Mother JonesModify

2026-04-30 20:00:00

Over the last few months, Trader Joe’s has pulled thousands of cases of focaccia bread and frozen fried rice from its shelves for potentially having fragments of metal or glass, respectively. If that makes you a little nervous about stocking up on other TJ favorites like cookie butter and Everything But the Bagel crackers, you’re not alone. (Trader Joe’s website notes that the company takes “these matters seriously—personally, even.”)

Monti Carlo, a chef who breaks down food recalls on her Substack, told me in November that at one point during the fall, it felt like there were too many recalls for her to keep track of. There was a listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals, an infant botulism outbreak in ByHeart whole nutrition infant formula, and a recall of certain corn dogs and sausage-on-a-stick products for potential pieces of wood in the batter. “You have to ask yourself, ‘What is going on?’” Carlo said. 

According to experts, the answer is complicated. For the past year especially, food safety has been in turmoil. 

Last fall, the 43-day government shutdown led to the furlough of over 30,000 employees at the Department of Health and Human Services, stalling public health communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and delaying inspections of food facilities. Then there was the Trump administration’s layoff of 3,859 FDA and 2,499 CDC employees by the end of 2025, as part of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services in accordance with the DOGE effort to cut costs. 

While it isn’t totally clear yet how the shutdown and layoffs will affect the food safety system, when a system on the brink loses thousands of workers, it creates fractures in an already delicate food system. In a March 2025 Consumer Reports article, food safety experts in and outside the agency agreed “that the food program’s budget was already inadequate to carry out the amount of oversight required even before the new administration took over.” 

For animal products like meat and poultry, food safety regulations are created and maintained by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, while the safety of all other food products is overseen by the Food and Drug Administration. Many USDA facilities are under continuous inspection, but the FDA may visit each facility only once a year, leaving much of the daily oversight to food manufacturers. State and local health agencies may be the first to identify cases of illness and determine the cause to be foodborne. Sometimes the FDA will delegate food manufacturer inspections to these agencies, but its main purview is typically the inspection of the retail food industry. When illness cases in different states are linked, the CDC will often get involved to coordinate an investigation and contact the appropriate agencies once an issue is identified. 

It’s a fragile system that becomes even more tenuous in situations like last year’s multistate listeria outbreak in prepared pasta meals. Donald Schaffner, an extension specialist in food science and professor at Rutgers University, recalled how that outbreak was an eye opener because it happened at a company making fresh pasta for meals, which made it an FDA-regulated company, but because the pasta might have been used to make a fresh or refrigerated entree that has meat in it, that became a USDA issue. They were still able to unravel the threads, but it showcased just how intertwined, and occasionally arduous, the system oversight can be. 

The ultimate hope is that with these overlapping systems in place, all food will be safe, but it’s not perfect. It’s unnerving to have to worry about whether the food you’re eating is safe, and most foodborne illnesses are identified first by the consumer—once they’re already sick.

“We have recalls as a last recourse. Everything else that we need to do in order to produce a safe food product must be done,” said Angela Anandappa, founding executive director of the industry nonprofit Alliance for Advanced Sanitation. “And the worst-case scenario is for someone to get sick and die.”

Despite how unnerving a recall might be, experts argue that it might be a good thing that we’re still seeing them, because that means there are still people within the government doing the work to keep our food safe. 

Schaffner noted that firing all the epidemiologists wouldn’t get rid of foodborne illnesses, it would just stop us from knowing about them.

“If you undermine those resources, things could get worse, and probably will get worse, and you might not even know it, because the people who are keeping track of whether it’s getting better or worse no longer work for the federal government,” he added.

When you see a new food recall, don’t take it lightly, but also remember that it means there are still food safety specialists working hard to make sure your food is as safe as it can be. 

2026-04-30 19:30:00

Richard Pan is no stranger to blood. As a pediatrician, he was trained for its inevitability. But unlike your average medical professional—and despite his approachable and buoyant demeanor—he’s had menstrual blood launched at him in protest. He’s been assaulted on the street by a person livestreaming the attack on Facebook. He’s been the subject of racist memes comparing him to Asian despots. He’s encountered demonstrators clad in t-shirts depicting his face smeared with blood. He’s gotten plenty of death threats, too.

