Hantavirus and Pandemic Preparedness

Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

At NYT, Apoorva Mandavilli reports on a hantavirus outbreak:

“We should be able to deal collectively with a hantavirus outbreak much more quickly and effectively than this is happening,” said Stephanie Psaki, the coordinator for global health security during the Biden administration.

“An outbreak of a known pathogen on a cruise ship is a relatively easy scenario,” she said. “It can get much harder than this.”

Because of deep staffing cuts the Trump administration has made to the C.D.C. and other health agencies, the government has far fewer people to respond to outbreaks, from trainees and contractors who can be deployed to do boots-on-the-ground epidemiology to senior leaders who can coordinate responses across the U.S. government and elsewhere. And because President Trump withdrew the country from the World Health Organization, the United States does not receive regular information from member states about emerging health threats.

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Last year, alongside massive cuts to research on mRNA and other vaccines, the Trump administration shuttered a network of research centers focused on preventing pandemics by studying pathogens like hantavirus that can jump from animals to people.

In its 2026 budget request, the administration said it planned to refocus the C.D.C. on outbreak investigations and preparedness. But at the same time, it proposed eliminating about $750 million in preparedness grants that states rely on to cope with natural and man-made disasters including outbreaks. It also zeroed funding for the Hospital Preparedness Program, which strengthens health care systems to respond to emergencies, saying the program “has been wasteful and unfocused.”

The Vatican and the US Government

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

 Matthew Choi and Dan Merica at WP:

For decades, the Vatican has been a unique partner in U.S. foreign policy. From mediating negotiations with hostile countries like Cuba to coordinating global efforts on combating hunger, the Vatican regularly taps into its singular status as both church and state to help U.S. objectives abroad. The relationship hasn’t always been seamless — past popes have spoken out about American policy — but the alignment on human rights usually overcame any disagreements.

Which makes the latest row between President Donald Trump and Pope Leo XIV all the more extraordinary. The president has ferociously criticized the pope this week, saying the pontiff should stay out of politics. He accused Leo of “endangering a lot of Catholics” for his criticisms of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, saying the pope would permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Vice President JD Vance has also said the pope should “be careful” in opining on theology when critiquing U.S. foreign policy.

Leo denied that he or the church have ever promoted nuclear weapons and that “should anyone want to criticize me for proclaiming the Gospel, they should do so with the truth.”

The back and forth has led to the lowest point in U.S.-Vatican relations since the two states established formal diplomatic relations in 1984, Vatican officials told our colleague Anthony Faiola. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is Catholic, met with the pope in Vatican City today in what Rubio described as a preplanned meeting that wasn’t driven by the latest rift between the two leaders. But the tension is certain to loom in the background. Anthony and Stefano Pitrelli have more on Rubio’s visit here.

“It’s extraordinary,” Margaret Susan Thompson, a professor of history and political science at Syracuse University, told us of the administration’s rhetoric toward the pope. “To have [Vance] speak out and say, in effect, the pope should mind his own business, and the pope should learn Catholic doctrine, and other members of the administration saying things like, the pope should read the Bible — these are kind of odd statements.”

High Level of Antisemitic Incidents

Many posts have discussed antisemitism and the Israel-Hamas war. 

From the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) :

The year 2025 was the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) began tracking them in 1979.

Each year, the ADL tracks incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and physical assault in the United States in our annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. While incidents of harassment and vandalism decreased significantly in 2025 from record highs in 2023 and 2024, physical assaults this past year were higher than ever before. In 2025, there was an average of 17 incidents per day, compared to an average of eight incidents per day between 2020 and 2022.

More than two years after October 7, 2023, fundamentally transformed the landscape of antisemitism in America, the data make clear that while the fight against antisemitism and the work that ADL does has yielded measurable progress, the work of tracking, confronting and dismantling antisemitism demands our continued, unwavering vigilance. Rigorous, year-over-year tracking of antisemitic incidents is essential to understand the true size and scope of this threat, identify emerging trends, and measure which efforts are working and where more action is needed.

 

Debt Matters

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Neil Irwin at Axios reports on federal debt exceeding 100% of GDP.

Catch up quick: The Commerce Department last week reported $31.9 trillion annualized GDP in Q1. That surpasses the $31.4 trillion in debt held by the public on the last day of the quarter.The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio briefly topped 100% during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when economic activity collapsed. But before that, it hadn't exceeded that ratio since the aftermath of World War II.

The ratio is on track to continue rising, with the Congressional Budget Office projecting it will reach 120% in 2036.

Zoom in: Consider a family with $100,000 in debt and an annual income of $100,000. Is their debt excessive? The answer, of course, is that it depends.If the family ran up that debt due to one-time expenses that won't recur and has a low interest rate, rising income and day-to-day spending in line with what they bring in, they're probably fine.

If, on the other hand, they ran up that debt to support routine living expenses in excess of their earnings and have a high interest rate and stagnant income, it would raise serious alarm bells.

