2025-01-30 21:00:00
It was September 2023, and a certain sweatshirt wouldn’t leave me alone. It was heather gray with a grid of 12 pickle jars on it, and it showed up on my TikTok feed with what I’d consider astonishing frequency, as in, multiple times an hour.
Between ads for the pickle sweatshirt on TikTok Shop, I saw young people drinking the brine of their pickle juice, reviewing various grocery store pickles, putting edible glitter into a pickle jar and shaking it like a snowglobe, and doing the “pickle challenge” by sticking dill pickles in chamoy, Tajin, and sour candy powder so that they became bright red and spicy. Even Dua Lipa was putting pickle juice in her Diet Coke. Why are all these people so obsessed with pickles? I wondered, a thought immediately followed by a chilling realization: I was witnessing a new generation discover its version of the avocado.
For reasons that have less to do with millennials and more to do with lifted import restrictions, improved production techniques, and the explosion of a little fast-casual chain called Chipotle, US avocado consumption skyrocketed at the dawn of the 21st century. Avocados were healthy, they were versatile, and they were also more expensive than most produce, which made them feel a tiny bit luxurious. It wasn’t until 2017, when an Australian real estate mogul blamed young people’s inability to afford homes on spending too much on avocado toast that millennials became forever linked to the fatty green fruit. Avocados, even more so than other au courant superfoods like kale, quinoa, or açaí, illustrated something about the generation: specifically, that our appetite for small pleasures would ultimately bring about our doom.
What then, do pickles say about Gen Z? Pickles are weird. They’re inherently funny because they look like the male sex organ if it was green. Pickles are good for you, and specifically good for your gut, the health obsession of the moment. Like avocados, they are extraordinarily versatile. They pair well with other contemporary food trends like dirty martinis and canned cocktails, and fit right in with aesthetically pleasing butter boards and “girl dinner” spreads. Unlike avocados, however, they’re cheap. (In the age of Shein, Temu, and dupes for everything, perhaps pickles are a sign Gen Z has learned from our lessons: If you ever want to own property, don’t go broke on produce.)
Andrea Hernández, founder of the food and beverage trend newsletter Snaxshot, traces the rise of the pickle on social media to the early days of Covid, when people were stuck at home and filming social media content about life under lockdown. It was boredom and a desire to experiment, she says, that led people to confess that they loved to drink the brine of the pickle jars in the back of their fridges or bring viewers along for taste tests. Or, to put it more bluntly, “People were playing around with TikTok clickbait.”
Soon enough, influencers were making pickle wreaths, brands were releasing pickle-flavored gummy vitamins, hard seltzers, sparkling waters, Doritos, Goldfish, and Mountain Dew. At the end of 2024, Pinterest listed “pickle fix” as one of the top trend predictions for 2025, despite the fact that the rest of the food world seems to have moved on — now there’s a whole new slew of hot food items that were once unassuming pantry staples.
An it-food must be a little controversial: Not everyone enjoys the lumpiness of cottage cheese, the smell of tinned fish, or the brininess of an olive.
A recent viral tweet listed nearly two dozen of these items as “pick me” foods, including tinned fish, dates, rice cakes, olives, dark chocolate, and bone broth. (Though typically used in dating contexts, to be a “pick me” is to do something solely for the attention because you believe it makes you special or different — e.g., begging someone to pick you.)
Jaya Saxena, a correspondent at Eater, describes these foods as giving an aura of “I’ve studied abroad,” that they lend a sophistication other, more popular foods don’t. An it-food must be a little controversial: Not everyone enjoys the lumpiness of cottage cheese, the smell of tinned fish, or the brininess of an olive. You should feel a little special for being able to recognize its merit. If you’re a social media creator making it-food content, so should your commenters who agree that pickles are hugely underrated and then form a little tribe around them. (Its reverse is also crucial to drive engagement: “There is some level of rage bait happening here, where you can get people to be like, ‘Ew, I hate olives!’” Saxena says. “And then someone says, ‘I’m Greek, you’re racist for saying that.’”)
The food and consumer packaged goods industries, seeing this chatter play out online, will then jump to invest in cool, elevated (and needless to say more expensive) iterations to appeal to this hot new market. It-foods should also have humble origins — oysters used to be cheap! — and therefore be ripe for a rebranding. Meme pages will make collages of these hot new products in a tone that is both laudatory and ironic, gently poking fun at the desperation of the brands and the coolhunters who buy them; journalists and trend watchers will compile them all into stories about what it all means, if anything. And thus, an it-gredient is born.
This cycle is a relatively new one. Food trends in the 20th century typically traveled top-down from cookbook publishers, professional chefs, the food industry, and pop culture, then spread to the masses. It was Julia Child and The Joy of Cooking, for instance, that made quiche inescapable at 1970s dinner parties, while a single scene of a 2000 episode of Sex and the City officially launched the cupcake craze.
Then in the early 2010s, Instagram changed everything. Food now had to look good in a flat lay photo (colorful macarons and avocado toast were early favorites), or shock viewers with too-weird-to-be-believed social media bait like rainbow bagels and milkshakes with whole-ass pieces of cake on top. Simultaneously, a backlash brewed on Tumblr, where all the cool kids were suddenly making cheesy, fatty junk foods like pizza, cheeseburgers, and tacos a part of their digital identity as a winky response to picture-perfect treats on social media. The Hairpin coined it “snackwave,” one part self-deprecation and one part ironic nihilism (“touch my butt and buy me pizza”). Snackwave was Jennifer Lawrence in gowns on a red carpet talking about pizza, it was Miley Cyrus straddling a hot dog, and it was the accounts for Taco Bell and Denny’s mimicking the affectations of Weird Twitter.
