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The Trump administration slashed funding for Affordable Care Act navigators, which help people sign up for ObamaCare coverage on the law’s exchanges, by 90 percent. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on Friday announced health insurance navigators will receive just $10 million per year over the next four years. Navigators received $98 million in 2024. (Weixel, 2/14)

Federal research funding to tackle areas like cancer, diabetes and heart disease is lagging by about $1 billion behind the levels of recent years, reflecting the chaotic start of the Trump administration and the dictates that froze an array of grants, meetings and communications. The slowdown in awards from the National Institutes of Health has been occurring while a legal challenge plays out over the administration’s sudden policy change last week to slash payments for administrative and facilities costs related to medical research. (Jewett and Rosenbluth, 2/14)

For Nancy Hastings, the face of the federal government is the young man who picks her up every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:45 a.m. to drive her to dialysis. She’s 86, and frail, and he stands behind her in the smoky half-light as she maneuvers down her front stairs. “If you happen to fall, don’t get scared,” he tells her. “Just fall on me, and I’ll shield you.”Then suddenly, in late January, word came that he was gone. With the Trump administration’s spending freeze, the five-person nonprofit where he’d worked didn’t have money to keep paying everyone, and he was among the three workers laid off. One of the two remaining employees called Hastings to let her know. “She said, ‘We’ll come and get you one way or the other,’” Hastings recalled — both a reassurance and a reminder of her own fragility. The staff calls her dialysis “life-sustaining,” which is a nice way of saying that if she doesn’t receive it, she’ll die. (Boodman, 2/18)

President Donald Trump’s government-wide directive to slash regulations doesn't appear likely to hamstring day-to-day operations for companies that do business with programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Trump’s executive order requires federal agencies to cut 10 regulations for each new one proposed. But its impact seems poised to be minimal at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, largely because most of the rules it issues are mandatory under statute. (Early, 2/14)

Just over a mile from where Patricia Flores has lived for almost 20 years, a battery smelter plant spewed toxic elements into the environment for nearly a century. Exide Technologies in southeast Los Angeles polluted thousands of properties with lead and contributed to groundwater contamination with trichloroethylene, or TCE, a cancer-causing chemical. Since Exide declared bankruptcy in 2020, California has invested more than $770 million to clean the various properties. But much more cleanup is needed, and with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, those efforts are uncertain. (Pineda, 2/15)

The Trump administration has directed the nation’s premier health agencies to place a notice harshly condemning “gender ideology” on agency webpages that a federal judge ordered be restored online this week. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were asked to place a notice on “any restored pages that were taken down due to their content promoting gender ideology,” according to an email sent from an official at the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday evening. (Sun, Roubein and Rizzo, 2/14)

A second federal judge has blocked enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order threatening the federal funding of hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to teenagers. U.S. District Court Judge Lauren King in Seattle — a Joe Biden appointee — sided Friday with the Democratic attorneys general of Washington state, Oregon and Minnesota who had sued to restore access to health services for transgender patients 19 years and younger. The services were disrupted by the administration’s “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” executive order. (Ollstein, 2/14)

President Donald Trump has instructed his administration to scrutinize the “threat” to children posed by antidepressants, stimulants and other common psychiatric drugs, targeting medication taken by millions in his latest challenge to long-standing medical practices. The directive came in an executive order Thursday that established a “Make America Healthy Again” commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has criticized the use of those drugs and issued false claims about them. (Nirappil, Eunjung Cha and Gilbert, 2/16)