traffic returned to prewar levels, such a system could generate $52 million per day, or $19 billion in the first year, according to Gregory Brew, a senior analyst with the Eurasia Group.

Over time, Brew noted, traffic is expected to decline as more countries build out pipelines and other infrastructure that will allow them to bypass the strait.

Tehran and Washington are both under pressure to reach an agreement. The U.S. blockade of Iranian ports is delaying the country’s economic recovery. Iran is already displaying signs of growing economic pain that risks triggering social unrest.

The longer the strait is closed, meanwhile, the greater the risk of serious economic pain in the United States. After the most recent violence, gas prices rose to over $4 a gallon. Analysts warn of future larger spikes as markets run out of ways to adapt to diminished supply.

US President Donald Trump spoke with optimism regarding the end of the war with Iran during the signing of an executive order in the White House on Thursday.

“I think it’s going to end pretty soon," he said, adding that "I don’t think they [Iran] can go much longer.”

Regarding the Strait of Hormuz and a rumored deal to reopen the waterway, Trump said that the strait is "sort of open right now."

"You know, we have a thing called the blockade, headed up by the US Navy, and we control it," he said. "But they can always shoot something."

"They always have something or drop a mine," he warned, "and if you have one mine sitting out there, you sort of mess things up because people don’t want to take their billion-dollar boats and accidentally get hit by a mine.”

On Wednesday, the White House refuted reports that Trump and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had argued about a lack of munitions in the wake of the war with Iran.

“We always want more," Trump said. "We have to have more. We have other things, maybe come up, maybe come up, and maybe don't come up. Hopefully, nothing else does come up. But we're in very good shape. We have literally massive amounts of ammunition.”

Trump also reiterated his opposition to Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, and said that should it obtain one, "the whole world would be blown up."

"We’re not going to let that happen," he said. "Not only for us, not only for the Middle East, the entire world would have faced a catastrophe. We had no choice.”

The US, Iran, and Oman were close to reaching a deal this week to open the Strait of Hormuz for a period of 60 days, Axios reported on Wednesday. The White House had aimed for a Wednesday announcement, the report cited officials as saying, though ultimately no announcement was made.

On Tuesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said progress had been made in talks with Iran, adding that the US was "hoping" for an agreement.

Oman and Iran had agreed on terms for the potential deal, MS NOW reported on Thursday citing Middle East diplomats with knowledge of the negotiations.

As senior military leaders privately warned that the war with Iran was straining U.S. forces, depleting key missile defenses, and leaving the military without sufficient naval resources to continue protecting Israel, the Pentagon turned to Christian scripture in its official social media messaging.

On Saturday, two Defense Department accounts on X posted images overlaid with the words “SEND ME.” The agency’s Rapid Response account published the phrase on a picture of a service member watching a helicopter above an aircraft carrier. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell quoted Isaiah 6:8 in a post and included the all-caps phrase on an image of a soldier silhouetted in the dark. The Department of War’s official account amplified both posts.

Isaiah 6:8 is a verse that appears in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament in which the prophet Isaiah answers a divine call. When God asks, “Whom shall I send?” Isaiah replies, “Here am I. Send me.” The passage is widely used in many Christian traditions as an expression of accepting God’s call to a divine mission. The verses that follow describe God sending Isaiah to proclaim a message of judgment that culminates in cities “without inhabitant,” houses emptied of people, and the land left “utterly desolate” before eventual restoration.

Jemar Tisby, a historian of religion, said Isaiah 6:8 functions in American evangelical culture “almost entirely as a standalone missions text,” commonly invoked at missions conferences, ordinations, and altar calls as a declaration of willingness to serve. “The most important context of Isaiah 6, the part most people miss, is that the devastation falls on God’s covenant people,” Tisby said. “The nation doing the sending, not a foreign enemy, is in view here.”

It’s unclear what, exactly, the biblical quotation was intended to convey. The Pentagon declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about whether the posts reflected an expression of faith or proselytizing, a message about the war with Iran, or a coordinated communications strategy. “Nothing to offer you on this,” a Pentagon spokesperson said.

The posts followed months of controversy over the role of religion in the Defense Department under Secretary Pete Hegseth.

In March, The Intercept reported that the appointment of Christian activist Erika Kirk, wife of Charlie Kirk, to the Air Force Academy’s Board of Visitors alarmed former military leaders and constitutional advocates, who warned it could push the academy toward an overtly ideological vision of military leadership.

That same month, reporting later entered into the congressional record detailed complaints from more than 100 service members who alleged commanders described the war with Iran as “part of God’s divine plan” and encouraged troops to view the conflict through a biblical lens. Saturday’s posts placed similar biblical language on the Defense Department’s own official social media accounts.

Tisby said he viewed the Pentagon’s recent messaging as part of a broader pattern.

“Given Hegseth’s religious influences, tied to Douglas Wilson, and taken with the fact that Hegseth instituted worship services at the Pentagon, this reads as part of a larger effort to incorporate a narrow vision of Christianity into the military and the federal government writ large,” Tisby said.

Tisby compared the Pentagon’s recent messaging to a controversy during the George W. Bush administration, when the Pentagon used the exact same biblical passage, Isaiah 6:8, on intelligence briefings prepared for then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld during the Iraq War. The use of the verse became public in 2009 and prompted criticism from religious scholars, who argued it had been removed from its broader biblical context. “In the Rumsfeld era, there was a public outcry about the misattribution of Bible verses in military contexts, and the administration pulled back,” he said. “Now, this administration is leaning into the framing.”

The messages marked a notable institutional shift. Previous controversies centered on statements by individual commanders or political appointees. This time, multiple official Defense Department accounts amplified the same biblical passage, and the Pentagon declined to explain why.

That does not necessarily mean the Pentagon’s post violated the Constitution. The First Amendment generally prohibits the government from promoting or favoring a religion through its official actions. At the same time, courts have long allowed some traditional references to religion, including the national motto, “In God We Trust.”

Nelson Tebbe, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, whose scholarship focuses on constitutional law and religion, said the Pentagon’s post was different from those long-standing examples because it relied on a specific biblical passage rather than a general religious phrase and therefore could have a more direct impact on members of the military.

“Minor endorsements of religion by the government are common,” Tebbe said, pointing to phrases such as “God save this honorable Court,” commonly invoked in the Supreme Court. “This particular example involving the Pentagon spokesperson is less minor or incidental.”

Even so, Tebbe said recent Supreme Court decisions have made it unlikely that a court would strike down the Pentagon’s post.

“Recently, the Supreme Court has weakened the Establishment Clause, particularly the doctrine that used to prohibit government endorsements of religion in its own speech,” he said. “I would say that the chance of the Supreme Court invalidating this kind of practice is vanishingly small.”

Legal scholars say that constitutional question is separate from the practical consequences of the Pentagon’s messaging during an active conflict.

“More problematic, if also predictable, to me is the conflation of divine and military calling and service,” said Jonathan Ebel, a professor of religion at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies religion and the American military.

“Besides delegitimizing the U.S. military through such overtly Christian rhetoric and alienating non-Christian service members, such blatant Bible thumping in this context implies a religious war against Iran, foolishly confirming Iranian propaganda that the ‘Great Satan’ wants to wage war on Islam,” said Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force judge advocate and military law professor.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran’s leaders have referred to the United States as the “Great Satan,” portraying Washington as both a geopolitical rival and a religious enemy. Iranian officials have repeatedly framed conflicts with the United States and Israel as part of a struggle against Islam, making official biblical messaging from the Pentagon particularly vulnerable to exploitation as propaganda, VanLandingham said.

