Simeon Rice has been announced as the next member of the Buccaneers’ Ring of Honor, but Buccaneers co-owner Bryan Glazer is lobbying for Rice to get an even greater recognition. Glazer called Rice “the missing piece to make our defense one of the greatest of all time” and said that the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s selectors have committed an oversight by not putting Rice in Canton. “From 1996 to 2005, he totaled a league-best 101.5 sacks over those eight years, more than Hall of Famers Michael Strahan and Jason Taylor,” Glazer said. “During that same stretch, his mark of eight seasons with double-digit sack totals is the seventh most in NFL history, and all six men ahead of him on that list are members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Simeon’s credentials for induction into our Ring of Honor are unquestioned, but he’s equally qualified and deserving of an overdue call from the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Notably, he’s the only retired player with 100 sacks over eight consecutive seasons who doesn’t own a Gold Jacket. It’s time to rectify that oversight.” Rice said getting into the Pro Football Hall of Fame while his parents were still alive would have meant a lot to him because of how much it would have meant to them, but that after his parents died he thought less about it. “That’s all that meant anything to me,” Rice said. “The only thing that mattered to me was playing football. I loved this game, and it’s how I celebrated my mother and father. And they’re not with me. . . . I’m just thinking about my mother and father.” The Cardinals drafted Rice out of Illinois with the third overall pick in 1996. After five seasons in Arizona, Rice signed with the Buccaneers in free agency in 2001 and spent six seasons with the Bucs. He then played briefly with the Broncos and Colts before retiring.
When the NFL schedule was released last week, one thing that stood out was that the Jaguars are set to play just one prime time game during the 2025 season. That was notable because they added Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter after trading up in the first round of the draft and because they have former first overall pick Trevor Lawrence at quarterback. Quarterbacks are central to the league’s marketing efforts and Lawrence actually appeared in advertising for the schedule release, but the lack of spotlight games illustrates the view that his career has not unfolded as many people thought it would. On Monday, Lawrence acknowledged that things have gone the wrong way for him and the Jaguars over the last couple of years while also expressing confidence in new head coach Liam Coen’s chances of getting Jacksonville back on track. “I really like the people we have here now,” Lawrence said, via the team’s website. “I love the system. I love the staff, the players that we brought in along with the guys that were already here. I feel very confident in where we’re going and the trajectory we’re heading. You can’t change the past. I would love to have had a little more success up until this point, but this is where we’re at, and I love where we’re at. I have a lot of confidence in it, and we just have to keep putting the work in out here every day to prepare ourselves for the fall.” The Jaguars signed Lawrence to a five-year extension before last season, so they are invested in seeing things get better as soon as possible for a player who entered the league with the expectation that he’d be a lot further along by this point in his career.
The push to have NFL players participate in flag football during the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles is reportedly set for a big step forward on Tuesday. Adam Schefter of ESPN reports that a resolution allowing players to participate is expected to pass a vote of team owners during league meetings in Minneapolis. The resolution will need yes votes from 24 teams in order to pass. Under the terms of the proposal, no more than one player from each club would be able to participate with an exception for designated international players who would be able to play for their home countries. It also includes specifications for playing fields and injury protection under the salary cap for any player who might be injured during the competition. The NFL Players Association has already indicated its support for players participating in the Olympics, so an affirmative response in Tuesday’s vote would clear the path for a significant NFL presence in Los Angeles in July 2028.
Rule changes in recent years have made onside kicks extremely difficult to recover, but a proposed rule change to be voted on at this week’s league meeting may help give the kicking team a chance. The league is considering changing onside kick rules to make it easier for the kicking team to recover, adding language that restricts where players on the receiving team can line up for onside kick recovery. “The receiving team may have a maximum of three players in the setup zone not on the restraining line, but never more than one player in each of the three areas within the setup zone bordered by the sidelines and inbounds lines,” the new language says. That language is going to be confusing to most football fans, as the league’s new kickoff rules have introduced a new vocabulary that hasn’t caught on with the general public. But the gist is that the new rule is designed to spread out the receiving team and give the kicking team a better chance of placing an onside kick into an area where no one on the receiving team is waiting to recover it. Any restrictions on how the receiving team can line up on onside kicks will at least in theory give the kicking team a slightly better chance of recovering, but the reality is that even if this new rule passes, onside kicks will remain extremely hard for the kicking team to recover. Unless the NFL goes back to allowing the kicking team to line up as many players as they want on either side of the kicker, and allows those players to get a running start, don’t expect many onside kicks to succeed. And the NFL has no interest in doing that because of concerns that the old onside kick rules risked too many injuries from high-speed collisions in confined spaces. Another option would be adopting one of the onside kick alternatives that regularly get proposed, such as allowing the kicking team to put its offense back on the field, facing a fourth-and-15, and keep the ball if they convert. Such rules have led to some exciting late-game situations in minor football leagues, but so far those proposals have failed to generate significant support within the NFL. The league will also consider allowing the trailing team to try an onside kick at any point in the game. Under the current rules, which were adopted last year, onside kicks may only be attempted in the fourth quarter.
