A federal judge in Maryland granted a temporary restraining order on Monday blocking the Education Department and the Office of Personnel Management from disclosing sensitive data to members of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team and anyone assisting them. The order, issued by Judge Deborah L. Boardman in Federal District Court for the District of Maryland, prevents Mr. Musk’s representatives from carrying out what they have described as an audit of the Education Department’s student loan systems for two weeks while the lawsuit continues. Judge Boardman wrote that the government had not argued convincingly that members of Mr. Musk's team had a real need for access to such personal information in the performance of their duties. “DOGE affiliates have been granted access to systems of record that contain some of the plaintiffs’ most sensitive data — Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, income and assets, citizenship status, and disability status — and their access to this trove of personal information is ongoing,” Judge Boardman wrote. “There is no reason to believe their access to this information will end anytime soon because the government believes their access is appropriate.” The American Federation of Teachers, a union representing more than 1.8 million educators, had sued to keep members of the Musk team out of the department’s data systems, which it said contained private information that its members had submitted in connection with student aid for themselves or their families. “We brought this case to uphold people’s privacy, because when people give their financial and other personal information to the federal government — namely to secure financial aid for their kids to go to college, or to get a student loan — they expect that data to be protected and used for the reasons it was intended, not appropriated for other means,” Randi Weingarten, the group’s president, said in a statement. Last week, a judge in a related case refused to issue a restraining order restricting Mr. Musk’s team, finding that the group that brought the lawsuit had not shown that a group of students who had lodged similar complaints had suffered clear harm by having their data analyzed by affiliates of Mr. Musk. But Judge Boardman found that the disclosure of sensitive personal information to Mr. Musk’s team alone was itself a concrete injury, notwithstanding any hypothetical concerns like the possibility of identity theft. Lawyers who brought the suit had asked that the same restraints be placed on the Treasury Department, but Judge Boardman declined, as a judge in a separate case had already blocked Mr. Musk’s team from sensitive data there. She indicated that she believed the teacher’s union would prevail in its lawsuit, and that the restraining order was necessary until the members of Mr. Musk’s team who are detailed to the Education Department could explain why they could not do their analysis with data that left out or redacted sensitive information.

His selection is being celebrated by MAGA world, while it feels like the latest scare in Democrats’ nightmare. President Donald Trump announced Sunday night that Kash Patel had tapped Dan Bongino to be second-in-command at the FBI, after the Senate confirmed Patel as the bureau’s new director last week. A former police officer and Secret Service agent Bongino started his career as a cadet then officer with the New York City Police Department from 1995 to 1999, according to a previous campaign website. He joined the Secret Service in 1999 as a special agent, starting in the New York Field Office and assigned with investigating federal crimes such as “protective intelligence, computer crimes, bank fraud, credit card fraud and counterfeiting.” Bongino left the field office in 2002 to become an instructor at the Secret Service Training Academy in Beltsville, Md. In 2006, Bongino joined the Presidential Protective Division, serving during the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Bongino then transferred to the Baltimore Field Office in 2010, before leaving in May 2011 to run for office. He has published multiple books on his time with the agency, including Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top-Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away from It All (2013) and The Fight: A Secret Service Agent’s Inside Account of Security Failings and the Political Machine (2016), drawing criticism for allegedly exaggerating his importance and proximity to power and “hijacking the Secret Service brand” to gain attention. Ran for Congress three times, unsuccessfully In 2012, Bongino ran for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, winning the Republican primary but ultimately losing by a landslide to Democratic incumbent Ben Cardin. He ran at the time on cutting taxes, growing jobs, and his “heartfelt desire to shake up an unquestionably broken political system and culture.” In 2014, Bongino ran against Democratic incumbent John Delaney to represent Maryland’s 6th congressional district in the U.S. House, but he narrowly lost. Bongino then moved to Florida in 2015 for a “non-emergency family situation,” raising speculation that he would run for Congress again, to represent the state’s 18th district. In 2016, he ran instead in the GOP primary for Florida’s 19th district, which was an open solid-red seat, but he finished third. Survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma In September 2020, Bongino announced a 7-cm. growth had been found in his neck. The next month, he said he had to undergo an operation to remove the growth, and he later disclosed post-operation that it “looks like lymphoma”—a type of blood cancer. On Oct. 16, Bongino said he’d been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, though he added that “there’s a treatment plan.” In an interview with Megyn Kelly in 2024, Bongino said he was “two years clean in remission.” ‘My entire life right now is about owning the libs’ Bongino began a new career in media after his unsuccessful run for Congress in 2015, starting a podcast in his basement called The Renegade Republican (since renamed The Dan Bongino Show). By 2016—with episodes such as “Debunking Liberal Spin About Democrats and Inner Cities,” “How The Media Fooled America,” “The Truth About Trade Wars” and “I’m Disgusted by Republicans for Hillary”—his audience was reaching millions. Bongino’s popularity and brash style earned him a contract in 2018 with NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s short-lived online video channel. “My entire life right now is about owning the libs,” Bongino famously said during a segment in October 2018. Over the years, Trump took notice of Bongino, frequently posting on social media about his comments. “Did you see what Bongino said?” Trump reportedly told a confidant after seeing Bongino as a contributor on Fox News in 2018, according to the Daily Beast. “He’s so right, he’s just so right about it all. You have to see it.” Bongino, like many new leaders across the Trump Administration including Patel, represents a radical departure from convention for his role. The FBI deputy director, which does not require Senate confirmation, is traditionally an active agent with significant operational expertise and experience—something Patel reportedly agreed to maintain before selecting Bongino. Bongino, a 50-year-old former Secret Service agent turned conservative-media commentator, is instead most well known for his outspoken support for Trump and his frequent spreading of misinformation, including about the FBI. In 2019, Bongino launched Bongino Report, an aggregator of right-wing media headlines intended as a pro-Trump alternative to Drudge Report. Bongino’s Facebook page grew to generate “more monthly engagement than the pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN combined,” according to a 2020 New York Times report. In 2021, Bongino was tapped by talk radio and podcast network Cumulus Media to take over the late Rush Limbaugh’s slot. That same year he also began hosting a Fox News weekend program, Unfiltered With Dan Bongino, as well as a five-part series on cancel culture called Canceled in the USA on Fox Nation. (Bongino left the Fox News network in April 2023, citing failed contract negotiations.) Bongino continues to host his podcast and radio show, though Trump said in his post announcing Bongino’s FBI appointment that it is “something he is willing and prepared to give up in order to serve.” A misinformation ‘superspreader’ Bongino has been criticized for promoting misinformation and conspiracy theories on a range of subjects. A critic of vaccine mandates and masking (which he called “useless”) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bongino was permanently banned from YouTube in January 2022 for violating its policies against pandemic-related misinformation, and Google pulled its ad services from his website. His podcast also went on hiatus in October 2021 after he publicly threatened to leave Cumulus Media over its vaccine mandate, despite being vaccinated himself. The show went back on air less than two weeks later, however, without Cumulus changing its policy.

