Medical News

The White House’s AI Action Plan, released in July, mentions “health care” only three times. But it is one of the most consequential health policies of the second Trump administration. Its sweeping ambitions for AI—rolling back safeguards, fast-tracking “private-sector-led innovation,” and banning “ideological dogmas such as DEI”—will have long-term consequences for how medicine is practiced, how public health is governed, and who gets left behind.

Already, the Trump administration has purged data from government websites, slashed funding for research on marginalized communities, and pressured government researchers to restrict or retract work that contradicts political ideology. These actions aren’t just symbolic—they shape what gets measured, who gets studied, and which findings get published. Now, those same constraints are moving into the development of AI itself. Under the administration’s policies, developers have a clear incentive to make design choices or pick data sets that won’t provoke political scrutiny.

These signals are shaping the AI systems that will guide medical decision making for decades to come. The accumulation of technical choices that follows—encoded in algorithms, embedded in protocols, and scaled across millions of patients—will cement the particular biases of this moment in time into medicine’s future. And history has shown that once bias is encoded into clinical tools, even obvious harms can take decades to undo—if they’re undone at all.

AI tools were permeating every corner of medicine before the action plan was released: assisting radiologists, processing insurance claims, even communicating on behalf of overworked providers. They’re also being used to fast-track the discovery of new cancer therapies and antibiotics, while advancing precision medicine that helps providers tailor treatments to individual patients. Two-thirds of physicians used AI in 2024—a 78 percent jump from the year prior. Soon, not using AI to help determine diagnoses or treatments could be seen as malpractice.

At the same time, AI’s promise for medicine is limited by the technology’s shortcomings. One health-care AI model confidently hallucinated a nonexistent body part. Another may make doctors’ procedural skills worse. Providers are demanding stronger regulatory oversight of AI tools, and some patients are hesitant to have AI analyze their data.

The stated goal of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan is to preserve American supremacy in the global AI arms race. But the plan also prompts developers of leading-edge AI models to make products free from “ideological bias” and “designed to pursue objective truth rather than social engineering agendas.” This guidance is murky enough that developers must interpret vague ideological cues, then quietly calibrate what their models can say, show, or even learn to avoid crossing a line that’s never clearly drawn.

Some medical tools incorporate large language models such as ChatGPT. But many AI tools are bespoke and proprietary and rely on narrower sets of medical data. Given how this administration has aimed to restrict data collection at the Department of Health and Human Services and ensure that those data conform to its ideas about gender and race, any health tools developed under Donald Trump’s AI action plan may face pressure to rely on training data that reflects similar principles. (In response to a request for comment, a White House official said in an email that the AI plan and the president’s executive order on scientific integrity together ensure that “scientists in the government use only objective, verifiable data and criteria in scientific decision making and when building and contracting for AI,” and that future clinical tools are “not limited by the political or ideological bias of the day.”)

Models don’t invent the world they govern; they depend on and reflect the data we feed them. That’s what every research scientist learns early on: garbage in, garbage out. And if governments narrow what counts as legitimate health data and research as AI models are built into medical practice, the blind spots won’t just persist; they’ll compound and calcify into the standards of care.

In the United States, gaps in data have already limited the perspective of AI tools. During the first years of COVID, data on race and ethnicity were frequently missing from death and vaccination reports. A review of data sets fed to AI models used during the pandemic found similarly poor representation. Cleaning up these gaps is difficult and expensive—but it’s the best way to ensure the algorithms don’t indelibly incorporate existing inequities into clinical code. After years of advocacy and investment, the U.S. had finally begun to close long-standing gaps in how we track health and who gets counted.

But over the past several months, that type of fragile progress has been deliberately rolled back. At times, CDC web pages have been rewritten to reflect ideology, not epidemiology. The National Institutes of Health halted funding for projects it labeled as “DEI”—despite never defining what that actually includes. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made noise about letting NIH scientists publish only in government-run journals, and demanded the retraction of a rigorous study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, that found no link between aluminum and autism. (Kennedy has promoted the opposite idea: that such vaccine ingredients are a cause of autism.) And a recent executive order gives political appointees control over research grants, including the power to cancel those that don’t “advance the President’s policy priorities.” Selective erasure of data is becoming the foundation for future health decisions.

American medicine has seen the consequences of building on such a shaky foundation before. Day-to-day practice has long relied on clinical tools that confuse race with biology. Lung-function testing used race corrections derived from slavery-era plantation medicine, leading to widespread underdiagnosis of serious lung disease in Black patients. In 2023, the American Thoracic Society urged the use of a race-neutral approach, yet adoption is uneven, with many labs and devices still defaulting to race-based settings. A kidney-function test used race coefficients that delayed specialty referrals and transplant eligibility. An obstetric calculator factored in race and ethnicity in ways that increased unnecessary Cesarean sections among Black and Hispanic women.

Once race-based adjustments are baked into software defaults, clinical guidelines, and training, they persist—quietly and predictably—for years. Even now, dozens of flawed decision-making tools that rely on outdated assumptions remain in daily use. Medical devices tell a similar story. Pulse oximeters can miss dangerously low oxygen levels in darker-skinned patients. During the COVID pandemic, those readings fed into hospital-triage algorithms—leading to disparities in treatment and trust. Once flawed metrics get embedded into “objective” tools, bias becomes practice, then policy.

When people in power define which data matter and the outputs are unchallenged, the outcomes can be disastrous. In the early 20th century, the founders of modern statistics—Francis Galton, Ronald Fisher, and Karl Pearson—were also architects of the eugenics movement. Galton, who coined the term eugenics, pioneered correlation and regression and used these tools to argue that traits like intelligence and morality were heritable and should be managed through selective breeding. Fisher, often hailed as the “father of modern statistics,” was an active leader in the U.K.’s Eugenics Society and backed its policy of “voluntary” sterilization of those deemed “feeble-minded.” Pearson, creator of the p-value and chi-squared tests, founded the Annals of Eugenics journal and deployed statistical analysis to argue that Jewish immigrants would become a “parasitic race.”

For each of these men—and the broader medical and public-health community that supported the eugenics movement—the veneer of data objectivity helped transform prejudice into policy. In the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court codified their ideas when it upheld compulsory sterilization in the name of public health. That decision has never been formally overturned.

Many AI proponents argue concerns of bias are overblown. They’ll note that bias has been fretted over for years, and to some extent, they’re right: Bias was always present in AI models, but its effects were more limited—in part because the systems themselves were narrowly deployed. Until recently, the number of AI tools used in medicine was small, and most operated at the margins of health care, not at its core. What’s different now is the speed and the scale of AI’s expansion into this field, at the same time the Trump administration is dismantling guardrails for regulating AI and shaping these models’ future.

Human providers are biased, too, of course. Researchers have found that women’s medical concerns are dismissed more often than men’s, and some white medical students falsely believe Black patients have thicker skin or feel less pain. Human bias and AI bias alike can be addressed through training, transparency, and accountability, but the path for the latter requires accounting for both human fallibility and that of the technology itself. Technical fixes exist—reweighing data, retraining models, and bias audits—but they’re often narrow and opaque. Many advanced AI models—especially large language models—are functionally black boxes: Using them means feeding information in and waiting for outputs. When biases are produced in the computational process, the people who depend on that process are left unaware of when or how they were introduced. That opacity fuels a bias feedback loop: AI amplifies what we put in, then shapes what we take away, leaving humans more biased for having trusted it.

A “move fast and break things” rollout of AI in health care, especially when based on already biased data sets, will encode similar assumptions into models that are enigmatic and self-reinforcing. By the time anyone recognizes the flaws, they won’t just be baked into a formula; they’ll be indelibly built into the infrastructure of care.

Every year, there is a single day when summer turns to fall. In 2025, on the Gregorian calendar, this day is September 22. On the pumpkin-spice calendar, it was Tuesday, when Starbucks reintroduced its legendary latte. (For Dunkin’ loyalists, fall began on August 20.)

Pumpkin spice, as fans and haters alike will tell you, is not simply a flavor. It is a state of mind. You might imagine that, by now, our national appetite would be sated. You would be incorrect. This year, among other innovations, we will be graced with pumpkin-spice-dipped waffle cones, pumpkin-spice protein shakes, and pumpkin-spice spreadable cheese. That there are still products left to pumpkin spice-ify is a testament to human ingenuity. You can already find pumpkin-spice yogurt, pumpkin-spice almonds, pumpkin-spice graham-cracker Goldfish, and pumpkin-spice fig bars. There is pumpkin-spice bacon and pumpkin-spice cottage cheese. For the seed oil–conscious, there is pumpkin-spice avocado oil.

But just as the Pumpkin-Spice Industrial Complex whirs into action, as it does every August, there is a new threat. On Wednesday, the Trump administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on imports from India. This might be just another episode in Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war, except that India is a major exporter of spices: among them, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Together, along with allspice and ginger, these form the backbone of the pumpkin-spice mix. Like so many other goods, pumpkin spice—the taste, smell, and spirit of fall—might get more expensive. Just how much do Americans love it? We’re about to find out.

