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Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism “by September.” That didn’t pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again—by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to “innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention” with his friends and fellow […]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is buying up warehouses across the country to build a massive network of detention centers.Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent to create huge immigrant jails, often in small towns, Bloomberg reports. The agency paid $102 million for a warehouse near Hagerstown, Maryland, and $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. And that’s just the cost to purchase the buildings—ICE also has to pay to turn them into jails with bathrooms, beds, dining, and recreation facilities. A third warehouse purchase in El Paso, Texas, could be one of the largest jails in the United States when completed, housing 8,500 beds.ICE plans to use up to 23 warehouses around the country to detain immigrants in even more cities, including in Minnesota, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The new strategy is a shift for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, which has been relying on many tent camps, such as the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” in south Florida.People who live near the proposed jails are pushing back against the plan, with protesters showing up in Hagerstown to protest on January 20 despite freezing temperatures. In Oklahoma City, the owners of a warehouse backed out of a deal Thursday to build an ICE facility, following local backlash to the plan. Similarly, the owners of a warehouse in Salt Lake City announced they had “no plans to sell or lease the property in question to the federal government” after protesters showed up at their offices.In all, there have been protests or packed public meetings in at least 15 communities where ICE is planning to build a facility, The Washington Post reports. In many places, state and local officials are arguing that these detention centers would be a threat to public safety, strain local infrastructure, and violate zoning laws. And ICE has a history of failing to meet government standards for detention facilities: At one of its tent camps in El Paso, Texas, last September, inspectors found 60 different violations.ICE’s warehouse plan is full of flaws, but the chief obstacle is the opposition from local residents, which only grows with every negative ICE headline. Will this mega network of warehouse jails get built, and will they even be safe to house thousands of people, including possibly U.S. citizens?

President Donald Trump, who is an inflation dove, announced Friday morning that he will name Kevin Warsh—whose past record is that of an inflation hawk—to succeed Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been so desperate to lower interest rates that last year he contemplated firing Powell, whose views on monetary policy are fairly mainstream. Now he’s nominating somebody who, unless he’s undergone a complete ideological transformation, will displease Trump even more.In the past, Warsh has been such an inflation hawk that when he was a Federal Reserve governor in April 2009, he pronounced himself “more worried about upside risks to inflation than downside risks.” This was at a time when the consumer price index, or CPI, was negative 0.4 percent, unemployment was 8.9 percent, and the economy was in a recession that turned out to be the longest and deepest downturn since the Great Depression. During the decade that followed, inflation never rose above 3.2 percent, and mostly stayed below 2 percent.Today, inflation is 2.7 percent, which doesn’t worry me particularly. But that’s 0.3 points higher than it stood in the last CPI report, released before Trump won the 2024 election by claiming inflation was “the worst we’ve ever had.” (Trump turned inflation hawk temporarily so he could bash President Joe Biden.) There’s every reason to believe that Trump’s tariffs (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t strike them down) will push inflation higher. The Warsh of April 2009 would be apoplectic about that.But the Warsh of January 2026 is unconcerned—or at least he’s been saying he’s unconcerned in order to secure the Fed nomination. In a November Wall Street Journal op-ed, Warsh suggested inflation wasn’t a worry right now because “AI will be a significant disinflationary force, increasing productivity and bolstering American competitiveness.” Whatever. The Fed, Warsh wrote, “should abandon the dogma that inflation is caused when the economy grows too much and workers get paid too much.” If that made Warsh sound like a left-winger, he reaffirmed in his next sentence that he was not. “Inflation,” Warsh wrote, “is caused when government spends too much and prints too much.” That sounded like the old inflation-hawk Warsh, but he was careful not to blame Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill, which will increase the budget deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next decade. Instead, Warsh blamed quantitative easing—i.e., the Fed’s purchase of government bonds and other financial instruments to stimulate the economy after the Great Recession—even though the Fed had been unloading those assets (“quantitative tightening”) for the previous three years. The Fed stopped in December, but that was after Warsh published his op-ed.Warsh’s Journal piece also faulted the Fed for excessive bank regulation, which he said “systematically disadvantaged small and medium-size banks, which has slowed the flow of credit to the real economy.” Here’s a reality check: The string of bank failures in 2023 (Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, First Republic Bank) was the result of under-regulation, not overregulation, including a partial rollback of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill that occurred during Trump’s first term.Warsh used to oppose “the rising tide of economic protectionism,” and, as recently as 2018, he told Politico that “I wouldn’t prioritize a [U.S.-China] trade deficit as the framework by which we should judge the importance and the difficulty of the most important great power relationship for the next 100 years.” That’s heresy in MAGA-world. But today, Warsh is not only OK with Trump’s tariffs, he faults the Fed for criticizing them because it’s an admission that “their credibility has been impaired.” These more up-to-date diagnoses (along with his more explicit calls for lower interest rates and his preposterous claim that the reconciliation bill was “putting the fiscal house in order”) apparently appeased Trump sufficiently for him to choose Warsh, bypassing the other, more reliably sycophantic Kevin in Trump’s White House. But if Trump believes Warsh is going to lower interest rates faster than Powell, the markets do not; news that Warsh was Trump’s pick sent the dollar higher and gold lower. They can’t both be right.Don’t discount Warsh’s good looks. “On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Trump’s post was otherwise a dull recital of Warsh’s résumé, suggesting that maybe there was no “everything else.” If there were, it might be that Trump enjoys forcing ambitious people to renounce their prior views. I’m convinced that he chose JD Vance (who has turned out to be a maladroit vice president) not in spite of Vance’s previously calling Trump “an idiot” and “America’s Hitler” but because of it; it demonstrated that he’d made Vance grovel.An alternative explanation, though, is that Trump is doing this for the billionaires, who are displeased with his antics around the Fed. Billionaires don’t like inflation or regulation, and they trust only so far others who aren’t billionaires. Warsh would be the Fed’s first billionaire Fed chair. He has achieved that status not through his own efforts but through his wife, Jane Lauder, the daughter of Ronald and granddaughter of Estée. According to Forbes, she’s worth $2.7 billion, which means as long as they’re married Kevin is worth that much too. Jay Powell’s net worth is a not-inconsiderable $20 to $55 million, but Warsh would be easily the richest Fed chair in history. That he became so through a family connection conceivably increases Trump’s sympathy for him (since Trump did too).If you’re inclined to believe, as I do, that billionaires’ opinions about how to manage the economy are (with rare exceptions) formulated by their money rather than their brains, then Wall Street is right about Warsh’s likely direction and Trump is wrong. It took Trump about a year to go from choosing Powell, in 2017, to turning against him. Lately he’s been trying to throw Powell in jail. I believe we’ll witness a similar trajectory with Warsh. Asked to choose between his president and his wealth, he’ll choose his wealth, because that’s what billionaires do. Score one for the American oligarchy.