Oh, and by the way, he’s running for Congress.

What’s with the hate? Most of it stems from the fact that during his tenure as a California state senator, Pan authored some of the nation’s strongest vaccine laws. In 2015, he introduced legislation that nixed the ability of parents to use “personal beliefs” to exempt their children from the routine immunizations required for public school enrollment. Four years later, he wrote a bill cracking down on fraudulent medical exemptions for vaccines, which passed despite protesters’ clamorous attempts to shut down the Legislature. “They brought the militia to the capital,” Pan recalls.

“When we came out of the hearing room, I was shaken by the level of vitriol, and I was almost in tears—but Dr. Pan was so calm,” says Leah Russin, a parent who, concerned about high rates of vaccine exemptions in California schools, began working with Pan to generate support for the 2015 bill.

Opponents had been bussed in from around the state—mostly mothers who described their children as “vaccine-injured”—to address lawmakers in Sacramento. As anti-vax firebrands yelled into the microphone and religious leaders promised imprecatory prayers, Pan stood and listened calmly. “It was like the ocean lapping against a wall without eroding it at all,” Russin remembers.

This scene repeated in 2019, but escalated to include the blood throwing and even a bodily assault. “It was the roots of what we now call the MAHA movement,” Russin says, and Pan endured their “crucible.”

Pan, now 60, his dark hair peppered with gray, ditched his usual coat and tie for our interview, opting for a crisp blue Oxford shirt. He has never been too rattled by the vitriol, he tells me: “When you resort to violence, then I think you’ve already admitted you’ve lost the argument.”

After four years in the California Assembly and 12 in the state Senate, Pan termed out and took a hiatus from politics—returning to his teaching post at UC Davis School of Medicine. But the rise of the vehemently anti-vaccine Make America Healthy (MAHA) movement and its erratic figurehead, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has compelled him to jump into the national ring, where his résumé, unflappability, and knowledge of vaccine science and its deniers make him uniquely qualified to push back.

Having tousled with the anti-vax movement for decades, Pan has watched it shift from a hodgepodge of religious fundamentalists and lefty hippie types toward a more violent, right-leaning contingent obsessed with personal freedoms and urged along by peddlers of bogus cures. “As a physician,” he says, “I learned a lot about both the diseases and the vaccinations themselves, but I had to learn more about this anti-vaccine—not just ideology, but all their myths.”

This knowledge, he believes, is his best weapon against vaccine dissenters, including RFK Jr., who butted heads personally with Pan after showing up in Sacramento to argue against his public health bills. “I like to say I met him twice. I debated him twice. I beat him both times,” Pan says. The first time was a true debate; the second not so much. During a hearing on his 2019 bill, other anti-vax witnesses didn’t leave enough time for Kennedy to speak. Sitting next to the pediatrician, he grumbled something, whereupon Pan said, “It’s not my fault. You know that your guys didn’t figure this out.”

A 15-minute slot on the floor of the California Senate is one thing, but Kennedy has since gained a powerful national platform—watching him spew misinformation during a raucous four-hour Senate hearing last September served as the final straw for Pan’s return to politics. Soon after, Pan announced he would run for the House of Representatives, challenging Republican incumbent Rep. Kevin Kiley in California’s Third congressional district.

The Third District contained a sliver of left-leaning Sacramento, where Pan lives, along with a large tract of the more conservative Eastern Sierras. But he’d flipped a Republican seat during his first bid for elected office. Maybe he could do it again? Plus, Gov. Gavin Newsom was mounting a campaign to redraw California’s electoral map in response to an aggressive gerrymandering effort by Texas Republicans. The political landscape Pan was launching himself into was about to be overhauled.

The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Pan was born in Yonkers, New York, and raised in Pittsburgh. He knew he wanted to be a doctor since the third grade, he remembers, after he read a book from the school library about (of all things) blood. It took another few decades for him to find his penchant for politics, but he began straying from the conventional med-school track while studying biophysics at Johns Hopkins in the late-1980s.