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. Chris Christie’s flight from Detroit landed in Newark, N.J., on Thursday and was one of the unlucky arrivals without a dedicated gate assignment. Tired and cranky, the former New Jersey Governor lumbered onto a bus ferrying passengers back to the terminal, where the woman seated beside him started unpacking the unpredictable state of politics, particularly President Donald Trump’s chaotic first few weeks back in power. “She said, ‘You know, he's really shaking things up, and maybe some of that will turn out OK,’” Christie recalled two days later at the Principles First Summit, a confab of traditionalist Republicans trying to chart their way through the next four years of Trumpism. “At that moment, when I'm at the end of my travel day, my Sicilian instinct is to grab her by the shoulders and go, ‘Are you kidding me?’” But Christie, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, ran afoul of his mercurial nature, and subsequently found himself exiled, listened politely before offering a self-aware question to her: “What about everything you've seen about him for the last 10 years leads you to believe that it might turn out OK?” In Christie’s telling, the woman in question said it was important for anyone in the presidency to succeed. Christie, uncharacteristically, was prepared to let the chat end there, but not his parable for an audience of hard-core NeverTrumpers, disaffected Republicans, and more than a few self-identified Democrats looking for answers in this charged period. “There's going to come a moment where that woman, I believe in my heart, is going to say, ‘Yeah, no, this is not OK anymore,’” Christie said. “But we all get there at a different pace.” And then the former prosecutor summed up the ethos for that sold-out thinkfest held a few blocks from the White House back in Trump’s control. “To the extent that we try to force that pace because we can't stand it anymore, we run the risk of lengthening it, not shortening it,” he said. “And a lot of damage could be done.” Welcome to the latest iteration of the Conservative Resistance. They are angry, they are motivated, and they are altogether at a loss at what to do with those feelings. This year’s Principles First summit, it’s fifth, offered its usual blend of anti-Trump fervor and pragmatic posturing about how to reclaim a Republican Party and conservative movement with which they once comfortably identified. On the same day that Trump regaled the more boisterous crowd just across the river at CPAC with his tales of political retribution, several hundred activists and insiders gathered in downtown D.C. to make sense of their current impotence. In the room, much of the rhetoric came off as scorching and inspired, as if a solution to the ongoing dismantling of much of the federal government were just over the horizon. Beyond the basement ballroom, though, it sure seemed lukewarm. It was a wait-it-out strategy that, frankly, is not entirely dissimilar to the approach Democrats are taking on their side of the observation deck. The path forward in no way matched the appetite for immediate action. It felt, at times, like being promised a decadent five-course meal and realizing later you had been served a rice cake. Dark humor and worries about democracy’s nadir frequently intersected in the basement of the J.W. Marriott. When former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales mused that maybe “Congress will say enough is enough,” the ballroom giggled with skepticism. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson similarly drew laughs when he suggested Congress will assert its check over the presidency: “I’m optimistic that they will at the right time. And it may be very, very soon.” Yet former Rep. Joe Walsh, a Tea Party founder from Illinois, said no one should count on the group he once counted himself a member to do their jobs: “Forget about Republicans in Congress. They’re done.” Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban was similarly dismissive of those who thought wailing about Trump tearing down democracy would get the public on their side. “How’d that work in the campaign?” he needled. The gathering seemed simultaneously poisoned by pessimism and laden with pleas to give Trump time to reveal himself as a true threat to All Things American. The job of harnessing that outrage, the argument went, will get easier once Trump inevitably hands his critics a full dossier of second-term over-reach. As one introducer ticked through Trump’s foreign policy changes so far, he seemed out of breath by the end of the partial list. “That was in one month,” he said. “There are 47 months left.” But talk of waiting things out was constantly in tension with what many saw as an urgent moment in history that demanded action. “This is the collapse of an American ideal, American ideology, the American view of the world,” said Tom Nichols, a retired academic who now writes for The Atlantic. To his right on stage, one of the most recognized democracy advocates, chess grandmaster and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, offered a polite correction. “We are not watching the collapse of the American ideal. We are watching the betrayal of the American ideal,” Kasparov said. “We are living in the middle of the coup.” As the day’s sessions neared its end, Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and publisher of The Bulwark, deadpanned, “This has been a long day and is terrifying,” before calling the President “a fabulist, a liar, and a bad person.” No one really objected to the verdict, but it was not apparent what to do with it. (Before the Summit closed out on Sunday, organizers announced they had received “a credible bomb threat” from someone claiming to be Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, forcing a temporary evacuation. Tarrio reportedly denied any involvement.) While adopting a resigned wait-it-out slouch, a running thread at the summit came down to a simple but actionable question: At what point has the United States entered into a constitutional crisis? Trump has been musing that he was not subject to court rulings, might serve a third Gonzales, who served as President George W. Bush’s top lawyer and ran his Justice Department, but endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris last year, said he is waiting to see if Trump ignores an inevitable setback from the courts. “Until that happens, we don’t have a constitutional crisis,” Gonzales said. Added Hutchinson, a former U.S. attorney: “We’re not there yet.” And Christie, another former U.S. attorney, said he, too, is concerned about the looming crisis, but warned that the language is being too casually bandied about. “I think we use this ‘constitutional crisis’ thing much too liberally,” Christie said. “What we're doing is cheating, because when we really do have the constitutional crisis, half the country is going to go…” He then uttered a verbal shrug that could possibly be transcribed as “meh.” In the room, folks nodded along with a dour expectation that they too were going to be using that rhetoric at some point. It may just be as premature as it is inevitable. Patience is far from sexy, but it may be the best strategy to allow for Trump to trip over traps of his own making. Yet those most committed to restoring traditional conservative footing in the GOP are anxious to do more than stand by at this specific moment. “The resistance will rise,” said Bill Kristol, a self-described hawk who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. “But will it rise quickly enough?” In the crowd, there were visible shaking of heads.

