Aria Bendix, health reporter for NBC News, discusses the impact of cuts and changes at the Department of Health and Human Services. The Washington Post examines the overall impact on public health of Trump’s first 100 days in office. Gerry Shih, Jerusalem bureau chief for the Washington Post, joins to talk about Israel’s plans to occupy more of Gaza and fully control distribution of aid there. Trump has threatened massive tariffs on movies produced overseas. Meg James, senior entertainment-industry reporter for the Los Angeles Times, discusses the studios’ response. Plus, the winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, the issues plaguing Newark’s airport, and what to know about the Real ID deadline. Today’s episode was hosted by Shumita Basu.
Full Episode
Good morning. It's Tuesday, May 6th. I'm Shemita Basu. This is Apple News Today. On today's show, Israel's plans to take more control of the Gaza Strip, how Trump's tariffs could impact your favorite movies, and what to know about today's real ID deadline.
But first, attorneys general from 19 Democratic states plus Washington, D.C., are suing the Trump administration over efforts to overhaul the Department of Health and Human Services. So far, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has eliminated 20,000 full-time positions at HHS and has canceled funding for a number of longstanding research programs that support millions of Americans.
One is the Diabetes Prevention Program, which has been tracking people with type 2 diabetes and prediabetes for three decades, and it also works to better understand associated diseases like Alzheimer's and dementia. Around 38 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, and the CDC estimates that one in five people don't know that they have it.
NBC News health reporter Aria Bendix told us about the impact of canceling this program.
Columbia University was one of the sites participating in the study, and it handled the bulk of the funding. So the researchers now say they can't do blood work, brain scans, urine samples, all the things that are necessary to study patient outcomes. And they're also really worried about the ability to preserve the data sets that they've already collected.
These cuts come as Kennedy says that tackling chronic disease is a cornerstone of his Make America Healthy Again agenda. Another long-running program HHS terminated, an advisory committee that makes recommendations on how to test newborns and children for genetic disorders. HHS says it's part of the administration's broader goal of reducing the size of the federal government, but...
Advocates say this was a low-cost, high-reward effort that won't make much of a dent in the federal budget.
Genetic screenings detect potentially life-threatening or life-altering conditions for roughly 14,000 babies every year. Again, Bendix told us it's hard to square this with RFK's larger goals.
These are really severe and debilitating childhood diseases that often don't result in survival beyond the teen years unless a child has access to early treatment. So it's unclear why something like this would be cut.
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