Over the course of 20 days in March 2020, 55 million American children stopped going to school as Covid-19 swept the United States. What was impossible to anticipate then was that millions of those students would not return to classrooms full-time until September 2021, a year and a half later. Those children and teenagers, often in public schools in Democratic areas, remained online at home while private schools, child-care centers, public schools in conservative regions, office buildings, bars, restaurants, sports arenas and theaters sputtered back toward normalcy. Five years on, the devastating impact of the pandemic on children and adolescents is widely acknowledged across the political spectrum. School closures were not the only reason the pandemic was hard on children, but research shows that the longer schools stayed closed, the farther behind students fell. What would happen if another health crisis came along — a pressing concern, as cases of measles and bird flu emerge? In the face of a new unknown pathogen, how would school leaders and lawmakers make decisions?“It’s so important for Democrats to do a retrospective on this episode,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, who represents a district in the Boston suburbs where some schools were fully or partially closed for a year. He has argued that during the pandemic, his party “over-indexed” toward the views of teachers’ unions and epidemiologists, who often pushed for a slow, cautious approach to reopening schools. The extended closures “crystallized how the party has been failing in governance,” Mr. Auchincloss said. In some ways, moving to online learning would be easier next time, now that nearly all schools give students their own laptops or tablets. And in places where schools remained closed longer, some people in positions of power, including health officials and leaders of local teachers’ unions, say they stand by the decisions they made at the time. Still, in interviews with more than a dozen leaders in health, education and politics, including some who were key figures at the time, others said they would take a different approach in the future, and try to do more to avoid extended shutdowns for entire school districts. “Yes, I’ve learned a lot from this,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a powerful force in Democratic politics who at times worked behind-the-scenes to negotiate reopenings. She also stood by locals in places like Philadelphia and Chicago, where union members fought for vaccines, tests, ventilation and other safety measures — even after classrooms in other parts of the country had reopened.Ms. Weingarten defended her members’ right to work safely and emphasized the importance of ventilation, but said she would strive to be clearer in the future that “kids have to be the priority.” That includes in-person instruction, she said. “I thought I was pretty loud,” she added. “I would be even louder.” Conflicting advice in 2020 Few education or health leaders doubt that it was right for schools to close in March 2020, when much about Covid-19 was unknown. But by early that summer, there was a spate of evidence that pointed toward a careful reopening. Classrooms had reopened abroad, with research showing that there was limited spread of the virus inside schools. It was becoming clear that children tended to be less severely affected by the virus than many adults were, and that young children were less likely to spread the disease. The American Academy of Pediatrics issued a report in June 2020 recommending that schools reopen. Republican-run states like Texas and Florida forged ahead with plans to offer in-person instruction to families who wanted it. Yet thousands of schools in Democratic-majority states like California, Oregon, Washington and Maryland stayed closed or partially closed for another full year. Policymakers who had a role in those decisions argue that applying evidence from abroad was difficult because of several factors, including higher U.S. infection rates, less consensus around masking and limited availability of virus tests. The politicization of the pandemic also played a role. President Trump repeatedly called on schools to reopen, while many Democratic officials and advocacy groups fought for stricter safety measures and more federal aid to schools. In addition, conflicting advice from health experts caused confusion.The Centers for Disease Control had, at times, recommended greater precautions than the pediatrics academy did, including maintaining six feet of distance between desks. In the summer of 2020, health agencies in states like California advised schools to remain closed in areas where case levels were high — which was almost everywhere. The California Department of Public Health declined to respond to questions about their approach to school closures for this article. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers’ union, said that following cautious public health guidance was the right approach, and is the one she would follow again. “What we needed to do was to listen to infectious disease experts,” Ms. Pringle said. She pointed out that rates of infection and death were higher in low-income communities of color, and that many parents preferred to keep their children at home. “You try to make the best decisions with the information you have,” she added. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Colorado and the lead author of the academy’s report, recalled that some teachers pushed back against the report’s recommendations by pointing to crowded classrooms, dated H.V.A.C. systems and sealed-shut windows in their schools, many of them in low-income urban neighborhoods. