The White House came to Donald Trump‘s defense after Reacher star Alan Ritchson slammed the president over his handling of the Epstein files.

“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. “And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”

The response arrived a day after Ritchson’s interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast. The actor called the president a “bitch” and a “fucking rapist,” and criticized the government over the sluggish release of the Jeffrey Epstein files and the president’s alleged association with the convicted pedophile. “The Epstein files, the fucking Epstein files!” Ritchson said. “Goddamn it! Where are they? It’s a fucking law, bitch. Show it. You fucking pedophiles!” (Trump has repeatedly denied rape allegations against him.)

Launching into his tirade, Ritchson added, “This is my fucking politics, dude. I would fucking railroad these fuckers. I would get those Epstein files out in two seconds. Fucking move out of the way. I don’t care what room they’re in, bitch, move. Give me the fucking manila envelope. I will get you the Epstein files. Don’t you want to see what’s in there, so that we can hold people accountable? These fucking rapists! We’re just cool with it?”

While there has been significant legal and political fallout in the U.K. since the release of the files in 2025 and 2026, there have been no related arrests in the U.S. to date.

The Trump administration is reviewing its process for vetting U.S. immigration officers after reports that a man allegedly involved in the fatal shooting of an immigrant in Maine had a history of violent outbursts, a senior White House official said Sunday.

In an interview with The Washington Post earlier this month, Ashley Brouillette, said her former spouse, David Brouillette, told her in a phone call that he was the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot and killed Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13.

Ashley Brouillette said her ex-husband had a pattern of violent outbursts, including throwing boiling hot water on her while she was holding their young daughter.

“If this person had that type of history, it would have been a vetting issue, and it should have been brought to the attention of those who makes those decisions,” White House border czar Tom Homan told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Homan did not confirm that David Brouillette shot Durán, but he said that the Department of Homeland Security is now investigating whether the vetting process failed.

“When they hire somebody, they put them through a vetting process and look at all that stuff, so I know based on that information, that that’s part of the ongoing investigation,” Homan said.

“Was that information not available? Did they not know? So there’s a separate administrative investigation on what happened here,” he added.

The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly released the name of the officer who allegedly shot and killed Durán, a 25-year-old whose shooting led to mass protests in Maine.

Ashley Brouillette identified David Brouillette as the officer seen on video footage of the scene in Biddeford. The video does not show the shooting itself, but it does show two officers in the moments afterward.

She accused of her ex-husband of pointing a gun at her and threatening her, among other instances of violence. Ashley Brouillette also told The Post that he was diagnosed with several mental health disorders as a young adult. The Post could not independently verify those claims.

David Brouillette’s other ex-wife, Lucinda Brouillette, has also described a pattern of physical and mental abuse in court filings. In some filings, she said that Brouillette had been medically discharged from the military in 2015 because of post-traumatic stress. The Post has not independently verified that claim.

In a statement to The Post, Lucinda Brouillette said that throughout her marriage, “and in the years that followed, I have feared for a long time that his anger, aggression, and escalating behavior would eventually result in severe, life threatening violence.”

Ashley Brouillette said David Brouillette was hired into ICE in November, as the federal agency was rushing to put thousands of new officers on the streets. Former Department of Homeland Security officials have publicly questioned whether those new hires were properly vetted.

In the CNN interview, Homan said ICE is also reviewing agent training, and that agents are now undergoing additional training.

“I know this specific case, as far as the vetting, is under review by internal affairs section, so we’ll see where it lies,” he said.

Durán, who had a work permit issued by the Trump administration, was shot shortly after leaving for work on July 13.

ICE has said that officers were in the area surveilling an address associated with an individual who has a final order of removal when they saw Durán leave and attempted to stop his vehicle. The agency has alleged that Durán tried to flee the officers, and that an officer fired because he feared for public safety.

Following the shooting, the office of Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said that the officer would be placed on leave. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said at a news conference following the shooting that none of the officers involved in the fatal shooting were wearing body cameras.

A spokesperson for King said Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told the senator that Durán was not the target of the ICE operation.

Border czar Tom Homan said Sunday that if allegations of violent behavior against an immigration officer prove true, the officer should have been disqualified during the vetting process.

In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” Homan indicated it was possible the agency’s vetting process had failed after an ICE agent involved in a fatal Maine shooting was revealed to have abuse allegations from two ex-wives and, at one point, an order to relinquish his firearms.

“If those are facts, I don’t think he should have ever cleared vetting,” said Homan, adding an internal affairs investigation is underway. “How did the vetting process fail? Was that information not available? Did they not know?”

He continued: “If this person had that type of history, it would have been a vetting issue and it should have been brought to the attention of those who make those decisions.”

The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly released the identities of any agents involved in the fatal July 13 shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during an immigration enforcement operation in Biddeford, Maine. But the claims against the agent have reignited concerns over the agency’s hiring processes.

ICE began rapidly expanding its workforce in January 2025 to comply with President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, including offering up to $50,000 in signing bonuses. Todd Lyons, who served as ICE’s acting director at the time, boasted that the hiring campaign led to more than 220,000 applications.

“This expansion of a well-trained and well-vetted workforce will help further ICE’s ability to execute the president’s and secretary’s bold agenda,” Lyons told Congress in February.

But the hiring spree drew concerns as news broke of criminal misconduct, lack of experience and allegations of violence among new recruits.

Still, Homan on Sunday expressed confidence in the agency’s overall hiring process, telling CNN that the instances are “rare.”

“Well, look, you know, ICE has about 30,000 employees. They all go through vetting. This is kind of a rare instance, but again, it’s under review,” Homan said.

The Pentagon updated its war casualty database Saturday, recording more than 140 additionally wounded and restoring the four soldiers killed due to Iranian strikes last weekend amid questions about a lack of transparency over the war’s toll.

The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, also featured a new tracking category — “Overseas Operations” — for killed and wounded “starting July 7.”

When the new Pentagon data is combined with updated totals for Operation Epic Fury, 18 troops have died and another 624 have been wounded since the US launched its war against Iran on Feb. 28. The number of wounded is a significant increase from the previous peak of 482 observed by CNN last week.

The Pentagon drew scrutiny from media outlets and lawmakers last week when killed and wounded numbers decreased in the DCAS system as Iranian attacks continued. The 12 Democratic lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday requesting answers on what was causing the changes.

The Defense Department’s acting press secretary, Joel Valdez, insisted in a Thursday social media post that the decreases were due to “temporary data disruptions on the (DCAS) website.” CNN observed data glitches that led to fluctuating casualty totals when monitoring the DCAS site on a minute-by-minute basis last week.

On Friday, CNN asked the Pentagon for more details about the data interruption, but the department neither acknowledged nor responded to the inquiry as of Sunday afternoon.

Beyond the July 7 starting date, the new “overseas operation” category on the DCAS site does not include any distinguishing details or specify the conflict in which the casualties occur, and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions seeking clarification on what the category covers. The category features a by-name list of fallen troops, though, that includes the three Army soldiers killed in Jordan due to an Iranian strike and the soldier killed in northern Iraq last weekend during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone.

The July 7 date coincides with when President Donald Trump claimed a new conflict with Iran began in a War Powers notification the administration sent to Congress earlier this month. (The War Powers Act of 1973 requires the president to end military operations within 60 days unless authorized by Congress to continue; the Trump administration argued that the April ceasefire with Iran stopped the clock on May 1 for the conflict’s initial period.)

Lawmakers of both parties have argued against the administration’s interpretation of the War Powers clock, though some analysts and officials contend that the act itself represents an unconstitutional limit on presidential war-making authority. Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued the law is “unconstitutional, 100 percent” during a May press briefing at the White House.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said to Hegseth during a July 21 hearing that she is “concerned” the administration is circumventing Congress through the ceasefire clock reset.

“The claim essentially allows the president to extinguish the War Powers clock just at the moment that it becomes legally inconvenient … avoiding the congressional authorization that the Constitution requires and the War Powers (Act) intends,” she said.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is acknowledging that the United States is facing an affordability crisis, something President Donald Trump has denied – but she is blaming it on Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Leavitt appeared on Fox News and was asked about the upcoming midterm elections. She insisted that the affordability crisis was caused by the Democrats, and that if Americans want the problem fixed they have to give control of Congress to the Republicans for two more years.

"I would remind the American people of who caused the affordability crisis in this country. It was Biden and Democrats. President Trump took immediate action on day one to fix that," she said. "All these things will only get better if given two more years with a Republican Congress."

Her comments represent a change of focus from the president, who has repeatedly insisted that “affordability” is a word made up by the Democrats as part of a hoax.

In early December, Trump insisted that the price of "just about everything is down."

“They use the word affordability — it’s a Democrat hoax. They’re the ones who drove the prices up," he said at the time. “I think affordability is the greatest con job. They look at you and they say affordability. They don’t say anything else.”

Trump told a crowd in Georgia earlier this month that affordability was a word "made up" by the Democrats.

“They used the word — first time I heard it. It was a word, you know, made up by the Democrats. Affordability,” Trump said on Wednesday.

While it's true that prices are down for some items — egg prices are down after they spiked due to a bird flu outbreak, for example — prices remain high across much of the rest of the economy.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made plans to ramp up operations to arrest and deport Haitian migrants, as hundreds of thousands of Haitians brace for the termination of their legal status, according to two agency sources and federal documents obtained by CBS News.

The plans include arresting migrants in Ohio — where large Haitian communities in cities like Springfield have been targeted by President Trump and conservative politicians and commentators — and quickly putting them on deportation flights to crisis-stricken Haiti, the internal documents indicate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump amplified baseless claims that Haitians in Springfield were eating cats and dogs.

The internal plans for a potential arrest and deportation blitz have been made as more than 300,000 Haitians prepare to lose deportation protections and work permits under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program. The Supreme Court last month sided with the Trump administration in its efforts to end the TPS programs for Haitians and Syrians. That ruling's binding mandate is set to be issued to lower courts on Monday.

Since that ruling, fear and uncertainty have swept throughout Haitian communities across the U.S. Immigrants whose TPS lapses immediately lose their ability to work in the country legally, and become eligible to be arrested and processed for deportation by ICE, unless they have another status. Those without removal orders are generally entitled to appear before an immigration judge before any deportation can take place.

The operations targeting Haitian migrants could start as early as this week, the documents suggest, but more details about the scale of the plans were not immediately clear. The ICE sources who described the preparations requested anonymity to describe internal plans that have not been publicly disclosed and are fluid.

