Only practicing physician in Congress: Trump diagnosis won't ‘deter him from his job'
'As far as the president's health, making sure – look, he is robust. This is not going to defer him, or, deter him, from his job,' Murphy said during his Thursday appearance on NewsNation's show 'The Hill.'
The White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Thursday that Trump underwent medical testing because of 'mild swelling' in his legs and bruising on his hand. The test revealed that the president has chronic venous insufficiency.
The condition occurs when the person's leg veins have a hard time pumping blood back to the heart, leading the blood to pool, the Cleveland Clinic said. There was no evidence of deep vein thrombosis or arterial disease, according to Leavitt.
'This is not an uncommon thing. As people get older, the veins have little valves in them, and that's what allows blood to stay in a place, and then muscles contract and actually pushes blood from the legs back up into the heart,' Murphy told host Blake Burman. 'As time goes by, these valves become a little bit more incompetent. They're not working quite as well, so that leads to some stasis, some blood not coming back up as well.'
White House physician Sean Barbabella said in a Thursday memo that Trump's medical team did an echocardiogram, which showed 'normal cardiac structure and function.'
'No signs of heart failure, renal impairment, or systemic illness were identified,' Barbabella said.
The White House physician also said bruising on Trump's hand was 'consistent with minor soft tissue damage from frequent handshaking' and due to him often taking aspirin.
'[Trump] had an echocardiogram to look to make sure he didn't have what they call right heart failure, where the right heart is not taking in the blood like it should. That didn't seem to be a problem,' Murphy said. 'So this is a common thing, you know, and apparently he takes aspirin, so that's the bruising on the hand, very common stuff.'
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Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Some States Are Seeking to Deregulate Child Care. Advocates Are Fighting Back
Content warning: This story includes details of an infant's death. After Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan in 2021, states were flush with federal funding to help prop the child care sector up. But that money is now all gone, and as Republicans in Congress threaten to pass spending cuts that could further shrink state budgets, lawmakers are trying to find solutions to the child care crisis that don't cost money. Many have proposed changing the mandated ratios that require a certain number of early educators to care for young kids. Nearly a dozen states have considered rolling back child care regulations, including those governing staff-to-child ratios. But while these deregulatory bills are common, it's not a foregone conclusion that they will pass. Advocates in three states have been able to beat back these efforts in the legislative sessions that just wrapped up by mobilizing a wide variety of people to speak up against these proposals and deploying research-backed arguments about child safety and child care supply. Eliminating Ratios Entirely Idaho advocates faced down the most extreme bill. In its original form, HB243 would have eliminated all requirements that limit the number of young children an early educator can care for, leaving it up to individual providers. It would have been the first state in the country to take such a step. Advocates had very little time to fight back. The bill got fast tracked; there was less than 24 hours' notice before the first public hearing on it in the House. 'You can't get child care providers and parents there in that amount of time,' said Christine Tiddens, executive director of Idaho Voices for Children, a nonprofit that advocates for child-focused policies, noting that it requires moving work schedules and getting people to cover shifts. The bill sailed through the House. Eventually, Tiddens said, they were able to put parents and providers in front of lawmakers to warn of the negative consequences. One of those parents was Idaho resident Kelly Emry. On June 10, 2024, she got a panicked call from the home-based child care provider where she had just started sending her 11-week-old son Logan. She dashed to the provider's home and was told he was dead. The coroner's report later confirmed he died from asphyxiation. According to Emry, the coroner said the provider put him down for a nap between a rolled up blanket and a pillow and left him there for hours. The provider was caring for 11 kids by herself that day, putting her out of compliance with state regulations that, at the time, required at least two staff members. 'It was completely preventable, and that's what's so hard for me to come to terms with,' Emry said in a podcast interview in January. Emry wasn't the only one who spoke up. Once the bill got to the Senate, advocates packed the hearing and overflow rooms with several hundred people. Among the 40 people who signed up to testify, 38 opposed the bill. Baby Logan's uncle spoke, as did pediatricians, fire marshals, nurses, the state police, child welfare experts, child care providers and parents. Lawmakers were flooded with thousands of calls and emails from the opposition. Tiddens made sure every senator was sent the podcast interview with Emry. The bill passed the Senate committee by a single vote. Advocates decided to try to stop the worst elements, knowing that the bill was likely to pass in some form. They asked a senator who opposed it to 'throw a Hail Mary,' Tiddens said. When the bill came to the Senate floor, he asked for unanimous support to pull it and move it into the amending process. He got it. The original elimination of staff-to-child ratios was stripped out; instead, the bill preserved ratios, albeit higher ones than before. Under previous law, Idaho ranked at No. 41 among all states for how high its ratios were; now it has dropped even further to No. 45. The victory is 'bittersweet,' Tiddens said. She attributes it almost solely to one thing: putting parents, not just businesses and child care providers, in front of lawmakers, which led to the moving account of Logan's family, still in the midst of raw grief. 