At a time when some of the most powerful people in the country have made “DEI” into a four-letter word, the NFL claims it’s standing firm in its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Recent developments make it fair to ask whether the NFL is truly committed, or whether the NFL is simply trying to thread a needle that is getting smaller all the time. The latest news came from the league’s cancellation of the 2025 version of the accelerator program, which puts minority candidates in front of owners during the May meetings. The NFL issued a statement last week that attempted to create a “nothing to see here” vibe, explaining that the program was stopped for a year in an effort to make it better next year. Another view would be that doing it is still better than not doing it, and that it could have been held in its current form in 2025 as usual and changes could still be made for 2026. Jarrett Bell of USA Today has taken a closer look at the league’s mixed signals. On a subject where the league tries to say all the right things, the actions aren’t completely meshing with the words. “I realize that people are going to look at [the cancellation of the 2025 accelerator program] and say, ‘These people are backing off,’” Steelers owner Art Rooney II told Bell. “That’s not going to happen. There’s nothing I can really do about that perception, except to say that we’re still not satisfied with where we are, and we recognize that we still have work to do.” Both the perception and the reality when it comes to the league’s hiring practices for key positions like coach and General Manager have been equally bad over the years. Not long before former Dolphins coach Brian Flores put his career on the line by filing a landmark racial discrimination case against the NFL and multiple teams, NFL executive V.P. of football operations Troy Vincent provided a damning admission that was highlighted in Flores’s civil complaint. “There is a double standard, and we’ve seen that,” Vincent said. “And you talk about the appetite for what’s acceptable. Let’s just go back to . . . Coach [Tony] Dungy was let go in Tampa Bay after a winning season. . . Coach [Steve] Wilks, just a few years prior, was let go after one year . . . Coach [Jim] Caldwell was fired after a winning season in Detroit . . . It is part of the larger challenges that we have. But when you just look over time, it’s over-indexing for men of color. These men have been fired after a winning season. How do you explain that? There is a double standard. I don’t think that that is something that we should shy away from. But that is all part of some of the things that we need to fix in the system. We want to hold everyone to why does one, let’s say, get the benefit of the doubt to be able to build or take bumps and bruises in this process of getting a franchise turned around when others are not afforded that latitude? . . . [W]e’ve seen that in history at the [professional] level.” Since Flores filed his lawsuit in 2022, the NFL has been trying to change its ways. The problem, as of 2025, is that a full-throated commitment to DEI can result in an executive order at worst — and a rambling, nonsensical, all-caps social media assault at best. Speaking of rambling and nonsensical, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones provided some quotes to Bell regarding the impact of the political assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion. “I don’t want to . . . I think it just makes us all aware,” Jones told Bell. “The emphasis the president puts on it just makes us all aware and thinking about it.” What’s there to think about? Whether to remain committed to diversity? Or whether to find a way to tiptoe through a field full of mines planted by those who would like to 86 DEI? “I know you’re saying, ‘Was this a reaction to that? And the timing of it?’” Jones told Bell regarding the cancellation of the accelerator program for 2025. “I don’t believe and have seen nothing from talking to anybody, that this is a reaction to that. I think you’d be naïve if you didn’t think the Supreme Court decisions have impacted decisions all over the country. The issue of technically, how and what you’re doing, I think that’s a lot more influenced than anything our president is talking about. . . . You see what I’m saying? The overall direction the Supreme Court took, that whole area would be a bigger impact.” Jones is referring to the Supreme Court’s ruling from 2023 limiting race-conscious admissions practices for colleges and universities. Which is one of the unsurprising outcomes of a Supreme Court that has been stacked with the kind of conservative, business-friendly justices to whom someone like Jones would gift a Super Bowl ring and then act like it’s not part of a broader effort to ensure that the Supreme Court’s body of work will be favorable to the interests of America’s oligarchs. The challenge for the NFL is to create a P.R. strategy that pushes the idea that they’re trying to increase and promote diversity, while also discreetly waging legal battles aimed at minimizing liability. It’s one of the reasons why the league always tries to pull any civil action against it from the true independence of the court system and into the secret, rigged, kangaroo court of arbitration, where