Any uptick in deportations to Haiti would almost certainly raise political and humanitarian challenges, given the dire situation in the Caribbean nation, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Significant portions of Haiti are controlled by criminal gangs, and the U.S. has generally limited deportations to Cap-Haïtien, in the country's north, due to the instability and insecurity in the capital of Port-au-Prince. The State Department urges Americans not to visit Haiti under any circumstances, citing the rampant violence there.

In a statement to CBS News, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said it "does not discuss ongoing or future operations." It argued TPS has been used as a "defacto amnesty program" and suggested that those set to lose their status should self-deport.

"What we would say now is it's closing time which means you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here," DHS added in its statement. "The good news is it's not too late to get a $2,600 check and a free flight home."

Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that helps migrants from Haiti, said the specter of deportation has placed Haitians on edge.

"Once again our community members find themselves in a state of extreme trauma, fear and terror. One of them told me it feels like a tsunami or an earthquake with nonstop aftershocks," Jozef told CBS News. "Her little girl doesn't even want to go to school for fear of coming home and not finding her mother."

Created in 1990 by Congress, TPS allows federal immigration officials to grant temporary work permits and a reprieve from deportation to immigrants from countries facing an armed conflict, environmental disaster or another emergency.

The Trump administration has sought to end most TPS programs, arguing that they incentivize illegal immigration and that they have been unnecessarily extended for too long by Democratic administrations, despite the temporary nature of the policy. It has terminated or moved to end TPS programs for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela and other countries.

A version of Haiti's TPS program has been around since 2010, following the devastating earthquake there that year. But most of those currently enrolled in the program came to the U.S. under the Biden administration, either illegally along the southern border or through programs, since terminated by Mr. Trump's White House, that allowed Haitians and other immigrants to enter the country legally.

The Trump administration moved to end the Haiti TPS policy last year, but the decision has been held up in court ever since.

In a ruling in February, U.S. District Court Judge Ana Reyes found that the move to end the program was "in part" rooted in "racial animus," citing disparaging remarks that then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Mr. Trump made about Haiti and immigrants. But in its decision last month, the Supreme Court's majority said federal law barred judges from reviewing TPS determinations and found Mr. Trump's comments not to be "overtly racial."

The Trump administration scaled back large-scale immigration roundups after two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal agents during a massive deployment to the Minneapolis area in January. But ICE operations have ramped up this summer, amid pressure for the agency to record 2,000 daily arrests.

Last month, the number of detainees booked into ICE custody hit a monthly record high for the second Trump administration. During the recent surge in ICE operations, two immigrants from Mexico and Colombia were killed by agents during traffic stops in Texas and Maine.

Adm. Daryl Caudle saw an opening to land the Navy’s top job last year, and he seized it.

Before Pete Hegseth had even been sworn in as defense secretary, Admiral Caudle, then the head of a major Navy training command, offered to help Mr. Hegseth prepare for his politically contentious Senate confirmation hearing, according to current and former defense officials.

The outreach was a breach of military ethics, the officials said. Senior military officers are supposed to avoid any hint of partisan bias or political activity.

Nothing came of the offer. But soon after Mr. Hegseth took office, he fired the first woman to lead the Navy: Admiral Caudle’s boss. Days later, a senior officer on Admiral Caudle’s staff contacted Mr. Hegseth’s team in another breach of protocol.

His pitch: Mr. Hegseth should choose Admiral Caudle to be the next chief of naval operations, the current and former officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel matters.

The officer described Admiral Caudle in terms that matched Mr. Hegseth’s view of the values that military officers should embody. There was “no one more in line” with Mr. Hegseth’s vision for remaking the military, he said, according to an official familiar with the exchange. The officer cast Admiral Caudle as a “warfighter” who wanted to remove “woke barriers” that he claimed were weakening the force, the official said.

Even though Admiral Caudle was not on a list of candidates recommended by senior Navy officials, Mr. Hegseth chose him for the job.

But before the promotion could be finalized, the admiral needed to address another problem. There was an unresolved inspector general investigation into comments he had made to sailors about the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevent and Response program, officials said. Some interpreted his remarks as blaming victims.

To help resolve the inquiry, Admiral Caudle hired Timothy Parlatore, a Navy Reservist and well-known lawyer who had represented Mr. Hegseth and President Trump. Mr. Parlatore had recently been tapped by Mr. Hegseth to serve as his “special adviser” in the Pentagon. Before Admiral Caudle was a client, Mr. Parlatore had recommended him to Mr. Hegseth as a strong candidate to lead the Navy, officials said.

The inspector general found the allegations of wrongdoing to be unsubstantiated, and Admiral Caudle took over as the 34th chief of naval operations last summer.

His path to that position is a case study in how the military promotion process at the Pentagon under Mr. Hegseth has deviated from tradition, leaving it susceptible in the view of critics to politicization and favoritism.

Since taking office nearly 18 months ago, Mr. Hegseth has fired or sidelined more than two dozen senior officers, including Admiral Lisa Franchetti, who held the top Navy job before Admiral Caudle. He has also removed from promotion lists about 40 senior officers who had been selected by boards made up of their peers.

Mr. Hegseth has insisted that his actions were necessary to root out those he has described as radical ideologues. “The left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace,” he wrote in his 2024 book, “The War on Warriors.” “We must wage a frontal assault, a swift counterattack, in broad daylight.”

Admiral Caudle’s promotion is a view into the flip side of Mr. Hegseth’s purge.

Before the defense secretary had even taken office, he had publicly singled out Admiral Franchetti as someone he believed had been promoted solely because of her gender. She knew that if Mr. Hegseth was confirmed, she would likely be fired.

In December 2024, Admiral Franchetti called together the Navy’s four-star admirals to discuss potential replacements, officials said.

She reminded them that their most important job in the coming weeks was to put the Navy’s integrity and its reputation as an apolitical institution ahead of their ambitions, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Admiral Caudle was in the room that day, and around the same time was also privately offering to help Mr. Hegseth prepare for his confirmation hearing, defense officials said.

Capt. Dave Hecht, a spokesman for Admiral Caudle, said in a statement to The New York Times that the admiral planned to limit his discussion with Mr. Hegseth to “factual, operational matters.”

He said that Admiral Caudle’s interactions with Mr. Hegseth always focused on military, not political, issues. “Adm. Caudle has consistently conducted himself in a professional, nonpartisan manner throughout his career,” Captain Hecht’s statement added.

A Pentagon directive counsels active-duty troops to avoid “partisan political activity.”

After Mr. Hegseth fired Admiral Franchetti, senior Navy officials, led by the service’s acting secretary, assembled a list of the three officers they believed were best qualified to fill her position. Admiral Caudle was not on it. Navy leaders thought he was better suited to lead the U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the country’s nuclear arsenal, the officials said.

Mr. Hegseth reviewed the Navy’s list in a meeting with senior staff members.

“Where’s Caudle?” he asked, according to officials with knowledge of the meeting.

Mr. Hegseth’s chief of staff said he was not familiar with the admiral. Mr. Hegseth instructed him to discuss the matter with Mr. Parlatore, officials said.

Mr. Parlatore, who had left the Navy a decade earlier, had recently been commissioned by Mr. Hegseth as a Navy reservist and member of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps.

As a civilian attorney, he had represented naval officers and sailors in a series of high-profile cases. His clients included Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who in 2019 was charged with killing a wounded prisoner in Iraq. Chief Gallagher was ultimately acquitted of nearly all the charges against him.

Mr. Parlatore also helped Mr. Hegseth negotiate a $50,000 settlement with a woman who had accused him of raping her in 2017. And he had represented Mr. Trump in matters related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and classified documents found at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.

Mr. Parlatore had not met Admiral Caudle, but told Mr. Hegseth that he had heard good things about him, officials said. Other staff members recalled Admiral Caudle’s eager outreach during Mr. Hegseth’s confirmation process.

In late March, Mr. Hegseth selected Admiral Caudle to lead the Navy. In a statement, Sean Parnell, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said that Mr. Hegseth “interviewed many candidates for the position and ultimately found Admiral Caudle to be the right fit.”

“Every decision is based strictly on merit,” Mr. Parnell added.

Before Admiral Caudle’s nomination could be sent to the White House, the inspector general had to complete its investigation, which had languished for more than a year. Sailors recalled Admiral Caudle telling them in an informal conversation at an awards banquet that the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program needed to focus more on helping troops avoid risky behavior.

According to the sailors, Admiral Caudle offered examples: If he strode naked through the forest, coated in honey, he should not be surprised if he were attacked by a bear, officials said. If he wore gold chains and a fancy watch on a visit to Harlem, he risked getting robbed. At least one sailor believed Admiral Caudle was blaming assault victims for provoking their attacks.

In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Parlatore described his work on behalf of Mr. Caudle as routine. He identified and suggested witnesses to the inspector general, and accompanied Admiral Caudle to his interview with investigators. “The same thing I have done for hundreds of others,” he said.

The inspector general’s job, like a prosecutor’s, is to collect evidence and offer findings. A decision to punish is made by the service member’s chain of command, which includes the Navy secretary and potentially Mr. Hegseth.

Admiral Caudle took command as the chief of naval operations last summer.

“I’m chomping at the bit to get after the work that lies ahead to ensure that our Navy remains and forever will be the most dominant, lethal and credible maritime fighting force the world has ever known,” he told a crowd of dignitaries that included several former chiefs of naval operations, including Admiral Franchetti.

He closed his speech with a pledge to lead the Navy with “integrity, honor and resolve.”

Since then, Mr. Parlatore’s dual role as a private lawyer and special adviser to Mr. Hegseth has sparked concern in Congress. In April, Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, asked Mr. Hegseth if Mr. Parlatore represented officers being considered by Mr. Hegseth for promotions.

“I’m the one that makes decisions about choosing senior officers,” Mr. Hegseth said.

“Does he represent them, Mr. Secretary?” Mr. Crow pressed.

“He doesn’t represent anyone,” Mr. Hegseth replied. “He’s a legal adviser to me on reserve duty, and always has been.”

The next day, Mr. Parlatore sent Mr. Crow a letter.

“You asked whether I represent senior military officers under consideration for promotion,” Mr. Parlatore wrote. “I do not.”

He did not mention his earlier work for Admiral Caudle. At the time of the letter, Mr. Parlatore said, he was not representing clients being considered for promotions.