Notably, the biggest food trends of the current moment are not themselves meals or dishes but rather ingredients. Saxena points out that olives and tinned fish tend to feel a bit more chic than a bowl of pasta (they also tend to look cuter on, say, a pair of pants). “All these foods are items you would find on a grazing table or a cocktail garnish,” she says. “Eating styles like charcuterie boards and ‘girl dinner’ are about assembling things rather than cooking — here are my little cubes of cheese, my olives, my martini. It’s this sort of aperitif culture that’s more about assembling beautiful little things.”
But a more pivotal reason that this era’s it-foods are largely ingredients you can pick up in a grocery store might be because post-Covid, even basics have seen their prices skyrocket. These days, coming home with a colorful grocery cart is no longer a given — it’s a status symbol.
“Older generations saw groceries as more of utility, and maybe it’s late stage capitalism, but it’s weird that somehow the only thing we have left to social signal is with our groceries,” Hernández says. “I always think, we’re living in Andy Warhol’s biggest dream, how he made Campbell’s cans a message of mass consumption. I’m like, ‘Wow, we’re insane.’”
Because there are influencers for everything now, there are also grocery influencers showing off their supermarket hauls; one such creator who shops at the high-end Los Angeles grocery store Erewhon mused to Cosmopolitan, “People will go to these stores as tourists just to see them, like a museum.” Perhaps grocery store staples are status items because everything is a status item now, from water bottles to dog breeds. Or perhaps it’s because we’re all just desperate to belong to something, even if the bonds of community are as loose as “everyone here loves pickles.”
This is why I often feel as though something in me died when I started buying Graza, the yassified olive oil that comes in a tall skinny squeeze top bottle with beautiful packaging and costs roughly 25 percent more than the kind I bought previously. It feels corny to fall for such a naked attempt at rebranding an item that was perfectly good to begin with, founded by people who came from similarly “disruptive” brands like Magic Spoon and Casper. Alison Roman once described such marketing pivots as having “‘Hello, Fellow Young People’ energy,” Grub Street referred to it as “smallwashing.”
“We’re living in Andy Warhol’s biggest dream, how he made Campbell’s cans a message of mass consumption.”
On Snaxshot and other in-the-know Instagram accounts where people poke fun at their own tastes, Graza and its ilk are stand-ins for a certain type of wannabe urban sophisticate, someone who has failed to achieve anything intellectually or creatively fulfilling and therefore relies on status olive oil to feel culturally relevant. (Though of course I tell myself I buy it because the sqeezey top is legitimately innovative, product design-wise.)
These products have already begun to feel cringe because they recall an even more humiliating food trend associated with millennials than avocados: bacon. Remember in the late 2000s, when Reddit humor — advice animal memes, dogespeak, ironic finger mustache tattoos — decided that inserting bacon into things that didn’t already include bacon in them instantly made them “epic”? I think about “epic bacon” every time a new food trend shows up on my feed, wondering if pickles or espresso martinis or olives will get big and omnipresent and annoying enough to line the halls of Gen Z’s most embarrassing tastes in the eyes of future generations.
The latest shelf-stable item to get the it-gredient treatment is perhaps the least sexy of them all. This year’s excitement over beans can pretty much be traced back to a single person: Violet Witchel, a popular cooking TikToker who in 2024 posted a video of the “dense bean salad” she made for healthy meal preps. Though she’d posted recipes and other videos of the salad before, she’d previously referred to it as a “chickpea salad” or “white bean salad.”
But when she added a single adjective, her videos exploded, garnering her tens of millions of views and 700,000 new followers. Suddenly, Witchel became “dense bean salad girl.” She launched a Substack, where she now has more than 162,000 subscribers and earns a “high six figures” income, stemming largely from her innovation — or rather, rebranding — of describing a bean salad as “dense.”
While “bean salad” sounds like something your aunt would bring to a barbecue, “dense bean salad” implies that it is packed with nutrients, that this one dish acts as a full meal, and, of course, that you can prepare it in advance. “People are turning to beans as an affordable protein source,” she says. “And they love a quick and snappy” name.
As for what’s next, she senses fiber is about to make a serious comeback (a prediction echoed on this very website): “My theory is that all the colon cancer research coming out is going to make soluble fiber the next big thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if figs or broccoli had a moment, or lentils or popcorn. I could see ‘making my nightly popcorn!’ becoming a fiber snack trend.”
Food influencers, meme accounts, and the consumer packaged goods industry: You have your marching orders.
2025-01-30 20:45:00
This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.
Ever since Donald Trump won the presidential election last November, kids around the country have been scared about what his promise of mass deportations might mean for them and their classmates.
“They come up and say, ‘What’s going to happen, teacher?’” Elma Alvarez, an instructional specialist at an elementary school in Tucson, Arizona, told me.
Now the fear in classrooms has ratcheted up to a new level, thanks to a directive issued last week allowing immigration agents to arrest people at schools and other “sensitive areas” that they’ve avoided in the past. Anxiety ramped up even further last Friday after federal agents who showed up at a Chicago elementary school were initially mistaken for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
They were actually Secret Service agents, but the episode has parents in the city feeling frightened, with one mom, who has legal status but whose children do not, telling the Washington Post over the weekend that she didn’t want her son going back to school until things had calmed down.
