China is beating U.S. in biotech advances, report warns
Why it matters: Advanced biotechnology is critical to national security, public health and the ability to continue feeding the population.
The U.S. slipping as the world's biotechnology leader "would signal a global power shift toward China," says the report from the congressionally appointed National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology.
State of play: China has made biotechnology a national priority over the past two decades, and U.S. biotech companies are struggling to attract investors in the current market.
China's ability to use artificial intelligence to notch new biotech wins is accelerating and contributing to its rise in the space — and making it increasingly harder for the U.S. to keep up.
Beijing's ascendency in the sector could allow it to weaponize biotechnology against the U.S., the report warns.
Securing America's position as the global leader of biotechnology will require a whole-government strategy, along with incentives for the private sector and investment in the talent pipeline, per the report.
"There is time to act, but no time to wait," the report says.
Zoom in: The report makes dozens of recommendations for how the U.S. can remain dominant, including establishing an investment fund to back tech startups that strengthen national and economic security.
Congress should also create a National Biotechnology Coordination Office in the White House to coordinate regulation and competition initiatives and prohibit companies working with U.S. national security and health agencies from using certain Chinese suppliers.
Catch up quick: The report is the result of two years of deliberation and research conducted between April 2023 and February 2025 by the bipartisan commission, which includes four members of Congress and seven academics, industry leaders and former defense and intelligence officials.
What to watch: Whether any legislation arising from the recommendations gains traction in Congress.
Congress couldn't agree last year on whether to ban federal contracts with certain Chinese biotech research and equipment firms deemed national security threats.
The theme of biotechnology as a national security asset is also manifesting itself elsewhere: It's expected to drive anticipated tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
The bottom line: The federal government needs to put significant resources into biotechnology over the next five years, commission member Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) is expected to say today in a House of Representatives hearing about the report.
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Los Angeles Times
27 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Millions of Californians may lose health coverage because of new Medicaid work requirements
The nation's first mandated work requirement for Medicaid recepients, approved by the Republican-led Congress and signed by President Trump, is expected to have a seismic effect in California. One estimate from state health officials suggests that as many as 3.4 million people could lose their insurance through what Gov. Gavin Newsom calls the 'labyrinth of manual verification,' which involves Medi-Cal recipients proving every six months that they are working, going to school or volunteering at least 80 hours per month. 'It's going to be much harder to stay insured,' said Martha Santana-Chin, the head of L.A. Care Health Plan, a publicly operated health plan that serves about 2.3 million Medi-Cal patients in Los Angeles County. She said that as many as 1 million people, or about 20% to 40% of its members, could lose their coverage. The work requirement will be the first imposed nationwide in the six-decade history of Medicaid, the program that provides free and subsidized health insurance to disabled and low-income Americans. It's relatively uncharted territory, and it's not yet clear how the rules will shake out for the 5.1 million people in California who will be required to prove that they are working in order to qualify for Medi-Cal, the state's version of Medicaid. After the 2026 midterm elections, millions of healthy adults will be required to prove every six months that they meet the work requirement in order to qualify for Medicaid. The new mandate spells out some exceptions, including for people who are pregnant, in addiction treatment or caring for children under age 14. Democrats have long argued that work requirements generally lead to eligible people l osing their health insurance due to bureaucratic hurdles. Republicans say that a work requirement will encourage healthy people to get jobs and preserve Medicaid for those who truly need it. 'If you clean that up and shore it up, you save a lot of money,' said House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana. 'And you return the dignity of work to young men who need to be out working instead of playing video games all day.' Only three U.S. states have tried to implement work requirements for Medicaid recipients: New Hampshire, Arkansas and Georgia. One study found that in the first three months of the Arkansas program, more than 18,000 people lost health coverage. People can lose coverage a variety of ways, said Joan Alker, a Georgetown University professor who studies Medicaid. Some people hear that the rules have changed and assume they are no longer eligible. Others struggle to prove their eligibility because their income fluctuates, they are paid in cash or their jobs don't keep good payroll records. Some have problems with the technology or forms, she said, and others don't appeal their rejections. Of the 15 million people on Medi-Cal in California, about one-third will be required to prove they are working, the state said. Those people earn very little: less than $21,000 for a single person and less than $43,000 for a household of four. The state's estimate of 3.4 million people losing coverage is a projection based on what happened in Arkansas and New