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The teachers argued that reopening schools would be dangerous, and they organized marches — outdoors and masked — to demand that classrooms remain empty until virus transmission rates fell essentially to zero. Dr. O’Leary said it was clear even at the time that those demands failed to consider what he called “the bigger picture.” “What are the downstream consequences of closing schools?” he asked. “Is this the right decision as a society?” Local officials who wanted to reopen schools sometimes found that their plans were superseded by governors and state health officials. Heidi Sipe, the superintendent in Umatilla, Ore., a rural district that serves mostly Hispanic and low-income students, remembered releasing a video detailing a complex reopening plan for her district in the fall of 2020, only for the governor to announce shortly afterward that all Oregon schools would be remote that fall based on infection rates. “It was devastating for us,” she said. “The challenge of that was the organizational trust that was lost — because so many of our families lost faith.” Oregon’s school strategy mirrored a cautious approach to the virus more broadly in many Democratic states. “I’m proud overall of our response,” said Dr. Dean Sidelinger, Oregon’s state health officer, who noted that Oregon had one of the lower Covid mortality rates in the country. But research now suggests that keeping schools closed was not a significant factor in slowing the virus, particularly after other parts of society were up and running. More people died in some Republican regions, Dr. O’Leary said, “not because the schools were open, but because they didn’t wear masks and didn’t get vaccinated.” Would leaders make different decisions today? Almost everyone in education acknowledges that extended school closures were damaging. Academic achievement plummeted and has not recovered. Student absence rates are double their prepandemic levels. And remote learning pushed children further into screens and away from learning and play in the physical world. But even today there is not broad consensus about whether the lengthy closures were necessary. Brent Jones, superintendent of Seattle Public Schools, said he was “not apologetic” about his system’s 18-month period of virtual and hybrid learning, one of the longest in the country. “I saw it as a forced opportunity to step back,” he said. “We were called upon, frankly, to expand our mission to include many other things: nutritional, social, emotional, mental health. There was a cry for support. Schools stepped into that gap.” Seattle also made investments in ventilation that he said could help keep classrooms open during another pandemic. In some other cities, ventilation remains a sticking point, particularly in old school buildings. “We would insist that the buildings be safe before they are occupied,” said Arthur G. Steinberg, president of the teachers’ union in Philadelphia, where dozens of school buildings do not have updated H.V.A.C. systems. Still, he and others said that they would be more apt to consider school closures on a building-by-building basis, rather than pushing for systemwide shutdowns.Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, acknowledged that some city schools “could have probably been fine” reopening sooner, but noted that they tended to be the ones in more affluent neighborhoods. “How do you continue to create a policy that marginalizes people who have been marginalized for years?” she asked in an interview late last year. Ms. Weingarten, the national union leader, said that in a future crisis, she would urge local unions to come up with their own safety plans, and to be creative in order to educate children in person — an approach many parents were desperate for during the Covid shutdowns. If school buildings do not have proper ventilation, she said, “then you find other buildings within the city.” Still, politics, not logistics, may be the biggest obstacle in a future health emergency. Public trust in science and schools fractured during the pandemic and remains low, especially among Republicans. Governors and state leaders could once again split along partisan lines. If anything, over the last five years, Americans’ views about vaccines, public health and education have only become more divided and politicized. Some of the mistrust seeded by the pandemic has spilled over into other arenas of education. Debates about schools now often focus on how race, gender and American history are taught. Republicans are pushing new state laws to provide public money for families to send their children to private schools. The number of children nationwide who are using some form of private-school voucher has doubled since 2019, to more than 1 million. Partisans on both the right and left say those trends might not have taken off without the widespread anger and frustration arising from how the education establishment handled Covid-19. Public health experts caution that their guidance in a future health crisis would depend on the particular disease. A future pathogen could be far more dangerous for children or teachers than Covid-19 was. “We don’t know what could be coming,” said Sean Bulson, the superintendent of schools in Harford County, Md., outside Baltimore. But based on what was learned over the past five years, he said, “our threshold for closing probably got higher.”

Texas Tech University has shut down its campus and sent students home early for spring break after a series of explosions and manhole fires, the university said in an emergency alert. An explosion at a substation near the school Wednesday evening caused power outages across campus, the university said. Conditions quickly devolved, with the university reporting a “gas odor” on campus. Videos on social media later showed green-colored flames leaping from manhole covers. University officials evacuated parts of the campus and forbade staff members from returning to their offices. Access to the university’s Engineering Key — the central area of campus where the gas odor was detected — was restricted.Videos posted on social media showed smoke billowing up from the street on campus and flames leaping out of manhole covers. The college, in Lubbock, Texas, was scheduled to begin its weeklong spring break hiatus on Monday, but it opted to send students home early. By late Wednesday, students were permitted to re-enter residence halls, but the university urged staff members not to return to their offices. Power remained out across campus, the university said.