Zoom out: The U.S. government is more like the latter family. The CBO projects federal revenue in the next few years will be 17% to 18% of GDP, while expenditures will be north of 23% of GDP.That gap, of around 6% of GDP, is higher than the CBO's GDP growth projection, which would imply an ever-rising debt-to-GDP ratio.

In those projections, the federal government's interest expenses soar to new heights as a share of the economy — surpassing $1.5 trillion and 4% of GDP in 2031.

That assumes interest rates remain broadly in their current zone, with a 10-year Treasury note yielding about 4.4% — and that bond investors prove willing to continue financing an ever-growing debt at those levels.
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The bottom line: The national debt hitting 100% of GDP isn't a worry in and of itself, and it isn't some magical threshold. What is worrying are the details of how it got there, and what comes next.

Spending, Taxes, and Deficits: A Book of Charts from Brookings

Many posts have discussed federal deficits and the federal debt.

Jessica Riedl at Brookings:

Debates over federal taxes, spending, and deficits will always be contentious due to deep disagreements over fiscal priorities, ideologies, and values. Yet these debates are often further hampered by an inability to agree on even the most basic underlying budget data. Simply put, standard liberal and conservative fiscal frameworks are often defended with fallacies regarding the current and projected makeup of taxes and spending, the trends in budget deficits and debt, and the fiscal records of recent presidents.

The new 2026 version of this annual chart book once again provides a standard, non-partisan look at the trends in spending, taxes, and deficits in hope of addressing common fallacies and providing a common starting point for fiscal debates.

The 132-page chart book begins by broadly examining the rising budget deficits and national debt and then dives deeper to show the policies driving the $138 trillion in new CBO-projected deficits over the next three decades—and how drastically the picture worsens if interest rates remain elevated. Next, the chart book shows the size of the reforms needed to stabilize the debt, and how the common “easy solutions” would fail to provide sufficient savings towards that goal. Finally, it examines trends in tax revenues and tax progressivity, slays common budget myths, and offers a full accounting of the fiscal records of Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

These charts—most of which rely on publicly-available data from the Congressional Budget Office, Office of Management and Budget, Census Bureau, and U.S. Treasury—nevertheless defy conventional wisdom about spending, taxes, and deficits.

Defying the Courts

Many posts have discussed presidential power.

SUDHIN THANAWALA at AP:

The failure of Trump officials to follow court orders has been highlighted most notably in individual immigration cases. But a review of hundreds of pages of court records by The Associated Press also shows an extraordinary record of violations in lawsuits over policy changes and other moves.

In the second Trump administration’s first 15 months in office, district court judges ruled it was violating an order in at least 31 lawsuits over a wide range of issues, including mass layoffs, deportations, spending cuts and immigration practices, the AP’s review of court records found. That’s about one out of every eight lawsuits in which courts have at least temporarily blocked the administration’s actions.

The Republican administration’s power struggle with federal courts — which is testing basic tenets of U.S. democracy — reflects an expansive view of executive authority that has also challenged the independence of federal agencies, a president’s ethical obligations, and the U.S.’s role in the international order.

The Trump administration violations in the 31 lawsuits are in addition to more than 250 instances of noncompliance judges have recently highlighted in individual immigration petitions — from failing to return property to keeping immigrants locked up past court-ordered release dates.

Legal scholars and former federal judges said they could recall at most a few violations of court rulings over the full four-year terms of other recent presidential administrations, including Trump’s first time in office. They also noted previous administrations were generally apologetic when confronted by judges; the Trump administration’s Justice Department has been outright combative in some cases.

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The AP’s review also found that higher courts, including the Supreme Court, overruled the district courts and sided with the White House in nearly half of the 31 cases. Critics say those decisions are emboldening the administration to ignore judges’ orders.

Perceptions of Media Freedom

Many posts have discussed freedom of the press.

Benedict Vigers  at Gallup:

As the world marks World Press Freedom Day this weekend, perceptions of media freedom worldwide show little movement, remaining near the levels recorded each year since 2010. Overall, a median of 64% of adults across 131 countries in 2025 said they believe the media in their country have a lot of freedom, while 30% disagreed.

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Three in four U.S. adults (75%) in 2025 think the U.S. media have a lot of freedom, among the lowest totals measured in the past 15 years and statistically tied with the other low point of 78% in 2023. This year also marks one of the few times the U.S. has been statistically tied with, rather than ahead of, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in these perceptions.

Since 2022, Americans’ perceptions that the press in their country has a lot of freedom have fallen 11 points (from 86%), compared with a one-point decline in the median among OECD countries. While this decline has been uneven — the measure rebounded slightly in 2024 before dipping again in 2025 — only three other countries have seen larger absolute declines in perceived media freedom than the U.S. since 2022: Ukraine (-18 pts.), Pakistan (-18 pts.) and Morocco (-15 pts.).