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The White House is redoubling its efforts to overhaul the Health and Human Services Department and cut its funding by 12.5%, according to an outline for its fiscal 2027 budget proposal issued Friday. President Donald Trump is seeking to reduce HHS funding and revive last year’s efforts to reorganize the department, chiefly by moving the 340B Drug Pricing Program under the purview of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The administration also wants to establish a new agency that would oversee health priorities currently managed by multiple agencies. (Early, 4/3)

Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine who chairs the appropriations committee, called the funding cuts to biomedical research “unwarranted” in a statement responding to the president’s proposed budget. ... In January, Congress offered a near total refutation of the administration’s plan, slightly increasing the NIH’s budget for the current federal fiscal year. In that funding package, legislators included language intended to prevent the NIH from implementing a 15% indirect-cost reimbursement cap. (Molteni and Oza, 4/3)

Government agencies, health advocacy groups, and health-related businesses spent nearly $37 million over four years to advertise on news websites accused of promoting misinformation, a new study shows. Although authors of the report question the wisdom of financially supporting websites whose content undermines public health, marketing experts say it’s important to reach vaccine-hesitant consumers, wherever they’re found. (Szabo, 4/3)

On the immigration crisis —

For five months, the young father waited for his 3-year-old daughter’s release from federal custody after she crossed the U.S.-Mexico border with her mother, hoping through delays for their safe reunion. Only when he turned to the courts as a last resort did he learn that the girl had suffered alleged sexual abuse at the foster home where she’d been placed after immigration officials separated her from her mother. (Gonzalez, 4/5)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: Immigrant Seniors Lose Medicare Coverage Despite Paying For It
Rosa María Carranza leaned forward to hold a 3-year-old’s back as the girl climbed a rock in the forested hills of northeast Oakland. Dressed in hiking gear and beaded necklaces, Carranza, 67, maneuvered between trees and children on a sunny morning in December. “Hold on to that branch,” she said in Spanish. “You can do it, my love!” (Sánchez, 4/6)

Also —

Republicans have found their health care message for the midterms: fraud. The White House and Congress have taken big public steps in recent months to highlight what they call rampant fraud in several blue states, taking action after YouTuber Nick Shirley went viral last year exposing fraudulent Medicaid providers in Minnesota. (King, 4/5)

RFK Jr.'s apparent contradiction on vaccines and peptides reflects a deeper belief: Americans have a right to try and can choose their own risks. (Todd, 4/6)

Studying labor law is not why Dr. Caspian Chouraya went to medical school. For more than two decades, he's worked in HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention. Now, he oversees HIV/AIDS programs in 12 African countries for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. But in recent months, Chouraya finds himself talking to legal advisors and burying himself in the law surrounding layoffs in various African countries. This is because for months, U.S. funding has been arriving in fits and starts. Not knowing when funds will arrive is undermining one of the U.S.'s most successful global health initiatives — the worldwide fight to combat HIV/AIDS. (Emanuel, Lambert and Tanis, 4/4)

The Trump administration on Friday took the first step toward reviving and expanding the conservative overhaul of the Title X family planning program that happened the first time Trump was president — changes that previously led to an exodus of reproductive health providers and a steep drop in the number of patients served. (Ollstein, 4/3)

In abortion news —

Florida’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee was created two decades ago to investigate why Florida moms are dying during and after pregnancy – and to stop preventable deaths from happening in the first place. But the secretive panel housed within the Florida Department of Health hadn’t publicly released any annual findings in years until a Florida Trib reporter asked agency officials last week about the committee’s apparent lack of action. (Payne, 4/3)

The years-long wait to settle Utah’s abortion trigger law has been delayed as multiple plaintiffs in some of the state’s highest-profile cases challenge new laws with the Utah Supreme Court, which moves their cases to new three-judge panels. (Aerts, 4/3)