the Commissioner is the one who hands out (and sometimes wears) the black robe. Here’s the NFL’s apparent DEI playbook: Say one thing, do another. And then, when the thing you do gets noticed and criticized, say whatever you have to say to explain it all away. That approach works, until it doesn’t. With the top of the executive branch currently going scorched earth on DEI, the tentpoles of the NFL’s P.R. effort are being quietly knocked down. Beyond the decision to abandon the accelerator in 2025 under the guise of making it better for 2026, the NFL didn’t conduct during the 2025 annual meeting (as Bell notes) a media briefing from the diversity committee, which Rooney chairs. The reason for that seems obvious. Anything the NFL would have said during the briefing to pat itself on the back when it comes to DEI efforts could (and quite possibly would) have been used against it, if/when the Commander-in-Tweet had happened to notice it while scrolling through his phone from the golden throne with a hole in the middle of the seat.
President Trump wanted a quick solution to his Air Force One problem. The United States signed a $3.9 billion contract with Boeing in 2018 for two jets to be used as Air Force One, but a series of delays had slowed the work far past the 2024 delivery deadline, possibly beyond Mr. Trump’s second term. Now Mr. Trump had to fly around in the same old planes that transported President George H.W. Bush 35 years ago. It wasn’t just a vanity project. Those planes, which are no longer in production, require extensive servicing and frequent repairs, and officials from both parties, reaching back a decade or more, had been pressing for replacements. Mr. Trump, though, wanted a new plane while he was still in office. But how? “We’re the United States of America,” Mr. Trump said this month. “I believe that we should have the most impressive plane.” The story of how the Trump administration decided that it would accept a free luxury Boeing 747-8 from Qatar to serve as Air Force One involved weeks of secret coordination between Washington and Doha. The Pentagon and the White House’s military office swung into action, and Mr. Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff, played a key role. Soon after Mr. Trump took office, military officials started to discuss how the United States could buy a temporary plane for Mr. Trump to use while Boeing’s work creaked along, an investigation by The New York Times found. But by May 11, when the president announced on social media that Qatar would be providing the plane to the United States, he characterized it as “a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.” There are lingering questions about how much financial sense the still-unsigned deal would make, given the costs of refitting the plane for presidential use and operating it over the long run — or even whether the plane could be ready for Mr. Trump to use before the end of his second term. The outlines of the arrangement that emerged have also drawn condemnation from both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, as well as ethics lawyers, who said it looked either like Mr. Trump himself was taking the gift or that the Qataris were using it to curry favor with the administration. And it remains unclear exactly how a plan that Pentagon officials and others inside the administration initially assumed would involve buying the plane from Qatar morphed into a proposed gift by the Middle Eastern nation. Editors’ Picks How Much Notice Do You Have to Give Your Landlord? Should You Fly Through Newark Airport? Here’s What You Need to Know. How a Sustainable Clothing Entrepreneur Spends Her Sundays Qatar has denied any intention of using the transaction as part of an influence campaign, and Mr. Trump has said he would not use the plane after leaving office. Some elements of the effort to acquire the plane were reported earlier by CNN. Interviews with 14 people involved in or briefed on the search for the replacement plane say it started when the White House Military Office, which oversees presidential travel, worked with Boeing and the Defense Department to compile a list of every late-model 747 on the market with a business-jet layout, which could more quickly be retrofitted into a presidential plane. There were only eight planes in the world that fit the bill, including a flashy double-decker jet that Qatar had been trying to sell for several years, with no luck. A brochure for the aircraft advertised just the kind of opulence Mr. Trump favors. There were “soft fabrics of the highest quality” in the bedroom, along with “luxurious leather and exquisite wood veneers” and a “lavishly designed” bathroom that is “almost a piece of art.” The emir of Qatar had donated the same make and model to Turkey in 2018 as a gesture of support for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Mr. Erdogan had stood by Doha as the country’s bitter rivals in the region cut off diplomatic and transport ties with Qatar, effectively isolating it. But this second 747 was still available for sale. Mr. Witkoff, an old friend from Mr. Trump’s early days in New York real estate, knew the Qataris well. The country’s sovereign wealth fund had bailed him out in 2023 when a real estate deal on Central Park South went bad.