'How could you listen and not have your heart changed?' Tiddens asked. Related Doubling Family Child Care Ratios Advocates in Maryland have fought back against legislation to loosen staff-to-child ratios twice now. Last year, lawmakers introduced a bill to raise the ratios in family child care settings, but it died thanks to 'a lot of advocacy,' said Beth Morrow, director of public policy at the Maryland Family Network, a nonprofit focused on child care. As in Idaho, the American Academy of Pediatrics and fire marshals warned about what would happen in the case of emergencies. Children under 2 years old are 'not capable of self-preservation,' Morrow pointed out; they might hide when a fire alarm goes off and can't evacuate on their own. 'If there is an emergency you have to be able to get these kids out,' she said. The idea returned this year in House Bill 477, this time coupled with looser ratios for center-based care. Family providers are currently allowed to care for eight children but no more than two under the age of 2; the legislation would have doubled that, allowing providers to watch as many as four children under the age of 1. That was a 'nonstarter,' Morrow said. It would also have been the first time that these rules were dictated by lawmakers rather than by the Maryland State Department of Education, which would have been barred from changing them in the future. So advocates marshalled research, with the help of national groups including the National Association for the Education of Young Children and Center for Law and Social Policy. They highlighted that there has been no evidence that stricter child care regulations lead to reduced supply. Lawmakers seemed moved by the argument that lower ratios support better health and safety for children. During the markup session, the chief sponsor amended the bill by striking the language about higher ratios; instead, the version that passed requires the Department of Education to study child care regulations with an eye toward alleviating barriers for providers. Ratio Increases by Another Name In Minnesota, lawmakers took a different approach to proposing changes to the number of staff required to care for young children this session. Their legislation avoided mentioning the term 'ratios' at all. Instead, the issue was presented as an exemption for in-home child care providers caring for their own children as well. The legislation originally would have exempted as many as three of the providers' own children from the number they are licensed to watch. 'That's a direct ratio increase, no way around that,' said Clare Sanford, vice president of government and community relations at New Horizon Academy, a child care and preschool provider. 'You still have the same number of adults but you're increasing the number of children that adult is responsible for.' In later drafts, the number of children who could be exempted kept being reduced. In the end the legislation didn't get a standalone vote and the language was left out of the final state budget. The argument that Sanford thinks worked the best was that increasing ratios wouldn't actually increase child care supply. That's because, as a brief by NAEYC argues, they will lead to more burnout among providers, which will push them to leave and, in the end, reduce available child care spots. The fight is far from over. Advocates in all three states expect lawmakers to try to loosen staff-to-child ratios again next session. Tiddens fears that, although Idaho didn't eliminate ratios, the idea could spread. 'Idaho has often been a frontrunner for harmful legislation,' she said. On the whole, more of these laws have been signed than stopped, said Diane Girouard, state policy senior analyst at ChildCare Aware of America. Ratio deregulation bills pop up 'in some states every single year,' she said. 'This isn't just unique to red, conservative states. It has happened in blue states, it has happened in purple states.' Advocates who oppose raising these ratios are formulating responses to the child care crisis that preserve safety standards without requiring state funding. In Maryland, for example, Morrow's organization helped pass a bill that removes legal barriers to opening and operating family child care programs. The hope is that with more solutions on the table to increase child care supply, states won't look to options that erode safety standards, such as increasing ratios. Tiddens has vowed to fight back. 'We're not going away, and we're going to show up next session with our own proposal,' she said. Her coalition plans to formulate a bill for next year that 'prioritizes child safety at the same time as dealing with the child care shortage,' she said. Solve the daily Crossword
Atlantic
2 hours ago
- Atlantic
Trump's ‘Gold Standard' for Science Manufactures Doubt
