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In January, the Trump administration attempted to fundamentally change the way the United States handles childhood immunizations. Following a memo from the Department of Health and Human Services, the CDC updated its vaccine schedule to recommend that some shots no longer be given to all children. A federal court undid the effort in March. In an executive order in May, Donald Trump called on states to adopt the narrower schedule anyway. On Monday, Trump issued a new executive order on the same subject, focused on lowering the number of vaccines that the government recommends for all children. As I wrote earlier this week, this White House has a habit of doubling down when it doesn’t get its way. But only states have the power to put these proposals into practice—and many state policy makers, concerned that the White House is contradicting existing research, aren’t keen to follow its guidance.

According to the new executive order, preventive shots for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, dengue, and other diseases should be recommended for “high-risk” groups only. The order also calls to split up vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella—the two-dose MMR shot that has been a standard recommendation for U.S. children for decades—into three separate stages, and directs the attorney general to pursue legal action against states that don’t respect “parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under the law.” (The order says it will align U.S. policy with the best practices of other countries, such as Denmark, but the experts I spoke with highlighted that what works in one country won’t necessarily work in another.)

The mandate may not have any legal authority to compel states to change their guidelines in the near term, although the invocation of the attorney general suggests that litigation may be on the horizon. And the single-disease vaccines that the executive order encourages aren’t yet available in the U.S. But this week’s order risks creating even more uncertainty about vaccines than already exists. “If you set out to write a policy that confuses people, it would look a lot like this one,” Jake Scott, an infectious-disease specialist at Stanford, told me.

Between the policy priorities of the Trump administration and the guidance of public-health experts, Americans have been stuck in a state of vaccine whiplash. When the American Academy of Pediatrics broke with the government earlier this year over its proposed vaccine schedule, the chair of the organization’s committee on infectious diseases told reporters that the recommendations are a “strong departure from the medical evidence and no longer offer the optimal way to prevent illness in children.” Some state lawmakers have been fighting over how best to adapt to the CDC’s changing guidelines; Kansas’s GOP-dominated legislature tried to bring the state’s vaccine rules into alignment with the CDC’s, only for its Democratic governor to veto the effort in April. And many other states have publicly said that they will reject the guidelines.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has questioned vaccines’ safety in the past, has been driving the discussions of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee, as my colleagues Tom Bartlett and Katherine J. Wu reported. And although the secretary has moved away from explicit anti-vax rhetoric in recent months (following a reported White House push for health officials to stick to messages with broad public support), vaccine skepticism clearly lingers within the administration. During the press conference for Monday’s executive order, Trump suggested that the MMR vaccine could be “quite lethal.” There is no evidence for this. Measles, though, can kill: Last year, the U.S. saw its first deaths from measles in a decade.

Rethinking MMR at this moment poses extreme logistical challenges. Even if pharmaceutical companies opted to invest the time and money to introduce these shots to the American market, splitting up the doses would create new problems for caregivers. “We are essentially tripling the operational labor required of the parent or guardian (who must now schedule three separate appointments for their child),” Maimuna Majumder, a Harvard epidemiologist, told me in an email, which is “all but guaranteed to result in missed vaccines.”

In the meantime, the executive order risks misinforming Americans who are already unsure of how they feel about vaccination. The Kaiser Family Foundation released a study in June suggesting that about a third of American adults fall into a “mixed middle group” of vaccine skepticism—they believe some myths and reject others. My colleague Nick Florko, who covers public health, told me that these are the people most likely to be swayed by the administration’s latest push: “Those are the folks that might see this and think, Okay, maybe my belief that I want to delay this vaccine is well founded because the federal guidance now says that we should do that.” Under the White House’s rubric, the Americans who most need clear guidance are those who stand to lose.

Related:

• Kennedy’s handpicked vaccine committee is a mess. (From 2025)
• The U.S.’s most concerning anti-vaccine policy

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• Hunger Games, MAGA style
• Trump’s new plan to get his name back on the Kennedy Center
• Our last Wi-Fi-less refuge is gone.