Johns Hopkins University, one of the country’s leading centers of scientific research, said on Thursday that it would eliminate more than 2,000 workers in the United States and abroad because of the Trump administration’s steep cuts, primarily to international aid programs. The layoffs, the most in the university’s history, will involve 247 domestic workers for the university, which is based in Baltimore, and an affiliated center. Another 1,975 positions will be cut in 44 countries. They affect the university’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, its medical school and an affiliated nonprofit, Jhpiego. Nearly half the school’s total revenue last year came from federally funded research, including $365 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development. In all, the university will lose $800 million in funding over several years from U.S.A.I.D., which the Trump administration is in the process of dismantling. Johns Hopkins is one of the top university recipients of the funding that the administration is aiming to slash. And it appears to be among the most deeply affected of the major research institutions that are reeling from cuts — or the threat of cuts — to federal money that they depend on for research studies and running labs. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In a statement on Thursday calling it a “difficult day,” Johns Hopkins said it was “immensely proud” of its work on the projects, which included efforts to “care for mothers and infants, fight disease, provide clean drinking water and advance countless other critical, lifesaving efforts around the world.” In a statement last week describing Johns Hopkins’s reliance on federal funding, Ron Daniels, the university’s president said, “We are, more than any other American university, deeply tethered to the compact between our sector and the federal government.” Of the school’s total operating revenue in 2023, $3.8 billion, or nearly half, came federally funded research. The Trump administration has said that it wants to make the government leaner and more efficient by, among other measures, dramatically cutting financial support for the program, which promotes public health and food security in low-income countries. In ordering cutbacks in the agency, which amount to a 90 percent reduction in its operations, President Trump said that it was run by “radical left lunatics” and that is was riddled with “tremendous fraud.” Critics of the decision, however, have said the cuts are ushering in a new era of isolationism that could prove to be dangerous. Sunil Solomon, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said the cuts would lead to a resurgence in the spread of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. “What true great nations do is help other nations, but now, it seems, we’re America first,” Dr. Solomon said. The administration has also sought to reduce the amount of money that the National Institutes of Health sends to university for research, cuts that have been blocked for now in the courts. If they go into effect, those cuts would reduce federal payments to Johns Hopkins by more than $100 million a year, according to an analysis of university figures. The university, which receives about $1 billion a year in N.I.H. funding and is currently running 600 clinical trials, is one of the plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit challenging those cuts. Separately, the Trump administration also has targeted specific schools for cuts. It slashed $400 million from Columbia’s budget last week based on accusations that it had failed to protect students and faculty from antisemitism. Johns Hopkins and Columbia are on a list of 10 schools that the administration says are being scrutinized by an executive branch antisemitism task force. The administration has threatened to reduce federal funding for schools on the list, and others, that it views as being noncompliant with federal civil rights laws. In addition to the more than 2,000 employees whose jobs have been eliminated, the university said that an additional 78 domestic employees and 29 international would be furloughed at reduced schedules. The cuts at Johns Hopkins involve programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. through which American universities have worked with global partners, largely to advance public health and agricultural research. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this week that 5,200 of the agency’s 6,200 contracts had been canceled and that the remaining programs would be operated directly by the State Department, eliminating the need for U.S.A.I.D., which is under the State Department. Research projects that are being eliminated include international work on tuberculosis, AIDS and cervical cancer, as well as programs that directly benefit residents of Baltimore. Dr. Solomon, the epidemiologist, runs a $50 million, six-year program to improve H.I.V. outcomes in India. He said the budget cuts in his program alone would result in layoffs of about 600 people in the United States and India. The program had led to, among other things, the diagnosis of almost 20,000 people with H.I.V. through contact tracing. “It’s heartbreaking,” Dr. Solomon said. “Stopping funding isn’t going to kill you today, but in six months you’re going to see an impact around the world.” Dr. Judd Walson runs the department of international health at Johns Hopkins, which oversaw a five-year, $200 million program to diagnose and control tuberculosis in 20 countries funded by U.S.A.I.D. In Kampala, Uganda, he said, the program was the only way children were diagnosed. “That’s just one example of how the sudden withdrawal of support is having real impacts on survival,” he said. In addition to the loss of jobs at Johns Hopkins, he said, the loss of the programs will lead to a spike in communicable diseases worldwide. What is essentially a shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. has had significant effects at universities around the country. An organization called USAID StopWork, which is tracking the layoffs, said that overall, 14,000 domestic workers had lost their jobs so far, with thousands more anticipated. Research by the Federal Reserve shows that universities serve as major economic engines in many agricultural regions, from Iowa to Florida, meaning that the impact of the administration’s cuts to science research will be felt in both red states and left-leaning communities like Baltimore. The elimination of a $500 million agriculture project called Feed the Future, which funded agriculture labs at 19 universities in 17 states, means many of those labs must shutter. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 30 people have lost their jobs at a Feed the Future lab that worked on improving soybean cultivation in Africa, according to Peter D. Goldsmith, a professor of agriculture who ran that laboratory. At Mississippi State University in Starkville, Miss., a fisheries laboratory was shut down, according to Sidney L. Salter, a university spokesman, who did not disclose the number of jobs lost. Economic ripple effects of the funding cuts are expected to spread through the Baltimore area. Johns Hopkins, which enrolls about 30,000 students, is also one of Maryland’s largest private employers.