Luigi Mangione will not face the death penalty. Mangione, who is on trial for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had his federal murder charges dismissed on technicality by a federal judge who determined that the shooting was not simultaneously committed during another act of violence. Prosecutors argued that stalking fulfilled that requirement, but the judge disagreed. U.S. District Judge Margaret Garnett, a Biden appointee, left in place the stalking charges against Mangione, which would carry a maximum sentence of life in prison. Mangione has pleaded not guilty to all charges.Thompson was killed in December 2024 on his way to an investor conference. Mangione, who has a history of severe back pain, noted in an alleged manifesto that the U.S. has the “most expensive healthcare system in the world” but “ranks #42 in life expectancy.”“United [Healthcare] is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but [h]as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it,” he wrote. The U.S. actually ranks even lower in life expectancy at sixtieth in the world. It is by far the most expensive.This is a massive blow for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, as they made a spectacle out of seeking the death penalty for Mangione. President Trump even claimed on Fox News that Mangione “shot someone in the back as clear as you’re looking at me.... He shot him right in the middle of the back — instantly dead.... This is a sickness. This really has to be studied and investigated.” All of what Trump is was only alleged, undermining federal prosecutors’ case.So much posturing and tough talk, only to have their dreams of capital punishment deferred by a technicality. It seems like the DOJ will have to go back to the drawing board. Mangione’s attorneys have yet to comment.  This story has been updated. 

A policing scholar and former FBI special agent lays out the established principles of policing and constitutional law that govern how federal immigration enforcement efforts should be carried out.

Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Jerome Powell as chairman of the Federal Reserve actually has a long history as an inflation hawk, not the most obvious choice for a president who keeps pushing for lower interest rates.Trump announced on Truth Social Friday morning that Kevin Warsh, 55, will be his nominee to lead the central bank. “I am pleased to announce that I am nominating Kevin Warsh to be the CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM,” Trump wrote. “I have known Kevin for a long period of time, and have no doubt that he will go down as one of the GREAT Fed Chairmen, maybe the best. On top of everything else, he is ‘central casting,’ and he will never let you down.”Warsh is a former Federal Reserve governor who worked as an economist for the White House during the George W. Bush administration. In April 2009, as unemployment skyrocketed during the Great Recession, Warsh was especially concerned about interest rates being lowered too much, seeing inflation as a greater risk.“I continue to be more worried about upside risks to inflation than downside risks,” Warsh said during a Fed meeting at the time. During those years, he helped manage the financial crisis with then–Fed Chair Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, who was New York Fed president at the time and would later become treasury secretary under President Obama.In recent months, Warsh has changed his tune and spoken favorably of lowering interest rates, which seems to have caught the eye of President Trump, who otherwise wouldn’t have made the seemingly conventional pick.Trump has railed against Powell for not lowering interest rates enough, even pushing an unprecedented criminal investigation into the Fed. But amid that controversy, Warsh’s nomination will now go to the Senate Banking Committee, and after a public hearing, the Senate will vote on whether to confirm him.Some Republican senators, such as Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, have said they would hold up the president’s Fed nominations while the criminal investigation continues, echoed by leading Democrats.“No Republican purporting to care about Fed independence should agree to move forward with this nomination until Trump drops his witch hunts of the current Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Governor Lisa Cook,” said Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, a member of the banking committee.

In May 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat in the White House and downed a shot of raw milk to celebrate the publication of the MAHA Report, a document full of AI slop and fake citations that was meant to present the Secretary of Health and Human Services’s solutions for chronic diseases and other ailments […]

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After a tumultuous year under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has adopted a new, almost unrecognizable guise—one that tears up environmental rules and cheerleads for coal, gas-guzzling cars, and artificial intelligence. When Donald Trump took power, it was widely anticipated […]