The timing is spectacularly inopportune. Long after Starbucks unleashed the pumpkin-spice latte upon America in 2003, it was easy to dismiss pumpkin spice as a trend. The nature of the world is that people get tired of things and move on. There was a period when everyone lost their mind over the concept of roasted brussels sprouts, but then they discovered cauliflower.

Instead, pumpkin spice only continued to rise. It became a personality. Pumpkin spice was a 20-something white girl in Ugg boots who kept a Pinterest board to catalog ideas about her future wedding, distilled into a single flavor. It became so popular that its very popularity inspired a backlash. Disliking pumpkin spice, if you did it very loudly, became a shorthand to indicate you had discerning taste. Anthony Bourdain hated it. John Oliver railed against it. Facebook communities sprang up to spread the gospel of revulsion. It was offensive precisely because it was so aggressively benign.

[Read: How Starbucks perfected autumn]

But pumpkin spice just keeps winning. Many people who might have once looked down on pumpkin spice, or slurped in secret, now “just embrace it,” Diana Kelter, the director of consumer trends at Mintel, North America, told me. Pumpkin spice has become so omnipresent that it no longer says all that much about you. Oh, you’re the kind of person who likes air? You’re one of those water drinkers? “It’s, like, beyond big,” Leigh O’Donnell, a consumer-insights analyst at Kantar, a market-research firm, told me. Over Zoom, she showed me a graph of consumer transactions involving pumpkin-flavored and pumpkin-spice-flavored things. The figures aren’t skyrocketing, but each year shows results higher than the one before. “Freight train,” she said, gesturing at the chart. “Ain’t no slowing down.”

The scope and scale of pumpkin spice—pumpkin-spice air freshener! pumpkin-spice dog treats!—only mean the tariffs could hurt more. Don’t expect major changes immediately. At Starbucks, a PSL costs the same as last year, a spokesperson told me: $5.75 to $7.25 for a grande, depending on the location. (Dunkin’ did not respond to my request for comment.) For now, there will still be plenty of pumpkin spice: pumpkin-spice crackers, pumpkin-spice bone broth, pumpkin-spice oat milk. (While Trader Joe’s will not be offering any pumpkin-spice hummus, that is only because it was discontinued in 2023.) This autumn’s pumpkin-spice products were almost certainly made with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves that were imported before this week’s tariffs. (There are also the seemingly unlimited possibilities of artificial flavoring.)

Eventually, though, America’s pumpkin-spice fix will become more expensive. It might happen sooner rather than later. Sana Javeri Kadri, the founder and CEO of Diaspora Co., a spice company that imports exclusively from India and Sri Lanka, anticipates that she’ll have no choice but to raise prices: A tin of Diaspora Co. pumpkin spice that now goes for $13 might soon be $14.50. “Everybody’s in the same boat right now, in that we’re fucked,” she told me. Even companies that likely have back stock and source spices from lots of countries—Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Mexico—are bracing: On an earnings call this summer, the spice goliath McCormick, which sources globally, predicted that tariffs could cost the company $90 million a year.

Imported spices, of course, won’t be the only reason the cost of a cozy autumn could go up. Your PSL might be served in a paper cup that is now more expensive because of tariffs, and the coffee is certainly imported; the foil top of your pumpkin-spice-yogurt container might have been made from aluminum that was imported and taxed. Americans are already beginning to feel the weight of the tariffs, and prices are poised to rise on all kinds of products. It’s another way that pumpkin spice is not special. Economically, as culturally, it is like everything else.

If a trade war doesn’t blunt America’s appetite for pumpkin spice, it’s hard to see what will. You could read its sheer dominance as a symptom of cultural collapse—evidence that everyone is simple now; that criticism, like punk, is dead. But unlike the current churn of trends that seemingly arise whole-cloth from nowhere—Dubai chocolate? Labubus? Lafufus?—pumpkin spice is staunchly rooted in reality. The pumpkin-spice latte was a corporate invention, but the first recipe for spiced “pompkin pie” was published in 1796. The appeal is obvious: It’s cozy; it’s nostalgic; it helps blunt the taste of coffee. Most things in the world are volatile, but not pumpkin spice. It appears each year like clockwork, reassuring us that, despite the actual weather, fall has arrived.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is coming undone. The White House announced last night that it had ousted the agency’s newly sworn-in director, Susan Monarez, whose lawyers insist that she still has her job because only President Donald Trump himself can fire her. (Yes, it’s a mess.) Four top officials resigned yesterday. Two of them—Demetre Daskalakis, who was the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, and Debra Houry, who was the chief medical officer—told me that the group quit together to signal that they believe science is being ignored and that public health is in danger.

The departures leave a leadership void that, according to current and former CDC officials, has demoralized the agency’s staff and will further undermine its ability to provide reliable guidance to Americans. As Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, who resigned from the agency in June as co-leader of a group that advises outside experts on COVID vaccines, told me, “It feels like the CDC is over.”

I spoke with Daskalakis this morning just before he and Houry were escorted from the CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. He told me that his decision to resign was prompted by a number of factors, including “the replacement of science with ideology” and “the sidelining of scientists so that their data cannot be seen.” He also fears that important information isn’t finding its way to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to Daskalakis, no one from his center had been allowed to brief Kennedy directly on any of the issues that it covers, including polio, measles, COVID-19, and various vaccines. “I’m not sure where he’s getting his information other than Substacks that are erroneous,” he said.

A spokesperson for Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview with Fox & Friends this morning, Kennedy declined to comment on personnel matters. “CDC has problems,” he said, accusing the agency of spreading “misinformation” during the coronavirus pandemic. “We need to look at the priorities of the agency, if there’s really a deeply, deeply embedded—I would say—malaise at the agency, and we need strong leadership that will go in there and that will be able to execute on President Trump’s broad ambitions.”

The CDC had already been in turmoil for months before this week’s departures. Health workers at the agency were caught up in the Trump administration’s mass government layoffs earlier this year. In June, Kennedy removed all 17 members of a respected vaccine-advisory committee and appointed eight new members, including Robert Malone, a prominent COVID-vaccine critic who believes that the United States government has “reality-bending information-control capabilities,” and Vicky Pebsworth, who, like Kennedy, has a long history of insinuating that vaccines can cause autism despite decades of high-quality studies refuting that connection. In response, CDC workers and alumni protested outside the agency’s headquarters, calling for Kennedy to resign. Then, early this month, a 30-year-old man who blamed COVID vaccines for his depression fired nearly 200 shots into the campus, killing a police officer. A letter signed by hundreds of CDC employees after the shooting objected to the “politicized rhetoric that has turned public health professionals from trusted experts into targets of villainization” and accused Kennedy of being “complicit in dismantling America’s public health infrastructure and endangering the nation’s health by repeatedly spreading inaccurate health information.” (After the shooting, Kennedy posted a statement on X in which he lamented the shooting and the officer’s death. “Public health workers show up every day with purpose—even in moments of grief and uncertainty,” he said. “We honor their service.”)

[Read: ‘I’m actually surprised it didn’t happen sooner’]

Yesterday’s attempt to remove Monarez as director was the last straw in the four officials’ decision to resign, Houry said. (Along with Houry and Daskalakis, the resignees include Daniel Jernigan, the director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, and Jennifer Layden, who oversaw the agency’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology.) Houry told me that officials across the CDC were excited for Monarez to take the helm when she was confirmed last month. At the time, Kennedy praised her as a “public health expert with unimpeachable scientific credentials” and a “longtime champion of MAHA values.” (She was apparently not the administration’s first choice for the position: Before nominating Monarez, the White House withdrew the nomination of David Weldon, a physician and former congressman, over concerns that his anti-vaccine views would undermine his Senate confirmation.) Then, just weeks later, Monarez was shown the door. “When we knew that her job was in jeopardy, that we weren’t going to have scientific leadership anymore, that was the final tipping point for us,” Houry told me. “We could not stay if there was not a scientific leader at CDC.”

A statement from Monarez’s lawyers said that she had been targeted by Kennedy because she “refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts.” Yesterday afternoon, a post on the Health and Human Services X account said that Monarez was “no longer director” of the agency. But Monarez’s lawyers said that, even though she had been notified by a White House staffer that she’d been fired, she believes that her termination has to come from President Trump himself. A statement from the White House spokesperson Kush Desai said that the director had been fired after “refusing to resign despite informing HHS leadership of her intent to do so.” The statement also said that Monarez is “not aligned with the President’s agenda of Making America Healthy Again.” (Monarez didn’t reply to an interview request.)

