Kristina Fiore, Director of Enterprise & Investigative Reporting - MedPage Today
Stephan:
The United States already has the lowest-ranked and most expensive healthcare system in the developed world. Now, as the fascists continue their coup, it is going to get worse. The vast majority of Americans have no idea what good healthcare is actually like.
HHS employees demonstrate against job cuts.Credit: MedPage Today
HHS will slash 10,000 full-time employees, which combined with its previous buyout and early retirement initiatives, will take the agency down from 82,000 to 62,000 workers.
It will also create a new “Administration for a Healthy America,” or AHA, that will combine five independent agencies into one.
Shedding 10,000 employees will save the government $1.8 billion per year, the agency said. It announced the changes in a press release and a fact sheet on Thursday morning, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. simultaneously posted a video to X
“We’re going to do more with less,” Kennedy said in the video, adding that “this will be a painful period for HHS as we downsize.”
HHS provided numbers on how many employees would be removed from its key sub-agencies, but offered few specifics:
FDA will lose 3,500 workers, though this won’t affect drug, medical device, and food reviewers, or inspectors
CDC will lose 2,400 employees, and will focus on preparing for and responding to epidemics and outbreaks
As the United States transitions into a fascist oligarchic autocracy, quite predictably, changes are being made to the tax laws so that they favor MAGAt monarch Trump, his family, and his oligarch funders. This article describes the federal estate tax, something you may never have even heard of. This is the only media report I have seen on this. Part of the fascist game is to create so much chaos that all kinds of important governmental changes don’t even get covered. This is an example of what I mean.
Elon Musk stands on stage with Donald Trump during a rally at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C. Credit: Tom Brenner / The Washington Post / Getty
Americans for Tax Fairness has crunched the numbers and found that a Republican push to do away with the federal estate tax—a measure that’s been described as an “aristocracy prevention act”—could yield billions for the families of U.S. President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, according to a report from the advocacy group published Thursday.
Abolishing the estate tax, a tax on the wealth of the richest Americans when they die, could save Musk’s family up to roughly $132 billion, and could save Trump’s heirs up to around $2 billion, according to ATF, which made its calculation using recent estimates of each man’s net worth. The top federal estate tax rate is 40%.
The group noted that “both the Trump and Musk families have undoubtedly set up elaborate estate-tax-avoidance schemes, as most superwealthy families do. Since we do not know what tax-avoidance schemes they have undertaken, we have calculated the […]
Over the past three weeks, I have received five emails from SR readers who live in other countries telling me that they are cancelling their plans to come to the United States for vacations or business. A sixth reader, a German medical researcher, told me that she had been offered a research grant that would have required her to come to Massachusetts, but after talking it over with her husband, she decided to turn the fellowship down. She said, “The United States is just too scary under Trump; it is turning into East Germany when I was a child.” I think the American tourist businesses are going to be significantly impacted.
The German and the U.S. flags fly in front of the Chancellery in Berlin, on Oct. 18, 2024. John MacDougall/AFP via Getty
Some European countries, as well as Canada, are warning their citizens who travel to the United States to strictly follow the country’s entry rules or risk detention as the Trump administration cracks down on immigration enforcement.
Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Canada have revised their guidelines at a time when some travelers from these countries have been detained by immigration officials.
Here is what to know about the advisories.
Why are these countries issuing warnings?
The heightened advisories come after citizens from European countries have been detained and deported by immigration officials while traveling to the United States. Some of the warnings also note that the State Department has also suspended its policy allowing transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to update the sex field on their passports — eliminating the X marker as an option.
“We will enforce visa rules and other conditions of entry,” a State Department spokesperson told NPR on Saturday. “Prohibiting travel into the United States by those […]
Marina Dunbar, U.S. Guardian Fellow - The Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan:
MAGAt Monarch Trump’s regime has just ended vaccine aid for millions of children in the developing countries. It is estimated that will result in the death of several million children. It will also ensure that Americans, particularly unvaccinated Americans, both adults and children, who travel to any of these countries may now be exposed to everything from polio to measles, and bring those illnesses back to the United States when they return. Since the U.S. healthcare system has been decimated, I predict we are going to see illnesses that have rarely occurred in this country recently return.
A Somali baby is given a pentavalent vaccine injection at a clinic in Mogadishu in 2013 through initiatives of the Gavi Alliance, Unicef and WHO. Credit: Carl de Souza/ AFP / Getty
The Trump administration is planning to end funding for Gavi, a global health organization that helps provide vaccines and other life-saving care to developing countries.
A 281-page spreadsheet obtained by the New York Times lists the Trump administration’s plans for thousands of foreign aid programs, including financial cuts to the organization that buys vaccines for children, as well as scaling back on programs that combat malaria in developing countries.
Gavi is estimated to have saved the lives of 19 million children since it was set up 25 years ago with the US contributing 13% of its budget, the Times said.
“The US has historically been one of Gavi’s biggest donors and I hope that longstanding champions on Capitol Hill will urge the administration to reverse course,” said Janeen Madan Keller, policy fellow and deputy director of the global health policy program at the Center for Global Development.