The 49ers and linebacker Fred Warner have made it across the goal line. According to multiple reports, Warner and San Francisco have agreed to a three-year extension, keeping the linebacker under contract through 2029. It was reported on Sunday that the two sides were close to a deal. The initial Monday afternoon reports indicate Warner will make $63 million on his new contract with $56 million guaranteed. Warner, 28, was seeking a new deal despite having two years remaining on his previous contract. But with a $29.2 million cap hit in 2025, it behooved both sides to get an extension done. A third-round pick in 2018, Warner has become one of the league’s best at his position. He’s been an AP first-team All-Pro for three consecutive seasons and four times overall. He also has not missed a game since 2021, playing 94 percent of San Francisco’s defensive snaps in 2024. In 115 career games, Warner has recorded 36 tackles for loss, 30 QB hits, 10.0 sacks, 15 forced fumbles, and 10 interceptions. The 49ers have now reached extensions with Warner, quarterback Brock Purdy, and tight end George Kittle over the last few weeks.
Eons ago, humans living in the wild were exposed to every germ nature could throw at them—mud, microbes, and whatever drifted around the communal waterhole. We’ve traded tree canopies for roofs, but the germs are still showing up, hiding in our household possessions. We often overlook the dirtiest items in our homes because grime is invisible (think bacteria) or accumulates too gradually for us to notice. Another factor: our brains tend to tune out the appearance of familiar, everyday objects, in a phenomenon called attentional blindness. This means we’re least likely to scrutinize the things we touch the most, even as they become swamped by bacteria. Advertisement Some argue that chronic immune conditions that plague modern humans stem in part from our tendency to avoid beneficial germs that would train the immune system to fight off pathogens. (This is called the hygiene hypothesis.) “There’s some truth to that,” says Kelly Reynolds, professor of environmental risk at the University of Arizona. “But we do need to reduce risk and exposure to bad bacteria that can drive sickness,” she says, including colds and skin infections. Here, experts reveal which items in your house are harboring the most bacteria—and how to clean them
In the past year, doctors have performed history-making transplants, placing genetically modified pig kidneys and pig hearts into patients. Now, a group of doctors and scientists in China report they have done the same with a pig liver. In a study published in Nature, the group describes transplanting a gene-edited pig liver into a brain-dead patient. At the request of the patient’s family, the study was terminated after 10 days and the pig liver was removed. The patient’s original liver was not removed, so the experiment served as a way to test whether a pig liver could supplement the function of failing livers for patients waiting for a transplant. Advertisement “The transplanted pig liver successfully secreted bile and produced liver-derived albumin, and we think that is a great achievement,” said Dr. Lin Wang, a surgeon at Xijing Hospital, Fourth Military Medical University and one of the senior authors of the paper, during a briefing. “It means the pig liver could survive together with the original liver in a human being—and would give additional support to an injured liver, maybe, in the future.” Pigs are promising sources of organs, but the human immune system rejects transplanted pig tissue. Scientists have been getting around this by genetically modifying the pigs that provide the organs. The donor liver in this case came from a pig that had received six modifications to certain genes in order to remove major pig proteins that would have led to rejection; the editing technique also added genes that made the liver appear more human to immune cells.