A federal appeals court ruled this week against a Florida couple who had sued officials in their child’s school district for disregarding their wishes and excluding them from discussions about the child’s gender identity. The ruling adds to a complicated legal landscape concerning minors and gender identity. While Republican lawmakers across the country have sought to restrict gender-transition care and the expression of gender identity, federal courts have remained divided over whether such laws violate equal protection. Some parents, like the ones in the Florida case, have argued that their rights should take precedence over a child’s professed wish to transition. Others, facing bans on transition care for teenagers, have argued that their children have a right to health care that they feel is necessary for their well-being. At the center of the Florida case is January Littlejohn, who with her husband sued the Leon County School District in Tallahassee and has become a prominent promoter of parental rights. Now affiliated with an organization opposed to gender-transition care, she was a guest of the first lady, Melania Trump, at President Trump’s speech to Congress last week. Ms. Littlejohn “is now a courageous advocate against this form of child abuse,” Mr. Trump said in his speech, nodding to her as he detailed the steps his administration had taken to “protect our children from toxic ideologies in our schools.” But two of the three judges who heard the case for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit rejected the argument made by Ms. Littlejohn and her husband, and upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case. “Even if the Littlejohns felt that defendants’ efforts to help their child were misguided or wrong, the mere fact that the school officials acted contrary to the Littlejohns’ wishes does not mean that their conduct ‘shocks the conscience’ in a constitutional sense,” Judge Robin S. Rosenbaum wrote in the majority opinion. A lawyer for the couple did not say whether the Littlejohns would appeal, but said “we cannot allow this assault on parental rights to remain unchallenged.” “This decision wrongly emboldens school districts to act in secret, eroding the fundamental parental rights that have been upheld by the Supreme Court for more than 100 years,” said Vernadette Broyles, the president and general counsel for the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, a nonprofit law firm. The child, who is not identified by name in the lawsuit, first asked to use they/them pronouns and a more masculine name ahead of the 2020-21 school year at Deerlake Middle School in Tallahassee. While the Littlejohns agreed to use a different name as a nickname, they did not explicitly agree to the use of different pronouns — something they told the school staff.At the time, the school district was using a 2018 guide that warned that “outing a student, especially to parents can be very dangerous” for a student’s well-being. And it allowed for a support plan that documented, in part, whether parents were “supportive” of a student’s identity or whether they were to be identified as L.G.B.T.Q. to their parents. (The guide was updated in 2022 after Florida passed a law prohibiting any classroom instruction about sexual or gender identity.) When the Littlejohns learned of their child’s identity change, they asked the school why they had not been included in meetings setting up a support plan. Administrators said that because the child had not asked for their involvement, and because there was no law requiring parents to be informed, the school did not have to involve them in the decision. “It’s our fundamental right to direct the upbringing of our children,” Ms. Littlejohn said in a video posted by the White House this month. “And that includes mental and physical health care.” The Littlejohns sued the school district, the superintendent, the assistant superintendent equity officer and a school counselor, arguing that their parental due process and privacy rights had been violated. But Mark E. Walker, the chief judge for U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, dismissed the case in December 2022. That decision upheld by the appeals court on Wednesday. The school officials named in the case “did not force the Littlejohns’ child to do anything at all,” Judge Rosenbaum of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote. “And perhaps most importantly, defendants did not act with intent to injure. To the contrary, they sought to help the child.” A lawyer representing the school district and staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment. After Mr. Trump singled out Ms. Littlejohn in his speech last week, Rocky Hanna, the Leon County Schools superintendent, told The Tallahassee Democrat: “To blatantly lie and disparage our teachers and our public schools to simply gain notoriety or political power is reprehensible. I only hope that truth and honesty matter more to our federal courts than it does to Ms. Littlejohn, our current governor and our current president.” Wednesday’s ruling — 169 pages in total — reflected divisions on the court, including between the two judges who agreed to dismiss the case. In his concurring opinion, Judge Kevin C. Newsom said he considered the actions taken by the school district officials “shameful.” But the question at hand, he wrote, was “whether it was unconstitutional.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “If I were a legislator, I’d vote to change the policy that enabled the defendants’ efforts to keep the Littlejohns in the dark,” he wrote. “But — and it’s a big but — judges aren’t just politicians in robes, and they don’t (or certainly shouldn’t) just vote their personal preferences.” Senior Judge Gerald Bard Tjoflat, who dissented, warned that the decision “ignores bedrock separation of powers principles, waters down fundamental rights and flies in the face of our prior panel precedent rule.”