Today’s News

1. The Kennedy Center’s board voted to put President Trump’s name back on the building, months after a federal judge ordered it removed. The board also approved closing the main building for a $250 million renovation, aiming to reopen it in 2028.
2. A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s anti-Semitism lawsuit against Harvard, finding that the incidents cited by the government were “too isolated and episodic” to show that the university was violating federal civil-rights law. The administration had accused Harvard of failing to address anti-Semitism on campus and sought the ability to deny the university federal grants.
3. Flock Safety, which operates a nationwide network of license-plate-reading cameras used by police to track vehicles, announced new safeguards after reports that officers misused the system to surveil people. The company said it will cut its default data-storage period from 30 days to seven and add stronger oversight of police searches.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: In 1973, an Atlantic writer predicted that Richard Nixon’s downfall would restrain presidents for generations. Instead, Watergate helped write the script for the scandals that followed, Jake Lundberg argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

What I Saw In Sinaloa

By Kevin Sieff

Last Tuesday night, I was eating sushi with a Mexican police chief in downtown Culiacán, a city that had momentarily flickered back to life amid a bloody cartel turf war. At the table next to us was a birthday party. The police chief ordered a salmon roll. Through the window, I could see groups of families and friends walking on the sidewalk, past car dealerships and strip malls, after months of self-imposed lockdown.

Among them were three influencers who pulled up to a KFC down the street. They were dressed as food-delivery workers, carrying insulated bags on their backs, joking with one another and livestreaming everything with their phones. César Gastélum, the group’s front man, had become famous for such innocuous pranks. Even as thousands were murdered by the cartels, Gastélum, a stocky, bearded 24-year-old, posted videos of himself dancing in pajamas, dressing as a priest, sipping iced coffee. He had more than 700,000 followers on TikTok.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Over the past few days, the president has continued his crusade against one of the supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool. In a lengthy post on Truth Social on Sunday, he alleged that “a National Park Service career employee, a highly credible witness,” had caught the former Olympic canoeist David Hearn in the act of “ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating.”

The problem is that the Department of Justice’s case against Hearn is already effectively over. More than a week earlier, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against him, citing information from the Department of the Interior; the damage to the Reflecting Pool was “the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” the government’s motion to dismiss reads. That evidence—and the judgment of DOJ—has done little to stop Donald Trump from pursuing this debunked theory over and over again. In recent weeks, the president has repeatedly returned to the same few vendettas and personal obsessions, trying to push them forward no matter the evidence against them. His strategy is summed up by a self-assessment that he gave CNN more than a decade ago: “I am the most fabulous whiner,” he said. “I keep whining and whining until I win.”

Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that White House officials have asked the Justice Department to consider prosecuting Hearn a second time. By doubling down on his vandalism thesis, Trump is sending a strong message to one of his most ardent supporters, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, whom he already castigated last week for dropping the charges. “I guess she choked,” he told reporters at the time.

The rulings of the Supreme Court don’t seem to sway the president either. On Thursday, he doubled down on another mission of personal importance—limiting birthright citizenship—despite the Court’s recent decision to strike down a previous executive order on the subject. Trump has now issued two new orders that are narrower in scope. One seeks to expand the category of children whom the government can deny automatic citizenship, and the other targets “birth tourism,” a phenomenon in which people travel to the United States “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”—something that the law already prohibits. These new attempts to upend more than a century of precedent are likely to face significant legal challenges. This tactic wasn’t Trump’s only option: Drawing on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s June opinion, the president could potentially urge Congress to amend a particular statute or enact new legislation to limit birthright citizenship (although this legislation would be unlikely to pass). Instead, he chose to use the same tool in the hope of getting a different result.

Trump is also forging ahead on his attempts to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Nearly a year ago, the president tried to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud. In June, the Court ruled that she couldn’t be fired, in part because the White House hadn’t given her a chance to contest the allegations. Last week, Trump’s longtime aide Dan Scavino sent Cook a letter warning her that she may still be removed and telling her in no uncertain terms that “this is your opportunity to respond.” In this case, Trump appears to be cooperating with the Court, although it’s uncertain whether this procedure will be enough to satisfy it. The note makes clear that the president isn’t letting up in his quest to oust Cook.