He had taken up a genetics research project between semesters, but another lab published findings that made it moot. “Oh, great, now I have to find a new project for the summer,” Pan recalls thinking.

That’s how he began working with Gerard Anderson, a professor of health policy who needed help collecting data for a book on how Medicare can fail to meet the needs of people with multiple chronic diseases. “I would have never anticipated him going into politics,” Anderson told me.

Pan had people skills, his former mentor recalls, but was overly focused on the details. “In biophysics, you’re dealing with very minute, specific topics,” Anderson explains. But as Pan delved deeper into the work, “all of a sudden the concept of a health system broadly not meeting someone’s needs clicked in his mind—you could see the world open up to him.”

Pan likes to say that he traded a micro view of health for a macro one: “We need people to discover the next great cure. We also need people to work on being sure people can get access to those great cures.”

To that end, he spent his summers during medical school on rotation with the Commissioned Corps of US Public Health Service, which places medical professionals in regions of the country that are experiencing public health crises. His first assignment was in a Pennsylvania trucking town, where the locals weren’t too concerned with infectious disease; they wanted officials to address an epidemic of domestic violence. The next year, the Commissioned Corps dropped him into a Philadelphia-area clinic at the center of a measles outbreak fueled by fundamentalist churches whose congregations refused to vaccinate their children. These experiences, Pan says, “really made me think about social determinants of health before that name was popular.”

This public-health lens informed his work on a range of policies, even ones with seemingly no medical connection. His core issues as a state legislator, including affordability, housing, and violence prevention, are also prominent features of his House campaign—as is countering President Donald Trump. But Pan says he doesn’t view his opposition to the administration’s agenda as separate from his medical obligations.

Part of his work as a pediatrician—he continues to treat low-income children at the Sacramento County Health Center—is to determine whether his young patients have experienced trauma. Because unaddressed, trauma is itself a risk factor for the kinds of chronic diseases RFK Jr. and Trump promised to tackle. (In fact, the administration has slashed research grants to scientists who study them.) And now, on Trump’s watch, we have “armed, masked agents going around breaking into people’s houses without warrants, breaking into people’s cars, children worried that their parents may not be home when they come home from school,” Pan says. “Think about the chronic impact of that trauma.”

“It’s not just to the person it happened to,” he adds. “It’s the person who’s witnessed it. It’s the person who hears about it—that our own federal government is in defiance of our Constitution.”

There’s no shortage of ways to portray the second Trump administration as a threat to people’s wellbeing, but its detrimental actions on vaccines and health coverage, in Pan’s view, are only a part of why medical professionals should feel obliged speak out. Because policies that make people fear for their rights and freedoms constitute their own public health crisis.

Congress has its share of physician members, but the majority of the 20 currently serving are Republicans. And most have supported Trump despite his detrimental public health policies and appointees. The Senate’s four MDs all voted to confirm RFK Jr., for example. But the rise of MAHA and the Republican gutting of Medicaid have prompted other doctors to launch Democratic congressional bids—counting Pan, at least three are running in California.

After voters approved Newsom’s redistricting plan, the district Pan had planned to run in, the Third, suddenly tilted liberal. A game of musical chairs ensued. Democratic Rep. Ami Bera, the incumbent in the adjoining Sixth District, announced a run in the Third. So Pan pounced on the Sixth.

His prospects look decent: 70 percent of voters in the newly drawn Sixth already know Pan pretty well—they’re his former constituents. And as the dust settled, Pan secured several key endorsements, including from the Sacramento Bee. Still, the race is anything but decided, especially now that Pan may get his match-up with a conservative incumbent.

Last month, Kiley announced he, too, would run in the Sixth—not as a Republican, but as an independent. His incumbency in the Third has given him a big money advantage. As of late March, per the most recent disclosure report, he’d raised nearly five times as much as Pan or Thien Ho, the Sacramento County district attorney who is also running as a Democrat and is slightly ahead of Pan in fundraising. But Kiley’s rebrand may not be enough to get him elected in the freshly left-leaning Sixth. He was endorsed by Trump in 2022, and has consistently voted with his conservative colleagues in the House.