Body mass index (BMI) is one of the most ubiquitous yet controversial metrics in medicine. A crude measure of weight relative to height, BMI is commonly used to diagnose obesity—even though many experts and professional groups agree it’s an imperfect tool that on its own reveals very little about someone’s health. Among other issues, BMI does not differentiate between weight from fat versus muscle and was not designed to assess a diverse array of bodies. It’s time to do better than BMI, an international group of 58 experts from fields including obesity medicine, endocrinology, bariatric surgery, cardiovascular medicine, gastroenterology, and primary care argue in a proposal published Jan. 14 in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. In most cases, the experts write, clinicians diagnosing obesity should either augment or replace BMI readings with other body measurements, such as waist circumference, or tests that can objectively measure body fat. (Tests that precisely measure body fat are already available in some medical clinics, but they are used far less frequently than BMI because they are more costly and labor-intensive.) The proposal also calls for dividing obesity into two categories: clinical and preclinical. Under the group’s definitions, clinical obesity is accompanied by health problems tied to excess body fat, such as impaired organ function, reduced mobility, or difficulty carrying out day-to-day activities. People with preclinical obesity, meanwhile, do not have immediate weight-related health concerns. The former constitutes an illness, while the latter is a health risk to monitor, says Dr. Francesco Rubino, chair of metabolic and bariatric surgery at King's College London and chair of the expert commission. Rubino calls his group’s framework “the most radical change that has been proposed for the diagnosis of obesity.” He says it constitutes “a new diagnosis…that is meant to be objective and pragmatic enough to be globally relevant.” Clinicians are under no obligation to follow the group’s proposal, but 76 medical organizations around the world—including the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the World Obesity Federation—have endorsed the report. “This new approach demands a fundamental change in how we treat obesity,” says Dr. Sahar Takkouche, an obesity-medicine specialist and associate chief medical officer at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was not part of the expert panel. Implementing its recommendations won’t be seamless, Takkouche says. Machines that precisely measure body composition, for example, aren’t available in every doctor’s office, and insurance policies often lag behind evolving medical practices. But the approach outlined in the proposal offers “new hope for more effective care.” The proposed criteria could, for example, help clarify which patients are likely to benefit from treatments like drugs and surgery, Rubino says. While these may be good options for some people with clinical obesity, he says, people with preclinical obesity may not need intensive treatments, like ultra-popular anti-obesity drugs Wegovy and Zepbound. For some preclinical patients, monitoring alone might be appropriate, he says. "Obesity is nuanced. It’s a spectrum,” Rubino says. “It’s not a single thing.” That distinction alone requires a mindset shift, says Dr. Tirissa Reid, an endocrinologist, obesity-medicine specialist, and associate professor of medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center who was not involved in the Lancet proposal. Reid says she and most other obesity specialists already do much of the testing and analysis the report suggests. But, she says, it’s “a big deal” for a group of experts to further the idea that “excess body fat doesn't necessarily equate with illness automatically.” That message could both “reframe” the general public’s understanding of obesity, Reid says, and also help clinicians decide if, when, and how to treat patients. There has long been debate within the medical community about whether obesity should be treated as a disease. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Medical Association both call obesity a disease, but some doctors argue that label is wrong—or at least overly simplistic. While many studies have shown that obesity is associated with chronic health problems including Type 2 diabetes and heart disease, there is less research to concretely prove it causes these conditions, says Dr. Lisa Erlanger, a clinical professor of family medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine and president of the Association for Weight and Size Inclusive Medicine. Some people with obesity show no signs of chronic conditions, studies have found, and other research suggests weight stigma and inadequate health care are associated with many of the same issues frequently attributed to obesity. Erlanger says the new proposal—which, she notes, was authored by many people with ties to the weight-loss industry—looks like progress on the surface, but is flawed. It still assumes “any impairment occurring while you’re fat” counts as illness and encourages clinicians to use metrics, like waist circumference, that are “poor measures of how many of a person’s symptoms are actually caused by the number of their fat cells,” Erlanger says. In general, she says, the mainstream medical community is “uncurious” about whether obesity actually causes many of the complications it’s linked to, and whether weight loss is truly the best treatment for some of these problems. Habits like getting adequate exercise, nutrition, and sleep can have profoundly positive effects on overall health whether they affect weight or not, Erlanger says. A recent research review, for example, found that cardiorespiratory fitness is a better predictor of longevity than weight. It’s in part because of such debates in the field, Rubino says, that there’s a need for nuanced yet accurate methods of assessing obesity and its health effects—which, he says, his group has produced. “Disease should not be a matter of opinion,” he says. “It should be a matter of fact.”
Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year. This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground. One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me. In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now. 1. State variation The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.) Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier. But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year.2. A blue-red divide Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican.I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then. 3. More inequality Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said. Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others. In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said. 4. How to recover The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right. Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help. One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.”