The incident “reflects the fear and anxiety that is present in our city right now,” Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said in a letter to parents.
That fear and anxiety have been echoed around the country, with parents and students afraid to leave their homes, and educators worried about how the threat of ICE raids could affect a generation of kids already reeling from school shootings, the Covid-19 pandemic, wildfires, and other disasters.
“They’ve already been through so much,” Alvarez said. “School is a place where everybody, every single person that steps on campus, should feel safe.”
Since at least 2011 — including during the first Trump administration — ICE policy has been to avoid making immigration arrests in or around schools, churches, hospitals, and other locations deemed “sensitive,” in order to avoid scaring people away from basic services. But last Tuesday, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security reversed that policy, with a spokesperson saying in a statement that “this action empowers the brave men and women in CBP and ICE to enforce our immigration laws and catch criminal aliens — including murders and rapists — who have illegally come into our country.”
The Trump administration has said it will target violent criminals in its immigration enforcement actions — and not, presumably, schoolchildren. Moreover, all children in the US have a legal right to a public education regardless of immigration status, as Axios notes, and schools generally do not keep track of whether students are in the country legally. Some school districts, such as Chicago and New York, have said they will not allow ICE agents into schools without a warrant signed by a judge. Getting such a warrant can be an “involved process” and “we did not see a lot of that in the first Trump term,” said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K–12 education research at the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.
Even if ICE agents do enter a school, there is a legal argument that arresting children there violates their right to an education, some experts say. However, the Trump administration has already taken actions many believe to be unconstitutional, such as attempting to end birthright citizenship, and the sense that the country is entering uncharted territory is fueling panic in many immigrant communities.
“There’s just a generalized sense of fear and confusion” about the new administration’s policies, said Abigail L’Esperance, co-director of the immigration program at the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley, California. “It’s a lot of wait and see, but with an undercurrent of terror.”
The fear is the most acute among families in which one or more members are undocumented — 6.3 million households, according to the Pew Research Center. Nearly 70 percent of those families are “mixed status,” meaning at least one member is a US citizen or legal resident.
But the prospect of federal agents entering a classroom and taking students can be terrifying for any child, regardless of immigration status. Decades ago, border patrol agents came to Alvarez’s sister’s classroom and took two of her classmates away, Alvarez told me.
“My sister was in first grade. She’s almost 50 now, and she remembers that day so clearly,” Alvarez said. “She still remembers her whole class just breaking out in tears.”
“That’s what’s going to happen to our children, our students,” if ICE does enter classrooms, Alvarez said.
Beyond fear of ICE raids at school, kids are facing another worry too: that when they get home at the end of the day, their parents won’t be there anymore. “The children are saying to their mothers, ‘I don’t want you to be deported, I don’t want to be separated from you,’” said Evelyn Aleman, founder of Our Voice: Communities for Quality Education, a nonprofit that serves primarily Latino and Indigenous parents in Los Angeles.
Aleman herself was deported in 1970 along with her mother, while her father stayed behind in the US, she told me. “Here we are, 55 years later, still dealing with family separation,” she said. “The trauma is real and it never goes away.”
Research has found that children separated from families under the first Trump administration experienced profound harms, including PTSD; in 2021, a group of pediatricians wrote that family separation “constitutes cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment that rises to the level of torture.”
The anxiety that someone in their family could be deported is already affecting children at school. It’s hard for them to focus on subjects like math and reading “when all they’re thinking about is what is happening to Mom and Dad,” Alvarez said. “They’re just on survival mode right now.”
Other kids are scared to even leave the house. Carolina Avila, a social worker in California who works with students who came to the US as unaccompanied minors, says many of her clients “have expressed an intense fear of really going anywhere, not just school.”
Some parents, too, “don’t feel safe congregating, they don’t feel safe leaving their home,” Aleman said. Some are afraid to drive or walk their kids to school.
That fear comes at a time when school districts are trying to battle chronic absenteeism and get kids back in school after the disruption of the pandemic. It’s also a time when kids around the country have to endure active shooter drills and hear about children their age losing their lives to gun violence. “Our kids are already traumatized thinking some crazy person is going to come in and shoot them,” Alvarez said.
For the kids in Aleman’s community in Los Angeles, fear of ICE arrives on the heels of devastating wildfires that have destroyed thousands of homes and at least eight schools. While the fires are a natural disaster, ICE raids are “a disaster of human proportions,” Aleman said. “It’s being caused on a human being by another human being.”
As the next weeks and months unfold, schools and districts can help kids by publicly affirming their right to an education and setting clear policies around when and how ICE agents can enter schools, experts say. Families may also need help creating alternate care plans in case a child’s parents are detained, said Avila, the social worker, who works with the Children’s Holistic Immigration Representation Project, a program serving unaccompanied minors in California.
Outside of schools, ordinary people can also support students and families who are feeling fear right now, Alvarez said: “Call your local legislative representative, let them know that you don’t think this is right.”
“These kids are loving kids,” she said. “They’re intelligent. They care about their community. They love their families. They’re not here to hurt anyone. They’re here to be a child.”
Extreme weather disrupted school for at least 242 million kids around the world last year, according to a new UNICEF report. Heat waves were the most common reason children had to miss school.
The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights under Trump has rescinded Biden-era guidance warning schools that banning books could violate civil rights laws. “Because this is a question of parental and community judgment, not civil rights, OCR has no role in these matters,” the office said in a release.