For more than a quarter of a century, the death toll in the Columbine High School mass shooting, a statistic intertwined with the gun violence epidemic in the United States, stood at 13 victims. But another name has now been added to the list: Anne Marie Hochhalter, who was a student at the time and was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the shooting. Her death on Feb. 16 has been officially classified by a coroner in Colorado as a homicide, bringing the number of victims to 14. In a 13-page autopsy report, Dr. Dawn B. Holmes, a forensic pathologist with the Jefferson County coroner’s office, linked Ms. Hochhalter’s death to the injuries that she suffered as a 17-year-old high school junior. “Complications of paraplegia due to two (2) gunshot wounds are a significant contributing factor,” Dr. Holmes wrote. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The report, which was obtained on Thursday by The New York Times, said that Ms. Hochhalter, who was 43, had died from sepsis, an extreme immune response to an infection. Twelve students and a teacher were killed when two heavily armed students opened fire at the school in Littleton, Colo., on April 20, 1999, before taking their own lives. At the time, it was the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. It also left 21 other people wounded. Ms. Hochhalter was eating lunch with friends when the gunfire erupted. She was hit twice, in the chest and the back. Despite experiencing a lifetime of medical challenges as a result of her injuries and having to use a wheelchair, Ms. Hochhalter maintained her independence and spoke often about gun violence. Her brother, Nathan, who was a freshman at Columbine at the time of the shooting but was not injured, said on Thursday that it made sense to include his sister among the other people who were killed that day. “She got an extra 26 years,” Mr. Hochhalter said. “She was very independent, but it was not an easy 26 years.” Mr. Hochhalter, 40, said that his sister had considered herself a survivor instead of a victim: She was able to drive, go to the store and attend school and lived by herself for a number of years. Police officers discovered Ms. Hochhalter’s body at her home in Westminster, Colo., on Feb. 16 while conducting a welfare check. Sue Townsend, who became close to Ms. Hochhalter after her stepdaughter, Lauren Townsend, was killed in the shooting, told The Times last month that Ms. Hochhalter had been dealing with lingering effects from her injuries, including a pressure sore and an infection. Over the years, the trauma manifested itself on a multitude of levels for Ms. Hochhalter and her brother. Six months after the shooting, their mother, Carla June Hochhalter, walked into a pawnshop, asked to see a gun, loaded it and killed herself. The elder Ms. Hochhalter, 48, had been struggling with depression and other mental health issues before the Columbine shooting, her daughter later said. In 2016, when Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters, released a memoir, “A Mother’s Reckoning,” Ms. Hochhalter wrote a note addressed to Ms. Klebold on Facebook saying that she harbored no ill will. “Just as I wouldn’t want to be judged by the sins of my family members, I hold you in that same regard,” Ms. Hochhalter wrote. “It’s been a rough road for me, with many medical issues because of my spinal cord injury and intense nerve pain, but I choose not to be bitter towards you. A good friend once told me, ‘Bitterness is like swallowing a poison pill and expecting the other person to die.’ It only harms yourself. I have forgiven you and only wish you the best.”

Aday after the Department of Education announced deep cuts expected to gut the agency, President Trump was dismissive of the fired workers, initially saying he felt “very badly” before suggesting many were of little use. “Many of them don’t work at all,” Trump said, sitting in the Oval Office next to the visiting Prime Minister of Ireland, Micheál Martin. “Many of them didn’t show up to work unfortunately.” The Department of Education announced Tuesday that it was cutting 1,300 workers, its latest move toward Trump’s plan to shrivel the federal government’s role in education. The agency’s workforce, which had 4,100 workers at the end of the Biden administration, has been cut roughly in half between recent layoffs and those who have taken buyout offers. The department is also cancelling leases in buildings in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and New York. The Education Department announced its headquarters building would be closed on Wednesday and reopen the following day. “When we cut, we want to cut the people who aren’t working,” Trump said. “We want to keep the best people.” Trump said the cuts are part of his “dream” to “move education to the states.” State officials already determine the education curriculum in public schools. The Department of Education is in charge of running the college loan programs, administering Pell grants, and dispersing some funds to states for certain education programs. The rapid downsizing at the Education Department is part of cuts across the federal government pushed by Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which has recently targeted the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs. Trump campaigned on eliminating the Education Department entirely. In a memo to the Education Department issued March 3, the same day she was confirmed by the Senate, Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote that Trump had “tasked us with accomplishing the elimination of bureaucratic bloat.” Her memo was titled, “Our Department’s Final Mission.” William Bennett, who served as Education Secretary under Ronald Reagan, said on Fox News Wednesday that McMahon’s cuts should not be so sweeping and should have been more targeted and specific. “It’s hard for me to believe she knows who the best people are. It may be right you can probably get by with 20% of that staff, but you got to carefully do it by going through who’s working and who’s not.” While he was President, Reagan had promised to dismantle the Department of Education, but was blocked from doing so by a House of Representatives controlled by the Democratic Party.