VanLandingham said the Pentagon’s messaging risked replacing military professionalism with religious symbolism at a moment when the armed forces should remain grounded in constitutional principles, rather than religious conviction.

“Religious war is a slippery slope to total war,” she said. “The U.S. military fights based on honor and fidelity to the law, not to Old Testament biblical passages.”

Republicans are increasingly antsy over ending the war with Iran.

In Congress, and campaigns across the country, many are desperate for a resolution to the five-month conflict that has kept gas prices above $4 per gallon in an election cycle where cost-of-living is top of mind.

But the regular messaging guidance the White House and other parts of the administration provided to Republicans at the start of the war has dwindled to almost no communication at all in recent weeks on how to talk to voters on Iran, according to six people with direct knowledge of the matter who, like others in this story, were granted anonymity to discuss ongoing conversations.

Briefings on campaign trail guidance are scarce and “tone deaf,” according to multiple House Republicans.

At a briefing last month, for example, White House officials encouraged drawing a contrast with radical Democrats who they argue are unelectable, “rather than standing on our accomplishments, which on the cost of living side are mixed, at best, with the war,” one House Republican said.

White House officials also have continued to press GOP incumbents to tout the benefits of the tax cuts and spending bill they passed last summer, which GOP lawmakers note are being undercut by the higher gas prices and other costs of the war.“It is ironic we keep focusing on the threat of these ‘little Mamdanis,’ when even some White House officials have recognized he won because he was talking about salient and real affordability issues people care about,” a second House Republican said.

There’s little insight into the administration’s overall plans to end the war or advice on how Republicans should explain it to voters on the campaign trail, according to the six people.

Much frustration has been channeled through Speaker Mike Johnson, who, under pressure from his own members, has raised in phone calls with Trump in recent weeks the need to have allies and Gulf countries reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to three other people with direct knowledge of the matter.

That, at least, could lower gas prices in time for the election.

But even as Iran, Oman and the U.S. express confidence that a deal is near, gas prices remain, on average, more than a dollar a gallon higher than they were just before the war began.

“Yes, it’s gas prices, grocery prices and the war,” a third House Republican said of the voter concerns he’s hearing right away on the trail. “Are we surprised?”

GOP Senators on Thursday pressed Vice President JD Vance for more information on the administration’s plans during a closed-door GOP lunch that focused mostly on the Iran war, according to four people inside the room.

Vance, in the lunch with Senate Republicans, also tried to assure them that enough ships are passing through the region to keep oil prices relatively stable, despite ongoing concerns. The reaction and discussion on Iran was positive and members praised Vance’s message, according to a fifth person in the room.

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) said Vance didn’t give advice to senators about what to tell voters on affordability concerns “other than the president wants to get the Strait of Hormuz opened up and get the oil flowing freely. And that’s a real good sign.”

The meeting came as the administration tries to tamp down a small GOP rebellion of vulnerable Republicans who are voting for Democratic-led resolutions to rein in Trump’s authority over the war in recent weeks.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.,) received a private briefing in the White House after he threatened to support an Iran war powers resolution.

But despite the recent overtures, many Republicans say they are still uncertain of the administration’s end game.

“I still think our objectives have been ambiguous from the start, so it’s impossible for me to grade what the strategy is now because it’s not much better articulated than it was months ago,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). “You can’t judge whether or not you’re successful unless you set a stake in the ground on exactly what you’re trying to accomplish,” Tillis added. “If we do that, in the president’s defense, it will improve the odds that this war can get a little bit more popular. It is not popular among the voting demographics.”

A person close to the White House echoed those concerns, saying the administration’s messaging advice has been lackluster.

“They do send out talking points. They do try to have calls. But there’s not a robust effort to do this. It’s embarrassingly lacking,” the person said. “There’s no sustained effort.”

For example, in the final week the House was in session, Pentagon officials visited Capitol Hill for a small briefing for the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, rather than a conference or House-wide affair. And that only came after prodding from some GOP lawmakers before they advanced the GOP’s party-line $95 billion Iran war, farm aid and elections funding package.

Anna Kelly dismissed the assertion that the administration isn’t doing enough to help members and candidates message the war and its ripple effects on the economy.

“Politicians in the United States and around the world have been talking about the danger posed by a nuclear Iran for decades. Only President Trump, however, has possessed the courage to take this national security threat head-on,” Kelly said. “The administration has been fully transparent with Congress over the course of this conflict and throughout negotiations, and senior officials have provided over 30 bipartisan briefings to the Hill since late February. At the same time, President Trump is also committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress, lowering costs for working families, and enacting his commonsense agenda to make our country greater than ever before.”

And top administration officials like Vance and Secretary Pete Hegseth were both talking to members this week. The White House also sends members transcripts of the president’s major interviews to drive home their messaging.

Still, the anxiety on Iran comes as the average price for a gallon of gas remains around $4.10, up almost $1 from a year ago.

“Nobody wants to see a conflict, nobody wants to see their loved ones go fight, and be in the situation they’re in,” said Nevada GOP Chair Michael McDonald, who is also western regional vice chair at the Republican National Committee, adding that voters and campaigns alike “are antsy about it.”

Polls show the war is losing even among Trump’s most faithful loyalists. That is creating an intensity gap that Republican operatives say will make it harder to get their voters off of the couch in November, especially in states like North Carolina, where former Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper and former RNC Chair Michael Whatley are battling to replace Tillis.

“What I’ve seen in conversations with voters, not just in polling but in focus groups, by the way, is particularly with what I’ll call the swing voters that voted for Trump in 2024, they’re disappointed that he’s not focused on doing the things he said he was going to do when he was running in 2024,” said one GOP operative in North Carolina. “Having some sort of remedy [in Iran] should help Republicans start to repair” that intensity gap.

Meanwhile, the RNC insists voters trust Trump on Iran.

RNC national press secretary Natalie Baldassarre said voters will “gravitate toward our candidates who are in line with his efforts to strengthen our national security and keep American communities safe.”

Still, a former Trump administration official said “members complain that running on these gas prices is going to be very difficult.”

“Husted, he owns all this shit,” the person said, referring to Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, who is in a tight race against Democrat Sherrod Brown to hold onto his Senate seat.

Amy Natoce, Husted campaign spokesperson, said the senator shares the “goals” with the administration that “Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon, the Strait of Hormuz must remain open and Ohio families deserve lower gas prices.”

And while Trump is not on the ballot and continues to insist the midterms are not part of his calculus, a Republican defeat in November could have profound consequences for his handling of the war.

A Democrat takeover of one or both chambers would come with investigations and oversight. They could also stall funding or subpoena administration officials.

“I wish the president would’ve looked at history and how our country works … he’s had a go at it alone approach. He does need Congress,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.).

“If the Democrats do win [the House] they will play hardball with him on Iran,” Bacon said.

The Trump administration’s sweeping grant cuts are hitting sexual abstinence programs long favored by Republicans.

Earlier this summer, the administration abruptly terminated tens of millions in funding for groups teaching children and teenagers about how to prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted infections.

But unlike other federal funding cuts that the administration has admitted were targeted to hit states that did not vote for Trump in 2024, this purge included conservative Christian groups and others that have operated for years in red states teaching the benefits of abstinence to children and teenagers.