In some ways, the challenges Pan will face in Congress if elected are not that different from what he confronted as a state legislator. He drafted the 2015 vaccine bill in response to a nonfatal measles outbreak in Disneyland, then the largest since 2000, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared the virus eliminated in the US. But that outbreak was only about 3 percent as big as the ongoing wave, which has resulted in 4,080 confirmed cases, 344 hospitalizations, and three deaths since the beginning of 2025. Roughly 93 percent of those afflicted were unvaccinated.

A few months into Trump’s first term, Pan and Russin got on a plane to attend the first March for Science in DC. They weren’t the only envoys from California’s vaccine wars. As they ambled down the National Mall with the rest of the procession, two familiar faces caught up. One was Joshua Coleman, a prominent anti-vaxxer from the Sacramento suburbs, and the other was Pan’s: Coleman’s sign and t-shirt bore a depiction of Pan’s face splotched with blood, and the word “LIAR” spray painted across his glasses.

Coleman has been a “perennial person,” Russin told me. Even after getting into legal trouble, he kept popping up, sometimes donning Star Wars themed costumes that obscured his identity. He followed Pan throughout the march, shouting accusations and documenting his actions for a 30-minute highlight reel he later published on YouTube. At the end of the video, Coleman stands on a DC sidewalk in the rain, beaming: “I ruined his day!”

Well, maybe. Much of the rest of the video consists of Pan strolling down the mall in his white coat, chatting with other science supporters and taking pictures with fellow physicians, despite Coleman hovering just a few feet behind. Beyond the occasional moment when Pan gestures towards the camera with a shrug, Coleman might as well be invisible—at least to Pan. Other science-minded demonstrators circle by with uneasy looks. A few bold ones block Coleman’s camera and ask him to leave.

All of this happened before anti-vax influencers helped convince nearly a third of Americans surveyed that childhood vaccines do more harm than good, before some of those right-wing skeptics were placed in key public health posts, and before Pan’s opponents began resorting to violence.

Yet though the political power dynamics have shifted immensely in a relatively brief period, Pan doesn’t plan to change how he responds. “To a certain degree,” he says, “some of the threats that I get are no longer about me. It’s about scaring other people, because they know I won’t give in.”

2026-04-30 19:30:00

The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority would have you think that its latest gerrymandering decision is a mere tweak to the legal rules governing political map-drawing. No doubt hoping for mild headlines, the court’s 6-3 opinion framed its holding as hewing to “the plain text” of the Voting Rights Act and “consistent with” the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against racial discrimination in voting. In compliance with these two guideposts, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion styles itself as a humble “update.”

Don’t be fooled. This is a counter-revolution. Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requires that people of color have an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice. Wednesday’s decision effectively strikes down Section 2—at least what this Supreme Court had left of it—and takes the country back to the dark days when Black and brown voters in many states cast meaningless ballots, having been diluted and gerrymandered into powerlessness. In the decades since the Voting Rights Act, southern states have sent Black representatives to Congress, state legislatures, and local political bodies because this seminal civil rights law demanded that minority voters have an equal voice in the political process. Congress has repeatedly defended and continued these protections. On Wednesday, a court majority watered them right down to nothing.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan laid out the stakes of what the court had just done, and repeatedly chided the majority for downplaying the gravity of its holding. Wednesday’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais “could destroy most of the majority minority districts that in the past 40 years the Voting Rights Act created,” Kagan wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The decision has “thus laid the groundwork for the largest reduction in minority representation since the era following Reconstruction. Under cover of ‘updat[ing]’ and ‘realign[ing]’ this greatest of statutes, the majority makes a nullity of Section 2 and threatens a half-century’s worth of gains in voting equality.”