Being “good at the internet” means something very different to kids than it meant to their millennial parents.
My little kid and I are reading Oge Mora’s Saturday, a sweet story about a special day that goes off the rails, and how a mother and daughter salvage it together.
A reader pushed back in response to my story last week on kids and food dyes, writing, “My 14-year-old daughter has ADHD. She and I can both tell with high reliability if she has eaten something containing FD&C red 40 fifteen minutes earlier.”
He added: “As you say, ‘Cutting out dyes won’t make all kids better-behaved, because not every child is sensitive to dye in the first place.’ But it will help, and moving in the right direction is something we should all strive for.”
To share your thoughts, recommendations, or ideas for stories I should cover, get in touch with me at [email protected].
2025-01-30 20:00:00
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went before the Senate finance committee Wednesday to make his case that he should be confirmed as President Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to pursue his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
Democrats focused their criticism on Kennedy’s long-standing vaccine skepticism. The former environmental lawyer has spent decades spreading pseudo-science and lies about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and their debunked links to autism. His calls to reevaluate our vaccine use remain broadly unpopular, even as the recent drop-off in child vaccinations worries doctors and public health experts.
Kennedy wanted to focus on topics that are much less divisive: America’s chronic disease epidemic and the unhealthy food that is widely available and consumed in this country.
“We will scrutinize the chemical additives in our food supply. We will remove financial conflicts from our agencies … We will reverse the chronic disease epidemic, and put the nation back on the road to good health,” he said in his opening statement.
One of Kennedy’s most important advisers and allies in that fight was in the hearing room.
Calley Means is a former lobbyist for food and pharmaceutical companies who is now a health-startup entrepreneur and healthy-food evangelist. Along with his sister Casey Means, he wrote the bestseller Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health. He supported Kennedy’s third party bid for the presidency, and then helped connect Kennedy with Donald Trump.
“Bobby Kennedy has not lowered or weakened faith in our public health authorities. The public health authorities have done that,” Means told Today, Explained cohost Noel King. “The insane thing to do would be to continue the current path. The smart thing to do would be to give someone a chance who’s talking about shifting the paradigm of our health focus to preventing and reversing chronic disease.”
Means talked to Noel about how he became a healthy-food crusader, why he thinks Kennedy’s agenda as HHS secretary would be broadly popular, and why he thinks we should all be more skeptical of how America administers vaccines. Below is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity. Make sure to listen to the whole episode.
You’re in a very unique position because you didn’t entirely witness this as a civilian. You say you were, in fact, also a lobbyist for food and pharma. Can I ask what you saw as a lobbyist that has brought you to this place?
In hindsight, what I saw is that the health care system is working to propagate a system where more Americans are sick and to perform interventions on those Americans — not to cure any disease but manage it. That’s 95 percent of our medical spending. 95 percent of our medical spending is management of chronic disease.
Why is Coca-Cola funding the American Diabetes Association? And why would the American Diabetes Association be accepting money from Coca-Cola when we have a diabetes crisis among children, when it’s liquid diabetes, it’s high-sugar drinks? So there’s actually this interplay between our food system, our ultra-processed food system that’s getting people addicted, that’s getting people sick, and then a health care system that stands silent. That’s on the food side.
On the pharmaceutical side, it’s the rigging of institutions. The pharmaceutical industry is the lifeblood of academic research. And the NIH and the federal bureaucracies are a revolving door, an orgy of corruption between industry and government. I mean, 11 of the 12 past FDA directors literally left the FDA and the next day walked into a pharmaceutical office. I had a list of Stanford and Harvard professors that we were going to funnel money to. It’s rank corruption. And I saw that.
Calley, what do you hear as the main pushback against you? What do your critics argue?
Well, they resort to ad hominem attacks. If you really stay on these unimpeachable messages, I think they’re pretty hard to disagree with.
It’s a demonstrable fact that our scientific and health care agencies are co-opted. 75 percent of the FDA department that oversees drug approvals is funded by the pharmaceutical industry itself. NIH bureaucrats are able to take royalties from drugs, which they did during Covid. It’s also impossible to argue with the fact that we’re the sickest country in the developed world and there’s a true chronic disease crisis among children that’s pretty hard to argue with.
The health care industry is the largest and fastest growing industry in the country. It’s the most powerful industry in the country. The pharmaceutical industry is the biggest funder of politicians themselves, scientific research, regulatory agencies, the media itself. So they control a lot of our institutions just by definition.
There’s a claim that there’s almost a conspiracy at play here that involves big food companies, pharmaceutical companies, medical schools. It goes all the way to the top levels of government. I wonder if you can explain that aspect of your message. Why? Because many people will be turned off by what they view as conspiratorial thinking. Someone might say it sounds a bit nutty.
What sounds nutty about what I said?
That idea that everyone is in league to make people sick.
I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that. I completely dispute the premise of your question.
I said that the pharmaceutical industry makes money when people are sick and loses money when they’re healthy. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s a demonstrable statement of economic fact. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s a statement of fact. Hospitals make money from fee-for-service health care. Many friends from Harvard Business School of mine work at hospitals, and their job is dependent on filling the beds. That’s not a conspiracy.
I’m going to push just a little bit further on this, Calley. Because there are statements of fact that you are making, and they will pass a fact check. But it’s this idea that pharmaceutical companies want to keep us sick, that food companies want to keep us sick.
I didn’t say that. I said there are economic incentives for people to be sick.