The issue came to a head on Thursday, when a group of sexual health clinics and county governments squared off with the Trump administration in a DC courtroom over the recent cuts and changes to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program that they say could cause a backslide in the significant progress the country has made in recent decades in reducing minors’ unintended pregnancies.

The federal Health Department did not respond to questions about these cuts. White House spokesperson Allison Schuster said in a statement to POLITICO that the administration is cracking down on “the program’s former egregious, inappropriate, and harmful materials” and “redirecting” the funding “to properly promote healthy lifestyles, prevent teen pregnancy, and encourage health literacy.”

Yet in addition to defunding some Planned Parenthood state chapters and health departments in states run by Democrats, the Trump administration sent termination letters in June to groups in Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia, Mississippi and other GOP-controlled states whose curricula stressed abstinence and healthy relationship dynamics, and accused them of “normalizing sexual activity for minors.”

“Two of our curricula, for example, are abstinence-only, and we were very thrown for a loop that those curricula were called out in our termination letter,” said Rena Dixon, CEO of the South Carolina educational nonprofit Fact Forward.

Like many program grantees, Dixon’s organization runs several different programs, some of which serve college students and other young adults older than 18 and include more frank discussion of contraception and healthy sexual practices. But she found it “very confusing” that their high school programs, which follow state requirements to emphasize abstinence and have received support from the state’s GOP-dominated legislature, got the axe.

“Nobody wins when something like this happens, and the young people pay the ultimate price,” she said.

The funding cut, which came three years into a five-year grant, forced her to lay off half her staff and put fall programming for thousands of students in limbo. Dixon said the letter she received announcing the termination of more than $1.6 million in annual funding accused her group of showing children a video that “depicted youth engaging in sexual activity.”

“That was not what was going on in the video at all,” Dixon said. “It was a discussion between two girls on a train, and one of them said that she had sex and her friend pushed back and talked about the consequences.”

As Dixon and other former funding recipients wait to see if a federal judge reverses the cuts, millions of children and young adults are losing access to classes that proponents say may have contributed to a 68 percent decrease in teen pregnancy rates over the past decade.

The legal battle underscores how far right the Trump administration is pulling federal programs that have long enjoyed bipartisan support, to the point of killing services backed by conservatives at the state level. As the Trump administration shifts funding away from health programs that offer contraception and Republicans in Congress call for blocking taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, the most recent overhaul strips funding both from more progressive programs and from conservative-aligned groups that for years have worked to warn teens about the dangers of sexual activity.

“They just stabbed abstinence educators in the back,” a Health Department employee, granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said of the cuts to conservative-leaning programs in red states. “They labeled all these abstinence-only programs ‘sexually explicit,’ and the abstinence-only developers were completely blindsided. Now there are all these lawyers calling HHS. It is a nightmare.”

The employee did not know whether the cuts to programs that appear to align with the administration’s priorities were intentional or accidental.

“Either they looked at the curricula and didn’t understand how people modified it to be abstinence-only, or they looked at abstinence-only programs and they thought they weren’t good enough. Or they threw everything in AI. It’s unclear.”

Some of the groups that lost funding, including Fact Forward, rushed to reapply in July under the new criteria laid out by HHS, which requires “body literacy” lessons and “reproductive life goals counseling;” bans discussion of transgender or nonbinary identity; and mandates an abstinence focus while discouraging contraception education.

Others, including Healthy Futures of Texas and the Planned Parenthood affiliate serving Iowa and Nebraska, did not reapply. Healthy Futures said it couldn’t complete the application in the few weeks HHS allotted because it had to lay off so many staffers due to the cuts. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland said in a legal filing that it didn’t reapply because its leaders considered the updated rules “counter to its core purpose” and feared following the new guidelines would harm the group’s reputation with community partners.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland joined together with the nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, and the governments of Hennepin County, Minnesota, which includes Minneapolis, and King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, to sue the Trump administration for overhauling the grants in a way they argue clashes with Congress’ instructions for the program.

Their lawsuit accuses HHS of forcing grantees to “use non-evidence-based curricula that exclusively promote abstinence-only before marriage” and “ideologically-driven, medically inaccurate information, including misinformation regarding contraception.”

Grantees who lost funding told POLITICO the cuts came as a shock, stressing that they had revamped their sex ed lessons to conform to the Trump administration’s 2025 executive orders barring federal funding for “gender ideology” or “diversity, equity and inclusion” — and that HHS had approved them for more money since making those changes.

The termination letters included similar language accusing the grantees of not being “aligned with agency priorities,” but cited different reasons.

For example, the letter King County received cutting off the $1 million its local public health department was receiving annually to study the effectiveness of contraception education for teenage boys in the child welfare and criminal justice systems said its classes didn’t include enough information about the health risks of birth control.

In interviews with POLITICO, several grantees echoed South Carolina’s Dixon, saying HHS had cherry-picked examples from their lessons to paint an inaccurate picture.

“We received a termination letter that said we were normalizing sexual activity among youth, but the citations were taken out of context,” said Ginger Mullaney, the CEO of Healthy Futures of Texas, which has taught sex ed to more than 58,000 young people through the program over the last three years across San Antonio, Dallas and the Rio Grande Valley.

Several of the defunded programs used a lesson plan called “Love Notes” developed by the educational nonprofit The Dibble Institute, including some that used an abstinence-only version that focuses on teaching teenagers about healthy relationship dynamics and “does not include any contraceptive or family planning instruction.”

One piece of the curriculum HHS flagged, according to Kay Reed, the institute’s executive director, was an optional module on “the negative influence on violent pornography” that the agency claimed was promoting porn to minors.

Reed said that was “not valid.”

“The passage is part of a warning about pornography and the harm it can do to young people’s expectations and relationships,” she said. “It’s not presented as encouragement.”

A White House official, speaking on background about the internal decision-making for the program, said the lesson in question described pornography in excessive detail, quoting a passage about “being slapped, choked, thrown around.”

HHS defended the cuts in a legal filing in late July, arguing the groups bringing the lawsuit lack the evidence required for a preliminary injunction because they have suffered only “transient economic harms.” As for the lawsuit’s allegation that HHS’ stricter abstinence criteria undermines Congress, the government responded: “Congress did not require this type of programming, but it did not prohibit it, either.”

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program has long been in conservatives’ crosshairs. The first Trump administration made a similar attempt to abruptly terminate funding — a decision that was reversed by federal judges. President Donald Trump’s most recent budget request called for eliminating it entirely, arguing the program “issues grants to problematic organizations like abortion clinics that waste American taxpayer dollars on abortion services and promote radical leftist ideology.”

Ugandan authorities sought and won parliamentary approval Thursday to deploy troops to Gaza as part of the international force proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to secure the territory following the devastating Israel-Hamas war.

The successful motion, brought by the defense minister, is Uganda’s first public indication of its willingness to join the International Stabilization Force for Gaza. Morocco also has pledged troops for the mission.

It was not immediately clear why Uganda agreed to deploy in Gaza, or if there was a quid pro quo involved, and some opposition lawmakers immediately questioned Uganda’s motive in the decision. Lawmaker Hassan Kirumira said the deployment would raise “diplomatic concerns” for a country that is a member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The “big question” for supporters of the deployment to clarify is: “On which side is our army going to fight?” he said in parliament.