NASA has a funny way of framing bad news. On May 2, the White House released its topline budget numbers for fiscal year 2026 and the space agency was quick to respond—with applause. “President Trump’s FY26 Budget Revitalizes Human Space Exploration,” read a press release. In an included statement, acting NASA administrator Janet Petro said, “This proposal includes investments to simultaneously pursue exploration of the Moon and Mars while still prioritizing critical science and technology research. I appreciate the President’s continued support for NASA’s mission and look forward to working closely with the administration and Congress to ensure we continue making progress toward achieving the impossible.” The real impossibility, however, might be in figuring out how NASA will achieve much of anything at all with the draconian cuts the president proposed. Petro is right in touting a relatively modest 10% bump in funding for human space exploration, with $7 billion now proposed for missions to the moon and $1 billion for later travel to Mars. But beyond that, things get awfully bleak. The Mars Sample Return Mission, which is currently underway, with the Perseverance rover collecting and caching soil and rock samples for return by a later robot craft, will be canceled. Twenty-seven sample tubes that have been sealed and left across the Martian surface like Easter eggs for that future rover to gather will be forever untouched. Those samples could have told us about possible conditions for ancient, or even extant, life on the once-watery world—potential knowledge that will now be lost. The Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket and the Orion spacecraft, both in development in one form or another since 2006, and both intended for crewed travel to the moon, will be scrapped too. Also marked for elimination is the Gateway spacecraft, a small space station planned for lunar orbit—despite the first of its modules having already been built. Gateway was intended to provide rapid service to and from the surface of the moon for future visiting astronauts. Space science missions will be slashed by more than 50%, threatening—among other projects—the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which, like the Gateway module, is already mostly built. Roman is designed to answer deep and thrilling questions, regarding the habitability of exoplanets—or planets orbiting other stars—and the nature of dark energy, which is thought to make up 68% of the universe and holds the key to its accelerating expansion. On top of all this, research into environmentally sustainable aviation technology is one of several “climate scam programs,” as the White House referred to it in a statement, which is also slated for cancellation. Consistent with new government-wide policies, any NASA DEI programs are also to be eliminated. Overall, NASA faces a 24% budget cut, from $24.8 billion in 2025 to $18.8 billion in 2026—its lowest funding level since 2015. “No spin will change the fact that this would end critical missions, dramatically scale back the workforce, and risk our scientific leadership around the globe,” said Rep. George Whitesides, a California Democrat and Vice Ranking Member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, on X. “It is completely irresponsible, and I will fight it every way I can.” “The proposed cuts are drastic,” says Stephan McCandliss, research professor with the department of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “They are devastating and, well, vicious, in terms of [being] unfriendly to science in general.” The proposed cuts don’t just represent opportunity costs, but the loss of sunk costs too. The SLS has already cost nearly $24 billion, with another $20 billion having gone to Orion—money that will have been spent to no end if the two projects are cancelled. The Roman telescope, currently idling in a clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, cost $4 billion. According to the General Accounting Office, $3.5 billion has been spent on Gateway, with the launch of the first module originally set for 2027. All of this penury is something of a departure for President Trump, who presided over small but steady budget increases for NASA—from just over $18 billion to just over $21 billion—during his first term. Space Agency funding rose further, to its near-$25 billion peak, under President Joe Biden, before the ax fell this week. The impending starvation rations, as always, have NASA veterans looking wistfully back at the space agency’s golden era, during the space race with the former Soviet Union. Historically, NASA’s peak funding year was 1966, when the agency was allotted $5.93 billion—or $58.5 billion in 2025 dollars. That represented 4% of the government’s overall budget. NASA’s slice of the federal pie today—before the Trump cuts? Just 0.4%. The generous funding of the 1960s yielded impressive results. The U.S. launched 10 crewed flights in just 20 months during NASA’s Gemini program in 1965 and 1966. From 1968 to 1972, eleven Apollo missions were launched—nine of them either to lunar orbit or around the far side of the moon, and six of those proceeding down to the lunar surface. That was all while NASA maintained a robust pure science program, launching more than 20 missions to the moon, Mars, and Venus during the 1960s. It’s the loss of those uncrewed science flights that worries some space experts the most. “It's mortgaging the future,” says Henry Hertzfeld, research professor at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute. “It takes time to develop these programs, to build the instruments and, of course, to analyze the results.” “I see a role for government in doing the science,” says McCandliss. “That's what government ought to do—the cutting edge