Category: New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday nominated his former personal lawyer Todd Blanche to serve as attorney general, elevating a loyal and trusted ally who as acting attorney general has shown a willingness to execute Trump’s maximalist demands.

The announcement, teased by White House officials last week, comes as public scrutiny of Blanche intensifies over his role in an administration push for a $1.8 billion fund with taxpayer money to pay those claiming they were victims of government mistreatment, most likely including rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The nomination was disclosed in a notice Monday on the White House’s website, saying that Trump had sent Blanche’s name to the Senate.

It remains unclear if Blanche, who promoted an expansive view of executive power at the expense of the legislative branch both as Trump’s defense lawyer and as the Justice Department’s second in command, will have sufficient support in the Senate to be confirmed as tensions grow between the White House and congressional Republicans.

A confirmation hearing for Blanche could pose a tricky political test for Republicans as the party prepares for midterm elections this year. A recent closed-door meeting between Blanche and Senate Republicans was described as blistering, with dozens of lawmakers sharply criticizing Blanche over the $1.8 billion fund.

Senators, however, failed to pass restrictions on any such payouts, suggesting their unhappiness with the White House may have ebbed.

His path to the permanent appointment he has long coveted will also be complicated by lingering anger — and unanswered questions — related to his handling of the release of millions of pages of investigative files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In recent weeks, his predecessor, Pam Bondi, who was fired in April after Trump privately vented over her failed efforts to prosecute his political enemies, placed primary responsibility for the release of the Epstein files on Blanche during an interview with a House committee.

Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, has shed his reputation as a mildly moderating voice within the department as he has energetically pursued a job whose main prerequisite, in the view of current and former officials, is never saying no to the boss.

A wide range of former law enforcement officials have sharply criticized Blanche’s brand of justice, saying he has deployed prosecutorial power to punish Trump’s perceived foes, and in the process badly damaged the department’s reputation with the courts and the public.

As acting attorney general, Blanche has taken a series of actions against Trump targets, including green-lighting the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for posting to social media an image of seashells arrayed to read “86-47,” which Blanche has described as a credible threat of violence against a sitting president. (The phrase “86” is a slang term evolved from restaurant parlance for throwing something out, and “47” refers to Trump, the nation’s 47th president.)

Blanche expressed internal reservations about the highly unusual plan to establish the fund, which also included a broad shelter from tax investigations for Trump, his family, and his businesses that could be worth more than $100 million.

But Blanche and one of his top aides, Stanley Woodward Jr., signed off on the plan, unlike some first-term Trump appointees who resigned or offered fierce resistance when confronted with demands they considered questionable. It was immediately assailed as a political slush fund by Democrats and Republicans alike.

Testifying before lawmakers last week, Blanche said the Justice Department was giving up the plan for the fund but would keep Trump’s shelter from tax investigations in place. Trump later cast doubt on the abandoning of the fund, saying, “I love it.”

“Todd Blanche has never stopped acting as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer,” said Stacey Young, the founder of Justice Connection, an organization of former department employees that includes many career prosecutors forced out by Blanche as he has sought to reshape the department to Trump’s liking.

“He has used his high position at the department to enter into a corrupt deal with the president and his family, advance vindictive prosecutions, illegally fire career employees, smear whistleblowers, and attack the judiciary,” she added.

The fund was the result of secret talks between Trump’s private lawyers and officials working for Blanche, as a means of settling a $10 billion lawsuit Trump had filed against the government over the leak of his tax returns, and unrelated claims for about $230 million that Trump had filed against the Justice Department and the FBI over past investigations and prosecutions.

Blanche and his team sought to create a settlement that would prevent the government from paying taxpayer money to Trump, which they saw as a potential ethical, legal, and political catastrophe.

In his testimony to lawmakers last Tuesday, Blanche insisted the protection of Trump and his family from tax audits or investigations would not be affected by the withdrawal of the fund proposal, and would remain in place.

“So the blanket immunity is not something that you’re going to move back on?” asked Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), who accused Blanche of prioritizing the president’s financial interests over the public good.

“You do not belong in this job,” she added.

But Trump, who has said he owes his freedom to Blanche’s hard-nosed legal efforts on his behalf in the criminal cases against him, appears to believe otherwise.

Blanche first gained the confidence of Trump while he was out of office, battling multiple investigations and indictments. Blanche became Trump’s defense lawyer in 2023, and represented him when he went on trial a year later in New York City; Trump was convicted on charges of falsifying business records.