Well, the economic incentive is the want. I mean, it’s America, it’s a capitalist society.
No, I didn’t. I didn’t talk about their motivations.
What are their motivations?
This is the largest industry in the country’s health care. A pharmaceutical executive gets fired if there’s no growth. Growth of the pharmaceutical industry presupposes and necessitates more sick people.
You’re saying there is an economic incentive.
Somebody gets fired unless the company grows, the company requires more sick patients to grow. That’s an indisputable fact.
I think that many people would agree with you that when there is money involved, the incentives to grow can lead to perverse outcomes like a lot of sick Americans. You are the founder of a company that sells, among other things, supplements, fitness classes, fitness equipment … You personally have an economic incentive in this, too. And I wonder, is there any part of you that thinks maybe I should just be the guy that says the thing but not try to make money off it?
Well, that’s inaccurate. My company facilitates third party medical interventions to recommend whether exercise, supplementation, food in some cases is a medically appropriate intervention.
And you’re not making any profit?
I don’t think we should expect nobody to make money. I think everyone’s financial conflicts should be highly exposed. My company makes money when a third party provider recommends efficacious treatments of root cause non-pharmaceutical interventions. My company will make money when more people are exercising and more people are eating broccoli. I am absolutely fine with that being exposed.
President Trump appointed a seed oil lobbyist to be chief of staff of the USDA. He fought Obama-era rules to cut ultra-processed foods from school lunch. He made RFK [Jr.] eat a Big Mac for a photo op. In the 2024 election, President Trump overwhelmingly won in America’s farm-dependent counties. Those are areas where there is a lot of farming. And so you would assume the president has to really take care not to alienate Big Agriculture. Do you think President Trump really is genuinely invested in the MAHA [Make America Healthy Again] movement?
Well, he didn’t have to appoint Bobby Kennedy. He didn’t have to say at every single rally that he was going to have Bobby Kennedy go wild on health. So President Trump said this: He doesn’t think a lot about health policy, but what he does think a lot about is corruption and taking on the swamp and taking on corporate cronyism. I think he’s really seen in Bobby Kennedy how the forces that profit from sick children are a great example of corruption holding us down.
There is an area here that is deeply divisive and it will come up again and again. Mr. Kennedy has said before that he believes autism comes from vaccines. He runs a nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, that consistently casts doubt on vaccines, on the schedule in which they are administered and the ingredients in them, and on whether they protect or actually cause chronic illnesses. Do Mr. Kennedy’s positions on vaccines concern you at all?
Well, what Bobby Kennedy has consistently said about vaccines during the campaign is that they should be studied like any other pharmaceutical product. Blanket trust of pharmaceutical companies is not a good idea either. I don’t think anyone disagrees with continued scientific research on interventions we’re providing to the American people, whether that be pharmaceuticals or the other 4.6 billion prescriptions we’re writing in America a year.
And even what you mentioned about the Children’s Health Defense, you didn’t say that they’re attacking all vaccines in general. You said they’re questioning the pharmaceutical schedule. They’re questioning specific ingredients. We should be scrutinizing each formulation. That’s a good thing to do.
Our parents are old enough to remember polio. We’re in the millennial generation and polio feels like it was a million years ago. It really wasn’t. Americans broadly are susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. Let me offer you the concern as I’ve heard it articulated: Americans are going to decide they don’t trust vaccines broadly. They are not going to vaccinate their children. And that will return us to a generation and a time that most people just don’t want to go back to.
I think you just painted an extremely pessimistic and nihilistic view of the American people. What an unfounded statement to say that they’re prone to conspiracy thinking. That’s kind of a dismissive statement.
I myself am prone to it.
Well, maybe that’s being rational. Maybe that’s being prone to questioning things. This is what President Trump and Bobby talked about during the campaign. I strongly believe the American people are rational. The American people don’t want their kids to be sick. I really commend and respect the media hearkening back and their concern for polio and polio coming back. But I would push you if you or anyone else is concerned about childhood health, which is the real issue here. We should be concerned about what’s happening right now. We have a chronic disease crisis. We have a truly societally destabilizing event happening. Yes, I agree. We should keep polio at bay. But that’s not even on the top 10 list.
Fair enough. Let me ask you one last question. If Mr. Kennedy is confirmed, MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement, is very close to being inside the system, maybe even in a couple of years it will be the system. Some people might say, “Well, that’s when the work gets really hard, right?” It’s easier to be an outsider than it is to be an insider. Do you have any thoughts on what it might be like for this outsider movement to operate on the inside? Do you think it’ll be tough?
Bobby a reform-minded person — I would say a magnetic, incredible leader — and he is putting a stake in the ground that we need to move to a more preventative model and a more chronic disease reversal focused model of health. That’s his stake.
I had a really profound conversation with the dean of a medical school recently, and he was honest. He said, listen, everyone in the faculty lounge thinks Bobby is a whack job. If you steer NIH funding to more preventative outcomes, they’re going to kick and scream and complain and say that’s stupid, but they’re going to write grants for what the NIH is saying they want. If you can win and keep this vibe and this movement toward that more preventative pull in four years and six years, Bobby will be gone, but if we keep heading in that preventative direction, in six years, it’ll be the norm. In six years it won’t be about Bobby being crazy. It will just be how things are done.