Hampshire. But those programs were brief, overturned by the courts and weren't 'a coordinated effort among the states to figure out what the best practices are,' said Ryan Long, the director of congressional relations at the Paragon Health Institute, a conservative think tank that has become influential among congressional Republicans. Long said advancements in technology and a national emphasis on work requirements should make work verification less of a barrier. The budget bill includes $200 million in grants for states to update their systems to prepare, he said. Arguments from liberal groups that people will lose healthcare are a 'straw man argument,' Long said: 'They know that the public supports work requirements for these benefits, so they can't come out and say, 'We don't support them.'' A poll by the health research group KFF found this year that 62% of American adults support tying Medicaid eligibility to work requirements. The poll also found that support for the policy drops to less than 1 in 3 people when respondents hear 'that most people on Medicaid are already working and many would risk losing coverage because of the burden of proving eligibility through paperwork.' In June, Newsom warned that some Californians could be forced to fill out 36 pages of paperwork to keep their insurance, showing reporters an image of a stack of forms with teal and gold accents that he described as 'an actual PDF example of the paperwork that people will have to submit to for their eligibility checks.' Many Californians already are required to fill out that 36-page form or its online equivalent to enroll in Medi-Cal and Covered California, the state's health insurance marketplace. Experts say it's too soon to say what system will be used for people to prove their work eligibility, because federal guidance won't be finalized for months. Newsom's office directed questions to the Department of Health Care Services, which runs Medi-Cal. A spokesperson there said officials are 'still reviewing the full operational impacts' of the work requirements. 'The idea that you are going to get a paper submission every six months, I'm not sure people have to do that,' Long said. Georgia is the only state that has implemented a lasting work requirement for Medicaid. Two years ago, the state made healthcare available to people who were working at least 80 hours per month and earned less than the federal poverty limit (about $15,000 for one person or $31,200 for a household of four). More than 100,000 people have applied for coverage since the program's launch in July of 2023. As of June of this year, more than 8,000 people were enrolled, according to the state's most recent data. The Medicaid program has cost more than $100 million so far, and of that, $26 million was spent on health benefits and more than $20 million was allocated to marketing contracts, KFF Health News reported. Democrats in Georgia have sought an investigation into the program. The Inland Empire agency that provides Medi-Cal coverage for about 1.5 million people in San Bernardino and Riverside counties estimated that 150,000 members could lose their insurance as a result of work requirements. Jarrod McNaughton, the chief executive of the Inland Empire Health Plan, said that California's 58 counties, which administer Medi-Cal, 'will be the ones at the precipice of piecing this together' but haven't yet received guidance on how the eligibility process will be set up or what information people will have to provide. Will it be done online? Will recipients be required to fill out a piece of paper that needs to be mailed in or dropped off? 'We don't really know the process yet, because all of this is so new,' Naughton said. In the meantime, he said, the health plan's foundation is working to make this 'as least burdensome as possible,' working to improve community outreach and connect people who receive Medi-Cal insurance to volunteer opportunities.
Los Angeles Times
27 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Newsom's cynical redistricting ploy should be rejected by voters
Gov. Gavin Newsom's political ambitions have reached a new low. In his efforts to look like a 'fighter' ahead of a potential run for the presidency in 2028, he's willing to ignore democratic rules in pursuit of political aims, setting aside the state's independent redistricting system to counter Texas Republicans' proposed partisan gerrymander. Newsom and his allies want to maximize the number of California Democrats elected to Congress in next year's midterm elections. In 2008 and 2010, California voters passed ballot initiatives that gave the power to draw the state's legislative and congressional district lines to the California Citizens Redistricting Commission, a 14-person independent body composed of five Democrats, five Republicans and four people who are registered with neither of the two major parties. Potential commissioners go through an extensive vetting and selection process (which the state Legislature participates in) and are prohibited from many forms of political activism, including donating to candidates, running for office or working for elected officials. Since the latest redistricting, in 2021 — triggered as usual by the constitutionally mandated decennial census — the map crafted by the commission has survived legal and political challenges, and the current districts are set to be in place through the next round of redistricting in 2031. Now Newsom wants to prematurely redraw the lines and craft his own partisan gerrymander for the November 2026 midterm elections, wresting control of the process away from the commission and giving it instead to the Democratic majority in the state Legislature. Last week, Newsom confirmed that he will call a special election to get voter approval for this end-run around the commission, but even dressed up with a vote, this is cynical politics, not democracy, at work. Newsom's excuse is the sudden partisan redistricting Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and