Since becoming the deputy attorney general in early 2025, Blanche has executed sweeping changes at the Justice Department, where he has proudly described firing more than 200 agents and prosecutors who worked on cases involving Trump or his allies. He has also talked of being at war with federal judges.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

The enduring mystery of the fertility decline has a new culprit: the smartphone.

Experts have long wondered if phones played a role in the birthrate decline — which began in 2007, the same year that Apple introduced the iPhone — but until now there had not been hard evidence to prove it.

Two new papers, one published Monday and the other in May, are the first academic endeavors that test whether the smartphone was a cause.

They are the most recent efforts to explain the sweeping fertility rate decline in the United States and other countries over the past 20 years. Researchers have already looked at contraception use, abortion rates, rising levels of female education, and even the popular television show 16 and Pregnant.

Proving phones caused the decline is a tricky endeavor. There were a number of major events in those years, including the Great Recession, and isolating smartphone use is difficult.

The gold standard for scientific evidence is known as random assignment. It compares outcomes for people randomly chosen to receive a treatment (like getting a smartphone) with people who are not.

But that is not possible when it comes to ferreting out reasons for declining fertility.

So researchers sought out data about smartphones that introduced randomness.

Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, and Ezekiel Hooper, her student, used the spotty early rollout of the iPhone as a way to isolate the effects of the phone on fertility. The first iPhone was released in June 2007, they wrote, and was available only on the AT&T network until February 2011. The study compared fertility rates in U.S. counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with counties that had little or none.

Their paper, published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that the iPhone caused as much as half of the fertility decline between 2007 and 2011. The most pronounced effects were among young people aged 15 to 24.

What happened in the counties with iPhones? One theory, Myers said, is that young people began to socialize more on their phones and less in person, and consequently were less likely to have sex and become pregnant.

Myers said iPhones may also have made pornography more accessible, which led young people to substitute it for sex, or young people may have used them to obtain better information on avoiding pregnancy, including contraception and abortion.

Researchers not involved in the study said the results were persuasive.

Phillip B. Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, said he was “a little jealous” of the Middlebury data, which he said provided a real insight into a potential driver of a major social change.

He said some variation in the AT&T data could throw off the final finding. For example, the company may have set up in counties that were wealthier, or more densely populated, introducing a pattern “that’s not likely to be random anymore,” he said.

He said Myers tried to account for those variations, and that her findings made sense.

But, he cautioned: “You shouldn’t take the result so literally and say: Oh, it’s the iPhone’s fault. It’s an example of the kinds of social influences that have led to the decline in birth rate.”

Dropping birthrates, once a feature of rich societies, are now a near-global phenomenon. The sweep of the decline has researchers looking for common drivers. The authors of the second study also decided to look at smartphones.

“Countries with very different healthcare systems, welfare regimes, abortion laws, religious traditions, recessions and demographic trends all saw similar breaks in the same window,” wrote the authors, Hernan Moscoso Boedo, an economics professor at the University of Cincinnati, and Nathan Hudson, a doctoral student.

“Whatever caused it was something global — something that arrived in roughly the same form in all of these places at roughly the same time,” they wrote.

They analyzed World Bank data measuring smartphone penetration and teenage fertility rates in 128 countries. In countries as varied as Iran, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey, they found that teenage fertility declines accelerated once smartphones became a mass phenomenon.

They tested their technology theory in the United States using data on wired broadband and 4G high-speed mobile networks. They looked at where access was better and worse and found a substantial effect: that fertility rates for teenagers declined fastest in counties with more high-speed access.

Theodore Joyce, an economist at Baruch College, said he was skeptical of both studies. Teenage births have been falling since the 1990s, he said, long before smartphone technology came on the scene. Myers’ paper, he said, examined a short period before smartphones had fully penetrated.

The hypothesis, he said, could be correct but “remains speculative.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

SANAA, Yemen — The Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen said Monday that it would stop Israeli ships from operating in the Red Sea and had fired missiles at Israel, threatening to widen the Iran war and impede navigation through a crucial global trade route.

The Houthis have largely sat out the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, despite frequently warning that they could join the fighting. But the group’s threat Monday appeared to signal a shift that could further disrupt shipping and energy markets roiled by Iran’s effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which much of the world’s oil and gas is shipped.