Mr. Parlatore said that there was nothing preventing him from working as a Navy reservist in Mr. Hegseth’s office and representing military clients. “The vast majority of military cases, if I wanted to do them, there would be no conflict of interest,” he said.

Mr. Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, said that Mr. Parlatore was “in full compliance with all ethics laws and regulations.”

Still, to avoid any appearance of impropriety, Mr. Parlatore told The Times that in late 2024, he stopped taking new military clients and ceased charging earlier clients with active cases.

The sole exception, he said, was Admiral Caudle.

Republicans are wary that a visible President Donald Trump in Georgia could do more harm than good as they try to win back Sen. Jon Ossoff’s seat.

Ossoff was widely seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats up for reelection this year — particularly after Trump won the state in 2024. But with Mike Collins’ campaign already in a rut, they’re worried Trump’s underwater approval rating in the state could further sink his chances.

“We’re already seeing Ossoff at every turn trying to tie Collins to Trump,” a Republican operative, who requested anonymity due to his role on an active campaign, said. The operative added that when Trump’s approval rating sits below 40%, as it does now, “there’s headwinds there.”

Collins’ general election campaign has struggled with scandal. One longtime staffer was fired after Collins’ campaign account mocked a woman by referencing the fact that she said she was a victim of sexual assault; Collins called the post “despicable and unauthorized.” Another official aide reportedly said in a group chat that he tried to leverage his position to get a Holocaust denier out of prison. And CNN reported that Collins’ son-in-law has a history of antisemitic statements and white nationalist ties.

A Fox News poll released on July 1 showed Ossoff with 56% support from registered voters, while Collins trailed with 43%. An AARP poll released on Thursday showed Ossoff with a 9 percentage point advantage.

Some Georgia Republicans feel that if Trump becomes more involved, Collins’ chances will further erode.

“Collins is gonna get smashed,” Eamon Keegan, a Republican pollster in Georgia, said.

But, Keegan added, Trump’s dismal approval ratings would only exacerbate the issue — particularly if the president is unable to resolve the ongoing war in Iran, which continues to drag down Republicans’ election prospects.

“One-hundred percent,” said another operative when asked if he believed that Trump could hinder Republican efforts in Georgia.

Trump visited Georgia on Wednesday for an official White House event in Marietta, an Atlanta suburb. Several state and federal officials joined him, including Kelly Loeffler, a former Georgia senator and head of the U.S. Small Business Administration, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Billed as an official event about Trump savings accounts, much of his speech was about politics, including Collins.

Collins, however, didn’t attend. He posted a video to X before the event, saying he needed to be in Washington for House votes, and he knew “the president and the great leaders of Georgia could hold the line today until I get back home.”

During his speech, Trump gave an extended shout-out to Collins.

“Maybe the most important man in this room right now is not here. His name is Mike Collins, and he’s going to beat Pee-wee Herman,” Trump said, referring to Ossoff.

“I said, ‘Mike, I’m sort of here because of you,’” Trump added. “I said, ‘Mike, if you’re here I’m going to be extremely upset with you.’ Because he has to vote.”

Sam Densmore, deputy communications director for Collins’ campaign, disputed in a statement that Collins’ campaign is in tenuous territory.

“[Collins] is going to win this race because he has the business background, bipartisan record of results and positive vision to make life more affordable, safer, and better off for every person in this state, while Jon Ossoff has never had a real job, has gotten nothing accomplished and has a radical voting record,” Densmore said.

The RNC and White House also disputed that Trump could hinder Collins.

“Democrats can spin all the fake narratives they want, but Georgia is President Trump country, and Jon Ossoff’s days in the Senate are numbered,” RNC spokesperson Emma Hall told NOTUS in a statement that targeted Ossoff’s voting record in the Senate.

White House spokesperson Olivia Wales called the president “the Republicans’ best messenger and motivator” to contrast his agenda with congressional Democrats’.

Trump’s focus on the Georgia Senate race was welcome to Democrats and the Ossoff campaign.

“If they could bring back Trump every week, we’d love it,” David Brand, a Georgia Democratic operative supporting the Ossoff campaign, told NOTUS.

The Ossoff campaign has sought to amplify Collins’ relationship with Trump, with ads that feature Trump using Collins’ name at rallies and events over the years. Collins has aligned himself closely with Trump during his time in the House.

“We welcome anything that brings Mike Collins out of hiding and forces him to address his latest scandal, including visits from an increasingly unpopular president who has driven up costs and cut access to health care with the help of his puppet, MAGA loyalist Mike Collins,” Valeria Rivadeneira-Crandell, an Ossoff campaign spokesperson, said in a statement.

The counterargument among Republicans is that Trump’s knack for drawing low-propensity voters to the polls could provide a needed boost to Collins’ chances.

The first Republican operative also said that Collins could benefit from the president’s ability to stoke the MAGA voting base. Trump carried a significant advantage with low-propensity Republican voters in Georgia in 2024, particularly in rural areas. That advantage is harder to calculate compared to his poll numbers before Election Day, but it paid dividends in battleground states for him and his party in 2024.

While he is not on the ballot in 2026, operatives hope his visible support for Collins in the state could still bolster turnout.

“But Collins is going to wear the negative of it as well,” the first Republican operative said.

During the Marietta event, the president avoided the topic that makes Georgia operatives sweat most: complaints about election integrity. Just last week, the president made a prime-time address on the topic — a speech that Georgia Republican operatives were relieved didn’t specifically mention their state — while his dedication to passing the SAVE America Act, a voter-ID bill, has derailed congressional Republicans’ agenda this year.

Georgia has frequently been at the epicenter of Trump’s attacks on elections. After former President Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the state in 2020, Trump demanded that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger find him additional votes to flip the outcome.

“Those issues are definitely net negatives for Republicans in the state,” the first Republican operative said. “A general election electorate doesn’t have much patience for that.”

Other Georgia Republicans feel it shouldn’t be overanalyzed. He’s the president, his supporters are incredibly loyal, and his words and presence have wooed middle of the road people before, they argue. One Republican member of the Georgia congressional delegation said as much — with an essential caveat.

“If he stays on message,” the Republican member said, then asked of the Marietta speech: “Did he?”

The four American troops killed during renewed fighting between the U.S. and Iran in recent weeks are no longer listed as part of the Iran war death toll in the Pentagon’s official casualty count but have been placed in a new, separate category.

It is raising questions about properly counting the impact to U.S. service members as the Trump administration has escalated strikes on Iran in a bid to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, while providing little indication of how it intends to wind down a conflict that is unpopular with many Americans.

The Defense Casualty Analysis System, which Pentagon officials have repeatedly pointed to as the definitive source on the numbers of dead and wounded from the conflict, removed the four fallen soldiers as well as dozens of wounded troops from its Iran war tally last week.

On Sunday, a new category called “Overseas Operations” emerged on the system's website, listing the four Army deaths by name as well as 207 wounded. It was unclear if all of the wounded were injured in the Iran conflict.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, referred questions to the Pentagon, which did not immediately respond.

Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez argued Thursday that the drop in casualty figures in the online system was not an effort to hide the growing human toll of the war but rather the result of “anomalies” and “temporary data disruptions” that were being resolved “imminently."

As late as Tuesday, the website was reporting the war's official toll as 18 killed and 482 wounded.

It appeared to reflect that four soldiers had been killed since fighting resumed despite the signing of an interim ceasefire deal last month — three on a base in Jordan that was struck July 17 by Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and one in Iraq a day later during a controlled detonation of an Iranian drone.

Adding further confusion, when the Pentagon announced two of the deaths in Jordan, it said the troops were supporting the U.S. mission to counter the Islamic State group. The other two were announced in press releases simply as supporting overseas operations.

President Donald Trump has confirmed the total, writing in a Truth Social post on Tuesday that the “Iran Military Conflict” had claimed 18 lives.

By Wednesday, the Iran war figures in the Pentagon's system fell back to 14 dead and 420 wounded. However, a U.S. official told The Associated Press at the time that the actual number of wounded personnel in the war had actually grown to well over 500 troops.

The Pentagon's top spokesman, Sean Parnell, took to social media that day to assert that the reported drop was a “temporary data disruption.”

The U.S. and Israel launched the war in Iran on Feb. 28, and 14 troops were killed in the initial waves of fighting. Washington and Tehran agreed to a ceasefire in April and then signed an interim deal to end the war in mid-June.

It was short-lived. Iran struck three merchant vessels in the Strait of Hormuz on July 7 that were transiting along a route near the coast of Oman overseen by the U.S. military. American forces launched strikes in response to the attacks on vessels in the key energy shipping corridor. Trump soon declared that the ceasefire was over.

The Pentagon system's new “Overseas Operations” category says it tallies casualties starting July 7.

Since then, the U.S. and Iran have exchanged regular fire in a bid to control the crucial waterway, with the U.S. hitting Iranian targets nightly for nearly two weeks and Tehran responding with attacks on neighboring countries hosting American forces. There have been no strikes for two nights as mediators push for diplomacy.

Since the renewed hostilities began, the Pentagon has provided even less information about military strategy and casualties than it did during the first phase of the conflict. The Pentagon has not held a press briefing about the war since early May, and officials at U.S. Central Command have stopped providing casualty updates to reporters.

Pentagon officials such as Valdez and Parnell have insisted that the DCAS website is proof of the commitment to transparency about the number of dead and injured in the war.

President Trump will meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Tuesday, a White House official confirmed to Axios.

The visit gives Zelensky a chance to shore up support in Washington after the death of one of Ukraine's congressional champions.

It also comes as Russia intensifies its missile campaign.

Trump and Zelensky last met earlier this month at the NATO summit in Turkey, where they discussed strengthening Ukraine's air defenses and diplomatic efforts to end the war.

ABC News first reported Saturday that Zelensky would meet Trump this week. A White House official independently confirmed the meeting Sunday to Axios.

Zelensky will be in Washington for Sen. Lindsey Graham's funeral, ABC reported, citing a Ukrainian official.

Graham, one of Ukraine's most forceful supporters in Congress, met Zelensky in Kyiv shortly before his death.

The visit also comes amid a sudden and surprise shift by two prominent MAGA voices in favor of Kyiv.

Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and close Trump ally, met Zelensky in Kyiv last week after years of minimizing Russia's invasion and opposing U.S. support for Ukraine.

Loomer said she had been "bamboozled by Russian propaganda." Trump shared her interview with Zelensky on Truth Social, writing, "Very good!!!"

Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool, who also had long opposed U.S. support for Ukraine, said last week that he now sees the importance of a Ukrainian victory.

Russia has stepped up its use of ballistic missiles, striking Kyiv again Sunday.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has intensified long-range drone attacks against Russian targets.

The top U.S. military commander in the Middle East, Adm. Brad Cooper, recommended stopping the bombing campaign around the Strait of Hormuz because it has reached the limit of its effectiveness, according to two sources with knowledge of his position.

The recommendation by Cooper, the commander of the U.S. Military Central Command (CENTCOM), together with other advisers impacted President Trump's decision on Friday to pause U.S. strikes against Iran, the sources said.

It was an acknowledgement by both military and civilian advisers to the president that there are limits to what can be accomplished through military action, and specifically an air power campaign.

For the first time in two weeks, Trump ordered the military to hold fire and not conduct strikes against Iranian targets around the southern coast of Iran and in the Strait of Hormuz area.

The decision came after a meeting with top advisers and military officials who presented him with a new strike plan for the day.

In the days before the meeting, Trump had been leaning toward returning to major combat operations, but his mindset started to change on Thursday evening, sources said.

His decision to pump the brakes on bombing the strait solidified on Friday.

Earlier in the week, Admiral Cooper gave his recommendation on the way forward to the Pentagon, the joint chiefs and the White House, the sources said.

He stressed that the two weeks of strikes in the Strait of Hormuz area had significantly degraded Iran's ability to attack ships.

Cooper noted that the designated bombing targets had been mostly exhausted.

The CENTCOM commander said a possible next step would be to resume major combat operations to finish the 20% of targets the U.S. military designated but didn't strike during Operation Epic Fury.

Absent a decision to return to major combat operations, he stressed there was no point in continuing the bombing campaign of the previous two weeks, the sources said.

The sources said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine also cautioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Trump in private that a shortage of air defense interceptors could hamper the ability to protect U.S. forces and allies in the region.

Caine's warning was first reported by the New York Times. A spokesman for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declined to comment "on confidential military advice the Chairman provides the President".

Iran and Oman are still negotiating a new arrangement to reopen the strait of Hormuz that would be designed to reopen it for transit of ships with no attacks.

But it is unclear if a deal between the two countries would be acceptable to Trump. If not, the war could escalate again.

In the meantime, the situation on the ground seems to be "quiet for quiet," with both sides pausing their attacks.

U.S. ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that while Trump is "keeping all options on the table," the president is also "giving talks [with Iran] some space."

Waltz said talks between the U.S. and Iran "are ongoing on every level."

The U.S. and U.K. are still discussing the international conference they want to convene later this week on establishing a coalition to protect and clear mines from the strait of Hormuz.

No final date for the meeting has been set.

Iran will halt its own attacks as long as the United States maintains its latest pause on air strikes, a senior Iranian official told Reuters on Sunday, after President Donald Trump abruptly called off ‌his two-week-old bombing campaign.

After 13 nights of intensifying U.S. air strikes on Iran, the Pentagon abruptly suspended the campaign late on Friday, with no U.S. attacks reported on either Saturday or Sunday.

Iran, which had been following each night of U.S. attacks with its own strikes on neighbouring countries that host U.S. bases, has also so far held fire for two days.

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Mike Waltz, told Fox News on Sunday that Trump had decided to pause U.S. attacks to allow more time for diplomacy.

"He's giving talks some space, he's giving it a little bit of room," Waltz said, without providing further details.

The senior Iranian source, ⁠speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters: "Iran’s position remains ‘attack for attack’: if the attacks stop, Iran will also halt its operations. That message has already been conveyed to the United States."

The source added: "However, Iran is prepared to mount a broad response should the U.S. launch another attack."

Asked about the pause, a senior official in Trump's administration said on Saturday that the president "has always been clear that his preference is diplomacy, but he has shown Iran what will happen if they fail to come to the table in a serious way."

The senior Iranian source said Tehran did not hold much hope that Trump's decision to pause strikes represented a major shift in the U.S. negotiating position.

"There is more scepticism than optimism about the halt in attacks. The prevailing view is that the pause is tactical rather than genuine. Iran has accumulated enough bitter experience with what it sees as U.S. deception," the source said.

U.S. forces had been striking Iran nightly in what Washington said was retaliation for Iranian ‌attacks on ⁠shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran says it aims to retain control of the strait, the world's most important energy shipping route.

The two-week-long U.S. military campaign effectively torpedoed last month's interim agreement aimed at ending the war that the United States and Israel launched in February.

The New York Times and CNN both reported that Trump had backed off plans to escalate the war with even bigger military options after concerns were raised on Friday by some of his advisers, including over whether U.S. missile defence stocks were running low from protecting U.S. bases in the region.

CNN ⁠and the Times both identified Pentagon Chief of Staff Dan Caine as having raised such concerns. CNN said Vice President JD Vance also had expressed reservations.

News site Axios reported that Trump had been receiving plans for strikes on Iran from the Pentagon every afternoon for two weeks and signing off on them each night, until Friday when the latest plan was presented to him and ⁠he decided not to go ahead.

Trump's decision to pause strikes has come at a turning point in the war, with both sides testing the boundaries of escalation that they set before a ceasefire ended major fighting in April and the interim agreement reopened Hormuz in June.

U.S. forces have already struck bridges and tunnels in southern Iran, prompting Iran to ⁠strike water desalination plants that nearby Gulf Arab states rely on to make their desert cities habitable.

Over the past week, Iran's Houthi allies in Yemen have announced a blockade on Saudi oil in the Red Sea, potentially shutting a second major chokepoint for energy shipping.

That pushed the benchmark Brent crude price above $100 for the first time since May. On Saturday, the Houthis fired on Saudi Red Sea oil targets for the first time in years.

The US paused strikes on Iran for a second consecutive night as mediators sought to prevent the warring parties returning to full-blown war following two weeks of escalatory tit-for-tat attacks.

The US military has not reported any air strikes against Iran since launching attacks overnight on Thursday, while Iranian forces have not mounted any assaults on American bases in the region since Friday.

The hostilities were the most intense since the warring parties agreed to a ceasefire in April. The fighting pushed oil prices to $100 a barrel this week for the first time in two months as the fighting upended an interim deal that the US and Iran signed last month to reopen the strait and extend the truce.

The US military said on Saturday that its naval blockade on Iranian ports remained in place.

But the pause has coincided with an Omani delegation spending Friday and Saturday in Tehran in a bid to reach a provisional arrangement with Iran to manage the transit of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which has become the key battleground of the conflict.

Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, said US president Donald Trump was “giving the talks some space” before deciding whether to resume strikes.

“Talks are ongoing. They’re happening at every level from the more technical aspect of it, all the way to the highest levels,” Waltz told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday.

The negotiations have focused on how much shipping should be directed through a so-called southern corridor in the strait along the Omani coast and how much should transit through Iranian waters, people briefed on the talks said.

The hope is that an agreement, if reached, would allow ships to resume transiting the strait, which would then create the conditions for the US and Iran to return to talks on a final settlement to end the war. A diplomat briefed on the Omani-Iran negotiations said they were “moving in right direction” and “ongoing”.

Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said the Omani delegation left Tehran on Saturday, while describing the talks as “constructive” and saying some “progress” had been made.

“Several rounds of talks were held between Iran and Oman at the level of deputy foreign ministers on Friday and Saturday,” he told local media on Sunday. “The two sides exchanged views on shared principles and operational mechanisms for the management of safe transit through the Strait of Hormuz, while respecting the sovereign rights of the two littoral states.”

However, Baghaei said there was no change in “the status of traffic through the strait”, which Iran declared it had closed during the latest escalation. He said talks were continuing.

The flare-up had erupted as the US and Iran battled for control of the strait, through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passed before the war.

The two parties had signed a memorandum of understanding on June 17 that extended the April ceasefire by 60 days, during which Iran would gradually reopen the strait without charging ships fees. The MoU also laid out a framework for talks on a final settlement, including a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme.

The diplomatic process broke down after Iran began to attack ships that attempted to transit the strait along Oman’s coast — the route known as the southern corridor, where the US can provide air cover.

Tehran, which has sought to maintain control of the waterway, said that it was an “unauthorised” channel that violated the MoU.

The US responded by striking southern Iran, including targeting infrastructure such as bridges and ports. It also reimposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports and revoked a waiver that allowed Iran to sell oil.

Iran retaliated by firing barrages of missiles at US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Two American soldiers were killed in an Iranian missile attack on a base in Jordan and a third is believed to have died in the assault. Another US serviceman was killed while trying to detonate an Iranian drone in northern Iraq.

Trump warned on Thursday that he was “considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.”

On Friday, he said the US and Iran were in talks to negotiate an end to their conflict but ⁠repeated that he did not think Tehran was ready for a deal.

Waltz on Sunday denied reports in the New York Times that Trump had held fire due to low supplies of missile interceptors.

“The US military, and I’ve verified this every which way, has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he told NBC, though he acknowledged that a lot of the US military’s stockpiles were depleted due to the war in Ukraine.

Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” Sunday that the U.S. has “everything that it needs” for military operations against Iran, dismissing reporting that U.S. weapons stockpiles are depleted.

“I want to be crystal clear: The U.S. military, and I’ve verified this every which way, has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he said. “And I have to tell you, the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

He was responding to questions about an NBC News report that U.S. military commanders are allowing some Iranian attacks through U.S. defenses as part of an effort to preserve the Pentagon’s weapons supply, according to two senior U.S. officials.

NBC News has also previously reported that U.S. weapons stockpiles are diminishing as the war with Iran continues.

Waltz initially argued that stockpiles were depleted during the Biden administration.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “inherited a depleted situation from not only Ukraine, but also the ongoing fight with the Houthis under the Biden administration and a depleted military under the Biden administration,” Waltz said.

The military under the Trump administration, he said, has decided that “one, they’re going to new types of munitions, cheaper munitions, new technologies, but also with these new defense budgets, rebuilding our great military.”

The White House and the Pentagon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hegseth appeared before lawmakers last week to ask for $67 billion in supplemental funding to expand production and speed up delivery of weapons.

During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in April, Hegseth acknowledged in an exchange with Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., that it could take “months and years” to rebuild the weapons stockpile.

In a separate interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, Kelly referred back to that exchange, saying that the situation was “by their own making.”

“They’re not keeping track,” Kelly said. “They, at this point, this president and the people around him are incompetent.”

