Raw Story

The Trump administration is hampering efforts to fight the measles outbreak that took the life of a an unvaccinated school-aged child this week in Texas, according to an MSNBC medical consultant Dr. Davita Patel.

The child's death was the first linked to an outbreak in West Texas that has infected more than 100 people. ABC News reported that most all of the cases "are in unvaccinated individuals or individuals whose vaccination status is unknown."

In an article Wednesday, Dr. Patel, a physician and health policy researcher, wrote, "The current Texas outbreak mirrors 2019’s surge in New York, where 1,274 cases nearly cost the U.S. its designation as a country that had eliminated the disease."

She continued, "Health experts stress that measles’ 90% transmission rate demands rapid, well-resourced responses. With hospitalizations rising and containment protocols delayed, the window to preserve this public health milestone is narrowing. Investment in immunization programs and disease surveillance remains critical to preventing measles from regaining endemic status.

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However, the Trump administration's reluctance to encourage vaccines while simultaneously cutting public health outreach efforts, "does not bode well for the next four years," she wrote.

"In a normal presidency, this would be a time for action, with federal support for local public health programs or maybe the president using the bully pulpit to encourage people to get their children a safe and effective vaccine that prevents a brutal disease that can cause deafness, intellectual disabilities or even death," Dr. Patel wrote.

Dr. Patel also laid blame with President Donald Trump's own "vaccine skepticism" that led the president to reinstate military service members who refused the Covid vaccine during the pandemic. Trump has also echoed concerns about vaccines espoused by his Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread conspiracy theories about vaccine safety.

In the piece, Dr. Patel wrote that, "Vaccination rates continue to decline nationally, with exemptions reaching record highs in 12 states." And, although a push to vaccinate would certainly save more lives, Dr. Patel concluded, "Unfortunately, we will not get the kind of response we need from the Trump administration soon."

Read the MSNBC article here.

Government agencies have been directed to submit "reorganization plans" and prepare for large-scale firings as part of Elon Musk's efforts to drastically reduce the federal budget.

CBS News obtained a memo issued by the Office of Management and Budget along with the Office of Personnel Management directing department heads to submit those plans by March 13 and ready themselves for "reductions in force."

"Agencies should also seek to consolidate areas of the agency organization chart that are duplicative; consolidate management layers where unnecessary layers exist; seek reductions in components and positions that are non-critical; implement technological solutions that automate routine tasks while enabling staff to focus on higher-value activities; close and/or consolidate regional field offices to the extent consistent with efficient service delivery; and maximally reduce the use of outside consultants and contractors," the memo states. "When taking these actions, agencies should align closures and/or relocation of bureaus and offices with agency return-to-office actions to avoid multiple relocation benefit costs for individual employees."

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The Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency has created chaos throughout the government after Donald Trump established the panel through an executive order on Inauguration Day, and the tech billionaire directed all federal employees over the weekend to justify their jobs by email or be fired.

However, some agency chiefs, including Trump appointees, said they had directed their employees not to respond.

Concern over Elon Musk's increasing power in Washington, D.C. is growing rapidly now that the Federal Aviation Administration plans to use the billionaire's SpaceX’s Starlink to upgrade its networks.

The FAA posted on X Monday night, "This week, the FAA is testing one terminal at its facility in Atlantic City and two terminals at non-safety critical sites in Alaska."

The news comes as Musk's Department of Government Efficiency plans to make staffing cuts at the FAA, which has many observers crying foul. This isn't Musk's first potential conflict of interest, however. There's plenty of government interplay with Musk's other companies, including Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX.

CNN pundit S.E. Cupp recounted on Tuesday how Musk "reportedly fired a bunch of workers at the FDA that were looking at his Neuralink program" for possible approval.

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"So, yes, he's got his hands in a lot of pots," Cupp continued. "And it's not just that he stands to gain financially; it's that he's overseeing agencies that are regulating his businesses, which is a little like, you know the old saying, ... making the arsonist the fire chief — but also head of HR, head of accounting — and then awarding him a contract for accelerants, is kind of like what all of this is."