Trump’s tenacity in pursuing his own agenda is nothing new. Take, for example, his eight-year attempt to brand former FBI Director James Comey as a criminal, despite a lack of evidence; when, in the fall, the first set of charges against him didn’t stick, Trump’s Justice Department simply tried again. As David A. Graham wrote in his story last week about the birthright-citizenship orders, the president’s recent actions invoke a kind of déjà vu. The commitment to doubling down has become a one-size-fits-all strategy: Trump’s desire to fight back doesn’t necessarily correlate with the odds of victory in a given situation. My colleague Tom Nichols recently noted that the president’s push to prosecute Hearn has only emphasized “just how immune to evidence and logic his beliefs have become.” Trump’s fixation on the Reflecting Pool is also directing his focus away from the issues that midterm voters care about most, such as affordability.

Meanwhile, new setbacks are arriving all the time. On Friday, after an appeals court upheld the block on Trump’s attempts to build a new ballroom for the White House, the president promised to make his case to the Supreme Court. That fight, like so many others, is not over until Trump says it is.

Related:

• Trump’s déjà vu moment on birthright citizenship
• Tom Nichols: Trump’s irrationality is dangerous.

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• The Democrats can’t just laugh off “Woke 1.”
• A little bit of shopping, all the time

Today’s News

1. President Trump secretly switched from a presidential aircraft to an alternate military jet in Turkey after last month’s NATO summit in response to an Iranian threat, according to a U.S. official. The White House has not provided details about the threat or the security operation.
2. Russia released the Marine Robert Gilman, who had been imprisoned since 2022, after President Vladimir Putin granted him a pardon on humanitarian grounds, according to U.S. officials. Trump said that no prisoner exchange took place. Gilman, who has reportedly been in poor health, is returning to the United States for medical treatment, according to the state department.
3. Voters are casting ballots today in primary elections across Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and Connecticut, and South Carolina Republicans are choosing a nominee for a special Senate election following the death of Senator Lindsey Graham. Alabama is also holding delayed U.S. House primaries under a new congressional map.

Evening Read

The Man Who Refused to Sit on the Sidelines

By Sally Jenkins

To a firefighter who is inside one, a fire creates as much darkness as heat. Flames start bright but throw off smoke that can swathe everything in pitch black. Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell did not fight fires so much as he groped through and problem-solved them, relying on half-blind judgment and expertise—and his fellow firefighters to keep flaming debris off his back.

At the cindering end of a successful 24-hour shift with the New York City Fire Department, Kevin would hang up his helmet, so ash-rubbed that it looked salty, and drive home to his wife and two sons in Rockaway Beach, Queens. “Oh, we had a good job last night,” he’d say, elated as well as exhausted. By “good,” his family knew, he meant the fire had been big.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Play our daily crossword.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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At this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Donald Trump told a room full of the world’s most prominent CEOs about a routine that he performs when he meets a successful businessperson:

I say, “Congratulations!”

They say, “On what?”

I said, “You’ve doubled your net worth since I’ve been president, right?”

This is how Trump has long pitched himself—as the savior of American commerce. One of his central promises to voters in 2024 was that he would encourage private investment in the United States, boosting the stock market and ushering in a “golden age” of economic activity. Everyone, he vowed, would be making money.

But the president now seems less pro-business than he once did. On Monday, in response to a question about the gargantuan profits being posted by U.S. oil companies, Trump told reporters that ExxonMobil and Chevron are “making too much money based on a shortage.” Energy companies adjust their prices as global markets move; when Trump took the country to war against Iran, in February, the world’s oil supply was abruptly pinched, and prices shot up. Chevron and ExxonMobil announced that they’d earned $12.1 billion and $14.5 billion, respectively, last quarter—many billions more than they’d made during the same period last year. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price,” Trump said.