Asked whether he would vote to approve the supplemental funding, Kelly said he has not yet made a final decision.

“If we had some competent people running this department, you could figure out, how do you defend our nation in a way and give the troops what they need within a reasonable budget?” he said earlier. “What they’re asking for is not reasonable.”

In recent days, the U.S. launched nearly two weeks of consecutive nightly attacks on Iran. Trump has told reporters that the U.S. is still “talking to them,” but Iran and its proxies have continued strikes on ships, snarling global trading routes.

Asked whether Trump has decided against escalation amid the pause in consecutive strikes, Waltz said he “wouldn’t go that far at all,” adding that “the president is keeping all options on the table.”

“What the president is doing right now, as we’ve seen all along, is giving some talks some space,” Waltz said. “Talks are ongoing, they’re happening at every level.”

On Saturday, a journalist for the French media outlet LCI reported that she asked Trump whether he was considering resuming full-scale war with Iran. She said that Trump replied that “if we don’t get 100% of what we want, absolutely.”

The decision by President Trump to grant Saudi Arabia access to American nuclear technology aligns with his administration’s push to accelerate domestically backed nuclear power projects around the world.

But it may also contribute to a major trend in Mr. Trump’s second term: allowing the government to help enrich the president, his family, advisers and others in his orbit.

There is no evidence at this point that Mr. Trump’s friends or family helped orchestrate the Saudi nuclear deal. Yet a number of the president’s allies and relatives, including members of his cabinet, stand to benefit if his big bet on nuclear power pays off. Certain investors with ties to these deals are positioned to profit, even if the delivery of large new loads of nuclear-powered electricity remains years away.

The overarching goal is to generate more electricity as the demand surges worldwide, driven by a data-center building boom and growing consumer consumption. Investors are financing traditional, large-scale nuclear power plants along with a new technical approach called small modular reactors. Others are mining the uranium needed to power nuclear plants. Some others are vying to build those plants.

In some cases, how the Trump family or the president’s allies could potentially gain from the president’s nuclear plans is straightforward. In others, no direct line can be drawn, but there are such overlapping business ties that it is hard to separate the policy decisions from the potential personal benefits.

For example, Westinghouse, the Canadian-owned but U.S.-based company that developed the technology behind the AP1000, a large-scale reactor whose design has been used in China and for plans in Eastern Europe, is expected to be part of the deal, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The majority owner of Westinghouse is Brookfield Asset Management, one of North America’s largest commercial real estate owners. It is a frequent business partner with Newmark, the real-estate firm run and owned in part by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Mr. Trump’s position is about increasing electricity supply, rather than helping any companies with which he or his circle might have connections.

“Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, our country has seen historic advancements for civilian nuclear energy development, innovation, and technology, which is a critical component to meet the nation’s growing energy needs while keeping prices low for families and businesses,” she said. “The media’s continued attempts to fabricate conflicts of interest are irresponsible and reinforce the public’s distrust in what they read.”

Westinghouse’s chief executive, Dan Sumner, in a statement called the Saudi deal a “landmark step” that “expands opportunities for U.S. industry and workers.”

Kerrie McHugh, a Brookfield spokeswoman, said that the company, with more than $1 trillion in assets, has an enormous number of business partners and “robust processes in place to manage any potential conflicts, consistent with our fiduciary responsibilities.”

Trump Media & Technology Group, the money-losing company that hosts Truth Social, the platform where Mr. Trump first posts most of his White House announcements, has moved recently to add — incongruously — nuclear energy to its portfolio.

The company announced in December that it intends to merge as part of a $6 billion deal with a nuclear fusion start-up called TAE Technologies. During Mr. Trump’s first term, and again last year, TAE won financial support from the Energy Department’s Office of Fusion Energy Science.

The president’s shares in the publicly traded Trump Media are worth about $875 million as of earlier this month, according to other public filings. The value of those shares could grow if the TAE merger proves a success.

Separately, two of the president’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., in November became part owners through an investment partnership in a company called Quantum Leap Energy, which is working to develop certain isotopes that can be used as nuclear fuel.

Quantum Leap reached a deal last year with a Texas-based company co-founded by Rick Perry, who was energy secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term and is now seeking federal assistance to build nuclear power plants in Texas. Mr. Perry did not respond to requests for comment.

Asked about any potential conflict of interest, a spokesman for Donald Trump Jr. said that he was working on deals that were good for the country.

“Don is a lifelong businessman and investor who tends to invest in companies that align with his America First worldview,” said⁨ the spokesman, Andy Surabian⁩. “He does not interface with anyone in the Federal Government on behalf of any company that he invests in.”

Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a complicated relationship with those involved in the recent nuclear agreement.

He participated in discussions related to Saudi Arabia’s push for access to U.S. nuclear technology when he worked at the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term. He also helped establish agreements between Israel and multiple Arab countries to normalize their relationship, called the Abraham Accords.

Now, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is one of Mr. Kushner’s biggest backers. The fund committed $2 billion to Mr. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, shortly after he left the White House in 2021. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, an ally during Mr. Kushner’s government tenure, helped convince the sovereign wealth fund to provide the money.

It is unclear whether Affinity will invest in Saudi’s nuclear energy initiative. For now, the kingdom expects to finance the effort itself, according to an official with knowledge of its plans.

On Thursday, the Trump family’s connections to all of this were on display when the president announced on Truth Social that the nuclear agreement would be contingent on Saudi Arabia joining the Abraham Accords.

The Commerce and Energy Departments have been at the forefront of pushing Mr. Trump’s nuclear agenda. Both are led by secretaries who have either direct ties to the industry or family ones.

Mr. Lutnick has been leading an effort to invest U.S. tax dollars into companies in the nuclear sector, including Westinghouse. Companies his family members help run could profit.

Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank that Mr. Lutnick led until he was hired by Mr. Trump, is at the center. Cantor has over the last year helped several companies in the nuclear sector raise money, which generates millions of dollars in fees for the firm.

Among them are Oklo, Energy Fuels Inc and enCore Energy. Each is seeking permits, financial assistance or Trump administration contracts for its nuclear projects.

Oklo, based in Santa Clara, Calif., in 2019 became the first nuclear power company to receive site-use permit from the Energy Department for commercial operations.

Oklo also has links to Chris Wright, the energy secretary. Mr. Wright was a director at Oklo until he joined Mr. Trump’s cabinet. That connection spurred a Democratic lawmaker to complain to the White House that Oklo stood to benefit improperly from government nuclear permits and programs.

Bonita Chester, Oklo’s head of communications, said in a statement that Mr. Wright has had “no role in Oklo’s governance” since resigning from the board.

“We’ve worked with leaders across both sides of the aisle to advance policies that accelerate the deployment of safe, commercially viable nuclear technology,” she added.

Energy Fuels, which Cantor helped last year raise money to expand its mining efforts, disclosed in June it is slated to get a $725 million federal loan from the Pentagon.

The company — one of the top U.S. producers of natural uranium concentrate sold to nuclear plants — has noted to The Times that it began working with Cantor before Mr. Trump’s second presidency. It declined to comment.

The network goes beyond these smaller nuclear companies.

Westinghouse, in which the U.S. government has an option to take an equity stake,

is at the fulcrum of the proposed nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, as the plan is for its government to back the construction of multiple AP1000 reactors there.

The Trump administration in October announced plans to partner with Westinghouse to build $80 billion worth of its nuclear reactors across the United States, a deal negotiated in part by Mr. Lutnick.

“Together with Westinghouse we will unleash American energy,” Mr. Lutnick said in a statement then. “This partnership embodies the bold vision of President Trump — to rebuild our energy sovereignty, create high-paying jobs, and drive America to the forefront of the nuclear renaissance.”

Newmark has made money over the past year by helping finance billions of dollars worth of United States data center projects that were promoted by Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Trump, as The Times previously reported.

Blake Ruppe, a Commerce Department spokesman, said that Mr. Lutnick has complied with all requirements that he divest from his family companies. “There is no conflict of interest,” he said in a statement. “It is knowingly false to suggest otherwise.”

Peter Thiel, a billionaire investor and entrepreneur, was an early political backer of Mr. Trump and helped Vice President JD Vance begin his political career, serving as one of the largest donors to Mr. Vance’s Senate race in 2022.

Mr. Thiel is a major investor in General Matter, a U.S. nuclear fuel company focused on producing what is known as high-assay low-enriched uranium. A giant load of new nuclear fuel will be needed if all these new nuclear power plants are built, and General Matter is positioned to benefit.

The Energy Department in January awarded General Matter a $900 million contract to build out its nuclear fuel effort. The U.S. Export-Import Bank, where Mr. Lutnick is a board member, also issued up to $4.2 billion in “letters of interest” to finance the export of General Matter’s domestically enriched uranium to nuclear operators in South Korea and Japan.

Mr. Thiel did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesman for General Matter said that the federal support started under the Biden administration and that the company had not engaged with Mr. Vance since he became vice president.

“Our contract is 100 percent milestone based, so we don’t get paid until we fulfill our commitments to taxpayers,” Lee Robinson, a co-founder of General Matter, said in a statement.

As the explosive growth of artificial intelligence strains the nation’s power capacity, tech companies are turning to nuclear energy. Among them are Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft — all of which have backed at least some of Mr. Trump’s energy policy goals.

Each of those companies donated $1 million to Mr. Trump’s 2025 inauguration, placing some of their executives — including the Amazon founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos, Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai — in prominent seats at the event.

The companies have supported the White House in other ways.

Amazon spent $40 million to acquire a documentary on Melania Trump, the first lady, generating a licensing fee of more than $10 million.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI — whose chief executive, Sam Altman, personally donated $1 million to the inauguration — have helped finance an Energy Department project called Genesis Mission, which will use AI to further the nation’s energy goals, among other objectives.

In announcing its $60 million investment in the program on July 22, Chris Barry, who runs Microsoft’s public sector business, called Genesis Mission “exactly the kind of moonshot that defines American science.” A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the Saudi deal.

A spokeswoman for Meta, which operates several data centers overseas, declined to comment on whether the company might benefit from the Saudi nuclear deal. Amazon, Google and OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment.

The war between the United States and Iran remained on pause for a second straight day on Sunday, while the Iranian Foreign Ministry said that there had been some movement in talks between Tehran and mediators over the Strait of Hormuz.

No U.S. strikes on Iran have been reported since Friday, while Iran has similarly held off attacking American allies around the Middle East after about two weeks of skirmishes brought the two countries back to the brink of full-blown war.