Host Dana Bash added, "It just reminds me of the game I like to play: What if this was George Soros, right? And Barack Obama or Joe Biden doing all of this."

On Musk's social media platform X, users pointed out about what Cupp called, "all of these obvious conflicts."

Liberal pundit @ArtCandee posted, "The FAA has agreed to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet system to manage US airspace. Yet another contract for Elon Musk to profit from while he's slashing funding for others. The conflict of interest is appalling!"

Media outlet @TheTNHoller wrote, "Wild. Bond villain stuff. Conflict of interest doesn’t even begin to describe this. The national security concerns here are off the charts."

Watch the clip below via CNN.

The Department of Government Efficiency has removed its so-called "wall of receipts" detailing its cuts to the federal budget after its purported savings were found to be riddled with errors.

Elon Musk's budget-cutting initiative has deleted all of the five biggest “savings” that had been posted on its website. It followed fact checks from media outlets, although the group still claims it has saved the government $65 billion. The website provided no explanation for the removals or its methodology for determining how much had been slashed from the budget, reported the New York Times.

"The 'wall of receipts' is the only public ledger the organization has produced to document its work," the newspaper reported. "The scale of that ledger’s errors — and the misunderstandings and poor quality control that seemed to underlie them — has raised questions about the effort’s broader work, which has led to mass firings and cutbacks across the federal government."

The last of the top five disappeared early Tuesday morning from DOGE's website, and the Times reported that some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to contain the same types of errors that plagued the original top five, which included a reported $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $655 million cut at the U.S. Agency for International Development and $232 million at the Social Security Administration.

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ICE's entire budget is about $8 billion, and the contract in question was worth $8 million, but DOGE seemed to rely on an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database as its metric for savings.

DOGE employees also erroneously counted a single cut three times in an apparent misunderstanding of how government contracts sometimes have "ceiling values" that are much higher than what is actually spent.

Musk's organization also seems to have mistakenly believed that SSA had canceled a massive information technology contract, but it had only ended a $560,000 portion of that project.

J.D. Vance has really done Ohio proud these last few weeks, hasn’t he? The lapdog vice-president, with evidently a lot of time on his hands, has managed to be firmly rebuked by Pope Francis, denounced by outraged NATO allies and widely ridiculed for his bizarre ‘masculinity’ rant at a weekend MAGAfest just a month into his tenure. Way to create a buzz/acute embarrassment back home!

What is wrong with J.D.? Have the wheels come all the way off? Why does the 40-year-old awkwardly playing VP keep stepping in it stateside and abroad? Is the “childless cat ladies” charmer acting out unresolved rage from a bad place? Working through some deep-seated anger? Seriously, Vance manifests juvenile cringe, not sober sway, as he settles into his nondescript role as an appendage in the Trump-Musk administration. Even Trump won’t name him as a slam dunk heir apparent. Not good.

For a supposed Ivy League intellectual, Vance sure spouts stupidity on the regular: Honestly, you’ve got to be really off base on Catholic theology for the Vatican to correct your twisted take on love with descending priorities as justification for mass deportations. In Vance’s godawful reading of the Christian order of love concept; (to mesh with his political ideology) family, community, and country come first and everyone outside that concentric circle later or not so much. Which puts migrant families outermost from Vance’s construct on brotherly love for me but not thee from outside our borders.

Francis rejected the VP’s sophomoric theoretical defense of cruel immigration crackdowns as flatly wrong. He urged the misguided millennial to meditate on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.” But “American citizens first” nativist Vance has no interest in building a “fraternity open to all,” just an all-white patriarchy focused on baby-making. To that point, he started a holy war (barely a week after inauguration) against charitable organizations across the country that feed, clothe and house refugees and immigrants (i.e., Catholic Charities and Catholic relief groups) by implying they perform their labor of love for federal money — not humanitarian concerns.