Last night and this morning, current and former CDC employees told me that many scientists who remain wonder how they will continue, and whether the agency is still dedicated to providing science-based guidance to the nation. “People are at their wit’s end, and there has been trauma after trauma after trauma,” one longtime CDC official, who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions from HHS, told me today. “I just don’t know how much more our staff can take.”

Daskalakis and Houry told me that they had stayed at the agency despite their misgivings about Kennedy’s views and concern about those he appointed to key positions. They stayed after he cast doubt on the safety of the measles vaccine amid the nation’s largest outbreak since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. They stayed after he canceled $500 million in funding for mRNA-vaccine development. They felt that as long as they were able to put out accurate data, remaining at the CDC was worthwhile. But after Monarez’s ouster, they no longer believe that’s possible.

[Read: Why RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine campaign is working]

They leave behind an agency that is now even more vulnerable to political interference, with fewer people standing between Kennedy and the career scientists whose work he has repeatedly maligned. Current and former officials I spoke with expect more resignations to come.

The mosquitoes and the National Guard were out, but it was otherwise a perfect day in the capital. Clear and sunny, not too hot: baseball weather. The first pitch was at about 9:30 in the morning. A player waiting in the dugout yammered “Whaddaya say, whaddaya say” before nearly every pitch. Another, after working a long at-bat and winning a walk, celebrated by turning to her teammates and tossing her bat gently toward them with both hands, palms up, like she was presenting them with a gift.

It was a regular workday, a Monday, for the rest of Washington, D.C., but inside Nationals Park, it was the final day of tryouts for the new Women’s Professional Baseball League. This will be the first of its kind since the dissolution of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League—a wartime entertainment that gave hundreds of women the opportunity to play baseball in front of paying fans, but which fell apart in the early 1950s due to mismanagement and dwindling attendance.

More than 600 players from 10 countries, including Japan, Australia, Canada, and Venezuela—places that have fielded successful teams in the Women’s Baseball World Cup—had reported on the first day of drills and evaluation. The tryouts were led by Alex Hugo, a former player who won a silver medal with the U.S. team during the most recent World Cup and who said in a Monday press conference that the open-tryout format was designed to find “anybody that we would have missed just trying to search ourselves.” Over the weekend, women were evaluated in the batting cages, in fielding drills, and as pitchers, with cuts at the end of each day. The count had been narrowed to just more than 100 for Monday’s doubleheader of scrimmages, which was open to the public. Those who made the final cut in the tryouts will be eligible for a draft in October.

The ceremonial first pitch was thrown out by Maybelle Blair, the 98-year-old elder stateswoman of women’s baseball, who played for the AAGPBL’s Peoria Redwings and now uses a cane made out of a baseball bat. Instantly identifiable by her white bouffant and chunky sunglasses, Blair has been a celebrity for many years, and is often associated with the 1992 movie A League of Their Own, which resurfaced women’s-baseball history in popular memory. “You have no idea the fun I went through when I was playing ball and how I wish that these girls could have the same opportunity,” she said in a press conference afterward. “I never in holy, holy life figured that we would have another league of their own, and here it is.”

A few hundred were people in the stadium, many of them families with young children. Preteen girls who’d come with their parents ate stadium nachos for breakfast and cheered for players who are household names, at least in certain households—Mo’ne Davis, who, 11 years ago, was the first girl to pitch a shutout in the Little League World Series; Alli Schroder, a Canadian pitching phenom who is also a firefighter (a baseball commentator’s dream). One roaming pack of three girls and two boys ran around the stands looking for Kelsie Whitmore, the face of the new league and arguably the most famous woman baseball player in the United States. She was one of the first women to play professional baseball, in a men’s independent league in 2016, and is currently pitching for the Savannah Bananas, the Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. The (mostly male) Bananas play regular baseball, except they also dance and do tricks and comedy bits during the game (and it counts as an out when a fan catches a foul ball).

When Whitmore came up to bat, a mom and daughter seated near me cheered enthusiastically. “Do you know her?” I asked, because many in the stands were there to support family members. “Yeah, who doesn’t know her?” the mom, a New Yorker named Jennifer Montero, replied. “It’s Kelsie Whitmore.” She and her daughter, Edally, had responded to the open call for players, but Edally was only 16 and had been told to come back when she was older. They stayed for the rest of the week anyway to watch. “It’s definitely surreal,” said Edally, who works on her curveball on the weekends in Central Park and plays on her high school’s otherwise all-boys baseball team. “It gives me hope, knowing I’m not working towards nothing.”

The league will start small, with four to six teams. They will play in small ballparks predominantly in the Northeast—places with about 3,000 seats, one of the league’s co-founders, Justine Siegal, told me. These are roughly half the size of those used by lower-level Minor League teams affiliated with Major League Baseball. Still, however modest its beginning, this league is historic: Though I wrote a feature on the history of women’s baseball in the U.S. earlier this year, I was still a little surprised when Whitmore and Davis used the word integration in the press conference, pointing out that the AAGPBL had been whites-only. They’re right. The WPBL, when it starts play in the spring of 2026, will be the first-ever integrated baseball league for women in the U.S.

[From the April 2025 issue: Why aren’t women allowed to play baseball?]

When I spoke with Whitmore after the conference, she rattled off a list of things she hopes to see in the next five years. That would be a full six-month season, a full spring training, maybe a winter league to help accelerate player development. There should be high-school and college baseball for girls in order to create a pipeline of talent, and the women should have salaries that allow them to make baseball their full-time job (a common issue with women’s sports). While playing for the Savannah Bananas, she is also getting a glimpse of the further-off future. “I feel like I’m living two different dreams right now,” she said. “I’m in an environment of playing women’s professional baseball, and then, on top of it, I’m playing in front of sold-out crowds in Major League parks. So, I mean the ultimate goal is we have sold-out crowds for women’s professional baseball.”

In the meantime, she was thrilled by the few days she’d gotten to spend with women who might be her teammates next year. She told me that she feels more like herself and plays more freely “with the girls.” “They’re just a breath of fresh air,” she said. Usually, when this happens—at an international tournament or after an exhibition game—the women have no idea when their next opportunity to play together will be. With a new league on the horizon, that’s over.

What that new league will look like in practice, and how would-be fans will engage with it, is still somewhat of a mystery, but the Savannah Bananas are an interesting parallel. Their goofy theatrics are not to my personal taste, but it’s obvious people like them in part because they feel approachable in a way that Major Leaguers really can’t. During the morning game at the tryouts, players who were scheduled for the second game lounged in the stands among everyone else. At one point, I watched a girl in an Aaron Judge jersey walk up and get an autograph from a WPBL player who was just finishing a hot dog.

The casualness reminded me of a conversation I had with Kevin Baker, the author of The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City, earlier this year. We were talking about how a new women’s league might be able to differentiate itself by recapturing some of the old neighborhood spirit of baseball. The Dodgers were just guys who lived in Brooklyn; Mickey Mantle walked to work through Central Park. “Players are so much more aloof now and kind of have to be aloof; I don’t blame them for it,” he said. “But you know, when they could live among us, that was in a way more thrilling.”

That’s one of many ways in which the women’s game might be different. In the stands, I spoke with a group of four players from Vancouver who’d come to the tryouts together and offered various other practical considerations. The women’s league will use metal bats instead of wooden ones. “Realistically, we don’t hit the ball as hard or as fast as men,” Claire Eccles, a pitcher and an outfielder, told me. Metal bats will mean more hits and a faster game, which is what people generally want to see. (Though it’s a new challenge for some of the pitchers who are used to playing with men and throwing to wooden bats.)

Juliette Kladko, a pitcher and first baseman sitting next to Eccles, guessed that the average fastball at the tryouts was probably in the range of 70 to 75 miles an hour. Professional men usually throw in the mid-90s or harder, so women who have played with men their whole life have often focused more on the timing and location of their pitches, the shape of their breaking balls, and what old-timers call the “lost art” of pitching. All four of the Vancouver women had a curveball in their repertoire, and one of them, Eccles, had a knuckleball. The classic curveball is an endangered pitch in velocity-obsessed Major League Baseball, and there are currently no knuckleballers.

The WPBL could offer a looser, more familiar, backyard kind of play, even if it intends to roster elite talent. Not only may the pitching be more painterly; the pitchers will also be the batters, base runners, and defenders. Shohei Ohtani, the Dodgers’ $700 million superstar, is an anomaly and a thrilling novelty because he has continued to pitch and hit at the highest level, even after the practice went completely out of style in the age of the designated hitter. In the WPBL, that would be the norm. Most of the women have been compelled by circumstances and limited opportunities to be super–utility players, and the WPBL teams will probably not even have full-size rosters, so it will remain necessary for women to do it all.