stuff that isn't going to be commercially viable, but will in the long run, bring some surprising results.” The matter of commercial viability—with the private sector taking over a growing share of the work now being done by NASA—seems to be driving much of the administration’s budget proposals. The aging International Space Station (ISS) is set to be de-orbited in 2030 and NASA and the White House are looking for industry to bankroll and launch the next generation outpost. “The budget reflects the upcoming transition to a more cost-effective, open commercial approach to human activities in low Earth orbit by … the safe decommissioning of the station and its replacement by commercial space stations,” said NASA in its press release. Currently, NASA spends about $3 billion per year to operate the ISS. Privatization would eliminate that outlay. Similarly, if SLS and Orion stand down, the move would clear the field for SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket. SLS and Orion have flown just once—an uncrewed mission, known as Artemis I, in 2022. Current plans call for Artemis II to carry a crew of four on a circumlunar journey late next year, and Artemis III to follow with a crewed lunar landing before the end of the decade. Artemis IV and beyond were intended to help establish a long-term human presence at the south lunar pole, but the new proposed budget cancels those plans. Starship could be a worthy successor. The biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, Starship stands 40 stories tall and puts out 16.7 million pounds of thrust at launch—nearly twice as much as the SLS’s 8.8 million pounds. The single flight SLS has managed in the 20 years it’s been in development is dwarfed by the eight uncrewed launches Starship has had just since April of 2023. None of those launches has been fully successful, but the business model for SpaceX and its boss, Elon Musk, has always been to fly fast, fail fast, and fly again until you get it right. The unalloyed success of the company’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket, which, with 467 successful flights, has become the world’s workhorse booster, stands as proof that that approach to R&D can work. “It's pretty amazing stuff that they've been doing,” says McCandliss. “When you have a devil-may-care leader who is willing to spend his own personal capital on these sorts of things, it's a different story [from what the government can do]. Musk has not been shy about trying to pursue his dreams, and he has the capital to do that.” If NASA has any hope of escaping the Trump Administration’s proposed cuts it’s in the fact that they are just that—proposed. Presidential budgets are wish lists put forth to Congress, with lawmakers calling the final spending shots, and NASA has seen this movie before—most recently and dramatically in 2010. Back then, President Barack Obama cancelled the space agency’s Constellation program—the precursor of Artemis, which was aiming to have bootprints back on the moon as early as 2015. The move pulled the plug on both Orion and the SLS—the latter of which was then known as Ares V. But legislators from space-friendly states that depend on NASA for thousands of local jobs—most notably Texas, Florida, and California—rebelled, and funding was restored for both vehicles. Today, Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Sen. Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat—the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Technology respectively—are being looked to for leadership to keep the lights on at NASA. Neither lawmaker has made a public statement yet on the proposed cuts and neither responded to a request from TIME for comment. Still, Capitol Hill will get the final word. “The president proposes and Congress disposes,” says McCandliss. “I know that there's an awful lot of NASA centers that are in red states.” NASA is accountable to Congress for its funding and Congress is accountable to the voters in those red states and all of the others for their own jobs. Ultimately, Americans will get the space program they demand.
President Donald Trump announced Tuesday evening that he would be selling a “gold card,” allowing foreign-born potential immigrants a pathway to citizenship for $5 million. “You have a green card. This is a gold card,” the President told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that’s going to give you green card privileges, plus it’s going to be a route to citizenship. And wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card.” The President said that cards would begin to be sold in “about two weeks,” though experts warn that the newly-announced program cannot be done by Trump alone. “A President can't create a visa. That's for Congress to do,” says Lori Nessel, a professor at Seton Hall University’s School of Law. The Trump Administration has been looking for ways to cut the U.S. deficit through new agencies like the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the “gold card” could be just one such way the President is hoping to increase revenue. An Oct. 28, 2024, analysis of the Trump Administration’s fiscal plan found that it would likely increase the deficit by $7.75 trillion over the next decade. Last year, the federal deficit reached $1.83 trillion, according to fiscal data by the U.S. Treasury Department. The announcement of the program also arrives as the Administration continues its crackdown on immigration, attempting to shut down asylum at the border and committing to enacting the “largest deportation operation” in U.S. history. On Tuesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that, with “limited exceptions,” all undocumented immigrants aged 14 or older “who were not fingerprinted or registered when applying for a U.S. visa