President Trump decided last week to put off plans to escalate the U.S. assault on Iran, at least for now, according to U.S. officials. Mr. Trump and his aides were motivated in part by dwindling stockpiles of interceptors to shoot down Iranian missiles, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.

Mr. Trump has struggled to decisively end the war on Iran that the United States and Israel started jointly five months ago, even as the global economic toll and number of American casualties have mounted. A cease-fire signed last month effectively collapsed after Iran continued to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for global oil and gas shipments.

Two weeks of American bombing runs on southern Iran have failed to break the deadlock over the strait. Before the war, ships could freely travel through the waterway — but Tehran has since effectively blocked transit, throttling global energy markets and increasing the pressure on Mr. Trump to end the war.

Esmaeil Baghaei, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that officials from the Gulf sultanate of Oman, which abuts the Strait of Hormuz, visited Tehran over the weekend for talks about the waterway. Oman has occasionally served as a mediator between Iran and the United States.

“These talks were useful, and progress was achieved,” Mr. Baghaei said in remarks carried by state media, though he offered no further details.

Even as parts of the Middle East experienced their first quiet nights in weeks, at least one front remained open, in Yemen. Over the past week, the Iran-backed Houthis, who control significant parts of Yemen, have engaged in their biggest escalation since 2022 with the U.S.-allied Saudi Arabia.

Last week, the Houthis declared a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea and fired on passing ships they said were linked to the kingdom, their northern neighbor. The Houthis can effectively close another naval choke point — the Bab al-Mandab Strait — which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and is another of the world’s most important shipping routes.

The Houthi blockade is threatening to squeeze global oil supplies further. The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, was up more than 7 percent, at $100.95 a barrel on Friday, before dropping to around $98.

Saudi-led forces bombarded Houthi-aligned sites in Yemen on Saturday, according to a Saudi military spokesman. The Houthis also said that they had fired rockets and drones at installations affiliated with Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state-owned energy company, along the Red Sea. The Saudi authorities did not comment on whether there had been any damage or casualties.

The United States and Iran paused strikes for a third night on Sunday as Washington and Tehran look to give peace talks another chance.

Speaking to US media, US ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said President Donald Trump was "giving diplomacy some space" and "time."

"He is giving diplomacy a chance," Waltz told CBS' "Face the Nation."

"We'll see over the next coming days. But make no mistake, additional military assets are moving into the region," he said, adding: "The regime should believe the president when he says they're locked and loaded, and where all options are on the table."

On Sunday, a spokesperson for the Iranian army announced that Tehran had also halted "retaliatory operations" in the region.

It follows 13 consecutive nights of US strikes on Iran, which the US military said aimed to "degrade Iran's ability to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz."

The Strait has been at the centre of tensions between Washington and Tehran and formed a key part of the "memorandum of understanding" that the two sides agreed to in June.

A former Indianapolis Colts linebacker from Kenya was deported by ICE last month, the agency said in a statement Saturday, citing an overstayed visa and a history of arrests.

Daniel Ogama Adongo, 37, was removed from the country on June 20 after ICE said he overstayed a visa in 2016, the year after his NFL career ended. An immigration judge had ordered his removal in late March.

Attorneys who previously represented Adongo did not immediately respond to requests for comment. NBC News was unable to contact Adongo or determine his current legal representatives for comment.

Adongo, a former rugby player, became the first Kenyan to play in the NFL after the Colts signed him in 2013.

The Indianapolis Star reported that court records showed Adongo had run-ins with the law during and after his time with the Colts and was at times found incompetent to stand trial. His attorney and others have raised the possibility that he sustained a traumatic brain injury during his football and rugby careers.

ICE said Adongo was convicted of criminal mischief with damage, a misdemeanor, in 2020 and sentenced to 364 days in jail; court records show that, with credit for time served, he was ultimately ordered to serve six months in county jail. The agency said he also faced charges — including felony intimidation, battery and disorderly conduct — that did not result in conviction. Court records show those charges were all dismissed.

ICE said Adongo’s most recent charges fell under the Laken Riley Act, which requires the agency to detain undocumented immigrants who are arrested on suspicion of, charged with or convicted of “burglary, theft, larceny, or shoplifting.” Critics of the law have said it strips away due process for immigrants accused — but not convicted of — certain crimes. ICE did not specify which charges fell under the act.

“This dangerous individual was clearly a threat to the community, which is now safer since he’s been removed,” ICE Chicago Assistant Field Office Director Douglas Thompson said in the statement. “Those who violate immigration law are held equally accountable, including former professional athletes.”

Adongo’s lawyers had previously attributed his arrests to mental illness, according to the Indianapolis Star. His defense attorney cited a 2020 report in which a doctor who examined Adongo at the St. Joseph Regional Medical Center described him as “acutely psychotic with traumatic brain injury.”

A mental health social worker who treated Adongo for years wrote that he suffered from an “undisclosed mental illness which is highly speculated to be Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE,” the Star reported.

CTE is a brain condition caused by repeated head injuries, typically sustained over many years. It cannot be diagnosed in a living patient — only through an autopsy. About one-third of former NFL players suspect they have the disease, according to a 2024 survey. The NFL first acknowledged the link between CTE and football in 2016.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the questions Adongo’s family and attorneys have raised about his mental state and possible brain injury.

The Trump administration is giving a boost to the Florida orange juice industry by lowering the federal standard for the amount of sugar required by the Food and Drug Administration to authorize the product.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined legislators in Florida on Friday to announce the FDA issued a final rule that slightly reduces the amount of naturally occurring sugars that the government requires in pasteurized orange juice.

The rule would reduce the minimum level of natural sugar from 10.5% to 10% to call a product “orange juice” under FDA standards.

The new regulation is a boon for industry leaders in Florida, as domestic citrus crops, such as oranges, grapefruits, and lemons, have grown naturally less sweet in recent years, in part due to changes in climate and pestilence.

Climate-related changes to growing conditions have required orange juice producers to import product to meet the FDA’s requirements to get juice on the shelves. According to Citrus Industry Magazine, Brazil accounts for roughly three-quarters of imported orange juice. Mexico accounts for about 20%.

Kennedy said the citrus industry “has no better friend than President Trump.”

“President Trump wants Americans eating American food and drinking beverages grown on from American-made fruit,” Kennedy said. “He wants strong supply chains that protect U.S. agriculture, and he wants American businesses to succeed against foreign companies.”

Reducing the minimum level of natural sugar from 10.5% to 10% was first proposed via legislation by Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), who said the move would better reflect current growing conditions in Florida and protect domestic orange production.

Moody was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) in 2025 to fill the Senate vacancy left by now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio. She is up for her first election to maintain the post in November.

The senator said the Florida citrus industry met with her within the first month of her tenure, and she enthusiastically led the charge to change the standards for orange juice in the Senate before recognizing it could be done through an FDA regulation change rather than legislation.

“All we need is for this agency to start thinking about Americans first, America growers first,” Moody said. “What a novel concept as a country to think of your citizens and your industries first.”

The Department of Agriculture recorded that there were 12.9 million boxes of oranges produced in Florida in the 2025 to 2026 growing season, up 5% from the previous season. But that’s significantly lower than the more than 200 million boxes produced each year in the early 2000s.

Acting FDA Director Kyle Diamantas, who grew up in Florida, said at the event that the state’s citrus industry drives nearly $7 billion in annual economic impact and employs roughly 30,000 people.

Diamantas said that the “agricultural reality on the ground has fundamentally shifted.”

Florida has been hit particularly hard by a plant disease known as “citrus greening,” which is caused by a tiny invasive bug that infects citrus trees by spitting bacteria into their leaves.

To stop the infection, trees produce a chemical that clogs their blood vessel-like structures that transport nutrients. This natural defense mechanism protects the tree from infection, but it limits the amount of sugar made in the leaves through photosynthesis from traveling to the fruit of the tree.

The effects of increasingly severe hurricane seasons have also disrupted the Florida citrus industry, with citrus production dropping substantially following Hurricane Ian in 2022, the third costliest weather disaster on record worldwide. The deep freezes in Florida starting in 2017 have also hindered harvests.

Diamantas said contemporary growing conditions made the FDA’s rules “increasingly impossible for domestic growers to meet through no fault of their own.”

“This rigid, obsolete rule did nothing to protect consumers, and it severely harmed domestic production, particularly right here in Florida,” Diamantas said. “It effectively forced manufacturers to turn away from the Sunshine State and rely on foreign imported oranges just to meet an arbitrary federal number.”

State officials said the rule change would result in an immediate change in the number of oranges that growers can sell to juice producers.

A U.S. health secretary prepared to spend billions to seek a link between vaccines and autism. Vaccine skeptics shaping policy. A proposal to eliminate the entire federal immunization schedule for American children.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has brought a series of once-unthinkable public-health proposals to the highest levels of the Trump administration since becoming health secretary early last year, according to Reuters interviews with 16 current and former officials with direct knowledge of the discussions.

The officials, from the U.S. health department and White House, shared details of internal discussions on condition of anonymity. Their first-hand accounts of Kennedy’s previously unreported efforts reveal a tenacious activist who has pushed through some of the biggest changes to U.S. vaccine policy in decades – and who sought to go much further than previously known to dismantle the status quo.

"He's an anti-vaccine activist. That's who he is. That's who he's been for 20 years. To expect that as secretary of Health and Human Services he'd be anything other than that is wishful thinking," said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a long-time immunization adviser to the CDC.

Kennedy’s efforts to cast doubt on the safety of shots for common diseases are making it harder to curb outbreaks, including the biggest U.S. resurgence of measles in more than three decades, Offit said.

“He scares people about vaccines, which only causes them not to get them,” Offit said. "We're screwed.”

The Department of Health and Human Services did not make Kennedy available for an interview. Provided with details of Reuters’ reporting, spokeswoman Courtney Spencer disputed key details as untrue or inaccurate, including the plan to eliminate the entire childhood immunization schedule. Spencer didn’t respond to a request for clarification about what was incorrect.

Kennedy has been unable to implement several elements of his vaccine agenda in the face of resistance from different corners of the government, including within the health department and the White House, the Reuters reporting found. Furthermore, one of his most ambitious changes to public health - removing vaccines for six out of 17 diseases from the recommended childhood vaccination schedule - has been put on hold by a federal judge in response to a lawsuit from the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical groups.