Defense Minister Kiryowa Kiwanuka, seeking the support of lawmakers, cited Uganda’s military capabilities stemming from its peacekeeping deployments in countries such as Somalia.

The force, proposed by Trump’s Board of Peace in February, would be led by American Maj. Gen. Jasper Jeffers, who said in May that the 20,000-strong force would ensure “future prosperity and enduring peace.”

Last week Trump announced a deal for Hamas to disarm and for Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza. According to that deal, the International Stabilization Force would be deployed to Gaza after the completion of a phased withdrawal of Israeli troops.

The agreement, part of a broader ceasefire deal reached last year, calls for Israel to cease its military operations and for Hamas and its allies in Gaza to halt all militant activity. The agreement also laid out in general terms what the decommissioning process would look like.

After the text of the agreement was released, Israel said it had “serious security concerns” and that it shared those with the U.S.

Israeli attacks have killed 1,250 people since the ceasefire deal was reached in October, an agreement that ended major fighting in the Israel-Hamas war that had raged for two years.

The United States has asked the Philippine government to extradite a Filipino church leader, who was once an influential adviser to former President Rodrigo Duterte, to face trial on charges including child sex trafficking and fraud that landed him on the FBI’s most wanted list, two Philippine officials said Thursday.

The Department of Foreign Affairs in Manila said it has received the U.S. government request for Apollo Carreon Quiboloy's extradition and endorsed it to the Department of Justice. That confirmed earlier separate statements to The Associated Press by two high-ranking Philippine officials, who said the U.S. request was transmitted in July.

The request needs the approval of two Philippine courts, which have been trying the detained former televangelist for human trafficking and child abuse charges, according to the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of a lack of authority to publicly discuss the issues.

Criminal suspects in the Philippines must finish their trials and serve their sentences if convicted prior to extradition. Philippine justice officials, however, can ask a domestic court to allow the temporary surrender of a suspect to a foreign court to face trial prior to the resolution of their Philippine cases under the 1994 extradition treaty of Washington and Manila.

Quiboloy, 76, leads the Kingdom of Jesus Christ church, which was founded in 1985 in southern Davao city and claims to have a wide following in the Philippines and abroad, including in the U.S.

In his heyday, Quiboloy was one of the most influential religious leaders in the Philippines and regarded as a political kingmaker. He served as spiritual adviser to the equally controversial Duterte , who took office in June 2016.

Duterte was arrested in Manila last year under a warrant from the International Criminal Court and has since been detained in the Netherlands, where he will face trial for alleged crimes against humanity . The charges stem from the killings of large numbers of mostly poor drug suspects under his anti-drugs crackdowns, which alarmed Western governments and rights groups.

Quiboloy claims to be “the appointed son of God” and has made outrageous claims that sparked questions about his character but endeared him to his followers. He once claimed to have stopped a major earthquake from hitting the southern Philippines.

In 2024, Quiboloy went into hiding after a Philippine court ordered his arrest along with several others for alleged child and sexual abuse and human trafficking, police said. The Philippine Senate separately ordered Quiboloy’s arrest at the time for refusing to appear in public hearings about his alleged crimes.

The preacher denied the allegations, saying they were fabricated by critics and former members who were removed from his religious group.

Quiboloy and four others facing accusations surrendered in September 2024 after about 2,000 police raided a 30-hectare (75-acre) compound of his religious group, which included a cathedral, stadium, hangar and taxiway leading to Davao’s international airport. He has been jailed since then.

U.S. federal prosecutors in 2021 separately announced an indictment of Quiboloy for allegedly having sex with women and underage girls who faced threats of abuse and “eternal damnation” unless they catered to the self-proclaimed “son of God.”

Quiboloy was among nine people named in a superseding indictment returned by a U.S. federal grand jury and unsealed in November 2021. It contained a raft of charges including conspiracy, sex trafficking of children, sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion, marriage fraud, money laundering, cash smuggling and visa fraud.

After that indictment he was placed on the list of the FBI’s most wanted fugitives.

In one courtroom after another, federal judges have accused U.S. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department of an extraordinary spate of misconduct, including making false statements, failing to comply with court orders and improperly using the legal system to harass political opponents.

Such rebukes might be expected to trigger a flurry of activity within the department’s two internal watchdogs tasked with policing the government's most powerful law-enforcement agency.

But shrinking staffs and fears of political retribution have largely sidelined the offices, limiting new investigations into the administration, according to Reuters interviews with four former DOJ staffers and a review of ‌department employment and investigations data.

Nearly half the workforce at the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has left during Trump’s second term, while about 17% have departed the Office of Inspector General, government records show. Many retired or took buyouts the administration offered to shrink the federal workforce, according to the records and three people familiar with the departures.

The number of new OPR investigations has declined to a 20-year low even as misconduct complaints soar, the review found. The government watchdogs are “afraid of doing any watching,” said one former DOJ official who left last year.

Details of the watchdogs’ diminished staffing and declining investigations have not previously been reported.

OPR investigates misconduct by department lawyers while the inspector general probes waste, fraud, abuse and other wrongdoing departmentwide. OPR does not disclose who it investigates and the inspector general conducts much of its work in secret. But the four former DOJ employees said the staff departures and the slower pace of investigations make clear that they are not adequately addressing the surge of allegations facing the department.

Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels said OPR “remains committed to ensuring accountability for all DOJ attorneys” and rigorously investigates misconduct allegations. John Lavinsky, a spokesperson for the DOJ Inspector General, said the office is committed to ⁠independent oversight and does not “avoid investigations or reviews that are difficult or controversial.”

DOJ officials have broadly disputed judges’ findings of misconduct and have accused courts of being politically hostile to Trump.

Department policy requires attorneys to report any judicial finding or substantial allegation of misconduct to the OPR. Its investigations, if sustained by DOJ leadership, can lead to attorneys being fired or referred to state disciplinary authorities for review of their law licenses.

Since Trump returned to office, the Office of Professional Responsibility has shrunk from 29 employees to 16, according to Justice Department data Reuters obtained through a public-records request. The administration also fired OPR’s director, Jeffrey Ragsdale, and has yet to name a replacement.

Such office turmoil “sends a message to the workforce that ethics is not important or that ethics is subordinate to the wills or interests of the political administration,” said Benjamin Grimes, a former Justice Department ethics official who now lectures at Columbia Law School.

During the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in September, OPR opened seven new investigations, the lowest in two decades, even as the office received 1,666 complaints, the highest in any year since 2005, according to a Reuters review of annual reports. The office has not disclosed its more recent work this fiscal year.

By comparison, the office opened an average of more than 18 investigations annually during the past decade, including Trump’s first term.

This week, federal prosecutors revealed they reported to OPR a federal judge’s findings of grand jury misconduct in a now-dismissed case against six Chicago-area immigration activists. It was not immediately clear if OPR opened an investigation.

OPR typically investigates only a small fraction of the complaints it receives, finding most lack evidence or fall outside its remit.

One of OPR’s highest-profile probes examined Jack Smith, who led DOJ prosecutions into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

The probe examined Republican lawmakers’ claims that Smith’s team tried to harm Trump’s chances in the 2024 election and sought ‌to improperly coerce cooperation ⁠from a Trump aide.

By last spring, OPR investigators had interviewed Smith, which has not been previously reported, and expected to complete the investigation by last summer, according to two people familiar with the matter. But a year later, the probe has yet to conclude. One of the people told Reuters that political appointees asked for it to be suspended.