150 Ohio doctors, organized by a national group called the Committee to Protect Health Care, have signed a letter strongly opposing a flurry of what they call “extremist” abortion bills moving through the Statehouse. Of particular concern to those doctors is House Bill 754, proposed just last month by Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Loveland) that would require every pregnancy and fetal death in Ohio to be registered with the state. (Bethea, 4/3)

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, conservative states have stressed that they won’t prosecute women, whom they describe as abortion’s “second victims.” That was the message Texas hoped to send when prosecutors in Starr County dropped charges against a woman named Lizelle Herrera for ending her pregnancy. But Herrera’s case is now communicating something else entirely: Prosecutors who target women for abortion often won’t face any consequences, even when they ignore the law. (Ziegler, 4/6)

On menopause, IVF, and breast cancer —

Women suffering through the hot flashes, night sweats, mood changes and sleep problems that can come with menopause — all while looking in the mirror and noticing signs of aging — are being bombarded with products. More open conversations about menopause and the period leading up to it — called perimenopause — are happening at the same time that marketing has been supercharged by social media. Women are being confronted by lotions and serums and light masks that promise to rejuvenate their faces and necks, dietary supplements claiming to do everything from boost moods to ease hot flashes and gadgets promising to help with symptoms. (Stengle, 4/6)

A Florida fertility center is closing several months after a patient alleged the clinic implanted another couple’s embryo in her — a discovery she made after giving birth. The Fertility Center of Orlando announced its closure on its website, saying the decision was made “after thoughtful consideration.” It was not immediately clear when operations would cease. (Chuck, 4/3)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: These Women Had Their Breasts Removed To Thwart Cancer. Then Came The Pain
Three weeks after Sophia Bassan’s mastectomy, she felt a stabbing pain beneath her right armpit. In the following months, painful shocks radiated through her chest and back. Her body became so sensitive that at times she couldn’t wear a shirt or lift a fork to her mouth. Bassan slept sitting up because it hurt to lie down, and she would flinch at the slightest touch. (Kelman and Maxmen, 4/6)

The Health Department is quietly laying the groundwork to revive a vaccine advisory committee whose membership and decisions were frozen last month by a federal judge. A document renewing the committee’s charter for the next two years, and scheduled to be published on Monday in the Federal Register, enshrines changes that would allow Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to nominate members of his choice. (Mandavilli, 4/3)

Related news on flu, covid, and measles —

US flu activity keeps trending downward, according to the latest FluView report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Flu cases are declining across most of the country, the CDC said, with influenza A viruses waning and influenza B viruses showing varying levels of activity. That trend follows the typical seasonal flu virus patterns. The proportion of tests that were positive for flu fell to 9.8%, down from 11.5% the previous week, and the proportion of outpatient visits for flu remained below the national baseline for the second straight week, falling from 2.8% to 2.6%. (Dall, 4/3)

Six months since the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) hosted a high-profile Long COVID event, the agency’s only public action tackling the disease is a new website, published earlier this month. While most of the site shares basic information about Long COVID, it also hints at other upcoming government efforts — first announced with a similar website and roundtable event for Lyme disease in December — including a “tech sprint” to develop new technologies and resources for people with the disease. (Ladyzhets, 3/31)

Influenza vaccination coverage among US health care personnel (HCP) during the 2024–25 respiratory virus season remained similar to coverage during the 2023–24 season, while uptake of the COVID vaccine, though significantly improved from the prior year, remained markedly lower, according to a report published yesterday in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. (Bergeson, 4/3)

Infants born to mothers who received mRNA COVID vaccination during pregnancy had a 36% lower risk of COVID–related hospital contact in their first 6 months of life, according to a study published in Pediatrics. The protective effect did not extend to other types of infections. (Bergeson, 4/3)

US measles cases climbed by almost 100 in the past week, reaching 1,671 infections, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said today in its weekly update. The vast majority of the 96 new cases are in Utah. The CDC said all but 10 of the 2026 cases are from 32 states and New York City, with the rest travel-related. The number of affected states grew this week by one. Of all confirmed cases, 94% are associated with one of 17 outbreaks, with one of those outbreaks (three or more related cases) being new. (Wappes, 4/3)