Yahya Saree, a Houthi military spokesperson, said in a statement on social media that the partial naval blockade would take effect immediately. Iran and Israel traded waves of attacks Monday as a two-month truce between the countries broke down.

Saree also said that the Houthis had launched a “salvo of missiles” against Israel in response to “aggression” against Iran, Lebanon, the Palestinians, and other targets.

“We will meet escalation with escalation,” he said.

It was unclear what the Houthi threat to Israeli ships would mean in practice. The territory controlled by the Houthis in Yemen sits alongside Bab al-Mandab, a narrow waterway that enters the southern end of the Red Sea. Cargo ships that cannot pass through the area must sail around the southern tip of Africa to transit between Asia and markets in Europe and the Americas, significantly lengthening travel times. Many shipping groups had already been avoiding the area.

During Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip, the Houthis regularly attacked ships in the Red Sea in what they described as an effort to try to force Israel to end its bombardment of the Palestinian enclave.

Since the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, the Red Sea has become a key outlet for Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, to reach international markets by avoiding the Strait of Hormuz.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a senior Houthi political official, said that the group would target only vessels linked to Israel, but he cautioned other states, such as Saudi Arabia, not to intervene.

“Any state that becomes involved will be targeted,” he said in a phone interview.

It would not take much for the Houthis to hinder shipping by increasing the risks for vessels transiting the Red Sea, a move that would also raise insurance premiums for shipping companies, said Farea Al-Muslimi, a research fellow focused on Yemen at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

“They can just send a signal and only one attack has to happen — and that will send a shock across insurance companies,” Al-Muslimi said. “I won’t be surprised now if you have a joint lockdown of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab.”

Rashid al-Haddad, an economic analyst based in Yemen, said that if the U.S. military or other countries’ armed forces were deployed to the Red Sea to counter the Houthis, it could turn the entire waterway “into a theater of military confrontation.”

“This would also drive up maritime insurance costs and divert a significant portion of global trade,” he said. “If hostilities escalate, the Houthis will resort to a complete closure of the Bab al-Mandab strait.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

WASHINGTON — Shortly after the World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak in Africa a public health emergency, a reporter asked Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if he was worried about the virus. Six Americans had already been exposed. His response was brief: “Yeah, we’re working on it.”

In the nearly three weeks since, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed travel restrictions to keep the virus from coming to the United States, Kennedy has made no public comments about the spreading outbreak. He has received few briefings about the virus from CDC scientists, although he speaks daily to the acting director, according to people familiar with his response.

Kennedy’s approach to the crisis reflects his broader management of the Department of Health and Human Services, which affects the health of 340 million Americans and provides healthcare to 40% of the population through Medicare and Medicaid.

Kennedy has shown little interest in managing the details of work in his department, according to multiple colleagues. Instead, they say, he is single-mindedly focused on his top priorities, including food recommendations and pesticide exposures, and hunting for evidence to support his long-held beliefs that vaccines are harmful.

Deeply mistrustful of career civil officials, the secretary has surrounded himself with a close circle of handpicked advisers and stacked agencies with political appointees aligned with his views. While major posts have sat vacant and a wave of veteran health experts and scientists have departed, Kennedy has remained isolated from much of the department’s top staff.

He rarely engages with members of Congress, colleagues said, unless he is asked to testify. He has made just one known visit to the CDC, after a gunman opened fire on its headquarters and killed a police officer last August.

This examination of Kennedy’s leadership style is based on the accounts of a dozen people who have had direct contact with him as secretary, as well as other health department employees, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

Kennedy and the department did not directly address questions about his leadership style.

The secretary’s detachment from much of the work of the agency, along with the administration’s deep staff cuts and his attacks on career staff, have driven down morale, they say. It’s a dynamic that could threaten the department’s ability to protect Americans in a crisis, according to public health experts and former secretaries.

Critics say one of the most urgent problems is Kennedy’s failure to act more swiftly to address a leadership vacuum. There is no surgeon general. About half of the 27 institutes and centers at the National Institutes of Health are run by acting directors. The acting chief of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases was recently fired, as was the nation’s top drug regulator.

The leader of the Food and Drug Administration quit last month under pressure over tobacco policy. Kennedy fired the CDC director last August; it is now run on an acting basis by Jay Bhattacharya, who has another huge job as director of the NIH.

“You would never accept a major corporation operating this way,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, who has advised health secretaries of both parties.