That’s the stakes right now. We’ve lost our way a bit. Our health incentives are too focused on waiting for people to get sick and then managing those conditions and, I would argue, profiting from those conditions. What we’re trying to do is get conflicts of interest out of the system and steer the sizable incentives that the government creates toward a more preventative future that asks, “How can we actually prevent and reverse these diseases?”
That’s the fight right now. And we just have to continue to win that argument. It’s not going to be total shock and awe. We’re not going to be able to change everything at once. But we really have changed the country.
2025-01-30 19:30:00
Within days of taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump implemented a blanket ban on entry from seven Muslim-majority countries. It was met with furious pushback, public outcry, and a string of defeats in court.
This time around, despite signing an initial barrage of executive orders, Trump has not implemented a travel ban. But that doesn’t mean it’s not coming. One of his Day 1 executive orders, experts say, takes the first step toward a new travel ban — one that could be even more extensive than the first time around.
The order lays the groundwork for a future ban by directing Trump’s Cabinet members to report back within 60 days on countries with “deficient” vetting and screening procedures for travelers. It’s not clear exactly what kind of punitive measures citizens of those countries could face. But the order leaves open the possibility of a “partial or full” ban on their entry to the US that could go beyond previous restrictions.
Experts say such an order could potentially be used to deport people who were issued visas in the last four years, not just to block future arrivals; it could also include provisions that could target those people based on their political beliefs, not just their country of origin. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Trump’s plans.
Trump’s slower approach to implementing a potential travel ban seems geared at avoiding the court losses that saw two versions of the 2017 ban struck down, experts say. This time, Trump is being more cautious about his legal strategy and gathering the kind of evidence he could use as justification for future travel bans, rather than immediately announcing one.
In his first term, Trump announced a ban without specifying why the targeted countries raised national security concerns and did not initially articulate any review process by which the bans could be lifted. That is what doomed the policy in court, said Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School and author of a textbook on immigration law.
“I think that they’ve learned from their mistakes in the first administration, setting things up so that if they want to do a travel ban, it’s fairly likely to be upheld in court,” he said.
Trump’s first travel ban, enacted in January 2017, targeted travelers, including green card holders, from seven Muslim-majority countries. That ban was struck down in court for discriminating against Muslims.
The Trump administration then revised the ban twice more, excluding green card holders and adding North Koreans and certain Venezuelan government officials to the list of those banned. That third version was the one that the Supreme Court upheld in 2018 and that remained in place until 2021, when former President Joe Biden rescinded it after taking office.
The framework Trump is laying out in his new executive order seeks to expand on that. Though it does not name any particular countries, experts anticipate that at least Yemen, Somalia, and Sudan, all of which were already hit with travel bans in Trump’s first term, could be targeted since those countries do not share vetting information with the US. It would potentially apply not just to future arrivals from those countries, but also to those who obtained temporary visas in the last four years and do not have permanent status in the US as green card holders or citizens. Trump’s executive order leaves open the possibility that those people already in the US could be deported.
According to César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor at Ohio State University College of Law and author of several books on US immigration enforcement, including Welcome the Wretched, Trump’s early executive order “appears to be setting the stage for more intense and longer-lasting surveillance of migrants” already in the US, including a provision calling for a report “identifying how many nationals from those countries [with deficient vetting] have entered or have been admitted into the United States on or since January 20, 2021.”
If such nationals are included in a potential ban, that might become the basis for a legal challenge: García Hernández told Vox that “unless migrants leave the country or get convicted for the type of crime that leads to deportation, once admitted into the country migrants are legally permitted to stay as long as they comply with immigration law requirements.”
In addition to its vetting requirement, Trump’s recent executive order also states that the US should not admit travelers who have “hostile attitudes toward US citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles” or who “advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”
It’s unclear what that might mean in practice. However, Trump did promise on the campaign trail to impose travel bans on Palestinians from Gaza, as well as what he described as Marxists, socialists, and communists from entering the US. Relatedly, he signed an executive order Wednesday to deport noncitizens who participated in pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses last spring.
“Those who come to enjoy our country must love our country,” Trump said in June, adding, “We’re going to keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists, and socialists out of America.”
This would potentially introduce a new kind of ideological vetting into the visa application process, which could go beyond screening for criminal or terrorist activity and begin targeting people based on their political beliefs.
That possibility has already raised alarms, Abed Ayoub, national executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, an Arab-American advocacy group that has condemned Israel’s war in Gaza, told Vox.
“The language that stands out to us is the language about the ideological exclusion,” Ayoub said, “bringing that practice back where folks who may not be from the banned countries may still get their visas denied or maybe banned from entering the US if it’s deemed their ideology is not aligned with the Trump administration’s or it’s deemed to be un-American.”
Even a much stricter travel ban, however, might well fall within Trump’s authority. Federal law gives Trump significant leeway to implement travel restrictions.
Specifically, Trump’s executive order invokes an authority in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that allows the president to “suspend the entry” of certain noncitizens or impose any restrictions on their entry that they deem appropriate for as long as their presence is “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”
This is a sweeping authority that has been routinely used by presidents other than Trump. For instance, Biden used it to block noncitizens who were determined to have “enabled corruption” in the Balkan states.
But the authority is not without limitations. It cannot override other aspects of federal immigration law, such as the right to seek asylum once in the US. There is also an unresolved legal debate about whether the authority can be invoked to address purely domestic concerns about the presence of noncitizens, such as costs to taxpayers or high unemployment.
Depending on the exact language of any future travel bans, those could be areas in which immigrant advocates could ground legal challenges. But such challenges may not find success with the conservative majority on this Supreme Court.