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. For weeks, Senate Democrats have tried to have it both ways as they’ve faced a tricky choice: cast a vote that allows for a government shutdown in hopes of saving some federal jobs or give into Republicans’ spending regime in the name of keeping the lights on. To the dismay of the progressive wing of the party, it seems retreat remains a very real option. Already, some Democrats are suggesting the hardline opposition ultimately does more harm than good, with a shutdown fight unwinnable for a party in the minority against a unified GOP majority. Others are staying vague, hoping this sorts itself out without laying down hard markers. To put it mildly, the indignation is real but a remedy is missing. Lawmakers face a deadline at the end of the week to adopt a spending program or trigger a government shutdown. In normal times, the party in control of Congress and the White House would be stuck holding the bag. But the Republican majority in the Senate is insufficient to pass this on their own under the chamber’s rules, leaving Democrats as the deciding factor between keeping the lights on or not. No vote has been scheduled but the ambiguity emanating from senior Democrats in recent days is widely seen as giving cover to vulnerable lawmakers to begrudgingly support Republicans’ plans to cut topline, non-defense spending by about $13 billion and boost defense spending by about $6 billion, all while giving Trump even greater powers to reprogram money as he sees fit. On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Republican framework does not have enough Democratic votes to clear the bar. Instead, he proposed a stopgap spending plan by way of a continuing resolution. “Republicans do not have the votes in the Senate to invoke cloture on the House C.R. Our caucus is unified on a clean April 11 C.R. that will keep the government open and give Congress time to negotiate bipartisan legislation that can pass,” Schumer said. Democrats are also looking for an ability to offer amendments to the House version as a trade for support, a Hill aide said. The proposal, coming after Democrats had a second all-hands, closed-door meeting about in as many days, was instantaneously a non-starter among Republicans, who still expect Democrats to cave to dodge a shutdown. Democratic strategists are decidedly mixed on what the smart play here is. The party has yet to really pick itself up after the 2024 loss to Trump, leaving many in doubt that it’s ready to effectively defend a shutdown as Republicans’ fault. The Resistance has not materialized and a grand strategy to stop Trump has not manifested. A unified message has yet to show up. To that last point, just consider the misfires this week. On Tuesday, as Trump turned the South Lawn into a Tesla showroom, the Democratic National Committee’s main social media account skipped right past the President’s blatant promotion of Elon Musk’s embattled company and fed the troll: “Ugly ass truck.” Whereas the party was once quick to decry a White House official’s promotion of Ivanka Trump’s shoes at Nordstrom's, it was less prepared to harness the outrage over Trump personally pitching his top political patron’s electric vehicles. In the end, the President is in the driver’s seat of both Washington and, apparently, a Tesla he bought to help his buddy. Confident that almost every Republican in Congress will do what he wants, he pushed for both House Speaker Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to stop playing footsie with Democrats in exchange for their votes to offset GOP defections. So far, that strategy has been proven right. House Republicans suffered just one defection on Tuesday despite very, very public complaints from GOP lawmakers about the package being pushed forward. (One Democrat who represents a district Trump carried, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, broke with his party’s instructions to be unified in opposition.) “It’s not like there’s a Plan B behind door number two,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise admonished on the House floor on Tuesday ahead of the vote, calling on his people to realize the stakes if the plan coming to a vote came up short. The GOP unity meant House Democrats had little power to shape the spending plan beyond a name-and-shame posture. That left Democrats as less-than-unified in their general messaging and again looking to voters like a scattershot collection of grievances rather than anything approaching a party with a central spine. Democrats’ impotence had no clearer moment of illustration than Republicans’ willingness to change the rules to avoid a tough vote in the next few weeks. Trump is running his trade war using emergency powers under a crisis, but Congress has the power to withdraw those powers by declaring an end to the emergency. Democrats had hoped they could avail themselves of a provision that requires a fast-track vote within 18 working days in the full House, but Republicans got wind of it and tucked a novel footnote into the spending plan: for the purposes