This statement echoes the president’s previous accusation of price gouging in the industry. Back in June, after the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding, Trump claimed that companies were keeping gas prices from falling as quickly as oil prices were. There are legitimate economic reasons that gas prices and oil prices aren’t always perfectly synced, and Big Oil doesn’t unilaterally set retail gas prices at American pumps (fewer than 5 percent of U.S. gas stations are owned directly by major oil companies, according to the American Petroleum Institute). The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission subsequently called for states to investigate possible retail-price manipulation. To shift some of the responsibility for high gas prices, the president is now scolding an industry he once championed—but it won’t change the reality that most Americans are unhappy with the economy, and that Trump is largely to blame.

Oil interests reportedly spent more than $75 million to get Trump reelected, and the administration has consistently supported the industry over the past two years. “Drill, baby, drill” has been a mantra for his administration since day one. The White House recently revoked protections for endangered species, clearing the way for companies to drill in critical wildlife habitats. The secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, has pushed to increase offshore drilling and drilling on public lands. Trump’s suggestion that Big Oil return some of its money “to the public” represents, by his own admission, a hard pivot. “I should be the last one to say it, because I’m a big free-enterprise guy—nobody bigger,” he said on Monday. (ExxonMobil declined to comment for this story, Chevron didn’t respond to my request, and the White House told me that “President Trump’s priority has always been and continues to be lowering gas prices for American families.”)

The Trump administration has made a point of celebrating businesses that have cut costs for consumers in recent months. In July, Trump applauded a new chain of gas stations called the Freedom Fuel Network for selling gas at a discount across the mid-Atlantic. On Truth Social, the president wrote that this “VERY smart Retailer” was “stepping up” on account of its patriotism, and that others should follow its example. Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote on X yesterday that a co-owner of 14 Piggly Wiggly supermarkets (who has been invited to the Oval Office in the past) was “answering Trump’s call” by “boldly stepping up to lower costs for families.” She praised Walmart for implementing similar price-cutting measures, and wrote a few days ago that another grocer, Meijer, was also “answering the call” by lowering prices on more than 1,000 items. But it’s unclear whether these companies’ discounts were actually responses to the president, as Rollins has suggested.

Trump and his party have every reason to be worried about high prices. All kinds of consumer goods have become more expensive since the start of the Iran war, and Americans are now broadly worried about the cost of living, just as they were before Trump took office. People’s dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of the economy is reflected in his abysmal approval ratings, which pose a problem for Republicans in the midterms. Trump’s strategy has so far been to avoid taking responsibility for any Iran-driven inflation and to insist that, actually, the U.S. is experiencing an economic boom. He’s right that some indicators have lately been positive: The stock market continues to set record highs, and inflation did cool in June after three straight months of acceleration—although it’s still higher than it was before the start of the war.

With his comments on Big Oil, the president seems to be acknowledging that high prices are indeed a problem for many Americans. He also seems to expect that private companies will bail him out during a moment of political weakness. This administration has created the conditions—both domestically and abroad—for consumer goods to become more expensive, and for the cost of oil to jump. No piecemeal discount can undo what Trump himself has already done.

Related:

• Get used to high gas prices.
• The great Chinese oil mystery

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The new parent trap
• How the U.S. squandered its strategic advantage
• What El-Sayed does next matters.

Today’s News

1. The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he refused to answer questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment at last week’s hearing. The resolution sends a referral to the Justice Department for possible prosecution over his alleged refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena.
2. Iranian media said that Iran and Oman are close to an agreement on new arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz; President Trump said that “a lot of progress has been made” and suggested that an announcement could come soon.
3. A Government Accountability Office report found that many of the Department of Government Efficiency’s claims of savings of $110 billion from contracts, grants, and leases may have been inaccurate or overstated, or could not be verified because of insufficient documentation.

Dispatches

• The Weekly Planet: Running from a fire should not be this routine, Joshua Partlow writes.