Your skin is your largest organ—and unlike your heart or lungs or kidneys, you can actually see it. That makes it a useful window into what’s going on inside your body. “It’s an immediate indicator of potential internal health concerns,” says Dr. Amy Basile, a dermatologist at Dermatology Partners in Philadelphia, starting on day one of life: If a baby’s skin is jaundiced, for example, doctors know to look for high levels of bilirubin or an immature liver. Throughout the years that follow, the skin continues to provide clues about underlying health concerns, from cancer to autoimmune disease. It’s key, however, to know what to look for. Not every blemish is a marker of internal turmoil, but certain ones raise red flags for dermatologists, who then investigate further. We asked skin doctors to share the weird or surprising symptoms that make them take notice. A bleeding acne-like bump Dr. Rina Weimann constantly sees patients who come in complaining about a solitary, stubborn bump they’ve had on their nose or face for a few months. “It looks like a pimple, but it doesn't have a head,” says Weimann, a dermatologist at Schweiger Dermatology Group and assistant professor of dermatology at Drexel College of Medicine. “It’s like a shiny pink bump, and it bleeds without you touching it.” Having that kind of growth linger for so long isn't normal, she adds, and warrants a biopsy to ensure it's not skin cancer. Biopsies aren’t as scary as they might sound: Typically, dermatologists remove a small sliver of your skin and send it to a pathologist. It takes about one or two weeks to get results, Weimann says. And if you do have skin cancer, “it doesn't mean you have to have your nose cut off," she says. “Especially on the face, we do a specialized surgery called Mohs surgery to conserve tissues, so you're not taking a ton of skin out.” Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily Sudden changes in body odor Dr. Angela Brimhall still remembers the stench she encountered during her dermatology residency, when she stepped off the elevator at the hospital. Down the hall, a patient was suffering from severe gangrene, “and the odor that it puts off is very unique and telling,” she says. While not always so noxious, Brimhall often sees patients with odor-related symptoms, which can indicate a range of hormonal issues or infections. Read More: What’s the Best Skin-Care Routine? While gangrene causes a foul, musty odor, for example, “Staph and strep have been described as having a mildly sweet smell—but like if something sweet is turning sour,” says Brimhall, a dermatologist at Sage Dermatology & Mohs Surgery in Draper, Utah. A metabolic disorder called trimethylaminuria, meanwhile, makes your sweat smell like rotten fish. Some people experience it episodically, like at the start of menstruation, and dietary tweaks can help relieve it; other times, antibiotics are necessary. “You don't have to suffer with it forever,” she says, but first you need a doctor’s help to figure out what’s going on. “Your skin is a dynamic organ, and it’s communicating with you, telling you what's going on inside.” Visible veins or blood vessels If your veins suddenly take on a starring role on the canvas that is your skin, call your doctor—especially if the newfound prominence is accompanied by swelling, pain, or redness. “If they were previously just minding their own business, and you couldn't see them, that could indicate deep vein thrombosis,” Brimhall says. “It can also happen with some autoimmune diseases.” Factors like vigorous exercise, hot weather, sun exposure, and tight clothing can also make your veins more noticeable, which is why it’s important to have your doctor take a look and determine the seriousness of the situation. Blue discoloration of the skin Any change in skin color, especially if it’s widespread or worsening, warrants a doctor’s appointment. Blue discoloration often ends up being related to a medication or supplement someone is taking, Basile says. Supplements with silver, for example, can cause a difficult-to-treat condition called argyria that turns the skin bluish-gray, while the antibiotic minocycline can cause the same discoloration on the arm, face, and shins. If you go out in the sun without protection while taking the arthritis drug Plaquenil, you could end up with blue-gray arms and feet, Basile adds. Usually, when that happens, “you stop the medication and find an alternative,” she says. “In some cases, it goes away, and other times, these pigmentations need to be removed with lasers,” which can be time-consuming and expensive. Read More: 12 Weird Symptoms Endocrinologists Say You Should Never Ignore A blue tinge to the skin might also signal someone is taking kratom, an herbal supplement that can have opioid- and stimulant-like effects. Sometimes, people taking kratom develop gray-blue hyperpigmentation in areas that are exposed to the sun. “You have to really pry and say, ‘Are you taking any new teas? Are you adding anything to your orange juice? Are you taking any new vitamins?’” Basile says. “These things come in so many forms, and they're not regulated,” which is why she encourages her patients to avoid kratom. Changes in nail appearance Your fingernails are “an excellent place to see how your body is doing metabolically,” Brimhall says. Discoloration, ridges, and splitting nails can all reflect systemic health issues. Splinter hemorrhages, for example—or squiggly red lines under the nails—can indicate a heart infection called endocarditis. “You’re throwing little bacterial-originated clots into the bloodstream, and the capillaries of the nails are superficial enough and small enough that they're picking up those clots, and you can see them, like a window, right there around the nails,” she says. You might also notice signs of potential autoimmune disease. For example, tiny red or white spots around your nail bed—called periungual telangiectasias, or small, dilated blood vessels—can point to dermatomyositis or lupus. Meanwhile, if you experience “spooning of the nails,” which means they curve inward and take on a spoon-like shape, you might be experiencing hypothyroidism or anemia, Brimhall says. “Clubbing” of the nails, on the other hand, which refers to a widening and rounding of the fingertips and toenails, often clues doctors into inflammatory bowel disease or pulmonary issues. It’s also important to keep an eye out for a dark line that runs from the top to bottom of your nail. This type of discoloration is most prevalent in the thumb, index finger, and big toe, Basile says, and can indicate melanoma of the nail. Basile generally measures the line, and if it gets wider or becomes irregular at the base, recommends her patients get biopsied. Velvety skin If you have thick, darkened patches of skin on your neck, armpits, or groin that feel soft and smooth, you might have a condition called acanthosis nigricans. “Patients often come in because they don’t like it,” Basile says. “They’re like, ‘What is this?’” Unfortunately, “it’s very difficult to treat with topicals.” Acanthosis nigricans is often caused by insulin resistance, which can lead to Type 2 diabetes if not addressed. Basile urges patients to take it seriously—especially adolescents who are overweight and going through puberty. “It may be the first indicator that your body isn’t responding effectively to insulin,” Basile says. “It’s like your first chance to address that, and to motivate yourself to make lifestyle changes and enhance your diet and exercise habits.” Skin that glows or shines Glowy skin is in right now. But a sudden, unnatural sheen could indicate hormonal changes, skin infections, or even cancer. “When I’m doing a full-body skin exam, I’m looking for a certain sheen that can be consistent with basal cell carcinoma,” Brimhall says. “It’s often described as a pearly appearance, and we’ll see it right over the area that’s having [abnormal cell growth]. That can be a big clue that something concerning is going on.” Basal cell carcinoma—which is highly curable when identified and treated early—usually develops in areas exposed to sunlight, like the face, head, neck, arms, and legs. You may notice tiny blood vessels on the surface of a translucent bump, and it may eventually bleed or scab over. Itchy palms Your hands might very well become itchy during the long, cold winter because they’re dry. But if you’ve been persistently overcome with the urge to itch for months, it’s time to get curious—especially if the itchiness flares up at night and isn’t accompanied by a rash. “That could be a sign that you need to do blood work to check your liver function and bile acid, and make sure there's not an issue with your gallbladder,” Weimann says. “It's important not to ignore.” She usually refers patients with itchy palms to a hepatologist or their primary care provider for additional testing. A slow-healing wound Maybe you’ve been diligently taking care of a wound on your leg for months, applying Vaseline or Neosporin, and it’s not going away. Some people are simply slow healers. “But it does make me concerned: ‘Should I do a biopsy and investigate this for skin cancer?’” Weimann says. “A lot of dermatologists will do that for slow-healing wounds.” Read More: 9 Weird Symptoms Cardiologists Say You Should Never Ignore Squamous cell carcinoma, in particular, can show up as a wound that refuses to heal—in addition to symptoms like a firm, dome-shaped growth, or a sore that develops in an old scar. The earlier you start treatment, the better, so if you’re worried, call your doctor. Skin that feels like sandpaper If your skin becomes so dry that it starts to resemble sandpaper—laden with small, rough bumps—you could have a condition like keratosis pilaris, also known as "chicken skin.” It’s characterized by “these tiny little 1-millimeter bumps that are very close together,” Brimhall says. They’re particularly common on the upper arms, thighs, and butt, and while the bumps are typically painless—and can be treated with moisturizers and prescription creams—they’re sometimes a harbinger of more serious afflictions. “We know that if you have keratosis pilaris, you’re predisposed to atopic dermatitis, asthma, and seasonal allergies,” Brimhall says. “We want to make sure we’re watching for any of those signs and symptoms, so if they develop, we’re really on it.” Unexplained hair changes If you notice sudden graying or other changes to your mane, call your doctor instead of your hair stylist. You could be dealing with an underlying health issue or nutritional deficiency. “Sometimes when the body goes into survival mode, it’ll show up in changes in your hair, and that can include color change or hair loss,” Brimhall says. The autoimmune condition alopecia, for example, can cause hair to turn white or gray, before ultimately leading to bald patches. Another autoimmune condition, vitiligo, causes loss of skin pigment, which can show up as white or gray hair. In rare cases, melanoma can also lead to these changes, usually darkening the hair in the affected area. “It’s important to pay attention,” Brimhall says, “because your hair can indicate something deeper is going on.” Increased sensitivity to products that didn’t previously cause issues If you start to experience sensitivity in the area where you’re applying a certain product, you might have allergic or irritant contact dermatitis. On average, it takes five years to develop a topical allergy, Brimhall says. “Sometimes patients will say, ‘I've been using this for years,’ and we’ll say, ‘Well, we still need to do a patch test,’” she adds. “The other difficult thing about these conditions is it's often a delayed hypersensitivity—so you’ll put the product on, and the rash doesn’t appear for five to 10 days.” It might then linger for weeks or months. Brimhall often asks patients to make a list of products they were in contact with, even briefly, like the bar of soap they used while staying at a hotel a month prior. Then, she instructs them to eliminate all of their products, adding one back in at a time and, after two weeks, adding another. “That way we can really see what’s affecting your skin,” she says. It’s a painstaking process, but “the upside is, once we identify the chemical that's causing this reaction, we have a 100% cure—and that's 100% avoidance.

