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.