A Midwest food pantry network that served hundreds of thousands of families has abruptly closed its doors. Ruby’s Pantry, which distributed food at 87 locations across Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota and Wisconsin, announced Tuesday it had immediately ended its operations. The organization helped more than 300,000 families every year, Minnesota Public Radio reports. (Hawkinson, 4/3)

More health news from across the U.S. —

A great-grandmother’s medicine tested positive for cocaine – spawning a 15-month legal nightmare, forcing her to refinance her home, and spurring a new state law that could set a precedent across the country. (Yan, 4/5)

Each weekend across the United States, thousands line up before dawn for free medical care at pop-up clinics, but a patchwork of state laws is preventing volunteer doctors from helping as many people as they could. Despite those constraints, Remote Area Medical (RAM) makes life-changing differences each week. (McCandless Farmer, 4/5)

Kim Paul, executive director of the Piikani Lodge Health Institute, a nonprofit on the Blackfeet Reservation that promotes health and well-being, saw the email notification flash across her computer screen as she was working late last week. It was the U.S. Department of Agriculture saying a nearly $9 million grant contract with Piikani Lodge had been terminated. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture has determined that awards under this program involved discriminatory preferences based on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and wasteful spending that did little to further lawful agricultural land purchases,” the USDA wrote. (Mabie, 4/3)

For weeks, the Food and Drug Administration has been asking a raw-dairy farm in California to recall its Cheddar cheese, which the agency has linked to nine E. coli illnesses in California, Texas and Florida. On Thursday, the dairy farm, Raw Farm LLC, finally complied, though it said it was doing so “under protest” as it continued to deny that its cheese was the cause of the outbreak. (Callahan, 4/3)

Elevance Health will apply its policy deducting pay from hospitals that refer some members to out-of-network providers to facilities in New York. Starting July 1, Elevance Health’s Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield subsidiary may reduce New York hospitals’ pay by 7.5% or terminate facilities from its network if hospitals refer commercial members to inpatient or outpatient providers without a contract. (DeSilva, 4/3)

More about the health care industry —

UHG is spending billions to embed AI to manage claims and care decisions. As 22,000 software engineers go to work, what are the benefits — and risks? (Ross, 4/6)

The federal government is not the only target for health insurance shenanigans. Fraud in employer-based insurance may not reach the heights or capture the headlines that Medicaid, Medicare and exchange incidents do, but schemes are on the rise. driving up costs for companies and their workers. Health insurers are investing in new technologies to tamp down on fraud before it comes out of their employer customers’ pocketbooks. At the same time, more third-party payment integrity firms are emerging to dispute bills employers already have paid. (Tepper, 4/3)

�������ýҕ�l Health News: �������ýҕ�l Health News’ ‘On Air’: Journalists Capsulize Weight Loss News And ACA Premium Pressures
Céline Gounder, �������ýҕ�l Health News’ editor-at-large for public health, discussed a new weight loss pill approved by the FDA on CBS News’ CBS Mornings on April 2. (4/4)

In pharma and tech news —

By the time FDA agreed to meet with Kezar Life Sciences it was in the process of closing. The chain of events fits a pattern of FDA volatility recently. (Chen, 4/6)

Jeff Vierstra's mother and two sisters all died following complications from ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, but the scientist and skier is hoping an experimental treatment and the first known attempt to prevent the neurodegenerative disease can help save his life. Vierstra was only two years old when his mother died. All her siblings also died of ALS in their late thirties and early forties. (LaPook, 4/4)

A pharmaceutical company has issued a voluntary recall of over 3 million of its over-the-counter eye-drop products after the Food and Drug Administration cited a “lack of assurance of sterility.” According to the FDA notice, K.C. Pharmaceuticals, of Pomona, California, manufactures the products for a number of brands sold under names such as “Dry Eye Relief Eye Drops,” “Sterile Eye Drops” and “Artificial Tears Sterile Lubricant Eye Drops.” The recall of 3,111,072 bottles began in early March. (Ozcan, 4/3)