The scrimmages I watched were a bit sloppy at times—lots of hit-by-pitches, lots of defensive errors—but they had exhilarating moments too. On a sharp, bang-bang double play, someone behind me let out a “Hoo, hoo, that was sweet.” After I watched a great play in the outfield, I chatted with two older men in the stands. One of them, Jeff Stewart, told me he’d also gone to watch the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women’s barnstorming team that played for a short time in the 1990s. He was impressed by the WPBL games, he said, and excited for the new league. Obviously, there was room for improvement, but there was a lot of potential. “You saw it!” he said. “That girl in center field just made an outstanding catch.”

The day was generally jubilant, but there was a hum of anxiety in the air. Siegal more than once made a point of saying that the league was going to be built to last and would be around, as she put it, forever. “My grandchild is going to play in this league,” she said in the press conference. Although everyone present certainly wanted that to be true, it doesn’t feel like a given. The first season of the new league will be only four weeks long, followed by a week of All-Star events and two weeks of playoffs, barely a blip on the calendar in comparison with Major League Baseball. During the four weeks of the regular season, each team will play two games a week.

Nobody expected the league to start with 162 games a year, but this seems awfully short—like the season would have hardly begun before it was over already. Montero, the mom who came with her 16-year-old, was dismayed. “Definitely it should be longer, way longer,” she said. “We’ve waited how many years?”

One of the more surreal knock-on effects of the gutting of USAID is that the U.S. government is now holding a massive fire sale for mosquito nets, water towers, printers, iPads, chairs, generators, defibrillators, textbooks, agricultural equipment, motorbikes, mobile health clinics, and more. Until recently, these items supported the 5,000-plus foreign-aid projects that the Trump administration has now canceled.

Normally, when a USAID project ends, its leftover, usable goods get methodically inventoried, then distributed to other projects or local partners who can put them to good use. This year is, quite obviously, different.

Federal and humanitarian workers have scrambled​​ to run a mass closeout before their own termination or their project’s bankruptcy, with little guidance from leadership at USAID or the State Department. The result is that millions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the United States has already purchased is being auctioned off, likely at an extreme loss, or simply abandoned. (The State Department declined to comment after repeated requests.)

Some USAID workers and local partners have managed to follow Plan A—that is, donating goods where they can be most useful—despite the fact that there are no longer any USAID-funded projects to hand equipment off to. (The State Department has assumed responsibility for the roughly 20 percent of USAID’s original projects that will continue.) A worker at one NGO that operates in Myanmar told me that her colleagues donated bed nets and medical equipment to the country’s collapsed health system after the U.S. government terminated a malaria project. (She, like many other current and former USAID workers I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of professional reprisal.) Shumet Amdemichael, the director of the nonprofit Mercy Corps’ Nigeria programs, told me that his organization may off-load generators to local hospitals. “But if they don’t have the money for the fuel for those generators,” he said, “it won’t be very useful.” An employee at an NGO operating in Kenya told me that her organization ended up donating USAID vehicles to local technical colleges so that engineering students could pick them apart. In Nigeria, a small team orchestrated the handoff of at least 140 vehicles and 1,350 pieces of furniture and IT or office equipment, according to an internal document I reviewed earlier this summer. Former USAID officials in Nigeria told me that they believe the items went mostly to local health ministries. There is seemingly no public record of where these items, or any of USAID’s other assets, have gone.

The Trump administration, for its part, has given few straight answers on where U.S. government property overseas should go. A recent report to Congress on operations in Iraq and Syria found that “USAID staff said that much of the direction they received regarding the transition was informal in nature, often with no follow-up to document decisions taken.” In Afghanistan, the Trump administration canceled a project that ran schools in community settings—crucial for girls who, under the Taliban’s rules, can’t continue their formal education past sixth grade. (That program had continued even after the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.) Then it waited months to tell the nonprofit International Rescue Committee what to do with hundreds of thousands of textbooks and school-supply kits, James Sussman, an IRC spokesperson, told me. When the project was canceled in February, the books and stationery had been in a warehouse awaiting distribution, where they have since remained. The IRC also operated a network of health clinics in Afghanistan, and when that funding was terminated, several were forced to close. The organization gathered the leftover supplies—medical-examination tables, stethoscopes, gloves, measuring tapes to diagnose severely malnourished kids, fortified pastes for treating them—to restock its surviving clinics, Sherine Ibrahim, IRC’s country director in Afghanistan, told me. Legally, those items are the property of the U.S. government, which has not green-lit this redistribution, Ibrahim said. But, she added, “it is very hard for us to see nutritional support for children and say, Okay, we’re not going to use this because we are waiting for the U.S. government to tell us what to do with it.”

[Read: The actual math behind DOGE’s cuts]

When donation fails, Plan B is generally to hold an auction. In Guatemala, the U.S. embassy has auctioned off iPads, ring lights, megaphones, and defibrillators that were once the property of USAID. At least 13 lots sold for a total of about $13,600. In Nigeria, the U.S. embassy advertised the auction of the contents of a USAID warehouse, including computer supplies and used generators. Earlier this year, in a letter to two congresspeople, USAID’s acting deputy inspector general expressed concern that auctions like the ones that have now happened in multiple countries would “return only cents on the dollar.” They also come with national-security concerns. The Trump administration is not publicly tracking the bidders of any auctioned USAID goods, which could plausibly end up being a cheap source of supplies for terrorist organizations, as the acting deputy inspector general noted in her letter. USAID is also not requiring employees to bring in their electronics to be erased in person, which leaves open the possibility that sensitive information remains on devices now being sold to the highest bidder.

Some items have been stranded or even abandoned. For much of this summer, the U.S. government has reportedly paid a parking garage in Nepal 80 cents a day per vehicle to store more than 500 cars and motorbikes used in the administration’s canceled USAID projects. Lisa Schechtman, a former senior USAID adviser, told me that the Trump administration left more than 20 water and sanitation projects half-finished across the globe. Another $4 million worth of tools and equipment meant for clean-water work in Ethiopia is likely lying unused somewhere in a warehouse, Schechtman said. But as of July 4, when she left her job, senior USAID leadership didn’t seem to know where the tools were, she told me. According to a recent federal report, the status of four USAID projects in Ukraine—more than $115 million worth of work that provided food, “building materials to repair war-damaged homes,” and more—was “unknown” as of June 30.

Other aid purchased by U.S. taxpayers is simply being destroyed. The Trump administration, as I previously reported, ordered the incineration of nearly 500 tons of food meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan.​​ It also intends to incinerate nearly $10 million worth of contraceptives, despite offers from the United Nations to buy the items, and has wasted hundreds of thousands of mpox-vaccine doses that are now so near expiration that they can’t be shipped to the African countries experiencing an outbreak. A former senior official at a major nonprofit told me that tubes of an antibiotic ointment—used in infants to prevent an infection that can cause blindness—sat unused in Mozambique while her colleagues waited for guidance from USAID that never came. Some portion of the antibiotics expired, she said, and were ultimately destroyed. Burning the emergency food alone cost American taxpayers more than $100,000; burning the contraceptives, the State Department says, will cost $100,000 more. In June, a Bloomberg reporter obtained a memo by USAID’s deputy administrator estimating that shutting down the agency would cost the federal government $6 billion a year for an undetermined amount of time. That figure doesn’t appear to include the sunk costs of half-finished projects and now-worthless goods.

[Read: The Trump administration is about to incinerate 500 tons of emergency food]

By the federal government’s own standards, USAID’s fire sale is unacceptable. Paul Martin, USAID’s former inspector general, told me that agency staffers could normally get fired for failing to properly oversee the disposition of equipment bought with taxpayer dollars. (Martin was fired in February after his office released a report warning that USAID’s shutdown risked aid going to waste or being stolen.) A former USAID contracting officer told me that under normal closeout circumstances, if goods are hoarded or fall into the wrong hands, federal employees can “literally go to jail.” One former USAID worker I spoke with helped evacuate agency staff from Afghanistan as the Taliban took over in 2021. He told me that this year’s retreat also felt chaotic and disjointed. “There was no intellectual curiosity as to how to do it right,” he said.

The motorcycles, malaria nets, and nutritional biscuits that the U.S. is currently off-loading are the last vestiges of a pre-2025 American commitment to humanitarian aid abroad. The American pullback could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, according to a study published in The Lancet last month. Governments that previously relied on the U.S. for basic health services are urgently trying to fill the vacuum, even though many of them lack the funds to do so, especially on such short notice. Nonprofits and philanthropists are also working to blunt the impact. Whether they succeed—and how many of those 14 million people survive—depends in part on whether they have the equipment they need and, therefore, on how efficiently the Trump administration can distribute what’s left.

If you are like me, you brush your teeth—too vigorously, I’m told—with a plastic rack of plastic bristles. You use your plastic brush to lather a paste pushed from a plastic tube. When you have a cavity, you go to a dentist who might fill the hole with a plastic composite then sand it flush right there in your mouth. Say you grind your teeth at night. Your dentist might prescribe you a fitted piece of cured acrylic to grind into instead, the surface of which eventually gets visibly rough and worn. Perhaps your teeth are not very straight, so you contemplate getting aligners—thin sheets of thermoplastic that would be heated and then molded to the contours of your mouth and that you would need to wear almost constantly. The retainers you’d wear afterward to keep your newly straight teeth in place might also be plastic.