In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022, many states have moved to protect the right to abortion, and several have turned to a new tool to do so: abortion shield laws. The laws are intended to preserve abortion access by protecting multiple classes of people—abortion providers practicing in states where abortion is legal, as well as patients and people who help them access abortion—from civil and criminal actions taken by states with bans or restrictions on abortion. Now, these laws are being tested through two legal challenges in Texas and Louisiana, both involving a New York doctor. So what are shield laws exactly, and what does the future hold for them? TIME spoke to experts to find out. What are abortion shield laws? Abortion shield laws are “novel protections” enacted in 18 states and Washington, D.C., says Lizzy Hinkley, senior state legislative counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, which has helped draft some of these laws. The laws provide protections for doctors providing medication or in-clinic abortions in the shield state, according to Rachel Rebouché, dean and professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Every law is different, so the protections offered by each state vary, but can include the shield state refusing to comply with another state’s extradition order for a doctor who has provided reproductive health care that’s legally protected in the shield state, refusing to participate in another state’s investigation into the provider, and refusing to penalize the provider through professional discipline. Enterprises eye China’s huge consumer market Branded Content Enterprises eye China’s huge consumer market By China Daily Connecticut was the first state to pass an abortion shield law, in May 2022, in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe. “What we were motivated by was, there is going to be an intense interstate conflict,” says Rebouché, who worked with colleagues to draft the state’s shield law language. “This is new territory,” Hinkley says. “Shield laws were a tool that states have been using in response to a change in how abortion rights are treated in the country. When there was still a federal protected right to abortion, states did not have to be concerned about whether a provider in their state was going to be criminalized for providing abortion care to a patient or resident of another state because states couldn’t criminalize that care. There was a right to abortion; there were guardrails that were federally protected.” Of the 18 states that have shield laws, eight of them—including New York—include protections for doctors who are providing abortion pills through telemedicine to patients in other states, according to Rebouché. About 63% of all abortions in the American healthcare system in 2023 were medication abortions, but anti-abortion activists and lawmakers have been trying to restrict access to the pills. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Biden Administration made efforts to increase access to abortion pills by allowing them to be prescribed via telehealth and received via mail, but reproductive rights advocates are concerned that the Trump Administration will roll back those efforts. Hinkley says telemedicine abortion has been “a lifeline” for many people who live in states that have banned or restricted abortion. Read More: How the Biden Administration Protected Abortion Pill Access—and What Trump Could Do Next What are the current legal challenges to shield laws? Texas, which has banned abortion in nearly all situations, filed a civil suit against New York-based Dr. Margaret Daley Carpenter for allegedly prescribing, via telemedicine, abortion pills to a 20-year-old woman in Texas. Texas alleges that the woman was hospitalized with complications. On Feb. 13, a Texas judge ordered Carpenter to stop prescribing abortion pills to Texas residents, and to pay a fine of more than $100,000. Carpenter and her lawyers didn’t respond to the lawsuit, given New York’s shield law that bars cooperating with other states’ investigations into providers. Louisiana, which also has a near-total ban on abortion, charged Carpenter with a felony for allegedly prescribing, via telemedicine, abortion pills to a minor who was pregnant. Louisiana officials claim that the patient was taken to the hospital after ingesting the pills because she was experiencing a medical emergency. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said on Feb. 13 that she won’t extradite Carpenter to Louisiana—“not now, not ever”—per New York’s shield law. Louisiana can’t constitutionally prosecute Carpenter unless she’s physically present in the state for a court appearance, according to Rebouché. The cases represent the first time shield laws are being tested in court. “I think they point to what we can expect moving forward for intense interstate conflict,” Rebouché says of the two cases. “I don’t think it’s surprising; I think this is where we were always going to land, given that Dobbs returned abortion to the state and a third of the country prohibits abortion from the earliest moments of pregnancy or before six weeks, just as many states have codified abortion rights in their constitutions and their state laws.” Read More: Here Are Trump’s Major Moves Affecting Access to Reproductive Healthcare What does the future hold for shield laws? Because New York won’t cooperate with Texas and Louisiana, the future of the two cases is a little unclear. “Those [cases] raise really profound constitutional, structural questions about interstate relationships,” Rebouché says. “They’re bound to end up before the Supreme Court because there’s a long, complicated history of mediating disputes between states when they don’t agree on public policy, and that’s where we are now.” Hinkley says the intent of the legal challenges is to scare doctors who are providing abortion care, but that shield laws are working to provide access to people across the country. She adds that the laws “are squarely within states’ power to enact” and are constitutional. “I’m sure that there will be continued challenges to the shield laws,” Hinkley says, “but I can say with certainty that [shield laws] were drafted with good care and with these legal challenges in mind, and they stand on solid ground, both within what states are allowed to do, as well as what they’re not allowed to do.