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Evening Read

How Theory Took Over the World

By Lynn Steger Strong

Separating facts from lies, and real thoughts from fabrications, can seem more difficult than ever: Words and images are easily faked, and some writers at every stage—students, academics, novelists—are letting machines do the work for them. The author may as well be dead. Ubiquitous cameras are eroding human privacy, creating the sense that we live in a panopticon. And across many popular platforms, information is often shorn of context, if not outright false.

The fact that I feed my kids and pay my rent as a novelist and teacher likely intensifies the queasiness I feel at these developments. Yet my profession also helps me understand that the idea of society coming apart might be the oldest story in the world.

Read the full article.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

For Donald Trump, social media is a fundamental component of the presidency. He shares his thoughts freely and constantly; world-shaking announcements that other presidents might have reserved for prime-time speeches, he posts online.

Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that controls Truth Social and is majority-owned by the president, is now selling speedy access to those posts through a service called Truth API. Launched this weekend, it provides users a raw feed of “market-moving” posts from the “highest-ranking Truth Social accounts”—the top one being Trump’s, which has 13 million followers. Typically, social-media users encounter split-second lag times before being notified about new posts; Truth API purports to minimize delays. It’s aimed at investment firms that can afford the subscription price (Trump Media has not publicized the cost, but The Wall Street Journal and others have reported that it’s up to $100,000 a month), and promises traders an advantage over their competitors. It also gives Trump Media a way to capitalize directly on the president’s words—and gives Trump another way to capitalize on the nation’s highest office.

The initial press release for Truth API made no mention of the president’s posts. But Truth Social was created primarily as a vehicle for Trump’s own commentary after he was booted off Twitter in 2021 following the January 6 riot. New accounts on the website automatically follow Trump, as well as Donald Trump Jr. and many others. (Trump Media declined to answer my questions, and the White House denied that Truth API creates conflicts of interest for the president.)

The value of the new service hinges on the fact that Trump’s statements move markets. This president has a habit of sharing new policies on social media before the White House has had a chance to release an official statement. He has used Truth Social to make adjustments to tariff rules, announce military actions, and telegraph future plans for foreign interventions. (Many observers have also pointed out that he tends to wait until after trading hours to share news that might have an undesirable effect on markets, as has been the case throughout the Iran war.)

The president’s comments portend stock-market shifts in lower-stakes situations too. One recent example: Trump told the public to “go out and buy” a Dell computer at least four times this year. He began doing this on February 19, about a week after he purchased at least $1 million worth of Dell stock. The last time Trump dropped this line, at the White House in July, the share price immediately climbed by almost 8 percent. Maybe the president just really likes Dell computers—or maybe he really likes the company’s CEO, Michael Dell, who, along with his wife, pledged to donate more than $6 billion to the administration’s new child-savings-account program. The president encouraged people to buy in, and shareholders made money.

Trump Media has said that Truth API data will be delivered in “milliseconds,” providing what they say is the “fastest access” to these posts. Critics argue that this gives certain traders an unfair, or even illegal, leg up: Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff wrote a letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week demanding an investigation into the service. The letter suggests that, because the service offers access to market-moving posts before most people have had a chance to see it, it could potentially violate insider-trading laws, which ban trades based on nonpublic information.

But most of the experts I spoke with questioned this logic. Existing securities laws don’t fit this situation perfectly. Trump Media told The Wall Street Journal that Truth Social posts will continue to be publicly viewable at the same time for all users, whether they pay for Truth API or not. Those who subscribe will be notified slightly before the rest of us, but the posts themselves won’t be delayed or hidden—which could make it hard to argue that the information contained within them isn’t actually public. And Trump Media didn’t invent the concept of high-speed data feeds for institutional traders. As Stephen Bainbridge, a professor at UCLA Law, has pointed out, today’s stock exchanges already sell similar products, which are broadly considered legal.

Some of the legal scholars I interviewed observed that because this situation is unprecedented, the law may simply not have caught up. The SEC could potentially play a role in investigating Trump Media, but the agency, now under the aegis of Trump’s handpicked chair, Paul Atkins, has not commented on Warren and Schiff’s letter. (A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment for this story.) When I asked Jonathan Macey, a professor at Yale Law, what he thought of Warren and Schiff’s letter, he told me that they were essentially asking the fox to come check on the henhouse.

