And so it starts. The first child in a decade in the United States has just died of measles, and now Robert Kennedy, jr. is attacking psychiatric drugs used in the treatment of children. So if you have a child who is depressed, anxious, or hyperactive. Trump and the Republican Congress members are telling you, “tough… you need to understand your wellbeing and the wellbeing of your children does not matter to us. The only people that matter to us are the rich who buy our seats.”
Anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr. head of Health and Human Services Credit: Forbes
Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made psychiatric medications a focus of his review of the country’s childhood chronic disease crisis, claiming the drugs have been “insufficiently scrutinized” and are addictive.
Childhood psychiatrists insist the drugs, for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression, are nonaddictive and proven safe and say they are more concerned about young Americans unable to access psychiatric medications that could help.
Kennedy emphasized his skepticism of these medications during his Senate confirmation hearings.
“Fifteen percent of American youth are now on Adderall or some other ADHD medication. Even higher percentages are on SSRIs and benzos. We are not just overmedicating our children, we are overmedicating our entire population,” Kennedy told the Senate Finance Committee.
The exact rate at which American youths are using ADHD medications is hard to ascertain. Kennedy may have been referring to the results of a Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey released in 2023 that found 15 percent of high school seniors reported […]
Gabe Fenigsohn, Contributing Writer - US News and World Report
Stephan:
By June I think we will not only be in a recession, we will also have millions of people — notably in Republican-controlled states – in chaos over their healthcare. I predict elder mortality, maternal mortality, and infant mortality will all increase. As I do this research day after day it is like watching a society wrecking crisis occur.
The Republican cost-cutting mantra these days is to slash and burn – and worry about the collateral damage to the American people later.
The House budget resolution that passed last night demands that the congressional committee that oversees Medicare and Medicaid cut $880 billion in spending over the next decade, an order that would require substantial cuts to the entitlement programs that more than 130 million Americans rely on for health care.
I’m a front-line health care worker in New York City, and like everyone else in this nation, I’m also a consumer of health care. The efforts by President Donald Trump and his cost-cutting czar Elon Musk to decimate our health care system will endanger all Americans’ lives in the name of ill-considered cutbacks. This is terrifying to me – and it should be to you too.
The safety of the food you and your family eat has now been put in danger by “king” Trump. The Trump coup is putting every American in danger. Do I need to say more?
Probationary employeesopens in a new tab or window across the FDA received notices Saturday evening that their jobs were being eliminated, according to three FDA staffers who spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The total number of positions eliminated was not clear Sunday, but the firings appeared to focus on employees in the agency’s centers for food, medical devices, and tobacco products — which includes oversight of electronic cigarettes. It was not clear whether FDA employees who review drugs were exempted.
On Friday, some officials expected the HHS to fire 5,200 probationary employees across its agencies, according to an audio recording of an NIH department meeting. HHS oversees NIH, FDA, and the CDC, among other things.
Like all fascist authoritarians criminal Trump makes no effort to hide the fact that he wants to control the media, and what it reports about him, and his administration. As you may have heard the Associated Press has been banned from the White House because they won’t call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. But that is just the beginning. Watch as Trump attempts to censor and control any media that says negative things — that is tells the truth — about him personally. Hitler did the same, Mussolini did it, Stalin did it, and Putin has done it. I think it is important that Americans get clear in their minds that what is going on is a coup to make the United States a christofascist authoritarian pseudo-democracy designed to make Trump a “king” and serve the interests of oligarchs.
The White House is stripping the White House Correspondents’ Association of its role in managing the White House Press Pool, taking control of deciding who will be a part of the small rotating group of journalists and photographers who accompany the president.
The press pool includes rotating representatives from television, print, radio, wire services and still photography outlets that travel with the president on Air Force One and in other small settings like the Oval Office or Roosevelt Room. They communicate information back to their counterparts at other outlets through what’s known as pool reports disseminated by email.
Since the 1950s, the independent WHCA, made up of representatives from hundreds of different outelts, has managed who is part of the rotation (in coordination with the White House). That now will change, Leavitt said.
“For decades, a group of DC-based journalists, the White House Correspondents Association, has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces. Not anymore,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at Tuesday’s press briefing.
Leavitt added, “Moving forward, the White House press pool will be determined by […]
As Trump’s fascist oligarch coup moves into its second month I confess I am surprised that Trump voters don’t yet seem to fully realize how severely Trump is going to damage the quality of their personal life, and the lives of their family. I keep seeing interviews with Trump voters, particularly White men, who just don’t seem capable of comprehending what is happening and continue to support Trump.
Protesters gather at a rally organized by the American Federation of Government Employees against the “Department of Government Efficiency” purges and resignation offers made to the federal civilian workforce, outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on February 11, 2025. Credit: Allison Robbert / AFP / Getty
The Trump administration has wasted no time attacking worker rights and bestowing even more power to employers through a barrage of anti-worker executive orders since Trump’s second term began.
Within his first two weeks in office, Trump rapidly targeted LGBTQIA+ workers and undid civil rights protections. He fired two Democratic commissioners on the five-person Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He terminated Chair Charlotte Burrows, whose term was supposed to last until July 2028, and Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels, whose term was supposed to last until July 2026. He also fired EEOC General Counsel Karla Gilbride, whose four-year term wasn’t supposed to end until 2027.
These moves leave only the commission without a quorum, which means that the organization taxed with enforcing federal laws against job discrimination is effectively powerless.