“I think that immigrants rights advocates will try to find a friendly court to challenge whatever new travel ban comes out, and they may get an injunction,” Yale-Loehr said. “If the new travel ban is like the provision set forth in this executive order, and like the travel ban that was upheld by the Supreme Court back in 2018, then I would predict that the Supreme Court would also uphold this travel ban.”
2025-01-30 19:00:00
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is not, in the scheme of things, a big part of the federal government. It dispersed $43.8 billion in the last fiscal year. That adds up to just 0.7 percent of the $6.1 trillion federal budget. USAID isn’t even a full Cabinet agency, but a subset of the State Department.
But USAID is worth paying attention to, both because it does important work that belies its size and status, and because it’s become an early case study in how the second Trump administration plans to dismantle major parts of the federal bureaucracy.
On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order placing a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid spending, a week before issuing a similar order affecting most of the rest of the federal budget. Secretary of State Marco Rubio took implementing the order seriously and issued stop-work orders for essentially all foreign aid on Friday. The pause was sweeping, including life-saving programs like PEPFAR, which provides AIDS drugs and preventative services to tens of millions of people. More than a week after Trump’s first order, Rubio signed a partial waiver for humanitarian aid, including some AIDS drugs.
Despite the order’s questionable legality, sources in the agency tell me USAID staff largely complied. Nonetheless, the Trump team initiated a crackdown: About 60 senior leaders in the agency — not political staffers, who usually leave when presidential administrations transition, but career civil and foreign service employees — were placed on administrative leave on Monday. Acting Administrator Jason Gray explained the move in an all-staff email to USAID by citing “several actions within USAID that appear to be designed to circumvent the president’s executive orders and the mandate from the American people.” He did not cite any specific actions.
In response to a request for comment, a USAID spokesperson wrote to Vox: “We aren’t going to comment on personnel matters. We are judiciously reviewing all the waivers submitted and have a process in place to ensure urgent humanitarian aid continues. In line with the President’s E.O. and to execute the implementation of the 90-day foreign assistance pause, several contracts have been paused to include personal services contracts (PSCs). These actions were not terminations or furloughs. These actions allow for a thorough and transparent review of the expenditure of all taxpayer dollars per the President’s E.O. and Secretary Rubio’s guidance. There have been no furloughs, no termination of contracts or personnel under the foreign aid freeze E.O.”
While USAID may not comment on personnel matters, others say the consequences of putting these leaders on leave could be immense. “This would lead to the destruction of US foreign assistance as we know it,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former veteran USAID official and current president of Refugees International, said in an interview. “That’s probably something they want.”
Even this, though, was not the end of Trump’s changes to the agency. So far he has also hit USAID’s contractor workforce, and his Office of Personnel Management has made USAID civil service staff vulnerable to reclassification and removal under so-called Schedule F moves.
Disrupting USAID’s operations could quite literally cost people their lives. To pick one example, it is the primary implementer for the President’s Malaria Initiative, which funded 36.8 million bednets and 48 million doses of malaria-preventing medication in 2023 alone; even with specific waivers, programs like this have been badly disrupted and lost crucial implementing staff.
But this isn’t just a story about USAID, but about a strategy that the Trump team is beta-testing there for disrupting the functioning of government agencies in general.
Trump’s Day 1 executive order was clear: “All department and agency heads with responsibility for United States foreign development assistance programs shall immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of development assistance funds to foreign countries and implementing non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors pending reviews of such programs for programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy.” It stated that the pause would be enforced by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) through what’s called “apportionment.”
Apportionment is a usually quarterly process in which OMB allocates funds from yearly Congressional appropriations to specific agencies. In a normal administration, this is a mere formality meant to ensure that appropriated funds are not spent too quickly. But Trump is trying to use it to block the spending of congressionally appropriated funds altogether.
This is part of a more general strategy called “impoundment,” previously attempted by Richard Nixon and the first Trump administration and roundly rejected by the courts as illegal. Trump’s nominee to be OMB director, Russ Vought, and Mark Paoletta, his OMB general counsel, have vocally argued that the president has the power to withhold congressionally appropriated funding at will, so long as they do not spend in excess of what Congress appropriated. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed by Congress explicitly states that they do not have this power, and courts have ruled that even before that law, this power did not exist. But the Trump team still insists that the law is unconstitutional and the court precedents are wrong.
So far, the courts are holding to their view. On Tuesday evening, US District Court Judge Loren AliKhan issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the freeze on federal grants; it did not explicitly address foreign aid and its implications there are unclear. On Wednesday, OMB rescinded its memo placing a freeze on all federal grants, though White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed this didn’t represent a policy reversal, but rather a clarification on Trump’s executive orders.
But initially, the order did in fact stop disbursements from USAID. The agency primarily works through “implementing partners”: for- and nonprofit contractors, nongovernmental organizations, and local government partners in developing countries that actually provide services for which USAID provides funding and/or technical assistance. The order’s block to “funds to foreign countries and implementing nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors” thus effectively shut down USAID’s work entirely, according to multiple people working at the agency last week.
If that were not clear enough, on Friday, Rubio issued a cable ordering employees to “ensure that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, no new obligations shall be made for foreign assistance.” So USAID couldn’t fund its existing programs, and couldn’t fund new ones.
The first time Trump was president, he tried to cut back on foreign aid spending too — not through these impoundment moves, but through his budget proposals. But Congress rejected the cuts each time.