Truth API is a clear attempt to create a new revenue stream for a struggling company—its CEO, former Representative Devin Nunes, stepped down earlier this year after overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses during his tenure. It’s also yet another way for Trump to make money from the office of the presidency. Trump reported that he earned more than $2.2 billion last year, much of which came from cryptocurrency tokens and investments. No other president has ever come close to generating this much personal wealth while in office. Now he stands to profit from something more straightforward: unmediated access to his own thoughts.

Related:

• David Frum: The Trump presidency’s world-historical heist
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Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Tom Nichols: Trump’s irrationality is dangerous.
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Today’s News

1. The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general. The nomination now heads to a vote in the full Senate.
2. President Trump met with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro at the White House after publicly criticizing her for dropping vandalism charges related to damage at the Reflecting Pool. Pirro was not fired and did not resign following the meeting, according to people familiar with the matter.
3. Representative Max Miller’s attorney apologized after the Ohio Republican publicly shared unredacted court documents that included a “sensitive” image of his young daughter, saying that the photo was inadvertently released. Miller is facing domestic-abuse allegations, which he has denied, from his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, who is also the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio.

Evening Read

The Catholic Church’s New Schism

By Luis Parrales

At an open-air Mass in Écône, Switzerland, before a crowd of about 16,000 people, four priests became bishops last month. The men professed their fidelity to tradition against “heretics, schismatics, and those who rebel against our Holy Father.” They did so knowing full well that, in becoming bishops, they lacked something the Catholic Church deems essential: permission from the pope.

Read the full article.

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Explore all of our newsletters here.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Back in April, Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote an op-ed celebrating the Trump administration’s efforts to get Americans off food stamps. Officially known as SNAP, the program has shed an estimated 6 million participants since Donald Trump’s return to office—a shift that Rollins argued could help break a “vicious cycle” of government dependence.

The idea that too many people have come to rely on federal handouts has long been a line of attack against SNAP. Per the Department of Agriculture’s preliminary data from April, about 37 million low- and no-income people in the United States are on food stamps. That’s roughly one in 10 Americans, down from one in eight last year. The reduction is in line with the administration’s broader approach to social welfare. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump has touted as one of his signature policy achievements, slashed funding to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And its cuts to SNAP—tightening eligibility requirements and limiting the amount of aid that recipients might be able to collect in the future—were the largest in the program’s history.

Food stamps will lose $186 billion in federal funding through 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s estimates. But what Rollins has framed as a way to curtail waste, fraud, and abuse is already having far-reaching impacts on the Americans who rely on the program. Last week, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, suggested that “it’s very likely that the number of children receiving SNAP has dropped by more than 1.5 million since July 2025,” when the OBBBA became law. Inflation has been rising quickly this year, in part because of the Iran war, and the assault on food stamps is now compounding an ongoing affordability crisis. If states can’t meet the federal government’s new requirements for SNAP, they may have to take on a collective $9 billion in food-stamp costs themselves—forcing local legislators to make hard choices about which kinds of social-welfare programs, and which kinds of people, should receive aid.

This past winter, when the White House decided to briefly stop funding SNAP during the government shutdown, Trump said that the program’s enrollment number was “many times what it should be.” It’s true that food-stamp enrollment—which tends to rise during moments of economic crisis and contract in moments of recovery—spiked substantially during the coronavirus pandemic as Congress temporarily increased benefit amounts, and enrollment still hasn’t reverted to its pre-2020 level. But stricter work requirements (homeless people and veterans are no longer exempt, for example) and reductions in federal funding have helped drive down SNAP enrollment at a vertiginous moment. Most people, whether on food stamps or not, are cutting back on groceries. And no other institution “is going to swoop in and provide these financial resources” to families struggling to buy groceries, Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, told me.