Astute skywatchers may have already seen the striking line of planets across the night sky in January. This week Mercury joins the queue. Now every other world in our solar system will be visible among the stars at the same time — if you know where to look. According to Gerard van Belle, director of science at Lowell Observatory in Arizona, an alignment of seven planets is neither mystical nor particularly rare. “On the scale of supermoon to death asteroid, this is more a supermoon sort of thing,” Dr. van Belle said. Still, the planetary parade, as the event is colloquially named, “makes for a very nice excuse to go outside at night, maybe with a glass of wine, and enjoy the night sky.” Why are the planets aligned? Whenever planets are visible in the night sky, they always appear roughly along the same line. This path, known as the ecliptic, is the same one that the sun travels along during the year. This happens because the planets orbit around the sun in the same plane. Dr. van Belle likened the configuration to a vinyl record: The sun is in the center, and the grooves are the orbits of the planets around it. Our point of view from Earth, then, is along one of those grooves, “looking out along the platter,” he said. This week, the planets are configured in such a way that all of them will be present in the sky at dusk from mostly anywhere on Earth. Around the end of the month, Saturn will slip below the horizon and into daytime skies, ending the seven-planet parade. But stargazers will get another chance to see a planetary alignment in August, when several of our celestial neighbors will be visible in morning skies. How can I see the parade? Only a handful of the planets can be seen with the unaided eye, and the best evening to catch them all may vary by location. Astronomers recommend using a software program like Stellarium to figure out when and where to look. To see the parade, find a dark place with a clear view of the western horizon at nightfall. Mercury and Saturn will be low in the sky, brushing past each other in the fading glow of the evening sun, which will make the pair difficult to spot. Trace that line of sight higher to find Venus, the most brilliant planet in the sky. “Venus, you cannot miss,” said Thomas Willmitch, director of the planetarium at Illinois State University. “You could be in a haze under streetlights, and there’s Venus, shining like a beacon to the west.” Even higher up, almost directly overhead, will be Jupiter, sparkling at about one-tenth the brightness of Venus. The string of planets ends in the eastern sky with Mars, easily discernible because of its pinkish tone. The planet is a few weeks past a close encounter with Earth, making it appear bigger than usual. According to Mr. Willmitch, this proximity has also cast the Red Planet in somewhat of a golden hue. The other two planets are too far away to be seen without binoculars or a telescope. Uranus is about two fists west of Jupiter, Mr. Willmitch said, while Neptune is hiding between Venus and the western horizon. But even if you can’t catch them all, Mr. Willmitch advised layering up and looking up anyway. “The sky is really beautiful in winter,” he said. “It’s a great time to go out and do some stargazing.”

It was 45 seconds too late, but the teacher had a plan. A gunman had just barraged her classroom with an AR-15, killing two students and injuring four others before turning to a classroom across the hall. The bullet-riddled walls were crumbling. Ceiling tiles were falling. If the shooter came back to kill more of her students, the teacher decided, she would stand up and shout, “We love you.” The teacher was Ivy Schamis, whose husband would be waiting at home with a Valentine’s Day dinner; whose son was planning a wedding she couldn’t imagine missing; whose curriculum for this class — History of the Holocaust — had just moments earlier stirred a discussion about hate on campuses. We love you. These would surely be her final words, Ms. Schamis thought. She knew her plan was futile — irrational, even. But with no stop-the-bleed kit, no shield, no help, words were all she had to show the children that an adult had put up a fight. The moment never came. The gunman doubled back to the class across the hall, but not to Room 1214. At the command of a SWAT team, Ms. Schamis climbed over bodies and ran with her surviving students down the blood-smeared hallway, out the doors, and into the blinding light. What waited for her there, in the days and months and years ahead, would be a whole new role in the lives of the 30 students who had survived. For them, she would be what she couldn’t be for the two who died: a lifeline. She felt she owed them that. She had been the only adult in the room. Attending to Her Students The morning after the 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., Ms. Schamis rose before dawn and began cleaning her bloodstained suede boots. Seventeen people had been killed, including Nick Dworet and Helena Ramsay, who had been in her class. Some of the surviving students had abandoned their blood- and glass-caked shoes on the school pavement, but Ms. Schamis had the strange feeling she ought to take hers home and wipe them down, over and over, until they came clean. She left the boots out by the closet to dry and then phoned the moving company that was set to relocate her family to a new neighborhood in a few weeks. She no longer had time to pack boxes, she explained to the movers. She needed to attend to her students.Within a few hours, Ms. Schamis was corresponding with her students by text. Today, she adamantly denies that she started the Room 1214 text thread, but everyone else seems to remember it that way. She used it to organize car pools to wakes and funerals, to check in on the wounded and to plan a meet-up at Cold Stone Creamery, just so everyone could be together. When the school reopened two weeks later, Ms. Schamis was there, shuffling between campus buildings with a cart of teaching supplies. The school’s psychological support offerings for students included coloring books and Play-Doh. She found them useless. She arranged to instead have a service dog, Luigi, a golden retriever, join her classes for the rest of the year. When Luigi arrived, tail wagging madly, students from throughout the school came to play with him — including some who had otherwise refused to return to campus. The following fall, Ms. Schamis arranged to have everyone from Room 1214 placed in her study hall for support. Ms. Schamis had known some of the students for only six weeks before the shooting, but she seemed to have a preternatural sense of what each of them needed. Rebecca Bogart, who had been a senior, felt so lost after what she had witnessed that Ms. Schamis encouraged her to apply for a scholarship to go abroad to Ecuador. The physical distance finally gave her mental space from the event. Ally Allen, who had watched the killer approach through a glass door panel, kept waking in the night with tears pouring down her face. When Ms. Schamis dropped a picture of a German shepherd puppy in the Room 1214 group chat — a future service dog, in need of a home — Ally felt deep down the dog was meant to be hers. She received Dakota the morning after the one-year anniversary of the shooting: a new beginning. And Kelly Plaur, who had called 911 four times during the shooting, was at a music festival when the crowd began running from what sounded like gunshots. This time, it was Ms. Schamis she called. Keep calm, the teacher coached. Keep me on the phone, and keep running. Students called and texted her with their grief, their panic attacks, their drug use, their suicidal thoughts. What their own parents could not fully understand — the worst moment of their lives — Ms. Schamis could. One day, she took some of the students to meet with a survivor of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado. His experience of being shot and watching a friend die was remarkably similar to theirs, and Ms. Schamis hoped that his journey toward healing would assure them that together, they could persevere. But weeks later, Ms. Schamis’s phone began buzzing incessantly. It was the Room 1214 text thread. The Columbine survivor had died of an overdose. Leaving Parkland Ms. Schamis committed herself to staying at Marjory Stoneman Douglas until every surviving student from Room 1214 graduated in the spring of 2019. It was not easy. On her commute each morning, she had the same troubling premonition: her car plummeting off the expressway overpass. Finally, her husband, Jeff, suggested a daily ritual. When she approached the bridge, she was to call him to discuss something grounding and ordinary, like