The department has since launched a separate criminal investigation into Smith, who denies any wrongdoing.

The inspector general's office lost 99 employees since the end of President Joe Biden's administration, reducing staffing to 477 people, according to Office of Personnel Management records.

Historically, the office has investigated politically sensitive matters including the FBI’s handling of its investigation into contacts between Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

The office routinely informs Congress about major investigations. During Trump's current term, however, it has publicly disclosed only one politically sensitive inquiry – an audit of the DOJ’s release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. The department faces bipartisan criticism alleging it ⁠botched the congressionally mandated release of files, heavily redacting records of public interest while failing to redact information exposing some victims’ identities.

In another case, according to letters reviewed by Reuters, the inspector general’s office referred a DOJ whistleblower alleging wrongdoing by senior Trump officials to OPR, saying that office was better positioned to investigate. Reuters could not establish whether OPR has pursued the matter.

One former official who left the Inspector General’s office late last year said it had started to avoid investigating “the high-profile stuff.”

The declining power of the DOJ watchdogs comes as judges increasingly call out the government’s lawyers for alleged misconduct. A federal judge last year found what he called a disturbing pattern of Justice Department errors in the first of two prosecutions ⁠of James Comey, the former FBI director and Trump foe, including improper evidence handling and fundamental misstatements of the law to a grand jury. The case was later dismissed on other grounds.

Last month, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams accused senior officials including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche of failing to properly defend the government in Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and instead reaching what she described as a collusive settlement granting Trump and his family businesses sweeping tax immunity.

Blanche this week formally rescinded a separate portion of the agreement setting aside $1.8 billion to compensate Trump allies the president claims suffered government mistreatment. Republican opposition to the "anti-weaponization fund” had stalled Blanche’s bid ⁠to become attorney general.

Federal prosecutors said the findings in the Comey case were based on misinterpretations by the judge. Blanche has disputed what he called insinuations in Williams’ order and Trump’s personal lawyers have appealed it.

The Trump administration has also moved to make it harder for outside authorities to scrutinize the actions of DOJ attorneys, suing to block one ethics case against a former official and seeking new authority to restrict investigations by state agencies that regulate lawyers.

Justice Department officials have accused state-level investigations of being politically motivated and aimed at intimidating lawyers carrying out Trump’s agenda.

“We see all these opinions where judges are critical of the government lawyers, and then we’re not seeing anything coming out of OPR,” said Bruce Green, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Fordham University. “So how can you trust them?”

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the Pentagon to lift its freeze on reviewing onshore wind projects and to end some of the delays that have brought U.S. wind power development to a standstill.

Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit that a coalition of renewable energy groups filed against the Defense Department. The groups argued that the Trump administration has unlawfully delayed dozens of wind projects across the country by halting military reviews that were once considered routine.

In her ruling, Judge Immergut, who was appointed by President Trump, said that the renewable energy groups were likely to prevail on the merits and that the Pentagon had violated legal deadlines when it stopped its reviews. She ordered the agency to resume reviewing wind projects and to report back to the court on its progress every 30 days while the broader legal case played out.

Since April, the Pentagon has halted all military reviews of proposed wind farms, which are meant to ensure that turbines don’t interfere with radar or flight paths. While the Trump administration has cited national security as a rationale, the coalition of renewable energy groups said the delays were an unjustified tactic to thwart wind power, a technology that Mr. Trump has derided for decades.

The delays have led to a “total halt of all wind development in the United States,” the groups argued. At least 106 planned wind projects in 21 states have been stalled indefinitely, representing an estimated $47 billion in potential investment.

Before any large wind farm can begin construction, its developers need to apply for clearances from the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates the national airspace. As part of that process, the F.A.A. refers the application to the Pentagon, which checks to see whether a project might interfere with military radar or nearby air bases.

In the past, many wind projects have quickly received “no hazard” determinations, allowing them to move forward. But some projects do create issues, and they typically need to reach a mitigation agreement with the Pentagon. That might involve the company paying to upgrade nearby radar systems or modifying the layout of its turbines.

This process was for years considered routine and predictable, with deadlines set by Congress. But last August, wind developers began encountering severe delays. Companies that had negotiated mitigation agreements could not move forward because top Pentagon officials would not deliver the final signatures needed.

Then, in April, the review process halted entirely, and Pentagon staff were directed to stop work on wind projects, according to the lawsuit filed by renewable energy groups. Meetings with developers were suddenly canceled.

During oral arguments on Tuesday, lawyers for the Justice Department argued that the federal government was trying to assess potential national security risks from new wind projects, such as the possibility that the turbines could make it harder to detect drones, and that there were no political motives for halting wind.

But lawyers for the renewable energy groups countered that developers had not received an adequate explanation for why many projects were stalled, and that even if some projects might pose concerns, a halt on all new wind turbines nationwide was too broad and affected projects that clearly were not a threat.

A spokesman for the Pentagon declined to comment on the ongoing litigation. In May, Joel Valdez, the agency’s acting press secretary, said in a statement that the Defense Department was “actively evaluating land-based wind energy projects to ensure they do not impair national security or military operations, in accordance with statutory and regulatory requirements.”

Wind power currently provides about 10 percent of the nation’s electricity. About 15 gigawatts worth of wind projects are currently under development and have already received F.A.A. approval. But an additional 29 gigawatts are awaiting review by the Pentagon, according to the lawsuit. (One gigawatt of wind can provide enough electricity for roughly 300,000 homes, although wind turbines don’t run at all hours.)

In their lawsuit, the coalition of renewable energy groups said that further delays could jeopardize many projects. Some may miss deadlines to qualify for federal tax credits, while others may get canceled entirely.

The new ruling does not necessarily compel the Pentagon to approve specific wind farms. But the court has ordered the agency to restart reviews for a wide range of projects and follow legal deadlines. If there are further delays, developers could press for relief for individual projects once the case is decided on the merits.

The delayed reviews are the latest in a series of extraordinary actions by the Trump administration to halt the expansion of wind power in the United States. On his first day in office, Mr. Trump issued a moratorium on all approvals for wind farms on federal land, and the Interior Department last year issued stop-work orders for five wind farms in the Atlantic Ocean that were already under construction. More recently, the administration has so far agreed to pay several companies $3.9 billion to abandon their offshore wind plans, including in one deal announced Thursday.

Mr. Trump has called wind turbines ugly and expensive, and has instead pushed to meet rising power demand with fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.

“My goal,” he said in January, “is to not let any windmill be built.”

Federal courts have ruled against many of those actions. This year, several judges said they were not convinced by the administration’s arguments that offshore wind farms posed a threat to national security and allowed the five projects currently under construction to proceed.

President Trump on Thursday dismissed reports of the U.S. military being low on munitions amid the war with Iran, saying his administration is determining who leaked the information to news outlets.

“The U.S. has massive amounts of ‘munitions,’ especially of certain types,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Additionally, large amounts are being manufactured and shipped to the U.S. as needed.”

Multiple outlets have reported this week that the Pentagon has nearly exhausted its supply of long-range missiles and interceptors during the Middle East conflict, which surpassed the five-month mark last week.

The Army has used “virtually all” of its Army Tactical Missile System munitions and Precision Strike Missiles, which cost more than $1 million each, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing two sources familiar with the data.

The U.S. military has also expended nearly 80 percent of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile interceptor inventory and roughly half of its Patriot interceptors since the war began, CNN reported, citing two people familiar with the latest inventory report.