This case is not the first that the Roberts Court has taken to dismantle the Voting Rights Act, but it may be the last. It is likely the final nail in its coffin, and the lid is now so firmly in place that it is improbable that any plaintiff will be able to pry it open and avail themselves of the law’s protections. This court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, began its assassination of the law in 2013, striking down the requirement that jurisdictions with a history of discrimination get pre-clearance for new maps and changes in voting rules. The court went on to make it harder to win cases against discriminatory voting laws that block minority voters from casting their ballots. And in a related line of cases, the justices green lit partisan gerrymandering and made it increasingly difficult to prove racially discriminatory map-drawing had occurred. The Callais decision marries these two lines of cases, destroying the Voting Rights Act while elevating permission to conductpartisan gerrymandering above minority voting rights. 

The dissent opens with a hypothetical that illustrates the import of the majority’s decision: Imagine a state with a history of virulent racial discrimination, in which Black and white voters prefer different political parties. The population is 90 percent white, save a single county, shaped like a circle, which is 90 percent Black. The Black voters elect a representative of their choice because they belong to one congressional district. Then “the state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts,” Kagan writes. “The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.”

Congress, under the Voting Rights Act, forbid this kind of racial vote dilution. Under Callais, the Roberts Court brings it back. Indeed, if the white majority in the dissent’s hypothetical seeks to hand all their state’s congressional districts to Republicans, then the Black population cannot have a meaningful vote because they would choose a Democrat. “The majority straight-facedly holds that the Voting Rights Act must be brought low to make the world safe for partisan gerrymanders,” Kagan writes. “For how else, the majority reasons, can we preserve the authority of States to engage in this practice than by stripping minority citizens of their rights to an equal political process? And with that, the majority as much as invites States to embark on a new round of partisan gerrymanders.” Notably, the majority does not dispute this. Alito does not counter that this hypothetical district—the paradigmatic Section 2 district—would survive Wednesday’s opinion. It’s a damning silence that tacitly admits just how sweeping his decision is. 

Partisan gerrymandering, the court’s preferred tool for dismantling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, is not a constitutionally protected practice. In fact, it’s long been viewed as a big problem. As recently as 2017, the Supreme Court appeared poised to limit extreme partisan gerrymandering and its obviously corrosive impact on democracy and individual rights. But two years later, after Justice Anthony Kennedy was replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court swung in the other direction. In Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that federal courts could not adjudicate partisan gerrymandering claims because they were ill-equipped for the task. Rucho “did not pretend that partisan gerrymanders were something in need of safeguarding,” Kagan recalled in her Callais dissent. “To the contrary, the Court conceded that they were ‘incompatible with democratic principles’ and ‘lead to results that reasonably seem unjust.’” But, seven years later, the majority has transformed partisan gerrymandering into a weapon with which to extinguish the political voice of minority voters.

Partisan gerrymandering—indeed any partisan concern that a legislature might raise—can now perform the same function that Jim Crow tactics did prior to the Voting Rights Act. There’s no need to resurrect poll taxes or literacy tests when legislatures can simply draw maps to exclude minority’s preferred candidate from winning. Against any accusations of discrimination against minority voters, legislators can simply invoke a political motive and prevail. The Voting Rights Act was “born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers,” Kagan wrote. Callais not only tramples the Voting Rights Act, it creates the scaffolding upon which to build a new discriminatory political system.

Defenders of the Roberts Court chafe at the accusation by liberal critics that it is guided by partisan concerns rather than faithful application of the law. But on Wednesday, the Republican appointees literally elevated partisan concerns above the individual and collective rights of minority voters. They ruled that helping your preferred political party trumps the rights of Black and brown citizens. It’s hard to imagine a less justifiable decision—or a more precise representation of this court’s agenda.

2026-04-30 04:14:40

Increasingly desperate negotiations. A plea from the president himself. An eleventh-hour sleight of hand, followed by a surprise vote in the dead of night. 

Over the past month, chaos has unfolded on Capitol Hill as House Republicans fracture over a central question: Should the federal government need a warrant to spy on US citizens?