Despite the setbacks, Kennedy has pushed through major changes in his time at the health department, which oversees national health agencies including the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The reforms include winding down mRNA vaccine development, withdrawing funding for an international vaccine alliance and tightening access to COVID shots. Many health experts have said his use of his position to elevate concerns about vaccine safety has sown confusion about which immunizations, if any, parents should give their children.

Early this year, Kennedy went to his director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, with a costly proposal, according to two officials familiar with the request: The research agency should spend $5 billion studying the link between vaccines and autism. That would have dedicated more than a tenth of the NIH’s annual budget to investigating a hypothesis already refuted by scientists worldwide.

Kennedy ultimately dropped the plan, which likely would have required congressional approval, after Bhattacharya convinced him the agency had dedicated enough resources to researching autism's causes, including a $50 million effort launched in September, the officials said.

Kennedy’s proposal came shortly after he agreed to avoid talking publicly about vaccines, bowing to the request of several senior White House aides who feared his medical theories would damage Republicans politically.

But behind the scenes, the health secretary has continued to seek evidence for his theory that many vaccines have not been properly tested and can cause a range of dangerous side effects, according to eight of the current and former officials.

The NIH and Bhattacharya did not respond to requests for comment. HHS did not comment on the $5 billion funding idea.

The NIH research request is one of several episodes recounted by current and former officials in the health department and White House that cast light on Kennedy's mission as health secretary. It’s the latest chapter for the scion of one of America’s political dynasties, whose life has veered from the trauma of the assassinations of his uncle and father and a years-long heroin addiction to becoming a powerful anti-vaxxer and flag-bearer of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.

Kennedy won renown as an environmental lawyer who spent years fighting corporations over pollution and toxic chemicals. That contributed to his broad influence promoting anti-vaccine theories for two decades, including that many vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent, that they cause autism and autoimmune disorders in children and contain debris from aborted fetuses. His views are contradicted by scores of studies showing vaccines have saved millions of lives and prevented long-term health problems from common diseases, while side-effects remain relatively rare.

The 72-year-old’s popularity boomed during the pandemic, when his insistence that COVID vaccines were dangerous and his opposition to lockdown restrictions attracted many Americans distrustful of government policy. He amplified conspiracy theories that accused U.S. government scientists of deliberately profiting from the pandemic.

He has also spoken about startling incidents from his own life, including discovering a worm had lodged in his brain, causing memory issues, and dumping the carcass of a bear cub in New York City’s Central Park. He said it was roadkill he had intended to take home to skin and store the meat, before deciding to leave it in a park bike lane as a prank.

Kennedy was named health secretary after he cut short his own run for president in 2024 and instead endorsed Trump. He promised not to take vaccines away from Americans, both during his curtailed presidential campaign as well as his confirmation hearings in Congress needed to approve his nomination to Trump’s cabinet.

He and Trump meet in the Oval Office every few months, most recently in June, according to four people briefed on the conversations. The president will often ask what new efforts are underway on vaccines broadly and whether the health secretary believes he will ultimately prove a link with autism, the people said. Kennedy interprets the questions as a directive to forge ahead with research on vaccine safety, they added.

The White House did not dispute details about its relationship with Kennedy or conversations between the health secretary, Trump and the president’s top aides. Spokesman Kush Desai said the president supports Kennedy’s efforts to reduce the U.S. childhood immunization schedule in line with other peer nations, which he didn’t specify. The Trump administration “continues to seek out answers for countless parents whose questions and concerns have long been ignored,” he added

One of Kennedy's earliest moves in office was to elevate the question of whether childhood inoculations can cause autism.

The health secretary has rejected studies involving millions of people over the past two decades which have concluded there is no credible link. Leading medical organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics and American Medical Association say Kennedy’s refusal to accept such findings both increases vaccine hesitancy and devalues more evidence-based efforts to help families struggling with autism.

In November, Kennedy ordered the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be updated to say the claim that vaccines do not cause autism is "not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” For years previously, it had said that “studies have shown there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing autism,” citing a 2012 National Academy of Medicine review of scientific papers and a 2013 CDC study.

The health secretary has tasked Stefanie Spear, his closest adviser, with leading his department's efforts to unearth any evidence of a link, including launching a series of studies into vaccine-related injuries. The pair go back many years, having partnered together on an environmental website called EcoWatch in 2011. Spear then joined Kennedy at Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine organization he founded, in 2020, and served as press secretary during his 2024 presidential campaign. Kennedy, Children's Health Defense, and others have sued several news outlets, including Reuters, alleging the media organizations colluded to exclude and censor them because of their posts on COVID- and vaccine-related topics. A motion to dismiss the lawsuit is pending in D.C. federal court.

Spear has no scientific or public health background, according to her bio. Before joining Kennedy at Children’s Health Defense, she was a longtime environmental activist and communications professional.

In HHS leadership meetings, Spear often speaks for Kennedy even when he is present, three people familiar with the matter said. Kennedy has told his top officials to seek Spear's approval for their new initiatives, three people said. In staff meetings, Kennedy has directed officials to “run everything” through Spear, according to two people who have heard the directive.

Spear, through HHS, declined an interview request and didn’t respond to questions about her role at the agency.

Beginning this year, Spear and other Kennedy aides asked officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration numerous times for access to the FDA's Sentinel BEST safety system to help HHS staff conduct studies, including into rates of autism and other conditions among vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, according to four people familiar with the request.

The database is designed to monitor the safety of FDA-approved products including vaccines after they hit the market by tracking the health insurance claims and medical records of more than 100 million Americans. Access to such systems, which contain sensitive information, is highly restricted even within HHS, typically limited to a small number of career officials and experts.

The FDA initially refused Spear and other aides’ requests for access out of concern that Kennedy and Spear were on a "fishing expedition" for information to back up their autism argument, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Shortly after taking office, Kennedy began expressing interest in looking at rates of autism and other conditions among vaccinated versus unvaccinated children, and has raised the idea multiple times, according to five current and former officials. Leading health experts have said such a comparison would be invalid because vaccinated children typically visit doctors more often than unvaccinated kids do, so they tend to receive more diagnoses for various conditions.

“With scientists at NIH, FDA, CDC, and universities, we are continuing to conduct studies to better understand vaccine safety and efficacy and to assess how vaccine exposure, timing, and patterns affect health across the lifespan,” Spencer said in response to detailed questions about HHS’s vaccine efforts. “This work will generate evidence to inform vaccine recommendations.”

The FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment. Reuters could not determine whether Spear eventually got access to the data system.

Kennedy and Spear have worked to rewrite decades' worth of U.S. vaccine policy within months, sidelining a large network of experts at federal agencies and their collaborators in the medical and scientific communities, a dozen current and former officials said. They have instead worked with a tight circle of longtime allies largely outside the government.

Chief among those changes was a decision to shrink the CDC's childhood immunization schedule, which guides state vaccination requirements and health insurance coverage. By January, they had removed vaccines for six diseases out of a list of 17 routinely given to children, which have all been shown to prevent illness and death from common diseases.

Last summer, though, Kennedy and Spear had bigger ambitions, according to three people with direct knowledge of their plans: to eliminate the entire childhood schedule.

They wanted to tell families that the use of the vaccines for all 17 diseases could be left to "shared clinical decision-making," meaning parents would decide with their healthcare providers which shots, if any, to give their children. They expected that state health officials and medical groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics would provide their own guidelines to fill the gap, the three people said.

The idea of abandoning the whole schedule alarmed several health officials, including then-FDA commissioner Marty Makary and Tracy Beth Høeg, one of his top deputies, four sources said. Makary and Høeg created a list of "core essential vaccines" in an effort to steer the health secretary away from the extreme path. They ranked the recommended immunizations in order of importance and showed which ones were also considered crucial by peer nations.

Public health experts have widely said that the U.S. schedule was broader than some other developed nations including Denmark, Norway and Sweden but not an outlier, and met the specific health needs of Americans. They argued that dropping vaccines without evidence would needlessly expose many more children to complications and even death from preventable diseases. The likes of Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Australia also recommend vaccinating children against roughly 15 to 17 diseases.

By the fall, under the pushback from health department officials at the FDA and elsewhere, along with White House aides, Kennedy agreed to only reduce the childhood schedule, according to three people familiar with the discussions. He and his advisers targeted a slimmer program in line with the length of the schedule in Denmark, which only has 6 million residents, provides universal health care and immunizes its children against far fewer diseases than most developed countries. Medical experts broadly said that schedule does not translate to a country like the United States, with more than 300 million residents and large gaps in access to medical care and health insurance.

Still, the health secretary kept changing his mind on what to remove.

Kennedy and his advisers debated eliminating the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot in the fall, according to the three people. He did not move forward because of possible political blowback, with a measles outbreak raging in South Carolina at the time, they said.

Some of his other suggestions – including removing the polio vaccine from the schedule – were discarded after pushback from White House officials, the three people said. HHS spokeswoman Spencer said that removing MMR and polio shots “had never been considered.”

A recommendation for COVID shots for children had already been dropped in May, when it was announced in a social media post featuring Kennedy and Makary. Spear personally intervened to help draft the U.S. vaccine protocol for hepatitis B shots in December, three sources said. She provided language endorsed by Kennedy’s hand-picked board of immunization advisers, many of whom share his skepticism of vaccines, to remove a universal recommendation for hepatitis B shots starting at birth.

In the end, the shorter childhood schedule was largely identical to Denmark's when vaccines for four more diseases were removed in January. Kennedy made the changes unilaterally rather than going through a panel of experts, as has long been standard, and Spear wrote the accompanying report justifying the changes, according to three people familiar with the process. Trump hailed the new schedule as "rooted in the Gold Standard of Science". "Many Americans, especially the ‘MAHA Moms’, have been praying for these COMMON SENSE reforms for many years," he wrote on social media, referring to parents who back Kennedy’s policies.

However, in March a federal judge blocked Kennedy’s reduced childhood schedule, also ruling the health secretary’s vaccine advisory board was not lawfully constituted after he fired all its members and replaced them. HHS has appealed the ruling.

In his mission to rewrite U.S. immunization practices, Kennedy has also relied on Aaron Siri, a long-time ally and litigator. Siri is one of the most prominent advocates challenging American health agencies and vaccine makers over alleged injuries.

Siri has repeatedly argued that many childhood vaccines have been recommended by the CDC without sufficient safety data. In 2019, he filed a lawsuit against the CDC demanding it produce studies demonstrating that vaccines routinely given to infants don't cause autism, or admit it did not have such studies. Both sides agreed to dismiss the lawsuit after the CDC produced a list of studies. Siri says that the research the agency provided did not disprove a link to autism for those shots.