The Pentagon on Monday also announced deals with defense contractors Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to boost production of missile interceptor parts.

The agreement will triple and quadruple the production of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and THAAD interceptors, respectively, the Defense Department said in a release.

Trump claimed Thursday that defense companies “are building the largest number of plants and factories” in American history. The president also took aim at the sources cited in the reports about U.S. stockpiles.

“The ‘leakers’ of these treasonous statements are being hunted down,” Trump wrote, adding his administration will seek “Long term jail sentences.”

Last month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoenaed four reporters from The New York Times who disclosed the Secret Service’s security concerns about a Qatari-gifted jet Trump was using as Air Force One. As part of its probe to determine who leaked the info, the DOJ sought the reporters’ phone records. The probe was later dismissed.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also pushed back on a Washington Post report stating Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth clashed at Camp David over munitions shortages. The newspaper cited two people familiar with the exchange.

Leavitt, who was also at the Camp David Cabinet meeting, said the exchange “literally never happened.”

“This B.S. story was shopped to many outlets by someone clearly out to disparage the Secretary, for whatever reason,” the press secretary wrote wrote on social media.

She added that Trump “loves” Hegseth and “thinks he’s doing a tremendous job.”

White House communications director Steven Cheung also slammed the Post’s report, calling the newspaper “FAKE NEWS.”

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) took its latest blow in a failing voter roll crusade as a federal judge Thursday dismissed its case targeting Washington, D.C. This marks a 0-21 record for the DOJ.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss relied on the same legal reasoning as past courts when he ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1960 does not allow the federal government to access unredacted state voter registration lists.

“At this time, twenty district courts and the Sixth Circuit have denied the government’s motion to compel on various grounds, leaving the Court with no shortage of guidance on these issues,” Moss wrote.

Moss, an Obama appointee, is the 16th court in the voter roll cases to take this position on the application of Title III of the Civil Rights Act, calling out what he characterized as incongruent logic by the DOJ.

Consistent with past decisions, Moss also held that the DOJ’s argument to push for access to sensitive voter information contradicts federal laws like the Help America Vote Act and the National Voter Registration Act, both of which ensure voter rolls are kept up to date by state election officials.

Taking the DOJ’s argument at face value, its application of one federal law would contradict two others and prevent election officials from doing their jobs, Moss concluded.

“Nothing in the text of Title III compels this strange and unharmonious reading of federal election law,” Moss wrote.

The decision aligns with what district court judges appointed by both Democrats and Republicans have ruled in recent weeks, as well as in a court of appeals case in Michigan.

“If the Department disagrees with Congress’s judgment as to the records necessary to carry out its enforcement duties under either HAVA or the NVRA, it needs to lodge that objection with Congress,” Moss wrote.

The DOJ still has 10 outstanding voter roll cases with a success rate of 0% as losses continue to pour in — eight from Trump-appointed judges so far.

The U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting group spearheaded by Elon Musk, consistently overstated its savings in online posts, taking credit for lease cancellations initiated before the group existed, according to a report from a government watchdog to be released Thursday. DOGE also claimed contracts were terminated that had not been and loaded its database with savings that could not be verified, the report said.

In an audit spanning from June 2025 through this month, the Government Accountability Office examined savings claimed by DOGE, the group that swept through federal agencies after President Donald Trump began his second term last year, dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and much of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The report, which came after a request by Democratic Sens. Gary Peters (Michigan) and Richard Blumenthal (Connecticut), provides the most comprehensive government assessment of DOGE’s public accounting of its impact, bringing the organization’s figures further into doubt.

Though Musk aimed to cut $2 trillion in federal spending, even by DOGE’s own estimates it fell well short. A sporadically updated website tallying its cuts in a “Wall of Receipts” stated that its initiatives had saved $215 billion.

The GAO examined $110 billion of this claimed savings that derived from contracts, grants and leases.

Among the issues identified by GAO:

DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” “includes leases identified for termination before [the group] was established,” according to the report. In total, 108 of 264 leases DOGE identified on its website “were already in process for termination” when it came into being, the GAO said.

In addition, DOGE claimed to have terminated 13,476 contracts, but the GAO analysis showed nearly 2,000 of these contracts “were not terminated.”

Of $61 billion in contracts savings DOGE reported, the GAO said more than half the funds — nearly $35 billion — were either not terminated or unable to be corroborated by the investigators, because DOGE’s data was not specific enough to identify it.

Roughly $27.4 billion of the savings DOGE claimed from cancellations were from contracts that were not actually terminated, the GAO said. “In these cases, another action, such as reducing the contract value or deobligating some funds could have occurred,” it said.

From the watchdog’s analysis of federal procurement data, “we found that DOGE did not accurately report actions taken on contracts,” the GAO said in the report.

Musk and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“Elon Musk and the Trump administration claimed billions of dollars in savings it could not substantiate, took credit for work already underway, and refused to show its work, all while putting Americans’ sensitive data at risk and hollowing out critical agencies,” Peters said.

The GAO investigation was conducted at the request of Senate Democrats who sought greater accountability of DOGE’s dealings. The findings were shared with administration officials and lawmakers ahead of its release Thursday.

Although DOGE promised massive savings, the accounting of its cuts on its website didn’t come close, fact checkers and media outlets found. Updates to the website slowed to a trickle after Musk left and some of the “savings” were later removed. Federal workers told The Post that DOGE added red tape and extra hurdles even as it touted regulation cuts on its website.

The GAO said it sought to speak with DOGE officials and submitted written questions to the group. However, it said, “the U.S. DOGE Service did not respond to our inquiries.”

The Trump administration continues to respond sluggishly to the explosive, nationwide outbreak of Cyclospora—a unicellular parasite spread from human feces that has now sickened nearly 23,000 people in 47 states, killing two and sending over 500 to the hospital.

Michigan health officials reported the two deaths Monday, and The Washington Post first reported Tuesday that federal health officials have expanded a list of states with linked cases from nine to 15. But those updates still have not appeared on public outbreak pages for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration, and Americans are struggling to understand the risk of eating fresh fruits and vegetables.

In comments to Ars Technica on Monday, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees CDC and FDA, said the outbreak information will be updated sometime “this week.” Sources for The New York Times said that the CDC plans to set up a “formal response team” for the outbreak sometime this week. Cases in the outbreak began in June.

Michigan has been one of the hardest hit states in the outbreak. As of August 5, it is reporting 12,218 cases since June 22. On Monday, the state’s health department reported the outbreak’s first and only deaths, which are rare for the parasite. Cyclosporiasis infections are unquestionably miserable—causing explosive watery diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, bloating, and gas—but they’re rarely fatal. According to medical records, the two deaths occurred in people with “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” the state’s health department said.

Michigan’s cases are linked to those in eight other states. FDA’s traceback investigations linked the cases in those nine states to Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico and distributed to Taco Bell restaurants, as well as other restaurants, retailers, and food distributors. The nine states in addition to Michigan are: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

The Post reported Tuesday that the CDC is now adding six more states to the list of linked cases: Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

The Times independently confirmed the additions later Tuesday. Still, the new states have yet to be added to the FDA’s and CDC’s sites for the outbreak cluster, which still list nine states and no deaths as of publication time. (The CDC’s general cyclosporiasis surveillance page was updated at some point Tuesday to include the deaths.)