“If the CEO lacked deep expertise in the company’s business and the leaders of its most important divisions were missing, investors would revolt,” Osterholm said. “Here, the stakes are much higher. The mission is protecting the health and safety of the American people, and we’re confronting serious disease threats without permanent leadership in some of our most important public health agencies.”

To address the management gaps, the White House and Kennedy initiated a shake-up in February, elevating Christopher Klomp, a department official and former healthcare executive, to serve as the secretary’s chief counselor and smooth out operations. In a statement, Courtney Spencer, who left the Labor Department two weeks ago to become Kennedy’s top spokesperson, said the health department was “aggressively recruiting top talent to fill every remaining vacancy,” adding, “Nothing has slowed our ability to execute.”

Kennedy’s allies say that while his management style may be different from that of his predecessors, he is leading in other ways by taking stands on matters of importance to Americans, including healthy eating and tackling chronic disease.

“You do not come to Washington to challenge powerful interests, disrupt decades of business as usual, and demand accountability to make friends,” Mehmet Oz, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and a close ally of Kennedy’s, said in a statement provided by the health department. “You do it to deliver results.”

Other advisers say Kennedy is also running into the realities of Washington, including a Congress that has refused to confirm some of President Donald Trump’s nominees.

“Very predictably, you get into governing, you get into a toxic political environment, and a situation where there’s trillions of dollars of interest and you have the burden of having to do policy,” Calley Means, a close adviser to Kennedy, said at a recent forum hosted by Harvard University. “Nobody executes perfectly.”

A remote presence

Kennedy keeps a low profile at the health department’s headquarters, a hulking building that faces the National Mall near the U.S. Capitol.

When he is in town, he exercises at his gym before work, then usually arrives at about 10 a.m. and leaves by 4 p.m., his colleagues say. He spends much of his day in closed-door meetings, according to those who work with him, and has little direct engagement with his staff.

Every Tuesday at 10:30 a.m., the chiefs of the department’s 13 operating divisions gather in the secretary’s suite to update leadership on their activities. At the outset of his tenure, Kennedy was rarely there, either virtually or in person, according to three people familiar with his schedule. Since Klomp’s elevation, he now shows up once a month. But when he does attend, he often appears disengaged and spends the time scrolling on his phone, according to people in attendance. Several described him as “checked out.”

Once, when he arrived to the meeting 15 minutes late, Kennedy offered a self-deprecating apology, according to one person in the room: “Thank you for putting up with my dysfunctional self.”

Health department officials did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting or Kennedy’s remark.

His lack of interest in matters that are not high on his priority list has meant that he has not engaged at critical moments, colleagues said.

When measles killed two children in Texas early last year, Demetre Daskalakis, who led the response but has since left the agency, asked repeatedly to brief Kennedy but was rebuffed, he said.

Susan Monarez, who briefly served as Kennedy’s CDC director before she was fired, had little direct interaction with the health secretary until she ran afoul of him on vaccine policy. She later told senators that during a series of tense meetings with the secretary, she was “directed to only work with the political appointees that he had put in place at CDC, and not to speak or work with the career scientists.”

In the current Ebola crisis, Kennedy has left the department’s response to Bhattacharya, a health economist with no prior experience in public health even though he is leading the CDC. Bhattacharya, who also led the response to a recent outbreak of hantavirus, wrote an opinion essay published in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday saying that while the “risk to the American public remains low, Ebola is dangerous.”

A White House spokesperson, Kush Desai, said the agency’s “rapid and comprehensive response” to the Ebola outbreak proved that “under Secretary Kennedy’s leadership, HHS continues to safeguard the health and wellness of the American people.”

Spencer, the HHS spokesperson, said the health department had “executed an immediate and coordinated response” under Kennedy’s leadership.

But key vacancies inside the health department have made the response more challenging, people familiar with the situation said.

The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, responsible for pandemic preparedness and for standing up field hospitals and quarantine facilities in Kenya, is currently run on an acting basis by John Knox, a former Los Angeles firefighter who founded the group Firefighters4Freedom during the pandemic to fight vaccine mandates.

As the Ebola outbreak has spread, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a tacit rebuke of Kennedy’s move last year to withhold funding from an international vaccine alliance, suggesting the State Department was taking back management of the U.S. relationship with the alliance.

“We are going to reengage,” Rubio told lawmakers last week. “We need to drive this to an outcome.”