Late last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a document detailing its vision for scientific integrity. Its nine tenets, first laid out in President Donald Trump's executive order for ' Restoring Gold Standard Science,' seem anodyne enough: They include calls for federal and federally supported science to be reproducible and transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, and subject to unbiased peer review. Some of the tenets might be difficult to apply in practice—one can't simply reproduce the results of studies on the health effects of climate disasters, for example, and funding is rarely available to replicate expensive studies. But these unremarkable principles hide a dramatic shift in the relationship between science and government. Trump's executive order promises to ensure that 'federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.' In practice, however, it gives political appointees—most of whom are not scientists—the authority to define scientific integrity and then decide which evidence counts and how it should be interpreted. The president has said that these measures are necessary to restore trust in the nation's scientific enterprise— which has indeed eroded since the last time he was in office. But these changes will likely only undermine trust further. Political officials no longer need to rigorously disprove existing findings; they can cast doubt on inconvenient evidence, or demand unattainable levels of certainty, to make those conclusions appear unsettled or unreliable. In this way, the executive order opens the door to reshaping science to fit policy goals rather than allowing policy to be guided by the best available evidence. Its tactics echo the 'doubt science' pioneered by the tobacco industry, which enabled cigarette manufacturers to market a deadly product for decades. But the tobacco industry could only have dreamed of having the immense power of the federal government. Applied to government, these tactics are ushering this country into a new era of doubt in science and enabling political appointees to block any regulatory action they want to, whether it's approving a new drug or limiting harmful pollutants. Historically, political appointees generally—though not always—deferred to career government scientists when assessing and reporting on the scientific evidence underlying policy decisions. But during Trump's first term, these norms began to break down, and political officials asserted far greater control over all facets of science-intensive policy making, particularly in contentious areas such as climate science. In response, the Biden administration invested considerable effort in restoring scientific integrity and independence, building new procedures and frameworks to bolster the role of career scientists in federal decision making. Trump's new executive order not only rescinds these Joe Biden–era reforms but also reconceptualizes the meaning of scientific integrity. Under the Biden-era framework, for example, the definition of scientific integrity focused on 'professional practices, ethical behavior, and the principles of honesty and objectivity when conducting, managing, using the results of, and communicating about science and scientific activities.' The framework also emphasized transparency, and political appointees and career staff were both required to uphold these scientific standards. Now the Trump administration has scrapped that process, and appointees enjoy full control over what scientific integrity means and how agencies review and synthesize scientific literature necessary to support and shape policy decisions. Although not perfect, the Biden framework also included a way for scientists to appeal decisions by their supervisors. By contrast, Trump's executive order creates a mechanism by which career scientists who publicly dissent from the pronouncements of political appointees can be charged with 'scientific misconduct' and be subject to disciplinary action. The order says such misconduct does not include differences of opinion, but gives political appointees the power to determine what counts, while providing employees no route for appeal. This dovetails with other proposals by the administration to make it easier to fire career employees who express inconvenient scientific judgments. When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Kush Desai argued that 'public perception of scientific integrity completely eroded during the COVID era, when Democrats and the Biden administration consistently invoked an unimpeachable 'the science' to justify and shut down any reasonable questioning of unscientific lockdowns, school shutdowns, and various intrusive mandates' and that the administration is now 'rectifying the American people's complete lack of trust of this politicized scientific establishment.' But the reality is that, armed with this new executive order, officials can now fill the administrative record with caveats, uncertainties, and methodological limitations—regardless of their relevance or significance, and often regardless of whether they could ever realistically be resolved. This strategy is especially powerful against standards enacted under a statute that takes a precautionary approach in the face of limited scientific evidence. Some of our most important protections have been implemented while acknowledging scientific uncertainty. In 1978, although industry groups objected that uncertainty was still too high to justify regulations, several agencies banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol spray cans, based on modeling that predicted CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. The results of the modeling were eventually confirmed, and the scientists who did the work were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Elevating scientific uncertainty above other values gives political appointees a new tool to roll back public-health and environmental standards and to justify regulatory inaction. The result is a scientific record created less to inform sound decision making than to delay it—giving priority to what we don't know over what we do. Certainly, probing weaknesses in scientific findings is central to the scientific enterprise, and good science should look squarely at ways in which accepted truths might be wrong. But manufacturing and magnifying doubt undercuts science's ability to describe reality with precision and fealty, and undermines legislation that directs agencies to err on the side of protecting health and the environment. In this way, the Trump administration can effectively violate statutory requirements