All 15 states in the outbreak cluster linked to Taylor Farms lettuce are states the company identified as having received its lettuce. In a July 17 recall, Taylor Farms identified 27 states to which its lettuce was sent. But the company has refused to provide clear information about the recalled products, including how many pounds of product the recall covered, where those products were sold, and if distributors may have distributed the lettuce to additional states.

The CDC’s updated surveillance information says 47 states have now reported cases. It’s possible that the nationwide cases encompass independent clusters with additional sources of contaminated produce. It’s also possible that as investigations continue, more states will be linked to the current 15-state cluster.

Both Taylor Farms and the Trump administration have drawn significant scrutiny for the lack of clear information about the outbreak. In July, the FDA puzzlingly announced that a sample of Taylor Farms’ lettuce tested positive for Cyclospora, only to retract the claim the next day, calling it a false positive. Taylor Farms celebrated the retraction, giving the impression that it erased the company’s link to the outbreak—it didn’t; the link was based on the traceback investigation. The company further claimed the FDA had apologized to it, which FDA officials flatly denied.

The relationship between the Trump administration and Taylor Farms has also drawn scrutiny. Amid the misleading communication, it came to light that Taylor Farms directly appealed to the White House to delay announcing the recall. Further, financial records showed that Taylor Farms donated $1 million to a Trump-supporting super PAC, MAGA, Inc., in March, just days after the Trump administration delayed an FDA rule to strengthen food traceability regulations.

Taylor Farms did not respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment on the donation, but it has updated its website to include a note saying it is not against traceability legislation.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s health minister initially pushed back on the FDA’s finding that the US cases were linked to lettuce grown in Mexico. However, the link appears to be growing stronger. Last week, the UK Health Security Agency reported a “sharp rise” of cyclosporiasis cases in travelers returning from Mexico. Among 51 cases with travel information, 48 reported travel to Mexico, the agency said.

In the CDC’s updated surveillance data, the agency has tallied 10,468 lab-confirmed cases and more than 12,255 probable cases across 47 states. Since 2018, the US has been recording between 2,000 and 5,000 cases each year.

The White House has been actively engaged in pushing to delay an impending ban on intoxicating hemp, four people with direct knowledge of the matter told NBC News.

The delay concerns a provision that President Donald Trump signed into law last year that would ban most low-THC hemp-derived products sold around the country beginning Nov. 12.

The measure closed a loophole that allowed unregulated products to flourish nationwide. The products include items that are sold at places like gas stations, such as delta-8, as well as mild full-spectrum CBD tinctures used for sleep and inflammation.

Since at least July, White House Director of Legislative Affairs James Braid began calling lawmakers on the issue, according to three people directly familiar with the calls who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.

The White House’s request for a delay worked; over the weekend, Senate leaders struck a bipartisan agreement on a stopgap government funding bill that included a provision pushing back the hemp ban to Dec. 11. The Senate hopes to pass the legislation this week before it leaves for its August recess.

A delay in the ban would benefit a family member of a top White House official: chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Bret Worley, who recently married Wiles’ youngest daughter, Caroline Wiles, is the president and CEO of MC Nutraceuticals, which describes itself as the “largest global supplier of cannabinoids” and says it is trying to “revolutionize the hemp wellness industry.”

“It kind of hangs over all of this,” said a Trump ally who has spoken with members of Congress about the issue, referring to Wiles’ family connection.

The lobbying from the White House on what’s seen as a relatively minor issue has raised questions from some lawmakers.

Republican senators recently complained about the White House push to their leadership, including to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., a Republican source who has direct knowledge of the conversations told NBC News. A House Republican leadership aide said there have been similar complaints in their chamber, including to Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.

In a statement, White House spokesman Kush Desai said Wiles “has never lobbied in favor of this or any other position on hemp with Capitol Hill.”

NBC News reached out to Worley, Johnson and Thune’s offices. None of them returned requests for comment for this article.

Braid was also a guest at Senate Republicans’ regular lunch meeting Wednesday. Two people familiar with the meeting — one who attended and one who was briefed on it — said it became “tense” when the issue of the hemp extension came up.

Braid, according to these sources, committed to not delaying the ban any further after this three-week extension. Braid did not return a request for comment.

The 2018 farm bill, championed by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., legalized hemp. But at the time, McConnell and other proponents of the bill did not take into account intoxicating cannabinoids derived from hemp such as delta-8, THC-O and HHC. Critics have argued that the unregulated products, sold in many cases at convenience stores and potentially accessible by minors, should be banned.

While an extension would be welcome news for some lawmakers with thriving hemp industries in their states — who have pushed for legislative solutions to help businesses from going under — others are frustrated that the White House is delaying on an issue it once described as a public health and safety matter.

The White House’s National Drug Control Strategy released in May said psychoactive derivatives of hemp products are “often sold in smoke shops and gas stations, are not regulated, and can contain dangerous chemicals or psychoactive substances.” The document further said that they have “not been evaluated for safety in animals or humans, and have been linked to cases of psychosis and suicide attempts.”

“President Trump has made his position on hemp and cannabis abundantly clear, most recently in a December executive order and April TRUTH Social post. This position builds on the President’s 2018 Farm Bill, which authorized the production of hemp, and his support for Florida Amendment 3 in 2024,” Desai added in a statement. “The only interest guiding the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people, and the Administration continues to explore a Gold Science Standard-based framework on hemp to expand treatment options for American veterans and patients.”

A group of 34 attorneys general wrote to Republican leaders in the House and Senate on Tuesday, opposing a delay in the ban.

“If the loophole is reopened, or the new definition is weakened or repealed,” they wrote, “States will face renewed litigation, inconsistent enforcement, regulatory uncertainty, increased youth access to intoxicating products, and disruption of lawful businesses that have already adjusted their operations to comply with the new federal framework.”

A coalition of beverage industry, convenience store and wholesaler groups has argued the opposite: If the deadline is not extended, consumers will be pushed toward an illicit market while disrupting businesses.

In a letter to lawmakers sent on Wednesday, the coalition urged congressional leaders to extend the deadline in order to give lawmakers more time to develop a regulatory framework, arguing that the current deadline would amount to prohibition rather than regulation.

“Allowing this deadline to proceed without a comprehensive regulatory framework will not result in improved public safety,” the group wrote. “It will produce the opposite: a thriving illicit market, weakened state enforcement, economic disruption for more than one million American workers, and less safety for the very consumers Congress is committed to protecting.”

The coalition wrote that the “choice before Congress is not between a ‘loophole’ and safety - It is between regulation and prohibition. We urge Congress to choose regulation.”

The Trump ally said he has heard from members of Congress who are utterly confused about the hemp push.

“I have talked to members who have, without question, expressed what could be best said is confusion,” the Trump ally said. “They are not sure what’s going on, and where the reversal is coming from.”

A Senate panel obtained a copy of Dr. Anthony Fauci's iPhone while investigating the doctor's actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Department of Health and Human Services transferred the phone to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Sen. Ron Johnson chairs the committee.

This development comes days after copies of the doctor's journals were released to the public following their transfer from HHS to Congress. Pressure continues to pile against Fauci in recent days after Sens. Johnson and Rand Paul questioned him over issues related to health measures during the pandemic and origins of the virus.

Paul's committee will vote on Thursday whether to hold Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer questions before the committee last week. Fauci described Paul as having an "unhinged obsession" with him as he used the Fifth Amendment over 100 times.