This time, he brought back some of his political appointees from his first term, but with a new attitude. “This new set of people … feel like career government servants impeded their ability to pursue their vision of a MAGA agenda,” Konyndyk observes.
Multiple current and former USAID officials with knowledge of the situation cited Peter Marocco, the new head of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance (which oversees USAID), as the key mover on foreign aid so far this term. Marocco was reportedly in the Capitol during the January 6, 2021, insurrection, and served in the agency during Trump’s first term, when his team issued a blistering 13-page dissent memo arguing he was incompetent and actively undermining their effectiveness.
Consistent with a feeling of frustration with career staff, then, was the decision of USAID, under Marocco’s supervision, to place roughly 60 senior officials on paid administrative leave on Monday evening.
The leaders placed on leave span the majority of USAID bureaus; most staff at the agency headquarters in Washington, DC, reported to one of them, through one avenue or another, according to an official with knowledge of the list of people placed on leave. Notably, the Office of the General Counsel saw several leave notices, including two senior attorneys focused on ethics, according to three individuals with knowledge of the situation.
“Do you know how many people collectively are under the direct reporting lines of 60 career senior executive service staff and senior foreign service staff?” one of the officials placed on leave asked me rhetorically. Some of them had dozens if not hundreds of people in their reporting lines, the official said, and the list seemed to include the vast majority of senior civil and foreign service staff at the deputy assistant administrator, senior deputy assistant administrator, or acting assistant administrator levels in DC.
Acting Administrator Gray himself is a member of the senior executive service and not a Trump appointee, but he works under Marocco’s authority.
Adding to the disruption was the dismissal of the agency’s institutional support contractors (ISCs). Devex’s Elissa Miolene has reported that in the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, which handles USAID’s response to disasters like famines and earthquakes, ISCs have all been furloughed, meaning a 40 percent cut to the Bureau’s workforce. An ISC in another bureau confirmed to Vox that they received furloughs too. While formally privately employed, these workers sit at USAID desks in the Ronald Reagan Building like any other staffer and are fully integrated into their team. Removing them amounts to a sudden, unplanned-for staffing reduction.
As of this past September, some 13,215 people worked at USAID, of whom 2,578 were institutional support contractors, and 1,061 were personal services contractors (another major contractor category). Over one-fourth of the agency, in other words, are contractors, who under a stoppage of all foreign aid contracts cannot be paid. Much of the rest of the agency reported to career officials who are now on indefinite leave.
Meanwhile, the 1,886 civil service staffers at the agency will have lesser protections under a memo promulgated Monday by the Office of Personnel Management. It enforces another Day 1 executive order that “creates a new Schedule Policy/Career in the excepted service for positions that are of a confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy- advocating character.” Agencies are instructed to review their staffing and move any roles of this character into the new schedule, where civil servants can be dismissed more easily. Trump tried to do this in 2020, shortly before losing reelection, calling the new set of positions “Schedule F”; it appears to have been renamed Schedule Policy/Career.
So any civil service officials still at USAID run the risk of being rescheduled to this new category, potentially setting them up for future dismissal. “I cannot think of a civil servant at USAID that would not fit under the sweeping terms of it,” a senior career official told me.
More immediately, the administration has asked agencies for lists of career staff who are still within one-year probationary periods, making them easier to dismiss than longer-served staffers. This creates an implicit threat for USAID staff in this category: If they displease the administration for whatever reason, their probationary status can be invoked against them.
Perhaps the most important function of the shock-and-awe campaign of funding freeze and mass administrative leaves has been to put the rest of USAID’s workforce on notice.
“If what you’re trying to do is downsize an agency that you feel is bloated in a responsible way, you don’t push out the 60 most senior staff and send home all the contractors who make the agency work,” Konyndyk says. “Those aren’t things you do if your concern is government effectiveness and efficiency. Those are things you do if you are trying to create an atmosphere of intimidation.”
The atmosphere included, per reporting by the Washington Post’s John Hudson, removing all pictures of aid programs from the USAID headquarters; photos from the office show empty picture frames, with photographs of USAID staff and those benefiting from US foreign aid removed:
The USAID staff I spoke with were mostly unwilling to be quoted due to fear of retaliation, and all of them described an atmosphere of uncertainty, unease, and omnipresent fear that one could lose one’s job at any moment. This is not an environment in which one can imagine an agency of any kind operating effectively.
As of this writing, the Trump administration has walked back its budget office’s call for a total shutdown on government grants. But the January 20 executive order ordering impoundment of foreign aid has not been rescinded. One potentially dangerous endpoint here is that the administration reverses course on impoundment in general, while quietly continuing to withhold funding for specific programs, like foreign aid or clean energy. That is likely to provoke less backlash — but as USAID is learning already, it has the potential to grind important government functions to a halt regardless.
2025-01-30 06:21:14
Donald Trump and JD Vance were officially sworn in as the 47th president and vice president of the United States on Monday, January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. Their inauguration looked different from previous years, in part because it was held inside the Capitol Rotunda, instead of outside the US Capitol, as a polar vortex threatened much of the nation with below freezing temperatures.
Trump has issued hundreds of executive orders soon after he was inaugurated for his second presidency, including laying the groundwork for a civil service purge and establishing a framework through which he intends to carry out mass deportations. He also provided sweeping pardons for the hundreds of so-called hostages convicted of storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Follow here for the latest news, analysis, and explainers about Inauguration Day and Trump’s first days in office.