President Trump are backing to increase the number of Republicans elected to Congress from that state, and in turn, to enhance the party's chances to retain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. California Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) calls the Texas action a 'Trumpian power grab,' and Newsom assails it as the 'rigging of the system by the president of the United States.' (Recent public opinion research conducted by Newsom's pollster revealed that the public is more likely to support a California redistricting maneuver if the fight has Trump, not Texas, as the central villain.) But two wrongs don't make a right. A key difference between the proposed line redrawing in Texas and the California plan is that the former, however brazen, is legal and precedented, while the latter specifically contravenes California law and the expressed will of the state's voters. In Texas, legislators are entrusted with drawing district lines, and a mid-decade partisan gerrymander they executed in 2003, again to boost Republican representation in the U.S. House, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court (except for one district whose lines violated the Voting Rights Act). But California voters explicitly placed the drawing of district lines in the hands of the independent citizens' commission to take politicians out of the process. Commissioners draw district lines based on numerous factors, including laws, judicial decisions and population shifts. They're bound by a basic rule: District lines cannot be drawn to purposefully benefit a specific party or candidate. And all the commission's deliberations must happen in public. The maps they've devised have been criticized by both Democrats and Republicans; and that's one of the many reasons why California voters entrusted the commission with this important power. If Newsom gets his way, California's districts for the 2026 midterm will ensure the election of as few Republicans as possible. Recent reports suggest that his gerrymander will mean Republicans win only four out of 52 House seats (9%), compared with the current California delegation, which includes nine Republicans (17%). Republicans make up about 25% of California's registered voters and statewide Republican candidates have won roughly 40% of the vote over the last few election cycles. The fact that Newsom's plan returns the power to redistrict to the citizens commission after the midterms makes it no less a subversion of the democratically expressed will of California's voters. To add insult to injury, the cost of the special election to ratify the scheme is estimated to be about $60 million in Los Angeles County alone, with statewide costs likely exceeding $200 million. By bending electoral rules in service of their own political interests, Newsom and California Democrats become no better than Abbott and Texas Republicans. And Newsom's hypocrisy strains the credibility of his argument that Trump and his allies are diminishing democracy. If Newsom moves forward with his cynical plan, Californians will at least have the power to reject it at the ballot box this November. Voters should reinforce their commitment to minimizing the role of partisanship and politics in redistricting, and to the independent California Citizens Redistricting Commission. Lanhee J. Chen, a contributing writer to Opinion, is an American public policy fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was a Republican candidate for California controller in 2022.
Los Angeles Times
27 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Why Texas could face greater legal hurdles than California in redistricting fight
California is in a standoff with Texas over redistricting that could decide the balance of power in Congress for the end of Donald Trump's presidency — a high-stakes gambit with risks for both sides. But if the courts have their say, Texas, facing accusations of racial discrimination, may find itself at a distinct legal disadvantage. Both efforts by Texas Republicans and California Democrats are blatantly partisan, proposing a mid-decade redrawing of district lines for the express purpose of benefiting their party in the 2026 midterm elections. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is working with a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature on 'trigger' legislation that would schedule a ballot initiative this fall for the new maps. It was a direct response to a Texas plan, supported by Trump and currently in motion in the Austin statehouse, to potentially flip five seats in the upcoming election from blue to red. The Supreme Court has ruled that judges are powerless to review partisan gerrymandering, even if, as it wrote in 2019, the practice is 'incompatible with democratic principles.' The court ruled in Rucho vs. Common Cause that partisan gerrymandering 'is incompatible with the 1st Amendment, that the government shouldn't do this, and that legislatures and people who undertake this aren't complying with the letter of the Constitution,' said Chad Dunn, a professor and legal director of the UCLA Voting Rights Project who has argued multiple cases before the Supreme Court. 'But it concluded that doesn't mean the U.S. Supreme Court is the solution to it.' What courts can still do, however, is enforce the core provisions of the Voting Rights Act, which bars states from redistricting that 'packs' or 'cracks' minority groups in ways that dilute their voting power. 'Texas doesn't need to have a good reason or a legitimate reason to engage in mid-decade redistricting — even if it's clear that Texas is doing this for pure partisan reasons, nothing in federal law at the moment, at least, would preclude that,' said Richard Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University. 