Nearly every part of modern dentistry and orthodontics involves—and is enhanced by—this remarkably useful material. In some cases, it’s part of necessary medical treatments: A cavity must be filled to prevent worse damage, and at least the plastic-glass composite filling your cavity won’t leach mercury, like the silver fillings that were more common for prior generations. But in cases that are purely aesthetic—tooth straightening can fall into this category—the trade-offs may look different.

Although many hands are wrung over the microplastics that pass from our tea bags and carpets and water bottles into our bodies, when it comes to oral health, we welcome plastic intentionally, and sometimes permanently, directly in our mouths. This troubles Adith Venugopal, an orthodontist and a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Otago, New Zealand; he published a letter in a dental journal last year raising concerns about the micro- and nanoplastics that slough off aligners and retainers. A robust body of research links chemical compounds that leak out of plastic to hormone disruption, developmental abnormalities, and cancer, but the effect of the actual fragments of plastic accumulating in our tissues and organs is less clear. Venugopal started researching microplastics in orthodontics after seeing a paper that found patients with micro- and nanoplastics embedded in their artery plaques were more likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Plastic exposure from dentistry or orthodontics, Venugopal thinks, is ethically different than the worries over plastic exposure resulting from consumer choices. “Prescribing it from a medical standpoint, knowing that it would leach out and cause so many millions of particles to be ingested on a yearly basis, is troublesome, isn’t it?” he told me. “I mean, that’s the first thing, to do no harm.”

But what the harm of dental and orthodontic plastics might be is, as of yet, poorly understood. Venugopal’s letter is one in a growing body of statements and studies coming out of those professions that ask if plastic may be harming patients. (“Microplastics: An Orthodontic Concern!” yelped an editorial in the Journal of the World Federation of Orthodontists last year.) So far, few if any papers have looked at the issue in humans, though preliminary studies attempt to replicate aspects of mouths in a lab, by simulating wear and tear from liquid and friction. The Nordic Institute of Dental Materials has been looking into the release of microplastics from night guards. The chief scientific officer of the American Dental Association’s research arm, Ben Wu, said in a statement that the association is “closely monitoring the scientific literature on microplastics” but that “no clinical evidence currently exists showing a meaningful oral or overall health impact from the particles.” The ADA’s best current advice to patients is to monitor their plastic dental devices for cracks, roughness, or breaks, and look into a replacement. Or, Wu suggested, instead of opting for clear plastic aligners, a person could get metal braces or retainers.

The American Association of Orthodontists is taking a more proactive approach. “This is certainly something that is high in our consciousness,” Steven Siegel, the organization’s president, told me. The association recently convened a panel of researchers to look at all of the available studies to date, and has asked its awards committee to put out a call for proposals for new research in this area. It hasn’t taken an official position on microplastics, because the group, like Venugopal and the ADA, considers the available research to be “preliminary,” he said. But it believes microplastics are “an issue that we need to pay close attention to.”

Clear orthodontic aligners have become a particular focus of early research attention, given the nature of their use. “They’re supposed to be worn about 22 hours a day for optimal tooth movement,” Venugopal told me. People typically change theirs out after one or two weeks and continue that cycle for months to years. A group of Italian researchers published a paper in 2023 that found that aligners did indeed leach microplastics after seven days when exposed to artificial saliva in a lab. But Venugopal points out that the lab study couldn’t capture the onslaught of enzymes, teeth gritting, and temperature variation that a real human mouth inflicts. So he and a doctoral student are now conducting what he believes is the first real-world study of how much microplastic leaches into saliva while an actual person is wearing aligners.

There is always the alternative that the ADA pointed to: metal braces. Although these may still use a small amount of plastic adhesive to bond the equipment to the front of a wearer’s teeth, at least the plastic isn’t on the chewing surface. (This doesn’t elide concerns entirely; one paper has tried to characterize the microplastics sloughed off by orthodontic rubber bands. It may be a lot.)

In his own practice, instead of prescribing plastic retainers, which can be removed, Venugopal says he’s intentionally prescribing more fixed-wire retainers for people who would get a similar benefit from either. (Some patients would still benefit more from having thermoplastic molded ones, he said. But for those who could go either way, they’re getting metal.) “So, yes, it is affecting me as a clinician as well,” he said. If a patient were to ask him about microplastics, he would tell them what research has shown (that microplastics leak from objects such as aligners) and what it hasn’t (whether the leakage from an aligner or retainer alone poses a significant danger). “Without being informed about that, I don’t want to scare patients,” he said. Each of his patients—like everyone—is already inhaling, drinking, and eating microplastics just by living in the world.

The only way to get us out of the dental-plastic loop will be to develop different materials. A plastic-bristled toothbrush may add approximately 30 to 120 microparticles of plastic to your diet with each brushing, according to one study. Another put the estimate at an average of 39 particles a day. Either calculation suggests that a plastic toothbrush adds tens of thousands of particles to one’s yearly load of microplastics, which is significant when considering that estimates of microplastic exposure from food, air, and water put a person’s yearly particle load at more than 100,000. Nonplastic toothbrush options exist, but they’re hardly mainstream. Most dental floss is plastic, too—alternatives, such as silk floss, are mostly a health-food-store find.

Conversely, not brushing your teeth would be a dental disaster, and no one should choose not to fill a cavity. The downside of an untreated cavity almost certainly far exceeds any hypothetical harm from additional microplastic exposure. “I was at a dental meeting a couple of months back, and I bit down and I fractured two molars, old fillings,” Siegel said. “And I went to my friend who’s an excellent dentist. I didn’t hesitate to have composite restorations with the materials that we use. I put it in that context: I think that the release, if any, of some of the compounds and microplastics is probably relatively minimal.”

The same goes for mouth guards: Siegel said he wasn’t aware of any material that could take the place of my acrylic set prescribed for tooth grinding. “Whether it’s crossing the street or having a medical procedure, one always looks at the risks and benefits,” Siegel told me. “I try and limit microplastic exposure in my own life. I try not to reheat things in plastic containers. I limit processed-food intake, things like that.” But, he said, when it comes to the health of your mouth, you want to ask yourself: Do the benefits of protecting your teeth and jaw outweigh the potential risks of adding to your microplastic dose? “For me personally, if I ground my teeth, I would wear a night guard,” he said. That was a sensible assessment, I thought, even if—for now—we don’t really have the information to base that decision on. Still, I got his point. I’ll pull mine out of storage tonight.

The U.S. Open is one of the few occasions a year when tennis really gets its due in America. More than 1 million people—including Simone Biles, Aaron Judge, and other top athletes—shelled out for tickets last year, feverish heat be damned. Ticket sales this year are up by 8 percent. The sold-out after-party, featuring the band Odesza, will transform New York’s Louis Armstrong Stadium from tennis court to dance club. All of the pomp around the Open harkens back to tennis’s history as an aristocratic leisure; the first precursor to the Open, in 1881, was held on a grass court in Newport, Rhode Island, at the height of the Gilded Age. Instead of electronica, spectators were treated to a string quartet.

But over the past half century, tennis has been dramatically democratized. The sport has been growing since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when hitting a ball outside, 80 feet from anyone else, seemed to be one of the healthiest exercise options available; last year, more than 25 million Americans played. Tennis today unfolds predominantly on public courts. You might even have a middle school up the street where you can play—just disregard the blue pickleball tape across the baseline. All you need is a racket, a ball, and one other person to return your serves. If you don’t know how to hit, Venus Williams, the winner of seven Grand Slams, can teach you a forehand on YouTube.

All of that makes tennis a refreshingly easy sport to pick up. But its real advantage over other sports is what happens when you keep on playing.  

Tennis is a full-body workout. It not only builds muscle but also elevates your heart rate. It is notably more aerobically challenging than pickleball, which has, for the past few years, infringed on tennis’s court space and crowded the zeitgeist. To reach the tennis ball before its fateful second bounce requires horsepower, and you’re responsible for covering a lot of ground—more than double the pickleball plot. The tennis net is also, ahem, two inches higher at center court, making it harder to clear. Frequent tennis play improves bone density, which staves off fractures and osteoporosis.

Crucially, tennis is a lifetime sport (two coaches described their clients’ age ranges to me as between 3 and 90), which means its benefits can last through middle age and your elder years if you stick with it. Keeping up with tennis over multiple decades was associated with a reduced risk of heart disease in men in a 2002 study. A Danish study from 2018 found that tennis players lived nearly a decade longer than their sedentary peers—and also longer than swimmers, cyclers, and joggers. No other sport in the analysis was correlated with such a large boost to life expectancy. (Thanks to this study and others, the United States Tennis Association markets tennis as “the world’s healthiest sport.”)