of that law, everything between now and the start of 2026 will be considered just one day of legislation. No, really. We are about to be living the longest legislative day in history. Both parties in the House recognized the futility of dragging out the inevitability of the GOP-powered spending bill and were more than willing to evacuate Washington early to return to their districts, effectively shutting the door to any more work on this project. From the House’s perspective, the take-it-or-leave-it strategy absolves them of responsibility if things blow apart in the Senate. That now forces the hand of Senators from both parties, none of whom are big fans of having to accept the House’s work product without an opportunity to tweak it. Anything the Senate changes would require the House to accept them or negotiate fixes, and the House is simply not here to take up that task before the Friday deadline. Senate Republicans have spotted the political perils baked into the House version of this spending package. Yet with the lone exception of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the GOP conference seemed poised to be behind it. That means the measure needs eight Democratic votes to get over the 60-vote threshold needed in the Senate rules, and there are signs they could get there if taken to the brink. Many Senate Democrats have, to a tee, put off questions about their plans. The issue still seemed an open question on Tuesday after lawmakers met for two hours in private, where emotions ran hot but answers came up dry. Some pretended that Johnson might abandon an all-GOP plan and work with House Democrats to get their votes for—and ideas into—a revised plan. Others thought they’d be able to keep current spending levels in place with just a few tweaks, leaving Joe Biden-era contours in place. But, after Tuesday’s House vote, Senators returned to the Capitol on Wednesday without that offramp. They faced what more than one office described as a choice with just two bad options: surrender to the House GOP funding scheme or be blamed for the shutdown. For Senate Democrats, the GOP plan is painful to swallow. There were ready-made political hits aplenty in the outline. Some would make for great campaign dings next year, but it may be tough to savage Republicans for legislation Democrats helped deliver to Trump’s desk. While some will surely debate whether Democrats are really to blame if the government shuts down at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, many in the party fear they will lose that argument in the court of public opinion. After spending the past few weeks defending the broad sweep of government services as worthwhile and essential, a muddled Democratic Party is not likely to have an easy answer to the question of why, then, they allowed the whole thing to go dark.

Later this year, a handful of people with a rare eye condition will receive a novel injection that is designed to quite literally turn back time. Nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy—known as NAION—can cause sudden blindness when blood flow to the optic nerve is blocked. It’s not clear what causes the condition, although diabetes, high blood pressure, and smoking are known to be risk factors. Some early evidence also suggests GLP-1-based weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Zepbound might also make patients twice as prone to the condition compared with those not taking the medications. Whatever its cause, there are no treatments for NAION. And if it strikes one eye, there is a good chance it will also affect the other, leading to complete blindness. Advertisement Scientists hope to change that with what is potentially much more than an eye treatment. The injection will test a new gene therapy that, instead of targeting specific genetic mutations that cause NAION, attempts to return certain optic-nerve cells to their pre-NAION state. It would be the equivalent of pressing a biological rewind button that takes the affected cells back to a younger condition—one in which they haven’t yet been struck by NAION or any other disease. To some scientists, this sounds wildly ambitious. To others, extremely unlikely. Either way, it is just the kind of big—and controversial—swing that is emblematic of the growing field of science devoted to untangling and reversing what is a central fact of life: aging. The particular therapy behind the NAION treatment is based on the work of David Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He has spent decades trying to understand the wear-and-tear processes that age our cells and is convinced that many conditions that plague us—from joint issues to metabolic processes that break down as we get older—could be avoided and even reversed.

t’s one of the most common misdiagnoses in American medicine, and it usually happens like this: An old and frail person gets confused, tired, or a little dizzy. Maybe she just doesn’t feel like eating. Or she stumbles. These are classic geriatric syndromes that usually receive a classic medical response: the senior is ordered to pee in a cup for testing. The leading suspect is a urinary tract infection. Too often, it’s the wrong suspect. The urinary tract infection (UTI), has become the medical bogeyman that will not go away, a default but often incorrect diagnosis that seems to come up every time an older person has some ill-defined health presentation but still lacks the most reliable symptom of painful urination. As a career geriatrician, I don’t enjoy calling out colleagues, but health professionals need to spend less time ordering people to pee in a cup and more time figuring out the true causes of the problem.