According to most interpretations of the Fourth Amendment, the answer is a simple yes. But for nearly two decades, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has created a nifty loophole. The law authorizes warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals abroad, but in practice, it allows intelligence agencies to scoop up the electronic communications of US citizens, too. Agents can then perform “backdoor searches” on records that would normally require a warrant to obtain—querying databases for Americans’ phone calls, text messages, and emails.

Privacy hawks and civil libertarians have long warned that the program undermines Americans’ constitutional right to privacy. Yet when Congress last reauthorized the program in 2024, Democrats were largely in favor. Joe Biden signed it into law with minor reforms; Donald Trump urged Republicans to “KILL” it.

But much has changed in the past two years, and FISA reform advocates say the 2024 changes have failed to stymie abuses. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence has collided with an unprecedented push by the Trump administration to expand government spy powers. ICE is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new surveillance technology while the FBI buys up Americans’ cell phone location data from commercial brokers. Shortly after returning to office, Trump fired all three Democrats on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent body tasked with advising the executive branch and reviewing programs like Section 702. And in May, the FBI shuttered an internal office that audits for Section 702 abuses.

Now that Trump stands to benefit from the spy program himself, he’s demanding that Republicans pass a “clean” reauthorization, pushing a bill through without any amendments. The law is set to expire Thursday, and despite the bill clearing a procedural vote in the House today, deep divisions remain in the Republican Party. GOP privacy hardliners have insisted that any reauthorization of Section 702 must include a warrant requirement for government searches of Americans’ communications.

Meanwhile, all but four House Democrats are opposing a clean reauthorization, as the abuses of Trump’s second term have crystallized the dangers of handing warrantless surveillance powers to an aspiring authoritarian. Administration officials have publicly labeled anti-ICE protesters “domestic terrorists,” ICE agents have collected biometric data from activists, and Trump has used the Justice Department to go after his political enemies.

Congressional staffers familiar with the negotiations told me that the growing bipartisan opposition to Section 702 marks a significant opportunity to reform America’s outdated surveillance laws. “It’s very clear that the presidency being in a different hand has totally changed the dynamic,” said one Democratic staffer, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “While AI is part of that new opportunity, I really think it’s because people are cognizant of how dangerous it is to have a federal government with someone like Stephen Miller actively going around talking about domestic terrorists.”

Earlier this month, the Lever and the American Prospect reported that the Democratic-led Congressional Black Caucus planned to support a clean reauthorization of the program, despite its use in federal surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists in 2020. A few days later, facing media scrutiny, the caucus came out against a clean reauthorization and called for a judicial warrant requirement and a ban on backdoor searches.

“As it stands, the Trump Administration has already committed serious violations that undermine democratic norms. We cannot allow federal law enforcement officers to have unfettered and unregulated access to information to persecute political opponents or intimidate American citizens,” CBC members wrote in a statement. 

In fact, FBI searches of US citizens’ data under Section 702 rose 35 percent last year to more than 7,000 queries, according to a letter the agency sent to Congress in March. An April report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board found that the FBI also conducted 839 “sensitive” searches in 2025—queries related to journalists, elected officials, political candidates, and religious groups—up more than 200 percent from 2024.

Critics say that those findings underscore that the 2024 reforms—which included a requirement that the deputy director of the FBI approve “sensitive” searches—did not go far enough.

“Until two months ago, the Deputy Director was Dan Bongino, a longtime conspiracy theorist who has frequently called for baseless investigations of his political opponents. His replacement, Andrew Bailey, is a highly partisan election denier who recently directed a raid on a Georgia election office to justify Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter on April 13.

Wyden also deposited a classified Dear Colleague letter with House Security, detailing a secret legal interpretation of Section 702 that “directly affects the privacy rights of Americans.” That letter has made a splash in Washington, DC, two staffers told me, even though it’s largely been absent from mainstream media coverage. In other words, the public doesn’t know the full scope of the spy law that Congress is battling over. 

“I strongly believe that this matter can and should be declassified and that Congress needs to debate it openly before Section 702 is reauthorized,” Wyden said in a Senate floor speech last month. “In fact, when it is eventually declassified, the American people will be stunned that it took so long and that Congress has been debating this authority with insufficient information.”