At its essence, tennis is about moving through space correctly, says John Ratey, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Receiving the ball, you gauge its trajectory—speed, spin, height of the bounce—while determining how to most efficiently reach it. Then, while running, racket outstretched, you decide how you’ll return it, with a new angle, speed, and spin. Ideally, the chosen combination results in the ball landing inside the court, and going to where your opponent is not. Also ideally, the racket (as directed by your body) follows your mind’s split-second intention. You even have to factor in the wind and the sun. The sport demands so much complex motor coordination, as well as finesse, that it carries the same cognitive, balance, and coordination benefits as dancing. (You need only watch videos of Roger Federer leaping and gliding across the court to realize how tennis approximates the quickstep.)

Like any sport, of course, tennis can lead to injury; the most common ones involve sprained ankles, a sore back, torn shoulder cartilage, and weakened tendons. But it’s remarkably low-risk. In an Aspen Institute comparison of the 10 most popular high-school team sports, tennis ranked first for safety, with infinitesimal rates of catastrophic injury and concussion. Tennis may even help stave off injury, especially for older players. Paul Wright, the chair of Nuvance Health’s Neuroscience Institute, told me that if you can balance yourself on a tennis court, you’re more likely to successfully negotiate obstacles at home, avoiding falls.

Perhaps most important, tennis is a workout for the brain. Learning new skills—rock climbing, knitting, chess—can buffer against cognitive decline. In one 2023 study, older adults who were assigned to weekly skills classes developed working memory and attention levels typical of people decades their junior. But there’s reason to expect that any tennis player, regardless of their level, can reap cognitive rewards. Racket sports require completing tasks in unusually rapid succession. (Here comes the ball again! And again, at this new angle!) You always have to be on, Wright said. It should be no surprise, then, that prolonged tennis training has been shown to shorten reaction times; among children, it has also been linked with enhanced decision making.

What’s uniquely beneficial about tennis is that it’s both highly complicated and highly aerobic. Any aerobic exercise can benefit the brain by improving mood, which in turn aids memory and cognition. Tennis, with its explosive bursts—sprinting to the ball, stopping, lunging laterally, jogging backwards to the baseline—can yield especially powerful results. James Gladstone, the chief of sports medicine at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, told me that tennis resembles high-intensity interval training, which has been shown to improve cognitive function and memory in healthy older adults. In youths, it has positive effects on cognitive performance and attention.

[Read: Tennis explains everything]

If you want to pick up a sport, I submit that tennis wins in straight sets—not only because it boosts health but also because hitting a ball and receiving it is a great time. Fun reduces stress, and the more stress you have, the more your body needs to move to keep your brain running smoothly, Ratey wrote in Spark. Plus, if you enjoy an exercise, you’ll do more of it and gain more health benefits. Several players described to me the addictive pleasure of striking the ball correctly: the popping sound of ground strokes, the satisfying release of driving the ball from the legs rather than the arms.

Other players find that tennis’s learning curve only stokes their interest. Mastering the sport takes years; that might sound intimidating, but to many, it’s motivation. Laurence Barrett, 89, has played tennis for nearly 70 years, dodging his son’s entreaties to play pickleball (for one, he can’t stand the high-pitched thwack of the plastic ball). On the morning that we spoke this spring, he had, by his own accounting, hit a few “damn good volleys.”

For most of my own life, I had swung a racket once a decade, aiming haphazardly and getting by with a rustic version of tennis. But a couple of years ago, I decided I would learn to hit a clean forehand that didn’t sail skyward. I began taking lessons, soaking in key information such as Don’t get too close to the dang ball. On YouTube, Williams taught me to move my shoulders “as a unit” in the forehand, and so when she appeared as a wildcard at the D.C. Open last month, I bought a ticket.

[Read: The most beautiful stroke in tennis]

I showed up two days after the 45-year-old Williams had served nine aces and defeated a woman nearly half her age. I watched as her forehand whipsawed the July humidity, her shoulders unlocking velocity and angles that were even more astonishing in person. How many hundreds of thousands of forehands had she hit throughout her lifetime? Watching her, I could imagine playing the duration of mine.

Both batches of french fries that my family had for dinner were from the frozen-food aisle. They appeared nearly identical when cooked, one batch faintly darker than the other. And we all noticed: Those bronzed fries were exceptionally tasty. My toddler devoured a small mountain of them. They left a meatiness on my tongue, as if I’d eaten them alongside a steak. After my husband unblinded the taste test, I realized that, in a way, I had. The paler fries had been cooked in avocado oil, and their more delicious counterparts in beef tallow. Damn, I thought. The MAHA fries are amazing!

They weren’t, of course, actually produced by the Make America Healthy Again campaign; both bags were from Jesse and Ben’s, a frozen-french-fry brand whose tallow fries predate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as secretary of Health and Human Services. Jesse and Ben’s, like many food companies, had already released so-called clean-label products, which cater to long-standing wellness trends such as avoiding artificial ingredients and added sugar—trends that overlap considerably with the MAHA approach to food.

Now companies are capitalizing on some of Kennedy’s favored dietary principles—including his assertion, which is refuted by most nutrition experts, that beef tallow is a healthy substitute for seed oils—by further overhauling the branding and recipes of their products. Unfortunately, MAHA-washing groceries in this way won’t make Americans any healthier. It might even change our diets for the worse.

Many product labels and ad campaigns decry ingredients on Kennedy’s hit list—besides seed oils, it also includes high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food dyes and flavors—and showcase those he deems healthy. This summer, Sam’s Club started selling beef-tallow-fried chicken strips. A brand of seed-oil-free instant ramen launched in August and is available at Kroger. This spring, PepsiCo relaunched its “Simply” line, which sells versions of snacks such as Cheetos and Doritos that are made without artificial flavorings and dyes; it later announced plans to extend the line with new products. A company spokesperson told me in an email that Lays and Tostitos will have no artificial colors or flavors by the end of the year. PepsiCo is investing in products without artificial dyes and flavorings “to make it easier for everyone to find snacks and drinks they feel good about,” the spokesperson told me. “The Make America Healthy Again movement has sparked important dialogue, and we share the belief that the food system should evolve—responsibly, at scale, and grounded in science and consumer trust.” Meanwhile, Coca-Cola announced that it would sweeten its sodas with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. President Donald Trump, who said he had previously discussed the change with the company, thanked its leaders; Kennedy subsequently thanked Trump.

Of course, fried chicken, instant ramen, soda, and chips share a certain inherent junkiness. Even without their shocking-orange hue, Cheetos are mostly empty vectors for salt and fat. A 12-ounce bottle of Mexican Coke still contains more than three-quarters of the added sugar that the FDA says an adult should limit themselves to in a day. MAHA-washing therefore “misses the bigger picture of the food landscape,” which is characterized by heavily processed food, fast food, and sugary drinks, Marie Bragg, a population-health professor at New York University, told me.

These reformulations may have some benefits; as my colleague Nick Florko has written, artificial food dyes in particular are both unnecessary and probably not great for health. But at best, the changes championed by the MAHA movement will likely yield marginal health improvements, Alyssa J. Moran, a director at the University of Pennsylvania’s food-policy laboratory, told me. Research has long shown that the most harmful elements of junk food are high levels of salt, saturated fat, and sugar, combined with minimal fiber and nutrients—not fructose, seed oils, or trace amounts of additives. Despite widespread concern resulting from studies linking high-fructose corn syrup to obesity in the 2000s, the evidence that it is less healthy than other forms of sugar is weak. Seed oils have repeatedly been shown to be not only safe to consume, but healthier than animal-based fats such as butter and beef tallow, which are rich in saturated fat and are linked to higher risk of heart disease. As I read the nutrition labels of my frozen fries, my heart spasmed: The beef-tallow version contains seven times more saturated fat than the avocado-oil kind.

[Read: America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

Unfortunately, Americans have proved themselves to be suckers for packaging that conveys a food’s healthiness, Bragg said. Shoppers are willing to pay more for food labeled “all natural” and prefer produce marked as “pesticide-free.” One study that Moran co-authored found that parents are more likely to give their kids sugary drinks labeled with images of fresh fruit than similar products without those images. People tend to falsely believe that Oreos labeled “organic” have fewer calories than their conventional counterparts, and that the cookies can be eaten more frequently, even if they are pointed to labels showing that both options are nutritionally identical. They are also more likely to forgo exercise if they choose an organic dessert over a conventional one. All of this bodes poorly for American shoppers, who seem likely to eat more of the MAHA-washed junk foods that will still contain just as much salt, saturated fat, and sugar.

These issues do not concern food companies, whose primary mission is, of course, to sell food. Jesse Konig, one of Jesse and Ben’s co-founders, told me that the company was pursuing taste, not health, when it started selling tallow fries, in 2024. “We’re restaurant guys, not doctors,” he said. The labels on my packages of Jesse and Ben’s fries, however, noted that the company doesn’t use conventional seed oils, because they “leave you feeling icky and inflamed,” referencing a common health claim made by seed-oil critics.