what they would have for dinner. At the 2019 graduation ceremony, Ms. Schamis wept: Helena should have received a diploma. Ms. Schamis found Helena’s brother and hugged him, but Helena’s mother stood back. Ms. Schamis wondered what the woman felt seeing the teacher who had been with her daughter. That fall, she took the semester off and then moved to Washington, D.C., forgoing her full pension in search of peace. Washington was where Ms. Schamis truly began to mourn. She joined a two-year waiting list for therapy. She reached out to Ally Allen, whom she had referred to a breeder for a service dog, realizing for the first time she needed one of her own. But two Parkland survivor charities she approached for financial aid to train a dog said they could not help her. As a teacher, she wasn’t entirely surprised: She didn’t recall a school administrator ever once checking in on her. She had never heard any school official admit that she had not received active shooter training, or that her classroom had no stop-the-bleed kit. And she had never been able to reclaim mementos of almost 20 years of teaching that remained inside Room 1214. Ms. Schamis, who has a master’s degree in education and specialized in Holocaust studies, had spent almost her entire career at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She had loved teaching social studies in part because it allowed her to watch students see themselves anew: As they made sense of current events in the context of history, she witnessed their opinions changing and their prejudices being renounced. There was nothing more meaningful to her. But she could not return to another classroom. So she took a job as an office manager at a small private school, accepting a major pay cut to avoid being in a classroom where she would again be responsible for students’ safety. When she started, she discovered the office manager station was in the front foyer of the building — in a way, the first line of defense. ‘Always Available’ The students, too, scattered around the country, but the Room 1214 text thread bound them together. Over time, there were updates: Ally Allen, inspired by Ms. Schamis, was preparing to become a teacher. Hannah Carbocci was pursuing a career in criminal justice and writing her thesis on warning signs in school shooters. Catie Krakow was getting a degree in mental health counseling and shared tips on how the others could care for themselves as another anniversary approached. I hope everyone is doing as well as they could be, wrote Elena Blanco, who had been assigned to the seat behind Nick. You guys are forever family, replied Matt Walker, whose desk had been next to Helena’s. As long as I am breathing, Ms. Schamis told them, I will always be available for you.A year later, soon after the Uvalde, Texas, shooting, Ms. Schamis woke up to a message on the thread that had landed during the night: Uvalde was one too many, a student wrote; he couldn’t take his anguish anymore. Ms. Schamis had taken a suicide prevention course the summer after the massacre. She knew the steps. She called the former student, asking if he had a specific plan to end his life. He did. She kept him engaged with questions — what was something he was looking forward to? — while she sought emergency help for him from five states away. She spent the next five hours in a maze of dead ends. She tried the suicide hotline, but they could not help her, since she was not the person in distress. She did a 40-minute intake call with a Florida behavioral health center, only to learn they did not serve his region. She connected with a mental health hospital, but it turned out to be private. By now, she was weeping. Eventually she reached the instructor of her suicide prevention class from all those years ago, who told her to call the West Palm Beach Police Department and explain that the distressed young man was a survivor of Parkland’s school shooting. The boy ultimately received emergency care and survived. But not before the dispatcher who answered Ms. Schamis’s call admitted that with all the school shootings, she could not specifically recall what happened in Parkland. ‘That’s My Girl.’ Four years after the shooting, a process server arrived at Ms. Schamis’s home with a subpoena calling on her to testify at the killer’s sentencing trial. Ms. Schamis hid. The text thread began to buzz with messages from former students who would also be required to appear. Ms. Schamis reverted to her usual role. I’m with you as you testify, she wrote. Daniela Menescal, who had gone on to study psychology in Boston and still had shrapnel embedded in her leg and back, was distressed about going alone. I’ll ask if I can be with you, Ms. Schamis told Daniela. As the sun rose on a Wednesday morning, she texted the group that it was her turn. Dylan Kraemer, who had already taken the stand, replied fast. You got this! If you look straight when u testify, he wrote, you can’t see the shooter. On the witness stand, Ms. Schamis spoke with the tone of a teacher in front of a class, nodding for emphasis and gesturing around the room. Her gold necklace glimmered under the lights as she described the layout of Room 1214, the lesson she had been teaching, the first deafening blasts.Her eyes trailed over to the defense table. There he was, the man who had stolen Nick’s chance to swim at the Olympics; who had robbed Helena of her plans to attend college in England. The killer kept his head down. The prosecutor, Mike Satz, brought over a photograph, Exhibit 3S, and asked Ms. Schamis to name the subject. “That’s my girl,” she said, putting her hand over her mouth, her voice cracking. “Helena. Helena Ramsay.” Then he brought over another, Exhibit 3R. “And that’s Nicholas Dworet,” she said. “Handsome boy.” Parents in the courtroom shifted in their seats. Others shook their heads. Ms. Schamis looked up to the ceiling, blinking the tears from her eyes, patting her cheeks with a tissue and adjusting her glasses back on her nose where they had been. Hannah Carbocci — watching the trial live from home — knew her teacher wouldn’t see the group chat until later, but she sent an encouraging message anyway: Mrs Schamis you’re a rockstar, she wrote. There were no further questions, the lawyer in the courtroom said. Ms. Schamis climbed down from the stand. That afternoon, she typed a response in the thread: Love you so. A Demolition As the sixth anniversary of the shooting approached last year, Lexi Gendron was struggling. She had tried to go to college, but like many of the others, found herself too preoccupied with classroom seating arrangements to focus. She couldn’t have her back to the door, but facing it meant watching for a killer. After one class, she dropped out, instead working at a casino and a winery before moving to Texas. Now, she was about to start nursing school in hopes of a career in pediatrics — which meant returning to a classroom once again. Just spilling my heart out, she wrote on the thread one night. Lexi had thrown away all her #MSDStrong memorabilia in search of a fresh start in Texas — only to realize that those tangible objects had been her puzzle pieces to a day that had never fully sunk in. I’m so upset with myself for letting that stuff go, she wrote. I can’t believe I did that. Ms. Schamis was the first to reply, offering to send T-shirts, bracelets, buttons and pins. Let me know whatever will make you feel better, she wrote. Love you all, she added.She understood the pull of Parkland. When the school’s 1200 building was set to be demolished, Ms. Schamis had reached out to the school board, desperate to return to her classroom one more time. The jury, bereaved parents, journalists, and even Vice President Kamala Harris were granted permission to enter the building, but Ms. Schamis was not. Instead, prosecutors sent a package to her home in Washington: a five-year-old box of stale Valentine’s Day chocolates from her desk in Room 1214. On the morning the demolition was set to begin, Ms. Schamis heard a radio segment as she drove to her new school in Washington. Bereaved families in Parkland were cathartically hammering off bits of the school building before the team came in to clear it away. Ms. Schamis, shaking, called Jeff. They discussed the weather. Her last mental image of her own classroom comes from a press pool report in which strangers described the artifacts left inside her fourth-period Holocaust class: a 2017-18 school year planner; a whiteboard bearing Ms. Schamis’s learning objective, “to be aware of the world and its surroundings”; bullet strike marks across the desks; and the dried blood of Nick and Helena coating a book titled “Tell Them We Remember.”

