I am reading an April 21, 2025 letter from Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. Stephen Ferrara which provides guidance for discontinuing treatment of minors with gender dysphoria at military medical treatment facilities. After noting the Pentagon policy banning the initiation or continuation of treatment with puberty blockers or cross-sex hormone therapy, the letter allows clinicians to offer a tapering-off regime which can last between 6 and 12 weeks, during which military doctors can write prescriptions. Anything longer than 12 weeks must get express approval from Ferrara’s office. The letter also notes administrative changes which will require patients to fill tapering prescriptions “at private sector pharmacies at their own expense.”

Over the weekend, University of Michigan President Santa Ono announced that he was leaving his post to take up the leadership of the University of Florida. It was an interesting choice. It’s been reported that Ono had been warier of resisting or challenging the dictates of the Trump administration than the majority of the University’s Board of Regents, the members of which are elected in statewide elections. The majority of appointees to the University of Florida’s board are appointed by the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis.

This is largely preaching to the choir, but it’s absent enough from the news coverage that is worth stating clearly. Most right-thinking people are aghast at Trump’s onslaught on higher education. The range of reasons is endlessly discussed and doesn’t need to be enumerated here. But through those discussions is the subtext that higher education is dependent on federal subsidies. There is some truth to this when it comes to Pell grants and backstopping student loans. But with grants to fund scientific research, it turns the reality on its head. It’s the federal government which is the initiator here, both historically and also in terms of the ongoing dynamic of grant-making.

Here is a brief follow-up on the question TPM Reader MA addresses in an earlier post: why does the Trump administration have it in for biomedical/disease research? It’s a really good question and one I have not seen an adequate explanation for. But having been reporting on this for a few months now I think I do get the outlines of it.

There it is.

Six months after Election Day, Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin has conceded the North Carolina Supreme Court race to Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs.

A note from TPM Reader MA on biomedical research. I’m sharing it because it’s a good simple explanation not only of the nuts and bolts reality of “your cure isn’t going to be there when you need it” but the massive hit to global competitiveness and economic advantage …

I’m racking my brain trying to figure out why Trump would want to kill funding for curing cancer/Alzheimer’s etc. I guess, as is often the case, with Trump, the simple explanation is the most likely. He sees the university as the enemy and wants to use whatever federal leverage he can to attack them, even if it ends up destroying one of the areas in which the US has a huge comparative advantage. There are significant economic consequences to spiking medical research in the universities: this subsidizes the training of people who will work in the industry, and it drives the types of blue sky research that industry doesn’t want to do, but that it benefits greatly from. It creates a vacuum that other countries will rush to fill. If it persists, the comparative advantage that the US has gained by attracting top global talent will collapse.

The following is very important news about the Trump White House’s unfolding war against biomedical/disease-cure research in the United States. But the set up is a bit complicated. So I want to note both the complexity and the importance in advance, because I want to really encourage you to read the set up and the details. It’s important stuff and most of it remains unknown to the public, though a few threads of the story have been published.

Back in late March and early April, the Trump administration announced grant freezes against a series of elite private universities, all notionally tied to charges of lax vigilance against antisemitism. The targeted universities eventually included Brown, Columbia, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Cornell and Northwestern. Harvard eventually sued the administration. Princeton has decided to fight the cuts but hasn’t sued. But most of the universities have generally kept quiet about what they’re doing. And in most cases what that means is that they’re negotiating with the administration and trying to keep their faculties quiet to avoid antagonizing anyone during those notional negotiations.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social recently started a streaming service for MAGAs and “pro-family” Christians called Truth+. Hunter Walker was surprised to find that among the top ten most watched movies featured for viewers was a “documentary” about how alien lizard people secretly rule the earth. And that was only the beginning of the fun.

Politico Nightly has a very interesting observation tied to Trump’s latest fever-dream about a tariff on movies produced outside the United States. Studios are spooked about it and the idea even pushed down entertainment stocks. (As I’ve noted a few times, the current hiatus on the law mattering has a lot of people jumpy.) I’m pretty sure this is yet another idea the President more or less randomly came up with on his own. There are a few problems with it, not the least of which is that movies aren’t physical goods. They are intellectual property. To put it in different terms you might put a tariff on physical books produced in the Philippines and shipped on a boat to the US. But you couldn’t easily put a tariff on the ideas in the book or the text itself. I actually heard in one conversation that there is a specific law preventing any effort to place tariffs on intellectual property in this way. Regardless of all that, the Politico Nightly piece makes a different and really interesting point. It’s been widely discussed that the notional statutory basis of all Trump’s tariffs is quite weak. There’s a small business lawsuit challenging them which is backed by Koch and Leonard Leo-funded groups, interestingly enough. There’s also a state attorneys general challenge. There have been recent signs that the court in question is looking very seriously at this challenge. And Politico notes that a threatened movie tariff, based on the same weak statutory basis and now claiming a national security threat based on “imported” movies might be flaunting the legal absurdity of the President’s actions at just the wrong time.

Governor Brian Kemp (R) just formally announced he’s not going to run for Senate next year against Senator Jon Ossoff (D). It’s difficult to convey how big a coup this is for Democrats and how big a setback it is for Republicans for the 2026 midterms. Candidate choice is always important but seldom decisive. This is an exception. Ossoff was (and is) a favorite against everyone but Kemp. Kemp is a popular two-term governor who has managed what has eluded virtually every other Republican in the country: not being labeled “Never Trump” or anti-Trump and yet defying Trump at a critical moment. You don’t need to valorize that to recognize that that is a big selling point in what remains a tipping point state like Georgia. My own read is that Kemp recognizes the political power of that needle-threading and wants to keep it intact to run for President in 2028 or possibly even 2032.