“Devout Catholic” convert Vance went all glib and combative on compassion and care for the “least of these” because they included Brown and Black mothers and fathers and children fleeing horrendous homelands for hope. But upholding the dignity of every human being (native-born or not) as a core tenet of Christianity clashes with the core MAGA mission to degrade, shackle and ship terrified families back to the foreign hellscapes they fled. Vance threw nasty and mean into the mix to look tough on dehumanized “illegals” and scorn mercy. He is a dutiful, if not decent, Trump toady.

But the swift rebuttals to Vance’s hollow broadsides from the Church and the pope himself only reinforced the veep’s smallness as a smug sycophant slinging ugly. Whatever reputation Vance may have enjoyed in the past as a thoughtful individual with at least a modicum of integrity is long gone. With a brief stint as a venture capitalist, an even briefer stint as Ohio senator and now VP, Vance is heady with power and hubris over his meteoric rise from bending the knee to a man he once derided as “America’s Hitler.” Then Vance went to the Munich Security Conference recently, not to collaborate with NATO allies on mutual security interests and Ukraine, but to turn on them.

Vance, the shameless election denier in service to an authoritarian regime lawlessly dismantling a democratic republic, had the towering audacity and historical blindness to lecture his European audience on democracy, downplay threats from Russia and China, and publicly court a far-right German party (AfD) that many Germans consider the heirs of Nazi ideas and that sanitizes the Holocaust. His blistering dress-down of European leaders, rightly dismayed over rising extremism and history repeating itself, coupled with his pronounced affection for far-right politicians a week before a crucial German election (U.S. election interference?) was obscene.

The last thing the world needs now is a U.S. vice-president trashing eighty years of foreign policy with America’s closest and most enduring friends. But that’s what a dangerously reckless Vance did on the world stage to compete with Elon Musk and boost his nascent brand as an uber-nihilist bent on destroying plurality for purity and seeding a new world order. It’s wing-nuttery on a disturbingly dark scale. But Vance, for all his performative bravado — whether it’s lashing out at European allies for not welcoming extremism, or engaging in petty posting on X, or weirdly obsessing about “the essence of masculinity” and a “broken culture” that tells you “You’re a bad person because you’re a man” — is a phony.

He morphed from Never-Trumper to groveling suck-up for unimagined power, but he can’t quite pull it off as a poser with a makeover beard spewing stupid and offensive and strange. Vance has been doing us proud by attacking friends, embracing enemies, insulting humanitarians, drawing papal ire, and pontificating laughably on what makes a man a man.

Seriously, what is wrong with J.D.?

Donald Trump admitted to making agreements he didn't quite understand with French President Emmanuel Macron.

The U.S. president met with his French counterpart Monday to discuss ending the war in Ukraine, which Macron says must come with security guarantees for the war-torn nation. Trump told a light anecdote about a previous dinner meeting the two had in Paris.

"I just want to tell you a little story," Trump said during a joint news conference at the White House. "So we were at the Eiffel Tower having dinner with your wonderful wife and with my wonderful wife, and we came out and he started speaking the French deal, and we didn't have an interpreter, and he was going on and on and on, and I was just nodding, 'Yes, yes, yes,' and he really sold me out.

"Because I got back the next day and I read the papers [and] I said, 'That's not what we said,'" Trump said, as he and Macron clasped hands and laughed. "He's a smart customer, I will tell you that. Do you remember? That wasn't exactly what we agreed to."

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After Monday's meeting, a reporter asked if Trump would still call Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator, as he did last week, and Trump indicated that he would.

"I don't use those words lightly," Trump said. "I think that we're going to see how it all works out. Let's see what happens. I think we have a chance of a really good settlement between various countries, and, you know, you're talking about Europe and you're talking about Ukraine as part of that whole situation.

"The other side has a lot of a lot of support also, so let's see how it all works out. It might work out. Look, you can never make up lives, the one thing you can't – you can make up the money, but you can't make up the lives. A lot of lives lost, I think probably a lot more lives than people are talking about. It's been a rough war, but I think we're close to getting it solved."

Watch the video below or at this link.

- YouTube youtu.be