Other companies are more outspoken about changing their products for the purpose of health. Mike’s Mighty Good describes its seed-oil-free ramen as “wholesome,” and similar instant-ramen products as “low-quality junk food.” Real Good Foods launched its tallow-fried chicken because customers kept asking for a “seed-oil-free solution,” Rikki Ingram, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me. Compared with conventional products, she said, the brand’s tallow-fried chicken offers health advantages unrelated to its lack of seed oils: more protein, fewer carbohydrates, and no highly processed flour.

[Read: America is done pretending about meat]

Changes such as these make good business sense. A company that agrees to, say, phase out food dyes from soft drinks improves its public image. It also courts a relatively affluent audience, says Trey Malone, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. MAHA-washed foods are likely to be more expensive, in part because reformulating products is costly; companies aren’t trying to market those goods to people already struggling to afford conventional food. Mike’s Mighty Good seed-oil-free instant ramen costs more than $3 a cup on its website; its conventional counterparts can be 99 cents or less apiece. At Walmart, a bag of Simply Lays costs nearly three times as much as regular Lays. The rise of MAHA has been good for Jesse and Ben’s business, Konig told me. Both the avocado-oil fries—which tick MAHA’s seed-oil-free criterion—and the beef-tallow version have been hits with customers, but recent public discussion about beef tallow especially has “generated a lot of curiosity,” he said.

To Kennedy’s credit, he’s never called french fries a health food. MAHA’s vision of an ideal food landscape is one where people eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, and minimally processed food (in addition to beef tallow and raw milk). Kennedy has long condemned processed foods and the companies that make them for poisoning Americans. Earlier this month, he lauded states for announcing plans to restrict SNAP recipients from using the benefits to buy candy and soda. Yet so far, his dealings with food companies themselves have been fundamentally friendly: asking them to voluntarily phase out food dyes, congratulating Coca-Cola for its commitment to sugar as a sweetener.

If Kennedy shies away from using the government’s real power, he could blow a genuine opportunity to overhaul America’s food landscape. Food companies have enormous power over what we eat and could effectively nudge Americans toward healthier habits, Bragg said. In the mid-aughts, for example, companies such as Campbell’s, Heinz, and Kraft committed to reducing salt levels in foods, including in breads, cold cuts, and cheese. It worked: From 2009 to 2018, the amount of salt in packaged food decreased by 8.5 percent. This outcome was partly driven by voluntary goals set by the National Sugar and Salt Reduction Initiative, a nongovernmental organization. The companies, however, also faced threats of regulation from the federal government if they did not comply. In 2016, the FDA proposed its own salt-reduction guidelines, further pressuring the food industry. “There has to be a threat of mandatory policy,” Moran said. “Otherwise, we’re just going to continue to see them making these changes around the margins that are very unlikely to meaningfully impact health.”

[Read: A ‘MAHA box’ might be coming to your doorstep]

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s HHS hasn’t instituted or threatened any binding regulations on food companies; indeed, it seems strongly opposed to doing so. A leaked draft of the second MAHA report, a document outlining HHS’s policy strategy that has yet to be finalized, explicitly details plans to deregulate food and agriculture. “The Trump administration has initiated a robust food policy agenda to Make America Healthy Again, from phasing out artificial food dyes to updating Dietary Guidelines for Americans to reforming the ‘Generally Recognized as Safe’ Standard,” the White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me in an email. (Under Kennedy, the FDA has so far revoked the authorization of one dye, Red 3. Formal changes to GRAS have not yet been announced.) “Every stakeholder in this movement—from parents to food companies to physicians to farmers to restaurants—has a role to play to transform how Americans view and make decisions about our health and nutrition.”

The superficial changes that companies have made to align with MAHA’s goals offer a glimpse of what could change if Kennedy were willing to enforce his more science-backed policy proposals. But as things stand, HHS is attempting to clean up America’s food supply with a spray bottle. What it really needs is a power washer.

Millions of Americans might soon have mail from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The health secretary—who fiercely opposes industrial, ultraprocessed foods—now wants to send people care packages full of farm-fresh alternatives. They will be called “MAHA boxes.”

For the most part, MAHA boxes remain a mystery. They are mentioned in a leaked draft of a much-touted report that the Trump administration is set to release about improving children’s health. Reportedly, the 18-page document—which promises studies on the health effects of electromagnetic radiation and changes in how the government regulates sunscreen, among many other things—includes this: “MAHA Boxes: USDA will develop options to get whole, healthy food to SNAP participants.” In plain English, kids on food stamps might be sent veggies.

The idea might seem like a throwaway line in a wish list of policies. (Kush Desai, a deputy White House press secretary, told me that the leaked report should be disregarded as “speculative literature.”) But MAHA boxes are also referenced in the budget request that President Donald Trump sent Congress in May. In that document, MAHA boxes full of “commodities sourced from domestic farmers and given directly to American households” are proposed as an option for elderly Americans who already get free packages of shelf-stable goods from the government. When I asked the Department of Health and Human Services for more information about MAHA boxes, a spokesperson referred me back to the White House; the Department of Agriculture, which runs the food-stamp program, did not respond.

MAHA boxes are likely to come in some form or another. Some of the packages might end up in the trash. Lots of people, and especially kids, do not enjoy eating carrots and kale. Just 10 percent of U.S. adults are estimated to hit their daily recommended portion of vegetables. But if done correctly, MAHA boxes could do some real good.

For years, nutrition experts have been piloting similar programs. A recent study that provided diabetic people with healthy meal kits for a year found that their blood sugar improved, as did their overall diet quality. Another, which provided people with a delivery of fruits and vegetables for 16 weeks, showed that consumption of these products increased by nearly half a serving a day. It makes sense: If healthy food shows up at your door, you’re probably going to eat it. “Pretty much any American is going to benefit from a real healthy food box,” Dariush Mozaffarian, the director of the Tufts Food Is Medicine Institute, told me.

Sending people healthy food could be a simple way to deal with one of the biggest reasons why poor Americans don’t eat more fruits and veggies. The food-stamp program, otherwise known as SNAP, provides enrollees with a debit card they can use for food of their choosing—and a significant portion of SNAP dollars goes to unhealthy foods. Research finds that has less to do with people having a sweet tooth than it does the price of a pound of brussels sprouts. Several studies have found that, for food-stamp recipients, price is one of the biggest barriers to eating healthy. Many states already have incentives built into SNAP to encourage consumption of fruits and vegetables. MAHA boxes would be an even more direct nudge.

Most nutrition experts I spoke with for this story were much more supportive of MAHA boxes being sent to Americans in addition to food stamps than as a replacement for them. Exactly how the care packages would fit into other food-assistance programs isn’t yet clear. Despite its shortcomings, SNAP is very effective at limiting hunger in America. Shipping heavy boxes of produce to the nation’s poor is a much bigger undertaking than putting cash on a debit card.

There’s also the question of what exactly these MAHA boxes will include. If the “whole, healthy food” in each care package includes raw milk and beef tallow—which Kennedy has promoted—that would only worsen American health. (His own eating habits are even more questionable: Kennedy once said that he ate so many tuna sandwiches that he developed mercury poisoning.) In May, after the Trump administration mentioned MAHA boxes in its budget request, a White House spokesperson told CBS News that the packages would be similar to food boxes that the first Trump administration sent during the pandemic in an effort to connect hungry families with food that would otherwise go to waste. According to a letter signed by Trump that was sent to recipients, each box was supposed to come with “nutritious food from our farmers.” News reports at the time suggested that wasn’t always the case. One recipient reportedly was shipped staples such as onions, milk, some fruit, and eggs, along with seven packages of hot dogs and two blocks of processed cheese. Another described their box as “a box full of old food and dairy and hot dogs.”

[Read: America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

The COVID-era program did eventually deliver some 173 million food boxes. But it was still a failure, Gina Plata-Nino of the Food Research & Action Center, an organization that advocates for people on food-assistance programs, told me. The logistics were such a mess that they prompted a congressional investigation. Nonprofits, which helped distribute the packages, received “rotten food and wet or collapsing boxes,” investigators were told. And the setup of the program was apparently so rushed that the government did not bother to check food distributors’ professional references; investigators concluded that a “company focused on wedding and event planning without significant food distribution experience” was awarded a $39 million contract to transport perishables to food banks.

This time around, the White House doesn’t have to navigate the urgency of a sudden pandemic in its planning. But questions remain about who exactly will be responsible for getting these boxes to millions of Americans around the country. The White House will likely have to partner with companies that have experience shipping perishable items to remote areas of the country. And although the White House budget says that MAHA boxes will replace a program that primarily provides canned foods to seniors through local food banks, it remains to be seen whether these organizations would have the resources to administer a program of this size.