by stealth, undermining Congress's mandate for precaution by manipulating the scientific record to appear more uncertain than scientists believe it is. An example helps bring these dynamics into sharper focus. In recent years, numerous studies have linked PFAS compounds —known as 'forever chemicals' because they break down extremely slowly, if at all, in the environment and in human bodies—to a range of health problems, including immunologic and reproductive effects; developmental effects or delays in children, including low birth weight, accelerated puberty, and behavioral changes; and increased risk of prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers. Yet despite promises from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to better protect the public from PFAS compounds, efforts to weaken current protections are already under way. The president has installed in a key position at the EPA a former chemical-industry executive who, in the first Trump administration, helped make regulating PFAS compounds more difficult. After industry objected to rules issued by the Biden administration, Trump's EPA announced that it is delaying enforcement of drinking-water standards for two of the PFAS forever chemicals until 2031 and rescinding the standards for four others. But Zeldin faces a major hurdle in accomplishing this feat: The existing PFAS standards are backed by the best currently available scientific evidence linking these specific chemicals to a range of adverse health effects. Here, the executive order provides exactly the tools needed to rewrite the scientific basis for such a decision. First, political officials can redefine what counts as valid science by establishing their own version of the 'gold standard.' Appointees can instruct government scientists to comb through the revised body of evidence and highlight every disagreement or limitation—regardless of its relevance or scientific weight. They can cherry-pick the data, giving greater weight to studies that support a favored result. Emphasizing uncertainty biases the government toward inaction: The evidence no longer justifies regulating these exposures. This 'doubt science' strategy is further enabled by industry's long-standing refusal to test many of its own PFAS compounds—of which there are more than 12,000, only a fraction of which have been tested —creating large evidence gaps. The administration can claim that regulation is premature until more 'gold standard' research is conducted. But who will conduct that research? Industry has little incentive to investigate the risks of its own products, and the Trump administration has shown no interest in requiring it to do so. Furthermore, the government controls the flow of federal research funding and can restrict public science at its source. In fact, the EPA under Trump has already canceled millions of dollars in PFAS research, asserting that the work is 'no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.' In a broader context, the 'gold standard' executive order is just one part of the administration's larger effort to weaken the nation's scientific infrastructure. Rather than restore 'the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good,' as the executive order promises, Elon Musk and his DOGE crew fired hundreds, if not thousands, of career scientists and abruptly terminated billions of dollars of ongoing research. To ensure that federal research support remains low, Trump's recently proposed budget slashes the research budgets of virtually every government research agency, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the EPA. Following the hollowing-out of the nation's scientific infrastructure through deep funding cuts and the firing of federal scientists, the executive order is an attempt to rewrite the rules of how our expert bureaucracy operates. It marks a fundamental shift: The already weakened expert agencies will no longer be tasked with producing scientific findings that are reliable by professional standards and insulated from political pressure. Instead, political officials get to intervene at any point to elevate studies that support their agenda and, when necessary, are able to direct agency staff—under threat of insubordination—to scour the record for every conceivable uncertainty or point of disagreement. The result is a system in which science, rather than informing policy, is shaped to serve it.
The Hill
3 hours ago
- The Hill
Tuberville says Trump health issues exacerbated by ‘fighting the radicals'
After President Trump was diagnosed with a chronic vein condition, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) suggested the president's health condition could be a result of his efforts in 'fighting the radicals.' 'The pressure on somebody like President Trump right now, not just from outside entities … all over the world but also fighting the radicals in this country,' Tuberville said during a Sunday interview with radio host John Catsimatidis on WABC 770 AM's 'The Cats Roundtable. 'Every day it's almost like a fistfight.' The White House announced Thursday that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition where leg veins have difficulty sending blood back to the heart. It often results in ankle swelling and is common in people over the age of 70. On the show, Tuberville repeated baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and claimed that illegal immigrants were voting in droves for Democrats. Tuberville also bashed Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor. 'He's a communist! No police? Are you kidding me?' the Alabama senator exclaimed. Mamdani called for defunding the police in 2020, but vowed not to do so during a June debate. He identifies as a Democratic socialist. Catsimatidis is leading a coalition of wealthy business leaders to back Mayor Eric Adams' bid for re-election as a way to oppose Mamdani, Politico reported in June.