As the science of detecting microplastics matures, so too does consensus about their ubiquity. Everywhere researchers have looked to find them, there they’ve been: In human brains and lungs; in breast milk and semen; in alpine snow and deep-sea sediment; in corn plants and beer. And that, say researchers, is the rub: Scientists are not just finding them in our livers, arteries and ovaries. They are also everywhere else: in research laboratories, pipettes, refrigerators, solvents, bottles, goggles and the very lab coats investigators are wearing to find them. (Rust, 4/5)

Joseph Buxbaum was initially unconvinced. When early hints of a connection between autism and Alzheimer’s began to appear in the medical literature a few years ago, they struck him as implausible — one a condition of early brain development, the other driving decline in old age. But the signals kept accumulating, and over time, his skepticism gave way to a new line of inquiry that could transform scientists’ understanding of the two diseases. (Eunjung Cha, 4/5)

More on aging —

Uri Alon was long puzzled by a textbook statistic: Longevity, the thinking went, was about 20 percent in our genes. “That makes you think what’s the rest of the 80 percent: Is it the lifestyle? Why should we study genes for lifespan if it’s not that important? It kind of bothered me,” said Alon, a physicist turned systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Alon uses mathematical models to understand complicated biological problems, and he and his colleagues built one to reexamine the factors that define the contours of human lifespan in a Science study published earlier this year. (Johnson, 4/5)

Working in complicated jobs is linked to a lower likelihood of dementia later on. (Kim, 4/6)

Scientists have developed a number of ways to estimate biological age, including so-called epigenetic clocks that measure changes to DNA at the molecular level. These clocks, often created for clinical research purposes, are becoming mainstream in the form of direct-to-consumer test kits. ... Biological age test kits are widely available online, ranging from $299 saliva-based tests to $499 blood tests. But all tests aren’t created equally, and there are limitations to the health insights they provide. (Leake, 4/5)

The accident happened in Pittsburgh on Nov. 16. Joseph Masterson, a lawyer who was just days from retiring at age 63, suffered cardiac arrest while driving, plowed into a guardrail and lost consciousness. Other drivers stopped, broke the car window and pulled him to safety. A passing volunteer fireman performed CPR until an ambulance arrived to take Mr. Masterson to U.P.M.C. Mercy Hospital. (Span, 4/4)

In Daly City, a woman broke a tooth after she was dropped while being moved to her nursing home bed. In Fairfield, a woman with dementia escaped from her nursing home and wandered across a busy street to a parking lot, where she was found wandering and asking for help. A man in Hayward died after staff missed his respiratory medication two days in a row. In Santa Rosa, a resident was found with maggots in his infected toe, which had to be amputated. (Allday, 4/5)

After a minor stroke, there are several risk factors that can predict another event, according to new research. A study published in the journal Circulation by the American Heart Association investigated what happens after someone has a transient ischemic attack (TIA), also known as a "mini-stroke." This was a follow-up to the previous PERSIST study, which found that stroke risk persisted after the typical 90-day monitoring window. (Stabile, 4/5)

Rural health care systems have been in crisis for decades, a situation that will become more dire when steep cuts to Medicaid kick in next year. (Lisa Jarvis, 4/5)

Estrogen patches are in scarce supply because of increased demand — that’s mostly a good thing. (Gillian Goddard, 4/5)

Medical foods are regulated differently than drugs, allowing insurers to classify them as optional. That must change. (Heather Gatcombe, 4/6)

When a child presents to the emergency department again and again in psychiatric crisis, the response should evolve. (Liz Koch, 4/6)

Pharma was just about the only industry that could afford to keep throwing money against the wall until some of it stuck. Large pharmaceutical companies report gross profit margins around 76%, roughly double the S&P 500 average. (Gautam Mukunda, 4/3)