Perhaps the Trump administration has already thought through all of these potential logistical hurdles. But trouble with executing grand plans to improve American health has been a consistent theme throughout Trump’s tenures in office. In 2020, for example, he pledged to send seniors a $200 discount card to help offset rising drug costs. The cards never came amid questions about the legality of the initiative.

Americans do need to change their eating habits if we hope to improve our collective problems of diet-related disease. Getting people excited about the joys of eating fruits and vegetables is laudable. So, too, are some of Kennedy’s other ideas on food, such as getting ultraprocessed foods out of school cafeterias. But Kennedy still hasn’t spelled out how he will deliver on these grand visions. The government hasn’t even defined what an ultraprocessed food is, despite wanting to ban them. The ideas are good, but a good idea is only the first step.

Since January, President Donald Trump’s administration has been clear about its stance on systemic racism and gender identity: Those concepts—championed by a “woke” mob, backed by Biden cronies—are made-up, irrelevant to the health of Americans, and unworthy of inclusion in research. At the National Institutes of Health, hundreds of research studies on health disparities and transgender health have been abruptly defunded; clinical trials focused on improving women’s health have been forced to halt. Online data repositories that contain gender data have been placed under review. And top agency officials who vocally supported minority representation in research have been ousted from their jobs.

These attacks have often seemed at odds with the administration’s stated goals of fighting censorship in science at the NIH and liberating public health from ideology. But its members behave as though they have no dogma of their own—just a wholehearted devotion to scientific rigor, in the form of what the nation’s leaders have repeatedly called “gold-standard science.” This pretense—that the government can obliterate entire fields of study while standing up for free inquiry—is encapsulated by what’s become a favored bit of MAHA rhetoric: All research is allowed, the administration likes to say, so long as it’s “scientifically justifiable.”

On Friday, the phrase scientifically justified appeared several times in a statement by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya that set the agenda for his agency and ordered a review of all research to make sure that it fits with the agency’s priorities. “I have advocated for academic freedom throughout my career,” he wrote in a letter to his staff that accompanied the statement. “Scientists must be allowed to pursue their ideas free of censorship or control by others.” But his announcement went on to warn that certain kinds of data, including records of people’s race or ethnicity, may not always be worthy of inclusion in research. Only when its consideration of those factors has been “scientifically justified,” he wrote, would a project qualify for NIH support.

That message may seem unimpeachable—in keeping, even, with the priorities of the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research: NIH-backed studies should be justified in scientific terms. But the demand that Bhattacharya lays out has no formal criteria attached to it. Scientific justifiability is, to borrow Bhattacharya’s description of systemic racism, a “poorly-measured factor.” It’s imprecise at best and, at worst, a subjective appraisal of research that invites political meddling. (Neither the NIH nor the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees it, responded to my questions about the meaning and usage of this phrase.)

Judging scientific merit has always been one of the NIH’s most essential tasks. Tens of thousands of scientists serve on panels for the agency each year, scouring applications for funding; only the most rigorous projects are selected to receive portions of the agency’s $47 billion budget—most of which goes to research outside the agency itself. All of the thousands of grants the agency has terminated this year under the Trump administration were originally vetted in this way, by subject-matter experts with deep knowledge of the underlying science. Many of the studies have been recast, in letters from the agency, as being “antithetical to the scientific inquiry,” indifferent to “biological realities,” or otherwise scientifically unjustified.

The same language from Bhattacharya’s email appears in other recent NIH documents. Last week, an official at the agency sent me a copy of a draft policy that, if published, would prohibit the collection of all data on people’s gender (as opposed to their sex) by any of the agency’s researchers and grantees, regardless of their field of study. It allows for an exception only when the consideration of gender is “scientifically justified.” The gender-data policy was uploaded to an internal portal typically reserved for agency guidance that is about to be published, but has since been removed. (Its existence was first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.) When reached for comment, an HHS official told The Atlantic that the policy had been shot down by NIH leadership, but declined to provide any further details on the timing of that shift, or who, exactly, had been involved in the policy’s drafting or dismissal.

Still, if any version of this policy remains under consideration at the agency, its aims would be in keeping with others that are already in place. One NIH official told me that one of the agency’s 27 institutes and centers, the National Institute for General Medical Sciences, has, since April, sent out hundreds of letters to grantees noting, “If this award involves human subjects research, information regarding study participant ‘gender’ should not be collected. Rather, ‘sex’ should be used for data collection and reporting purposes.” Payments to those researchers, the official said, have been made contingent on the scientists agreeing to those terms within two business days. “Most have accepted,” the official told me, “because they’re desperate.” (The current and former NIH officials who spoke with me for this article did so under the condition of anonymity, to be able to speak freely about how both Trump administrations have affected their work.)

Collecting data on study participants’ gender has been and remains, in many contexts, scientifically justified—at least, if one takes that to mean supported by the existing literature on the topic, Arrianna Planey, a medical geographer at the University of North Carolina, told me. Evidence shows that sex is not binary, that gender is distinct from it, and that acknowledging the distinction improves health research. In its own right, gender can influence—via a mix of physiological, behavioral, and social factors—a person’s vulnerability to conditions and situations as diverse as mental-health issues, sexual violence, cardiovascular disease, infectious diseases, and cancer.

The Trump administration has expressed some interest in gender-focused research—but in a way that isn’t justified by the existing science in the field. In March, NIH officials received a memo noting that HHS had been directed to fund research into “regret and detransition following social transition as well as chemical and surgical mutilation of children and adults.” That framing presupposes the conclusions of such studies and ignores the most pressing knowledge gaps in the field: understanding the long-term outcomes of transition on mental and physical health, and how best to tailor interventions to patients. (Bhattacharya’s Friday statement echoed this stance, specifically encouraging “research that aims to identify and treat the harms these therapies and procedures have potentially caused to minors.”)

According to the draft prohibition on collecting gender data, NIH-employed scientists would be eligible for an exception only when the scientific justification for their work is approved by Matthew Memoli, the agency’s principal deputy director. Memoli has played this role before. After Trump put out his executive order seeking to abolish government spending on DEI, Memoli—then the NIH’s acting director—told his colleagues that the agency’s research into health disparities could continue as long as it was “scientifically justifiable,” two NIH officials told me. Those officials I spoke with could not recall any instances in which NIH staff successfully lobbied for such studies to continue, and within weeks, the agency was cutting off funding from hundreds of research projects, many of them working to understand how and why different populations experience different health outcomes. (Some of those grants have since been reinstated after a federal judge ruled in June that they had been illegally canceled.)

The mixing of politics and scientific justifiability goes back even to Trump’s first term. In 2019, apparently in deference to lobbying from anti-abortion groups, the White House pressured the NIH to restrict research using human fetal tissue—prompting the agency to notify researchers that securing new funds for any projects involving the material would be much more difficult. Human fetal tissue could be used in some cases, “when scientifically justifiable.” But to meet that bar, researchers needed to argue their case in their proposals, then hope their projects passed muster with an ethics advisory board. In the end, that board rejected 13 of the 14 projects it reviewed. “They assembled a committee of people for whom nothing could be scientifically justified,” a former NIH official, who worked in grants at the time of the policy change, told me. “I remember saying at the time, ‘Why can’t they just tell us they want to ban fetal-tissue research? It would be a lot less work.’”

The NIH’s 2019 restriction on human-fetal-tissue research felt calamitous at the time, one NIH official told me. Six years later, it seems rather benign. Even prior to the change in policy, human fetal tissue was used in only a very small proportion of NIH-funded research. But broad restrictions on gathering gender data, or conducting studies that take race or ethnicity into account, could upend most research that collects information on people—amounting to a kind of health censorship of the sort that Bhattacharya has promised to purge.

The insistence that “scientifically justifiable” research will be allowed to continue feels especially unconvincing in 2025, coming from an administration that has so often and aggressively been at odds with conventional appraisals of scientific merit. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of HHS, has been particularly prone to leaning on controversial, biased, and poorly conducted studies, highlighting only the results that support his notions of the truth, while ignoring or distorting others. During his confirmation hearing, he cited a deeply flawed study from a journal at the margins of the scientific literature as proof that vaccines cause autism (they don’t); in June, he called Alzheimer’s a kind of diabetes (it’s not); this month, he and his team justified cutting half a billion dollars from mRNA-vaccine research by insisting that the shots are more harmful than helpful (they’re not), even though many of the studies they cited to back their claims directly contradicted them. Kennedy, it seems, “can’t scientifically justify any of his positions,” Jake Scott, an infectious-disease physician at Stanford, who has analyzed Kennedy’s references to studies, told me.

Bhattacharya’s call for a full review of NIH research and training is predicated on an impossible, and ironic, standard. Scientists are being asked to prove the need for demographic variables that long ago justified their place in research—by an administration that has yet to show it could ever do the same.