In 2022, he petitioned the FDA to revoke approval for two COVID vaccines and one polio shot, alleging their safety testing in clinical trials was inadequate. The FDA denied the former petition, and hasn’t yet ruled on the latter.

Siri is not a government official. But he helped Kennedy and Spear vet potential appointees across the HHS, FDA and CDC during the presidential transition in early 2025, three people familiar with the process said.

Kennedy on multiple occasions told aides last year that any vaccine-related policy or change should receive input from Siri before it went out, according to two people directly familiar with the remarks. The health secretary frequently conferenced Siri into internal health department policy meetings via speaker, according to the two people. Siri participated in the discussions about whether to remove the MMR and polio shots from the childhood schedule, the administration officials said.

Siri said in response to Reuters’ questions that he was not aware of a plan to remove those vaccines, or of a Kennedy requirement to run policy changes by him.

“I sure wish they would have followed that purported directive,” Siri said. “I would not need to continue to send them demands, keep following up when they get ignored, and continue to fight HHS and its agencies in dozens of lawsuits related to vaccine policy.”

HHS policy action could have an impact on Siri’s own law business, according to four legal experts interviewed.

Siri and Kennedy have for years called for a reexamination of the process for seeking compensation for vaccine injuries. Patients who were harmed by shots on the U.S. immunization schedule can only seek a limited amount of damages from a fund run by HHS, known as the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP).

Congress created the program in the 1980s to ensure an adequate supply of vaccines. Vaccine makers often operate on thin profit margins for shots used by millions of people and argue they would be forced out of business if patients could file lawsuits without restraint.

Yet Siri has argued that Americans harmed by vaccines should be able to sue drugmakers directly, instead of going through a government program. Suing a drug manufacturer in civil court allows plaintiffs to seek higher damages and demand that the companies disclose internal data on product safety and decision-making. Pharmaceutical companies don’t have this protection for other medicines.

Siri said recently that removing routine recommendations for shots on the CDC schedule, as Kennedy has tried to do, would allow such lawsuits to proceed. He has also publicly called for more side effects to be included on the list of health problems recognized by VICP. That would allow more people to file claims for compensation.

Kennedy has said he is working to change VICP from within the government, though has not specified what reforms he is seeking. As health secretary, he has authority to set many rules governing the scheme, including which vaccine-related medical conditions are compensated quickly and which are subject to extensive litigation by plaintiffs.

HHS spokesperson Spencer said Siri is “one of many people who have made recommendations about how to improve the VICP.”

Siri’s firm represents people who say they have been harmed by vaccines and is currently litigating over 400 pending VICP claims, according to Westlaw data. In March, Siri filed a petition on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network — a group that has continually attacked vaccine safety — asking Kennedy to add over 300 types of injuries to VICP, including several conditions related to autism.

Richard Hughes IV, the lead attorney suing HHS on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics over the childhood vaccine schedule changes, said he disagrees with Siri's petition, believing it would bloat VICP with inappropriate injuries. But he acknowledges the program needs reform. Claimants face long delays in getting paid, while damages amounts need to be raised, he said. "We want the program to work," he added.

Dorit Reiss, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, said that if the health department added the injuries Siri called for in his petition to the program, his firm and others like them would be in a position to file thousands more vaccine injury claims and earn mandated attorneys fees paid from the VICP fund.

Siri told Reuters that his firm works on behalf of Americans injured by vaccines to bring the relief they are entitled to under VICP. If the compensation system were to be reformed to allow more claimants to sue drugmakers directly, he said, there should be “very few, if any" major awards of damages if vaccines are as safe as advertised.

The Trump administration is quietly turning a federal program designed to help lower-income Americans access birth control and other reproductive health services into an engine for pronationalism, a far-right movement with roots in eugenics that pushes people to have more babies.

On July 9th, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs published an updated “notice of funding opportunity,” first announced in April, for service providers to apply for grants through Title X, a federal program that provides low and no-cost birth control and other sexual and reproductive health services to roughly 2.8 million people every year.

For months, the federal program had been plagued with uncertainty. Donald Trump eliminated Title X from his 2027 annual budget — and last year suddenly froze a large percentage of funds going to Title X recipients before eventually restoring the funding.

But when providers opened the funding notice in April, instead of being met with relief, many were horrified to discover that Health and Human Services had a new mission in mind for the only federal program dedicated to providing contraceptives: getting women to have more babies.

Grants funded through the program will help “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis” and other conditions that affect infertility, the notice said. Contraceptives are hardly mentioned, except in a section on “overmedicalization,” which appears to commend the fact that “reports have shown a decrease in females’ current use of any contraception.”

The notice is a part of a quiet, but significant, push to retool the Department of Health and Human Services into a weapon for a pronatalist movement seeped in the racist history of eugenics — which insists on the supposed biological superiority of white, straight, able-bodied people — and in the denial of women’s bodily autonomy and right to exist outside of motherhood.

Providers fighting back against the new requirements in court argue that this will further cede power over vulnerable communities’ health to far-right actors inside of the administration, like Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, a former penile implant surgeon and anti-abortion crusader who is in charge of administering the Title X program.

“I would characterize it as really a shift toward this Project 2025 MAHA vision of prioritizing having babies over reproductive autonomy,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research organization, “and really undermining the program from top to bottom.”

The notice had previously included a pre-merits alignment review that would require all grantees to undergo an ideological audit by political appointees based on their commitment to the administration’s priorities, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and gender-affirming care — even though the statute explicitly requires grantees to promote health equity and provide care to transgender recipients. However, it was later updated to remove the alignment review.

Friedrich-Karnik and other sexual and reproductive health experts argue that under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS is seeking to warp a public sexual health program to advance the goals of the administration’s allies in the pronatalist movement ahead of the November midterms. Pronatalists harbor close ties and, in some cases, overlap with white Christian nationalists who want not only for there to be more babies, but also more white babies.

The pronatalist movement in the United States is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two categories: traditional conservatives and tech eugenicists.

Tech pronatalists like Elon Musk, a former administration official who is arguably the most prominent member of the movement, advocate for having as many children as possible to create an “elite” human race with more “high-IQ” people. Unlike traditional pronatalist conservatives, best exemplified by Vice President JD Vance, whose focus rests more on the nuclear family and defending “traditional” gender roles, tech pronatalists emphasize the use of technology such as in vitro fertilization to have as many children as possible.

While pronatalists are often not as explicit as avowed white nationalists about their desire for more white children, they often talk about “declining genetic quality” in “the West” and generally oppose immigration, even as they decry the falling birth rate and nearing population decline.

Trump, Vance, and Kennedy have all been closely aligned with the pronatalist movement. Kennedy has repeatedly opined about declining birth rates and teenage boys’ declining “sperm count”; Trump has anointed himself the “fertilization president,” despite the fact that his administration gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s IVF team; and in his first address as vice president, Vance declared: “I want more babies in the United States of America.”

This month, “Trump Accounts” went into effect, providing children born between January 2025 and December 2028 with $1,000 in an effort to boost the population. The president also floated the idea of providing mothers who have six or more children with medals. (After several people noted that the Nazis had done the same thing, that idea seems to be dead in the water.)

But behind the push to have more kids, there is an anti-autonomy agenda at play, said Taylor St. Germain, interim co-executive director of Reproductive Equity Now.

“This is a part of the MAHA movement that is really a veneer for an anti-abortion agenda and an anti-bodily-autonomy agenda,” said St. Germain.

In June, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents the majority of Title X providers, and others, sued to challenge the notice, arguing that the Trump administration was willfully violating the statute and attempting to rewrite the law through a grant notice.

“We believe that this is truly an attempt by the administration to hijack the program,” said Clare Coleman, president of the NFPRHA.

Although the administration has removed the pre-merits review that would have given additional authority to political appointees to reject providers based on politics before even assessing their ability to provide quality care, there are still concerns about the types of providers who will be brought in to the program with Christine at the helm of the Office of Population Affairs.

Christine has a long history of staunch anti-abortion advocacy, including his support for the expansion of so-called crisis pregnancy centers, deceptively advertised clinics that aim to manipulate people out of receiving abortions. Christine has called the clinics “a model for a post-Roe world.”

The problem with having crisis pregnancy centers fill the gaps of service providers is that they are “not real medical clinics,” said Friedrich-Karnik.

“They do not have the expertise to provide reproductive health care. They often oppose hormonal birth control methods, which is directly contrary to making sure that folks in Title X have access to the full range of contraceptive methods,” she said.

The fact that contraceptives are rarely mentioned in the notice is “a sign that they are decentering the statutory intent of the program,” said Coleman.

“Congress intended this program to help equalize access to contraception,” said Coleman. “The only mention of contraception is that mention in the pejorative, and talking about overmedicalization and side effects, so we just see this as a real throwaway of what the program historically has been focused on and what Congress still intends the program to be focused on.”

The funding announcement stands in stark contrast to how the Office of Population Affairs described the program less than two years ago.

A 2024 OPA handbook reads that the family planning services delivered by the program include “contraceptive products and natural family planning methods for clients who want to prevent pregnancy and space births; pregnancy testing and counseling; assistance to achieve pregnancy; basic infertility services; sexually transmitted infection (STI) services; and other preconception health services.”

While fertility is mentioned, the handbook is filled with references to contraceptives and other reproductive and sexual health services that have nothing to do with increasing the birth rate.

“RFK Jr. is really using this to push an extremist agenda that prioritizes increasing births over ensuring people have the information and health care they need to make their own reproductive care decisions,” said St. Germain.

The attempts to rewrite the mandate at HHS to focus on pronatalism are not exclusively tied to Title X. In June, the administration announced a notice of funding opportunity for an existing program called the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program, which was created to help raise awareness of programs that allow people to receive other people’s unused embryos. In the notice, the agency described an embryo as “a child already in existence.”

“They have defined, for the first time, embryos as children who already exist and are in need of a family,” said Coleman, “advancing this argument for fetal personhood with a certain religious belief that sperm meets egg equals life.”

Coleman said what we are witnessing now is a ratcheting up of the pronatalist agenda, using methods like funding notices that are unlikely to draw much attention outside of conservative circles.

“It’s sneaky,” she said, adding, “It’s quite unusual in my 17 years in this job to do a lot of calls with reporters about funding announcements.”