Some reporting has incorrectly conflated Wyden’s warning with a classified March 17 opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That ruling found compliance issues with how intelligence agencies used “filtering tools” to query Section 702 data, winnowing down the results without specifically searching for a target, and therefore evading oversight. Wyden’s warning is about a different classified opinion, sources told me.

“Senator Wyden does not cry wolf,” said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director for liberty and national security at the Brennan Center for Justice. “In the past, when he has said that there’s a secret legal interpretation that will shock Americans, he has been right.” Goitein pointed to Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified documents revealing a massive, indiscriminate global surveillance operation by the National Security Agency and its allies. Two years before the leaks, Wyden had warned the public of a secret intelligence court interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

“Through the Snowden disclosure, we found out what that was. And that was that the NSA was collecting Americans’ phone records in bulk, and it was doing it based on a legal interpretation that the phone records of every American in the country were relevant to specific foreign intelligence investigations,” said Goitein. “That’s not a plausible interpretation of the law.”

2026-04-30 01:41:30

In an outcome that was widely expected, the US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that New Jersey’s efforts to investigate an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center for allegedly misleading consumers violated the First Amendment.

In a 9–0 decision, the justices said a sweeping subpoena by the state’s then-attorney general, Matthew Platkin, seeking information about donors to First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a chain of anti-abortion pregnancy centers in northeastern New Jersey, “burdened First Choice’s associational rights.” The full opinion in the case can be found here. 

The ruling clears the way for First Choice to proceed with a federal lawsuit challenging the subpoena. “Demands for private donor information…‘chill’ protected First Amendment associational rights even when those demands contemplate disclosure only to government officials and not ‘the general public,’” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for his fellow justices.

The opinion drew parallels between New Jersey’s demand for information and Alabama’s attempts in the 1950s to force the NAACP to turn over the names and addresses of all of its members in the state. The high court sided with the NAACP in the landmark 1958 ruling.

“Associational rights carry special significance for political, social, religious, and other minorities,” Gorsuch wrote. “Take that freedom away and ‘dissident expression’ stands particularly vulnerable to marginalization or outright ‘suppression by the majority,’ leaving all of society poorer for it.”

But Wednesday’s decision—the second major Supreme Court victory for the CPC industry in recent years—is likely to make it even harder for state lawmakers and attorneys general to investigate anti-abortion organizations. In 2018, the court blocked a California law that would have required pregnancy centers to inform patients about state-funded family-planning services, including abortion.

Crisis pregnancy centers, faith-based organizations whose mission is to deter women from having abortions, attract clients by offering free services such as pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, baby clothes, and diapers. But they also have a well-documented history of using misinformation and deception to dissuade abortion seekers from terminating their pregnancies. Like many CPCs, First Choice—which has served more than 36,000 clients in New Jersey since its founding in 1985—created different websites for donors and the general public, tailoring its anti-abortion message for each audience.

The question before the justices was narrow: Should First Choice be able to directly fight a state agency’s subpoena in federal court, or must it initially go to state courts? The long-accepted procedure for enforcing or challenging such a subpoena, New Jersey argued, is to first seek relief in state court, and then, should it be necessary, appeal to federal court.

But the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented First Choice, accused Platkin of “selectively target[ing] the nonprofit based on its religious speech and pro-life views.” According to ADF, the Platkin subpoena had such serious implications that First Choice should be able to seek immediate relief in the federal courts, rather than having to expend time and resources litigating the issue first in state court.

Lining up behind First Choice was a predictable collection of anti-abortion and conservative groups. But they were joined by progressive groups, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the ACLU, which also raised concerns that the same type of subpoenas against First Choice could be weaponized against humanitarian groups, journalists, and protesters. In Wednesday’s ruling, the justices seemed to concur. As Gorsuch wrote, “Strip away the ability of individuals to work together free from governmental oversight and intrusion, and the freedom to associate may become no freedom at all—individuals deterred, groups diminished, and their protected advocacy suppressed.”