and who remain in the United States for 30 days or longer” have to sign up for an immigration registry. Experts say that the program shows the Administration’s priorities when it comes to immigration. “To say, on the one hand, we are going to deport everyone in this country who's here without permission and we are going to close down our borders. And then, at the same time, say we're going to dramatically increase the number of people that can come in—if they've got millions of dollars—it's very clear messaging in terms of who's wanted in American society,” says Nessel. While there are arguably more questions about the potential gold cards than answers at present, here’s what we know so far. What is Trump's "gold card" route to citizenship? Trump’s “gold card” would essentially allow wealthy foreigners to pay their way to American citizenship through a $5 million dollar fee. The “gold card” would replace the existing EB-5 immigrant investor visa program, which allows foreign investors to apply for lawful permanent residence if they invest in commercial enterprises and plan to create or preserve 10 permanent full-time jobs for U.S. workers, according to USCIS. While the “gold card” visa may appear similar, experts warn that EB-5 has guardrails in place to specifically prevent the rich and wealthy from being able to purchase citizenship. “It's not about paying the government millions of dollars to get a visa. It's about showing that you have the capital available to actually improve our economy,” says Nessel. Even for those who are granted an EB-5, the green card they receive is conditional for two years “specifically, out of concern that it is not just buying your way in,” Nessel explains. “Within 90 days of that two-year period ending, the investor has to document and show that they actually have done what they said they would do, and they are creating jobs in the [U.S.] economy.” Nessel notes that similar visa programs in other countries have been shut down to a variety of concerns, including money laundering and tax evasion. A program that has drawn comparisons in Spain, which required incoming immigrants to purchase property, will officially close this April due to concerns it is making housing unaffordable for locals. During his first Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump said there was a “thirst” for the “gold card” visa and touted it as a way to attract entrepreneurs. “Companies can buy gold cards and, in exchange, get those visas to hire new employees,” the President said. “No other country can do this because people don’t want to go to other countries. They want to come here.” How might Trump's "gold card" work? It is not clear how Trump’s “gold card” would work. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at the Oval Office that potential applicants for the “gold card” visa would have to go through a vetting process to ensure they are “wonderful world-class global citizens,” but did not give further details. When asked by the press whether Russian oligarchs could apply to the program, Trump said: “Possibly. I know some Russian oligarchs who are very nice people.” The legality of the “gold card” visa is also in question. The EB-5 program, which the Administration said they were replacing, was created by Congress in 1990. That program allows potential immigrants who invest $1,050,000, or $800,000 in targeted employment areas—meaning rural areas or areas experiencing high unemployment—to apply for a green card, though there are a number of other qualifications applicants have to meet and it can be a rather lengthy process. “The EB-5 program was created by Congress. It's in statute. The President doesn't have the authority to override [that],” says Jorge Loweree, the managing director of programs at the American Immigration Council. The EB-5 visa has an annual cap of about 10,000 visas a year, or some 7.1% of the 140,000 employment-based visas available every fiscal year, per the State Department. It's possible that there will be no caps on “gold card” visas like there are for all other visas to the U.S. “200,000 of these gold, green cards is $1 trillion to pay down our debt and that’s why the President is doing it,” Lutnick said during Trump’s first Cabinet meeting. “Because we are going to balance this budget and we are going to pay off the debt under President Trump.” Speaking to Fox News, Lutnick said the number of people waiting for such a visa was even higher, estimating it to be 250,000, though it is not clear where he got that number from. Lutnick has been a vocal critic of the program. On Tuesday, he called it “full of nonsense, make-believe, and fraud,” and referred to it as a “way to get a green card that was low-price.” How are government officials reacting to Trump's “gold card” proposal? Some officials have been critical of Trump’s newly-announced proposal. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a Democrat, said that he thought immigration should follow a merit-based approach, and asked for reform to the H-1B visa, which allows U.S. employers to sponsor foreign-born workers in a specialty occupation. “We should welcome talented workers to America who will bring their creativity and productivity while also reforming the H1-B program to prevent abuses," Khanna said to Newsweek. Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Democrat from Massachusetts, also called out Trump’s plan. “It's typical Trump policy in which he takes a kernel of a legitimately good idea which is that we do need immigration reform… and he takes it to a corrupt and counterproductive place,” he told CNN. “We were talking about having scientists come to America to cure disease and now he takes it to ‘let's have Russian oligarchs here,’ to come to America and play golf with him.”