A daunting portfolio

Under any circumstances, the Department of Health and Human Services is difficult to run. It has 13 operating divisions covering a vast array of issues, such as child welfare and pandemic preparedness. Past secretaries from both political parties say there are three main ingredients for success: understanding the work of the divisions, strong crisis communication, and muscular coordination with state, local, and international health leaders.

Tommy G. Thompson, who as health secretary to President George W. Bush faced complaints about his management of the 2001 anthrax crisis, spent a week at each one of the operating divisions at the outset of his tenure, and made frequent trips to Capitol Hill to advocate for the department. In an interview last year, he said he “would strongly suggest” Kennedy do the same.

“The department is so vast and so complex,” Thompson said, “and you have to be prepared.”

Kathleen Sebelius, a former Kansas governor who resigned as President Barack Obama’s health secretary after the flawed rollout of the healthcare.gov website, said she met with the division chiefs regularly, likening them to her cabinet.

“My goal was to really be informed by the scientists, to make sure that NIH was at the table, that FDA was at the table, that our global health people were at the table,” Sebelius said in an interview. “I was really schooled by the people who had been there before and who knew what the hell they were doing.”

Kennedy, by contrast, has delegated broad authority to Stefanie Spear, a longtime adviser who has been with him since his days as an environmental lawyer and functions as his protector and defender, according to people who know them.

Spear runs meetings for the secretary, accompanies him on official trips, and keeps a list of his policy projects on a private spreadsheet to which his policy team has no access. There are more than 50 items on the list, one person who has seen it said.

All requests for the secretary’s decisions and meetings go through Spear. When Kennedy is asked a question, his frequent response is “just run that by Stefanie.”

Colleagues say that her tight control has slowed department operations.

After Kennedy promised Congress that the FDA would investigate the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone, the agency proposed updating a set of sophisticated databases of electronic records it needed for the research. But the project was delayed for months by Kennedy’s office, according to two people with detailed knowledge.

When a gunman opened fire on the CDC last August, Kennedy was fishing with Native American leaders in Alaska. Health department officials wanted to get a statement out to the news media. But it was held up for hours, several said, while Spear sought approval from the White House.

Frustration with Spear, who served as Kennedy’s communications director during his campaign and oversees his public comments, has fueled some key departures.

Kennedy is on his third top spokesperson; the first two quit in frustration, according to people familiar with their decisions. The secretary has also run through two chiefs of staff; he fired the first one, and the second was pushed aside in favor of Klomp.

In a statement, Kennedy praised Klomp and Spear as “two of the most effective leaders in government.” He said Klomp had ”been instrumental in driving operational excellence, strengthening accountability, and ensuring HHS delivers results for the American people,” and that Spear “keeps our team focused on results and ensures the president’s and my priorities get across the finish line.”

Klomp has moved quickly in the search for a new CDC director, with a nominee now awaiting Senate confirmation, as well as for other top leaders for the agency. He also brought in a new team of policy advisers to the secretary and instituted daily meetings between Kennedy and the leaders of the “Big Four” agencies: FDA, CDC, NIH, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to three people familiar with the department’s operations.

He has also sought to address low morale by starting a regular newsletter in which Kennedy addresses employees as “the dedicated professionals of HHS.”

The secretary, however, has been out of the loop on some key decisions. When Tracy Beth Hoeg, the FDA’s top drug regulator, was fired by FDA leaders in May, the secretary did not learn of it until after it happened, according to three people familiar with the events.

There is no question that Kennedy is changing the national conversation around health in America, especially healthy eating. While his vaccine agenda has so far been stymied by court decisions, he has scored “wins,” as he likes to call them, notably by flipping the food pyramid, persuading medical schools to revamp nutrition education, and convincing some food makers to abandon artificial dyes.

He travels often and makes aggressive use of his platform to promote his priorities, including on social media and The Secretary Kennedy Podcast, which began in April. Last week, he made stops in Wisconsin to spotlight the work of dairy farmers and faith-based groups working in addiction recovery, and New Hampshire to announce an effort to combat Lyme disease.

Colleagues say he also makes visits to Scottsdale, Ariz., where his son and daughter-in-law live, and Florida, where he stays at the Palm Beach mansion owned by Oz.

After Memorial Day, the public got a glimpse of him there. Kennedy posted video of himself, in a suit and tie, capturing two black racer snakes on Oz’s patio. One of them bit him.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.