Elon Musk caused alarm among federal employees and drew ire over an email sent on Saturday requesting that employees summarize their work for the week, and warning on social media that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation. The email—which boasted the subject line “What did you do last week?”—was sent from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to workers in various government departments, including the FBI, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Veterans Affairs Department, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), according to the New York Times. “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished this week and cc your manager,” the email read, telling employees to respond by midnight on Monday. In a post shared on his social media platform X, Musk, the head of the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said: “Consistent with President Donald Trump's instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” However, there was no mention of resignation in the email sent to employees. TIME has reached out to the White House for comment and clarification. “It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire,” Kelley said. He went on to add that the AFGE would “challenge any unlawful terminations” of federal employees. Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents employees from 37 different departments and offices, said in a statement that the email “should be called out as completely un-American,” according to CNN. “NTEU’s members are professional civil servants and will not back down to these blatant attempts to attack a vital resource for the American public,” she said. Republicans have shown varying levels of support and criticism over Musk’s directive. On Sunday’s episode of ABC’s This Week, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York was asked to share his reaction to the email and Musk’s comment that failing to respond would be tantamount to a resignation. Lawler said: “I don’t know how that’s necessarily feasible. Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under union contract.” He then went on to show his support for Musk’s efforts to downsize the government. “There’s no question, as the Department of Government Efficiency moves ahead, what they are seeking to do is ensure that every agency and department is effectively and efficiently doing their job,” Lawler told host Martha Raddatz. “The task at hand for Elon Musk and DOGE, at the direction of President Trump, is to find efficiencies and savings, and make sure that our federal workforce is doing their jobs." Also appearing on This Week, fellow Republican and the former Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, said that Musk’s survey is a “complete overstep.” “As with everybody’s employment, things vary from week to week,” Christie said. “From a management perspective, you can see what a clown car this is right now.” Meanwhile, during an appearance on CBS' Face the Nation, Utah Republican Senator John Curtis said: "If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it's please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people, real lives, mortgages. It's a false narrative to say we have to cut and we have to be cruel to do it." Appearing on the same show, Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen also shared his perspective. "There's no article in the Constitution that gives Elon Musk that authority," he said. "The actions he's taking are illegal, and we need to shut down this illegal operation." Musk appeared to address the mounting criticism early Sunday, via posts on X. He stated that the email responses should take “less than 5 mins” and that many “good responses” from employees have already been received. “These are the people who should be considered for promotion,” he said. The DOGE leader also called the highly-discussed email “a very basic pulse check.” He then proceeded to conduct a poll on his X account, in which he asked: "Should all federal employees be required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished last week?" The poll received over 1.2 millions responses, with 70.6% voting yes. Musk's actions came soon after President Trump posted on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday that Musk should be “more aggressive” in his efforts to downsize the federal government—a goal that has already led to mass layoffs and the ceasing of many government contracts. According to an NBC report, Trump’s newly-confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel told FBI employees in an email to “pause any responses” to Musk’s directive, expressing that they will go through their own performance review process. “The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” the message from Patel reportedly read. And Patel is seemingly not alone. Per the New York Times, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of the Office Of National Intelligence, instructed officers in the department not to respond to Musk’s email. Elsewhere, an email said to be from the State Department leadership to its employees had a similar message: that leadership would respond to the OPM email on behalf of the department, and they would evaluate their own employees. Department heads from the Pentagon, the IRS, FEMA, and NOAA, are also reportedly seeking guidance before they instruct their employees to respond, according to emails obtained by ABC News.

Tyler Nelson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florida, studies the neurobiology of pain, a choice partly motivated by his own frustrations with a neuromuscular disability. Last October, he applied for a grant at the National Institutes of Health that, if awarded, would support his dream of someday running his own lab. But, earlier in February, he learned that his application, which took six months to pull together, was about to be thrown out. The reason: Dr. Nelson had applied for a version of the award that supports researchers who are historically underrepresented in science, including people with disabilities. That funding avenue now violates President Trump’s executive order banning federal agencies from activities related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, or D.E.I.A. Dr. Nelson was tipped off by an N.I.H. affiliate, but he has received no official notice about the situation. “I’ve tried to call probably 150 times,” he said. Unofficially, he learned that the agency was planning to pull his submission altogether rather than move it to the general award pool for consideration. This has happened with at least one other type of award offered by the agency, which did not respond to a request for comment. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Thanks to the tip, Dr. Nelson was able to withdraw his application and resubmit it to the general award pool before its deadline — but he is unsure if others were so lucky. “What this does is discriminate against people who are underrepresented,” said an N.I.H. reviewer who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. The reviewer added that the evaluation criteria for the general and diversity award pools were the same, with no priority given to either pool. “I can’t stress enough,” the reviewer said, that an undeserving grant “is not going to get funded, whether it’s ‘diversity’ or not.”According to Eve Hill, a civil rights lawyer in Washington, D.C., this may violate certain legal protections for people with disabilities, although there is no precedent in court. “They’ve provided this category to overcome past discrimination,” she said. “By not then considering them in the general award, they are exacerbating that discrimination.” The predicament is one of many ways that accessibility across the sciences is taking a hit from the D.E.I.A. shutdown. Federal agencies, once proponents for increasing opportunities for scientists with disabilities, are now ceasing programs geared toward that goal. Left uncertain is how funding for disability research — from designing accessible health services to building better prosthetics — will be affected by the order. People with disabilities make up more than a quarter of the nation’s population and are considered to be the world’s largest minority. But experts say that, until recently, disability has largely been neglected in discussions about marginalized groups. “Accessibility was always seen as an afterthought,” said Kim Knackstedt, a disability policy consultant in Washington, D.C. “Whether intentional or not, disability has been excluded from a lot of D.E.I. efforts.” That extends to the sciences. The National Science Foundation reported that, in 2021, people with disabilities made up only 3 percent of the STEM work force. Only in 2023 did the N.I.H. designate people with disabilities as a community that experienced health disparities. As the first director of disability policy in the Biden administration, Dr. Knackstedt led a push for accessibility to be at the forefront of diversity, equity and inclusion policy. One outcome of this effort was an executive order issued by President Biden that explicitly named accessibility as an area to strengthen in the federal work force. “That was a win for many of us,” said Bonnielin Swenor, an epidemiologist who founded the Disability Health Research Center at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Swenor, who experienced barriers pursuing a research career because of a visual impairment, added that it was disheartening “to have that progress not just stopped, but rolled back.” Federal science agencies scrambled to comply with the reversal, leaving scientists and disability advocates apprehensive about the future of accessibility research. Earlier this month, the National Science Foundation began flagging grants that contained buzzwords commonly associated with D.E.I.A., including “disability” and “barrier.” An N.S.F. program director, who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation, said that there were “quite a few awards flagged for the word ‘disability,’” including projects to make driving and computing more accessible. The program director added that staff members were unsure if these research activities were banned by the executive order. A spokesman for the N.S.F. did not answer questions sent by The New York Times regarding the eligibility of such awards. Robert Gregg, an engineer at the University of Michigan who designs wearable robots for people with mobility impairments, said he had received notification from the N.S.F. to halt D.E.I.A. activities. But he interpreted that to mean supplemental programs aimed at increasing participation of underrepresented groups in science. “Fundamental research in technology, like robotics and A.I. — my understanding is that that is still perfectly valid and can continue,” he said. But Dr. Gregg also runs clinical trials funded by the N.I.H., and he recently learned that the renewal process for this funding had effectively been frozen again. Scientists with disabilities are also worried about what the clampdown on accessibility will mean for both their own careers and those of the next generation. “Disabled people were barely being included,” said Alyssa Paparella, a graduate student at the Baylor College of Medicine who founded an online movement called #DisabledInSTEM. “Now there’s a huge fear of what’s going to be the future of all of us.” A notice on the N.I.H. website encouraging participation of people with disabilities in the research enterprise has been removed, as has an N.S.F. webpage that listed funding opportunities for scientists with disabilities. Last month, the N.S.F. also indefinitely postponed an engineering workshop to better include people with autism and other neurocognitive differences in the work force. In the geosciences, many degree programs require students to complete weekslong outdoor field camps that can be difficult to navigate with certain disabilities. This led Anita Marshall, a lecturer at the University of Florida, to found GeoSPACE, an N.S.F.-funded camp that incorporates modern technology and can be completed virtually. She did not know if GeoSPACE would be able to continue. “This has really knocked me off my feet,” said Dr. Marshall, who described the project as her pride and joy. “I’m not sure what’s next.” Doubts have sprung up for Dr. Nelson, too. Although he managed to salvage his application for N.I.H. funding, the change has pushed back any clarity about his future in research by at least five months. “It’s a really dismal time in science for trainees,” he said. “I look at the last 15 years, like, ‘Why did I work this underpaid, high-stress job?’ Do I want to do this forever?”