'But Texas cannot redistrict in a way that would violate the Voting Rights Act.' In 2023, addressing a redistricting fight in Alabama over Black voter representation, the current makeup of the high court ruled in Allen vs. Milligan that discriminating against minority voters in gerrymandering is unconstitutional, ordering the Southern state to create a second minority-majority district. Today, Texas' proposed maps may face a similar challenge, amid accusations that they are 'cracking' racially diverse communities while preserving white-majority districts, legal scholars said. Already, the state's 2021 congressional maps are under legal scrutiny over discrimination concerns. 'The Supreme Court affirmed two years ago that the Voting Rights Act works the way we all thought it worked,' said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division. 'That's part of the reason for current litigation in Texas, and will undoubtedly be a part of continuing litigation if Texas redraws their lines and goes ahead with it.' The groundwork for the current Texas plan appears to have been laid with a letter from Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, who threatened Texas with legal action over three 'coalition districts' that she argued were unconstitutional. Coalition districts feature multiple minority communities, none of which comprises the majority. The resulting maps proposed by Texas redraw all three. J. Morgan Kousser, a Caltech professor who recently testified in the ongoing case over Texas' 2021 redistricting effort, said the politics of race in Texas specifically, and the South generally, make its redistricting challenges plain to see but harder to solve. How do you distinguish between partisanship, which is allowed, and racism, which is not, in states where partisanship falls so neatly down racial lines? That dilemma may become Texas' greatest legal problem, as well as its saving grace in court, Kousser said. 'In Texas, as in most Southern states, the connection between race and party is so close that it is exceedingly difficult to distinguish between them,' he said. 'That seems to give a get-out-of-jail free card, essentially, to anybody who can claim this is partisan, rather than racial.' Today, nine states face ongoing litigation concerning potential violations of the Voting Rights Act, a law that turned 60 years old this week. Seven are in the South — states that had for decades been subject to a pre-clearance requirement at the Justice Department before being allowed to change state voting laws. The Supreme Court struck down the requirement, in the case of Shelby County vs. Holder, in 2013. Newsom has been vocal in his stance that California should position itself to be the national bulwark against the Texas plan. Last week, the Democratic caucuses of the state Legislature heard a presentation by the UCLA Voting Rights Project on how California might legally gerrymander its own maps for the 2026 midterms. Matt Barreto, the co-founder of the project and a professor of political science and Chicana/o and Central American studies, said his organization's position is that gerrymandering 'should not be allowed by any state,' he said. But 'if other states are playing the game, the governor is saying he wants to play the game too,' Barreto added. He said that although five seats have been discussed to match what Texas is doing, he sees a pathway for California to create seven seats that would be safely Democratic. That includes potential redraws in Orange County, San Diego, the Inland Empire and the northern part of the state. Barreto said there are many districts that currently skew as much as 80% Democratic, and by pulling some of those blue voters into nearby red districts, they could be flipped without risk to the current incumbents, though some new districts may have odd shapes. For example, districts in the north could become elongated to reach into blue Sacramento or the Bay Area, 'using the exact same standards that Texas does,' he said. Legislators seemed receptive to the idea. 'We've taken basic American rights for granted for too long,and I think we're ill equipped to protect them,' said Assemblymember Maggy Krell (D-Sacramento), who attended the meeting. 'To me, this is much bigger than Texas,' she said. State Sen. Tom Umberg (D-Santa Ana), who has worked on redistricting in the past, echoed that support for Newsom, saying he was not 'comfortable' with the idea of gerrymandering but felt 'compelled' in the current circumstances. 'In order to respond to what's going on in Texas in particular,' Umberg said, 'we should behave in a like manner.' Barreto, the UCLA professor, warned that if any redistricting happens in California, 'no matter what, there's going to be a lawsuit.' Dunn said that it's possible voters could sue under the Voting Rights Act in California, claiming the new districts violate their right to fair representation — even white voters, who have more traditionally been on the other side of such legal actions. The 1965 law is 'for everybody, of every race and ethnicity,' Dunn said. A lawsuit 'could be on behalf of the places where the white community is in the minority.' The prospect of that litigation and the chaos it could cause gives pause to some voting rights experts who see the current situation as a race to the bottom that could ultimately harm democracy by undermining voters' trust in the system. 'It's mutual destruction,' said Mindy Romero, a voting expert and professor at USC, of the Texas-California standoff. The best outcome of the current situation, she said, would be for Congress to take action to prohibit partisan gerrymandering nationwide. This week, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), who represents a district north of Sacramento that would be vulnerable in redistricting, introduced legislation that would bar mid-decade redistricting. So far, it has gained little support. 'Just like lots of other things, Congress is dropping the ball by not addressing this national problem,' said Richard Hasen, a UCLA professor of political science and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project. 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