Anti-abortion groups hailed the decision. Erin Hawley, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom who argued the case before the Supreme Court in December, called the ruling a “resounding victory,” and blasted New Jersey’s investigation tactics as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

“This is a triumph for every faith-based ministry in America,” William Haun, senior counsel at Becket, a legal group that focuses on religious cases, said in a statement. “The Court made crystal clear that our First Amendment freedoms—including religious freedom—are ‘necessarily’ associative, and that keeps the federal courthouse doors open for religious groups to protect their governance from intrusive state bureaucrats.”

But Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, a national group that focuses on the CPC industry, pointed out that the ruling didn’t address “the broader substance of New Jersey’s investigation,” including questions about training of staff and volunteers and protections for patient privacy. Answers to these questions, RHFW said, “are critical to safeguarding patients who seek care at unregulated pregnancy clinics like First Choice.”

This post has been updated to include comment from RHFW.

2026-04-30 00:33:03

For the first time since the US began bombing Iran two weeks ago, our military leadership testified before a congressional committee today. The main takeaway: there is no real plan for ending this war. But there is a plan for giving the Pentagon more money. 

At today’s House Armed Services Committee hearing, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, General Dan Caine, and Comptroller of the Army Jules Hurst each explained why they believe it is critical to American security to fund the Pentagon to the tune of 1.5 trillion dollars in 2027. The military’s budget surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2026—but, Hegseth said, building a “lethal arsenal of freedom” requires 500 billion more dollars per year. This, he said, would both allow military “domination” and fuel the “American economic engine.” 

Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, invoked the power of mathematics to justify the budget proposal. Another half-billion dollars in funding for the Pentagon—an agency which has never passed an audit—is necessary, he said, because “China announced a 7 percent increase in defense spending this year” and “as a result, they are spending more of their GDP on defense than we are.” As are “all of our adversaries,” Rogers said. 

Moreover, he added, American defense spending as a percentage of GDP has “been falling since World War II.” American defense spending as dollars, however, has consistently risen. Adjusted for inflation, current U.S. defense spending is more than $400 billion higher than in the late 1990s. Nonetheless, Rogers said, “we don’t have enough munitions, ships, aircraft, and autonomous systems” to get the country “where we need to be if we want to truly deter conflict.” 

The military wants more money: as Hegseth put it, that money will go to “where technology is evolving. And as I mentioned, the character of war fighting is changing pretty quickly, mass simultaneity autonomy undersea space, cyber information.” All these big words require “a higher end of capital investment. It’s an important down payment on the future.” 

As Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) pointed out, the Pentagon that’s asking for all that money has not yet provided Congress with an estimate of how much money they’re spending on war with Iran. Hurst, for the first time, answered on the record: about $25 billion in 60 days, or over $400 million dollars per day at war. Some independent researchers’ estimates, however, are nearly double that. And according to Iran’s ministry of health, well over 3,000 people have been killed since the US and Israel started bombing Iran in late February. When Hegseth was asked how much this war is costing American families in fuel and food costs, he said “that’s a gotcha question.” 

Pressed by several members of Congress, Hegseth—who spent yesterday on a helicopter joyride with Kid Rock—did not outline a plan for ending the war. 

“Their nuclear facilities have been obliterated. They’re buried underground,” he said. 

“So we had to start this war, you just said 60 days ago, because the nuclear weapon was an imminent threat, and now you’re saying that it was completely obliterated?” Smith asked. 

“Their facilities were bombed and obliterated, their ambitions were not,” Hegseth said. This—bombing on the basis of ‘ambitions’—is a “peace through strength” strategy. 

Representative John Garamendi (D-CA) said that from his perspective, Hegseth’s strategy has been one of “astounding incompetence.” 

“You have misled the public about why we are at war, you and the President have offered ever-changing reasons for this war,” he said. 

Hegseth, for his part, said that criticizing him is providing free propaganda for America’s enemies. “Shame on you,” he told Garamendi. “Calling this a quagmire, two months in? Handing propaganda to our enemies?”

“Don’t say you support our troops on the one hand, and then a two-month mission is a quagmire. That’s a false equivalation. It undermines the mission.”