Helyeh Doutaghi, a scholar in international law, began a new job in 2023 as the deputy director of a project at Yale Law School. As an activist who had championed pro-Palestinian causes in both published papers and public appearances, Dr. Doutaghi seemed to fit into the left-leaning mission of the Law and Political Economy Project, which promoted itself as working for “economic, racial and gender equality.” Last week, though, she was abruptly barred from Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., and placed on administrative leave. She was told not to advertise her affiliation with the university, where she had also served as an associate research scholar. Yale officials cited the reason as allegations that she was tied to entities subject to U.S. sanctions. It was an apparent reference to Samidoun, a pro-Palestinian group placed on the U.S. sanctions list last year, after the Treasury Department designated it a “sham charity” raising money for a terrorist organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The decision came three days after a news site, powered at least in part by artificial intelligence, published a story about Dr. Doutaghi’s connections to the group. The news site called her a member of a terrorist group, citing postings referring to appearances she made on panels at Samidoun-sponsored events, but a lawyer for Dr. Doutaghi said she is not a member of Samidoun, a global organization that sponsors meetings and protests supporting Palestinian causes. In an interview, Dr. Doutaghi, 30, called herself a “loud and proud” supporter of Palestinian rights. “I am a scholar,” she said, adding, “I am not a member of any organization that would constitute a violation of U.S. law.” The swift action against Dr. Doutaghi illustrates the tightrope American universities are walking as the Trump administration takes aim at higher education. Yale’s peer institution, Columbia, lost $400 million in federal funding last week after being named on a list of schools accused of tolerating antisemitism. On Monday, the Trump administration announced that Yale was among 60 schools that could face funding cuts if federal investigations show evidence that they have permitted antisemitic behavior.In a statement Tuesday, Yale Law School described the allegations against Dr. Doutaghi as reflecting “potential unlawful conduct.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “We take these allegations extremely seriously and immediately opened an investigation into the matter to ascertain the facts,” said the statement, issued by Alden Ferro, a spokesman for Yale Law. “Such an action is never initiated based on a person’s protected speech.” Dr. Doutaghi said the actions against her are part of an attempt to silence scholars. “This is the type of thing that happens under fascist dictatorships, which Donald Trump is trying to establish,” she said in the interview. The article about Dr. Doutaghi was published on March 2 on Jewish Onliner. On its website and on Substack, Jewish Onliner says it is “empowered by A.I. capabilities.” It does not identify any reporters on its site. An effort to reach Jewish Onliner for comment elicited a response from “JO,” which identified itself as an A.I. assistant developed by Jewish Onliner. Later, emails from the site said that, while it uses A.I. to enhance research, fact-checking and rapid content creation, the final edits are done by humans. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The identities of the news site’s staff were kept private out of concern for “professional repercussions, doxxing, etc.,” the site said. In January, the Israeli publication Haaretz questioned the reliability of such A.I.-powered platforms that it said worked to promote Israel’s cause online. Eric Lee, the lawyer representing Dr. Doutaghi, also questioned the reliability of Jewish Onliner’s reporting in correspondence with Yale. In his letter last week letter placing Dr. Doutaghi on administrative leave, Joseph M. Crosby, Yale’s senior associate dean, raised concerns about her activities. “As you are aware, the university is reviewing serious allegations regarding your activities with various entities that are subject to U.S. sanctions,” said the letter, dated March 5, which was reviewed by The New York Times. Samidoun, based in Vancouver and London, says that its primary mission is to support Palestinian prisoners and to amplify the voices of Palestinian advocates of justice and human rights. The impact of U.S. and European Union sanctions on Iran was the topic of Dr. Doutaghi’s dissertation for the Ph.D. she obtained from Carleton University in Ottawa, which was officially awarded after she joined the Yale project. Amy Kapczynski, a Yale Law professor who co-founded the project, which is funded by outside grants, envisioned the project as an effort to understand the structures that led to the election of Mr. Trump and a counter to neoliberal thought in America, according to posts on its website. Ms. Kapczynski did not respond to a message seeking comment. Dr. Doutaghi joined in October 2023, about a week before the Hamas attack on Israel. An Iranian and a Muslim, she said Yale knew about her views when they hired her. “In fact, at the time I believed that this quality would be an asset for the project I was hired to help lead,” she said. The Law and Political Economy Project appeared to embrace Dr. Doutaghi’s views, featuring her last year in a virtual event titled, “A Political Economy of Genocide and Imperialism.” The page describing the discussion has been scrubbed from the project website, but it referred to the “genocide in Palestine,” a characterization that some pro-Israel groups have called antisemitic. Within 24 hours of the Jewish Onliner article’s publication, Dr. Doutaghi said, she began to receive harassing and threatening messages online. She was also asked to meet with Yale officials to explain her position. She decided to retain a lawyer, Mr. Lee, who is based in Southfield, Mich., and asked for additional time to prepare for the meeting with Yale because she was fasting for Ramadan and dealing with harassment. But three days after the Jewish Onliner published its article, Dr. Doutaghi was barred from campus and placed on administrative leave by Mr. Crosby, who told her the move was necessary because “we have not received any responses or factual explanations from you.” Mr. Lee said he hoped Dr. Doutaghi’s job and access to emails and campus would be restored, and he is asking the school to take “public action to restore her reputation.”