Vice President J.D. Vance arrived at the Dachau concentration camp under low, gray clouds. He climbed out of his armored Suburban SUV and approached the stucco and cement gatehouse, gravel crunching underfoot. Waiting for Vance beneath a low arch, in front of a gate that had the words arbeit macht frei set into its ironwork, was Abba Naor, a survivor of the camp. Over the course of the next 80 minutes, Vance, 40, toured the site with Naor, 97, at his side. In the first room of the memorial’s main exhibition building, a large map displayed the network of Nazi concentration camps that existed at the height of World War II. Gesturing to the map, Naor showed Vance his hometown of Kaunas, Lithuania, and described the route by which he arrived at Dachau in 1944, via the Stutthof concentration camp. On the way, he was separated from his mother and younger brother, who were sent to Auschwitz. “The moment I saw my mother and brother heading toward the train, I realized that was it,” Naor told Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial. “I could say ‘goodbye’ forever.” At Auschwitz, and at other death camps like Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec, 6 million Jews—2 of every 3 in Europe—were killed. In the next room, where arriving prisoners were processed, Naor showed Vance the identity card he had been given when he came to Dachau. Naor was dispatched to perform slave labor in the network of Dachau’s 140 subcamps. Dachau wasn’t created to exterminate Jews: the Nazis opened it in 1933, soon after Hitler took power, and among the first held there were Communists, Social Democrats, and other political opponents. Of the more than 200,000 people who passed through Dachau, more than 40,000 died. “The subcamps, this was our problem,” Naor tells TIME the day after his visit with Vance. “The people couldn’t stay long alive.” But Naor did, surviving a death march until he was finally liberated by American troops after his captors fled. “This is something you never forget,” Naor says. “I told [Vance] it was Japanese Americans who liberated us. He was happy to hear this.” Vance emerged from the camp’s museum with his wife Usha and made his way toward a memorial. A wreath of ever-green branches, accented with white roses, lay propped nearby, with a red, white, and blue ribbon reading "We remember" on one end and "United States of America" on the other. Vance and his wife picked up the wreath and placed it in front of the memorial. Vance prayed briefly and crossed himself. He adjusted the end of the wreath reading we remember so that it was visible. Then he walked to a large wall nearby, which bore the words "Never Again" in several languages. Vance thanked Naor for sharing his story. “I really am really moved by this site,” Vance said to the assembled media and officials of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. “While it is, of course, a place of unspeakable atrocity and terror and evil, it’s very important that it’s here, and it’s very important that those of us who are lucky enough to be alive can walk around, can know what happened here, and commit ourselves to prevent it from happening again.” Vance’s visit to Dachau on Feb. 13 came at a fraught moment for the U.S., for Europe, and for the effort to sustain awareness of the Nazi genocide. As the last survivors die and power passes to leaders who were born decades after the German attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe, the way we talk about the Holocaust is changing. Until recently, there was near consensus that the systematic extermination of 6 million lives was above politics. Now, leaders on the right argue that nationalist parties with neo-Nazi ties are being unfairly excluded from the democratic process. Pro-Palestinian activists have adopted “Never Again” as part of their campaign to hold Israel responsible for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Left and right accuse one another of fueling a rise in antisemitism, incidents of which have doubled in the past year, according to recent studies. Vance’s visit to Germany on the eve of that country’s Feb. 23 elections spotlighted the politicization. The day after he met Abba Naor at Dachau, the Vice President spoke at the Munich Security Conference, delivering an attack on Europe’s postwar approach to fighting a return of Nazism, including limits on free speech and the exclusion of far-right parties from power in a tacit agreement between mainstream parties called the “firewall.” “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters,” Vance told the heads of state, foreign ministers, and intelligence chiefs packed into an ornate hall at the Bayerische Hof hotel. “There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.” Later, the Vice President met with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s nationalist AfD party, some of whose officials have downplayed the Holocaust and embraced Nazi rhetoric, and which has run second in pre-election polling. The U.S. has refrained from attacking the German approach, and the speech shocked European leaders. The next day, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz began his speech to the conference with a retort to Vance. “A mere 20 km separates this conference venue from the National Socialist concentration camp in Dachau,” Scholz said, “where the most unimaginable crimes against humanity were perpetrated by Germans and in Germany’s name.” Preventing it from happening again, as Vance pledged to do at Dachau, Scholz said, cannot be reconciled with support for the AfD. More is at stake than German politics. For 80 years, the democracies that lived through the war shared a commitment to ostracizing extremists. That consensus has been beneficial on both sides of the Atlantic. Economic and political interests are fickle, but shared values like democracy and humanism endure, and they have provided decades of prosperity and peace. “Like the fish swimming in the water, we may no longer be really aware of how important that environment is for us,” says Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who co-led with Republican Senator Lindsey Graham a delegation of American lawmakers to the conference. “But any efforts by the U.S. to degrade that comes with real national-security peril.” While some European diplomats in Munich feared a rising international alliance of far-right parties led by Trump, others say that behind the scenes they received reassurances of continuing American commitment to shared values from Vance. “Every Administration brings new things to the table,” says Kaja Kallas, the E.U.’s top diplomat. “You’re not seeing a fundamental shift in the way America sees its vision for Europe or its relationship with Europe.” Yet Vance is at the vanguard of a movement that views itself as turning the page on the establishment consensus on everything from the U.S. Constitution to international trade to foreign policy. That includes the postwar alliance forged in the fight against Nazism. “The foreign policy establishment is obsessed with World War II historical analogies,” Vance told TIME last spring. “Everything is some fairy tale they tell themselves from the 1930s and 1940s.” The diplomats left Munich. Vance flew back to Washington, where his political ally Elon Musk, an AfD supporter who recently made a gesture during a speech that looked a lot like a Nazi salute, was at work dismantling U.S. aid programs around the world. Naor returned to Dachau. In a room just off the main exhibition space where he and Vance had been four days earlier, he spoke to some 80 students, a laptop open in front of him on a desk. The camp receives around 40 groups a day, and close to 1 million visitors a year. Naor wants to ensure they learn the truth about the Holocaust. “I come almost every day, meet children, and they listen to my story,” he says. Naor is not particularly emotional about the inevitable passing of the generation of survivors. The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site itself will endure, he says: “They will have a place in Dachau where everyone will be able to find my story.” As for the meaning of that story for a new generation of leaders, he says, the Holocaust transcends politics. Says Naor: “Dachau is the truth.” —With reporting by Melissa August/Washington