In Arizona, the number of people with access to SNAP benefits has almost halved in less than a year—the biggest drop in any state. A recent New York Times report explains that the OBBBA’s cuts and updated rules have created “bureaucratic chaos” in the state, which has been exacerbated by a labyrinthian paperwork process and antiquated tech infrastructure. The fact that Arizona laid off a third of its caseworkers after losing a federal grant has also made it harder to verify who is and isn’t eligible for aid—and monthly visits to food banks have outpaced SNAP enrollment in the state for the first time, according to the Times.

States have historically managed SNAP payments on their own; the federal government supplies the money for benefits and for some of the administrative costs. Critics of this arrangement have noted that the post-COVID swell in enrollments has coincided with an uptick in improper payments, most of which have historically been overpayments. In 2019, 7.4 percent of the payments SNAP doled out were made in error, according to the USDA; last year, the national error rate was 10.6 percent. The OBBBA puts states in a tough spot. When it went into effect, it gave most states until the end of September 2026 to get their error rates below 6 percent—a little more than a year. If they fail to do so, they will begin sharing the cost of food-stamp benefits with the White House in 2027 (Alaska and other states with higher error rates will have longer deadlines).

The consequences will affect red and blue states alike, unlike some other Trump-backed economic initiatives. According to data released by the USDA last month, 41 states had error rates above the threshold in the 2025 fiscal year, and many are now scrambling to get those numbers down. California could end up paying roughly $1.9 billion if legislators don’t find a way to reduce the state’s rate by almost half, and Florida may need to pay $900 million, according to one estimate. Taking on those costs would require states to radically reshape their budgets, raise taxes, or find some other way to pay for SNAP—otherwise, their constituents may hold them accountable when the food-stamp payments stop coming. Officials in Alabama and Arizona have already considered ending the program, and, in an anonymous survey, four states identified “withdrawing and/or pausing from SNAP” as a potential risk.

If states are able to lower their error rates, SNAP could be transformed for the better. But if they fail to do so by the fast-approaching deadline, it’s hard to see who wins: not food-stamp recipients, not the states that will have their budgets upended, and not the administration, which has been trying to convince Americans ahead of the midterms that it’s responding to their affordability concerns. Rollins has described SNAP as a “broken program,” but these changes aren’t guaranteed to restore trust in the system. Instead, the push to repair SNAP could end up breaking it even more.

Related:

• The deadline for a major shutdown casualty
• The new food-stamp rules will make your head spin.

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Today’s News

1. President Trump threatened to temporarily withdraw Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general until Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis, who are holdouts, leave office in January.
2. Iran and the United States continued exchanging missile strikes today; drone strikes targeted Egypt for the first time.
3. FIFA proposed spinning off the commercial rights of its major tournaments into a private company and then selling a 20 percent stake of it to investors. UEFA member nations argued that the plan would give private investors too much influence over soccer and threatened to boycott all FIFA competitions if the $20 billion deal goes through.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: Since the 19th century, office jobs have represented a path to comfort and prestige, Jake Lundberg writes. The AI era is testing whether that promise still holds.

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Evening Read

The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs

By Michael Powell

Late last year, I walked roughly a mile from downtown Seattle to the working-class neighborhood of Little Saigon and came upon a montage of human despair. An open-air drug market stretched along the intersection of 12th and Jackson: about 250 people, many smoking fentanyl or bent over in the thrall of the drug, tilting as if mid-fall. Three women lay passed out on the sidewalk, their chests slowly rising and falling, while fellow addicts stepped over them and dealers made sales. Young boys, schoolbags on their backs, stood on a far corner and watched …

Seattle, like a striking number of other liberal American cities, has embraced a radical form of “harm reduction,” which is more a philosophy about treating addiction than a scientific approach to it.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Read. Animal narrators in fiction have a long history, but they seem to be enjoying a contemporary moment. Rachel Vorona Cote explores Paul Yoon’s Etna and the instructive journey of a very good boy.

Watch (or skip). Despite seeming like a fresh start, the newest Spider-Man movie (out now in theaters) is trapped in the Marvel vortex, David Sims writes.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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