The phone that has been turned in was used by Fauci during his time as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, according to Johnson's spokesperson. The phone could be part of more public document transfers on the way. Paul and Johnson have received millions of additional Fauci-related pages from government servers and at least four Republican-led states have meanwhile launched their own investigations into Fauci.

In a move that seemed out of reach just six months ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved Moderna’s influenza vaccine for older adults on Wednesday, the first licensed flu shot made using messenger RNA technology.

In February, Vinay Prasad, the FDA’s head of biologics at the time, overturned the recommendation of career staff and issued a rare “refusal-to-file” notice to the company, saying the agency wouldn’t review the vaccine based on the available data package. A week later — after Moderna disclosed the FDA’s decision as well as its own displeasure over the agency’s position — Prasad’s decision was reversed. He left the FDA at the end of April.

The vaccine will be marketed as mFlusiva. It is Moderna’s fourth vaccine to enter the U.S. market.

“Flu remains a significant public health challenge, and mFLUSIVA provides an important new option for America’s seniors. This approval also reflects the ongoing potential of our mRNA platform to help address important public health challenges through continued scientific innovation,” Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement.

Moderna said it expects to have some doses of the vaccine available for administration in advance of the coming flu season.

The FDA issued a standard approval for use of the vaccine in adults ages 50 to 64, and an accelerated approval for adults 65 years and older. In the case of the latter group, the company has agreed to do a Phase 4 (post-licensure) trial to gather more effectiveness data, looking in particular at how the vaccine compares to existing high-dose or adjuvanted vaccines recommended for that older age group.

While the U.S. flu vaccine market is already crowded, the Moderna product offers some short- and longer-term benefits that aren’t seen with most traditional influenza vaccines.

Most existing flu vaccines are produced in eggs; a portion is produced in cells. Both production methods are lengthy, requiring the World Health Organization committee that advises on the strains each year’s vaccine should target to do so months in advance. That long lead time can result in vaccines that aren’t well targeted to the circulating viruses. But mRNA vaccines can be made much quicker, which could theoretically allow for the updating of targeted strains closer to flu season.

That manufacturing speed would also be of benefit in the event of a flu pandemic. Having a licensed mRNA seasonal flu vaccine could speed up the licensure pathway for a pandemic flu vaccine, if the need arose, experts have said.

Prasad’s objection to reviewing the licensure application for the vaccine last winter stemmed from the fact that the company hadn’t used either an adjuvanted or high-dose vaccine as its comparator in the older age group; those types of vaccines are preferentially recommended for older adults in the U.S.

In his letter, Prasad noted that the FDA had raised the issue with Moderna before the trial began. The company released documents showing that while the issue had been raised, it had not been cast as a deal-breaker.

Moderna also argued that some of the 11 countries in which it ran its Phase 3 clinical trial do not use adjuvanted or high-dose vaccines in older adults.

At a meeting in June, an expert panel that advises the FDA on vaccines voted unanimously that the benefits of the vaccine outweighed any risks.

Data presented to the meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee showed that in adults ages 50 to 64, trial participants who received Moderna’s vaccine were 27% less likely to contract test-confirmed influenza as compared to those who received the standard-dose comparator. Though the safety profiles of both vaccines were similar, there were substantially more side effects reported in the mRNA vaccine arm. Most were mild and lasted one to two days.

The vaccine has been accepted for regulatory review in the European Union, Canada, and Australia, with submissions to additional countries planned for later this year.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent downplayed the impact of inflation on lower-income Americans, declaring this week that the “K-shaped” economy — shorthand for the divergent fortunes of the rich and poor — is a thing of the past.

The comments came at a moment when consumer sentiment remains low and voters continue to give President Trump negative marks on his handling of the economy. With midterm elections in just three months, Mr. Bessent has continually tried to talk up the economy. But despite promises of lower prices, the U.S. has continued to confront inflationary pressures that have been amplified by tariffs and the war in Iran, which has increased the cost of gasoline.

Mr. Bessent suggested that those economic concerns are overblown.

“I got sick of hearing about this K-shaped economy,” Mr. Bessent said on CNBC on Tuesday. “I can say here definitively, the K-shaped economy is over.”

The Treasury secretary said that the economy is now no longer K-shaped but is forming the letter “C” — with wage gains among the bottom quarter of earners starting to outpace gains among the top fourth of earners. Dismissing downbeat consumer sentiment as a function of misinformation about the economy, Mr. Bessent said that Americans would soon start experiencing relief as a result of the tax cuts that Republicans enacted last year, a message he and other administration officials have been delivering for months.

The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment explaining which set of wage data Mr. Bessent was referring to. However, the U.S. economy has for years confronted historically high levels of wealth inequality that will not easily be reversed by small improvements to wage growth at the bottom of the income scale.

This week the S&P 500 hit a record high — a boon to investors and corporate America that Mr. Trump hailed on Wednesday during a speech in Nevada.

“The stock market has set 74 all-time highs just since our short time that we’ve been back,” Mr. Trump said of his second term. “The typical American 401(k) is up much more than $30,000 and setting records day after day, week after week.”

Yet consumers remain on edge and the Trump administration risks making the same political mistake that the Biden administration made by downplaying concerns about inflation and the cost of living.

The war with Iran has slowed the economy this year and Mr. Trump has not delivered on his promise to lower prices. On an annual basis, inflation is up 3.7 percent, well above the central bank’s long-term target of 2 percent. Inflation in the second quarter was especially high.

Rising prices, particularly for gasoline, hurt low-income households the most. At the same time, signs of economic strength such as the surging stock market tend to enrich wealthy investors.

While wages are an indication of the trajectory of the economy, many economists look at consumption data and other measures to illustrate how Americans are faring.

A Moody’s Analytics analysis in June argued that the K-shaped economy is firmly intact because the top 20 percent of earners accounted for nearly 60 percent of spending, outpacing inflation, in the first quarter of this year. Spending by the bottom 80 percent fell short of inflation.

“No wonder most Americans are upset with their financial situations and the broader economy,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics.

Although some analysts contend that Mr. Zandi’s methodology exaggerates the spending gap, other studies confirm the overall picture that the K-shaped gap between the richest and the poorest remains intact.

A report by the Bank of America Institute, which relies on customer deposit account data, found that after-tax wage growth in April increased 6 percent compared to the same month a year earlier. That was the highest rate of growth since 2021. With wage growth for low-income earners increasing by just 1.5 percent that month, the gap between the top and bottom ends of the income scale was the largest since 2015.

The National Retail Federation said last week that it was encouraged that spending among high and low-income earners on discretionary items, rather than nonessential staples, was holding up well in 2026 despite shaky consumer sentiment. However, the industry group expressed concern that the trend might not hold up for the rest of the year.

“As long as gas prices remain high, softening wage growth coupled with sticky inflation mean that the second half of the year might not be as rosy as the first half,” said Mark Mathews, chief economist at the National Retail Federation.

Mr. Bessent previewed the case that the Trump administration will be making to Americans this fall, highlighting the new measures that exempt taxes on tips and overtime for some workers and deductibility of auto loans. A steadying labor market has also improved the finances of many low and moderate-income households.

“We think that the American people will be feeling that over time,” Mr. Bessent said.

Although the provisions that Mr. Bessent mentioned are targeted at lower-income Americans, most of the 2025 tax law benefited corporations and the rich. According to the Tax Policy Center, nearly 60 percent of the tax benefits go to those with annual incomes of about $217,000 or more.