With one announcement, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek shook up all of Wall Street and Silicon Valley’s conventional wisdom about the future of AI. It should also shake up the climate and energy world. For the last year, analysts have warned that the data centers needed for AI would drive up power demand and, by extension, emissions as utilities build out natural gas infrastructure to help meet demand. The DeepSeek announcement suggests that those assumptions may be wildly off. If the company’s claims are to be believed, AI may ultimately use less power and generate fewer emissions than anticipated. Still, don’t jump for joy just yet. To my mind, the biggest lesson for the climate world from DeepSeek isn’t that AI emissions may be less than anticipated. Instead, DeepSeek shows how little we truly know about what AI means for the future of global emissions. AI will shape the world’s decarbonization trajectory across sectors and geographies, disrupting the very basics of how we understand the future of climate change; the question now is whether we can harness that disruption for the better. “We're just scratching the surface,” says Jason Bordoff, who runs the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University about the implications of AI for emissions. “We're just at inning one of what AI is going to do, but I do have a lot of optimism.” Many in the climate world woke up to AI early last year. Over the course of a few months, power sector experts issued warnings that the U.S. isn’t prepared for the influx of electricity demand from AI as big technology companies raced to deploy data centers to scale their ambitions. A number of studies have found that data centers could account for nearly 10% of electricity demand in the U.S. by 2030, up from 4% in 2023. Many big tech companies have worked to scale clean electricity alongside their data centers—financing the build out of renewable energy and paying to open up dormant nuclear plants, among other things. But utilities have also turned to natural gas to help meet demand. Research released earlier this month by Rystad Energy, an energy research firm, shows that electric utilities in the U.S. have 17.5 GW of new natural gas capacity planned, equivalent to more than eight Hoover Dams, driven in large part by new data centers. All of this means an uptick in emissions and deep concern among climate advocates who worry that the buildout of electricity generation for AI is about to lock the U.S. into a high-carbon future. As concerning as this might be, the projections for short-term electricity demand growth might mask much more challenging risks that AI poses for efforts to tackle climate change. As AI drives new breakthroughs, it will change consumption patterns and economic behavior with the potential to increase emissions. Think of a retailer that uses AI to better tailor recommendations to a consumer, driving purchases (and emissions). Or consider an AI-powered autonomous vehicle that an owner leaves to roam the streets rather than paying for parking. At the most basic level, AI is bound to generate rapid productivity gains and rapid economic growth. That’s a good thing. But it’s also worth remembering that since the Industrial Revolution, rapid economic growth has driven a rise in emissions. More recently, some developed economies have seen a decoupling of growth from emissions, but that has required active effort from policymakers. To avoid an AI-driven surge in emissions may require an active effort this time, too. But AI isn’t all risk. Indeed, it’s very easy to imagine the upsides of AI far outweighing the downsides. Most obviously, as DeepSeek shows, there may be ways to reduce the emissions of AI with chip innovation and language model advances. As the technology improves, efficiencies will inevitably emerge. The data center buildout could also catalyze a much wider deployment of low-carbon energy. Many of the technology companies that are investing in AI have committed to eliminating their carbon footprints. Not only do they put clean electricity on the grid when they build a solar farm or restart a nuclear power plant, but they help pave the way for others. “Governments are starting to realize that if they're going to attract data centers, AI factories, and wider technology companies into their countries, they have to start removing the barriers to renewable energy,” says Mike Hayes, head of climate and decarbonization at KPMG. And then there are all the ways that AI might actually cut emissions. Researchers and experts group the potential benefits into two categories: incremental improvements and game changers. The incremental improvements could be manifold. Think of AI’s ability to better identify sites to locate renewable energy projects, thereby greatly increasing the productivity of renewable energy generation. AI can help track down methane leaks in gas infrastructure. And farmers can use AI to improve crop models, optimizing crop yield and minimizing pollutants. The list goes on and on. With a little consideration, you could probably identify a way to reduce emissions in every sector. It remains difficult to quantify how these incremental improvements all add up, but it’s not hard to imagine that emissions reductions thanks to these developments could easily outweigh even the most dramatic estimates of additional pollution. And then there are the game changers that could, in one blow, completely transform our ability to decarbonize. At the top of that list is nuclear fusion, a process that could generate abundant clean energy by combining atomic nuclei at extremely high temperatures. Already, start-ups are using AI to help optimize their fusion reactor designs and experiments. A fusion breakthrough, supported by AI technologies, could provide a clean alternative to fossil fuels. It could also power large-scale carbon dioxide removal. This would give the world an opportunity to suck carbon out of the atmosphere affordably and pull the planet back from extreme temperature rise that may otherwise already be baked in. “If you think like a venture capital investor, you're betting 1 or 2% of incremental emissions, but what could the payoff potentially be?” asks Cully Cavness, co-founder of Crusoe, an AI infrastructure company. “It could be things like fusion, which could address all the emissions.” For those of us, myself included, who haven’t spent the last decade thinking deeply about AI, watching it emerge at the center of the global economic development story can feel like watching a juggernaut. It came quickly, and it’s hard to predict exactly where it will go next. Even still, it seems all but certain that AI will play a significant role shaping our climate future, far beyond the short-term impact on the power sector. Exactly what that looks like is anyone’s guess.

I could feel the anger in Erin Kyle’s voice when I spoke to her last week. She was in the harried process of moving from a hotel to an apartment in the Marina del Rey section of Los Angeles because her family’s townhouse was destroyed in the Palisades fire. Her daughter, who will be 16 on Friday, was a sophomore at Palisades Charter High School, a beloved local institution of 2,900 students where “about 40 percent of the campus was damaged or destroyed,” the principal told The Los Angeles Times. Pali High is providing virtual instruction while school leaders try to find a temporary location for their students, who come from all over the city. Kyle was especially furious and bereft because her daughter — like other Los Angeles high schoolers affected by the fire — has already had so much disruption to her young life. During Covid, Los Angeles schools stayed closed to in-person instruction longer than those of many other cities across the country. She talked about how much online learning harmed her daughter, a social butterfly, in fifth and sixth grade. “These kids suffered so much during that time period,” she said. I have heard this complaint from many parents over the past few years: California opened up hair salons and restaurants but kept schools closed, and that said everything about how the state values children and families. “Just to have to do this again, it’s terrible,” Kyle said. “I mean, she’s traumatized from what we went through. We were stuck on the road for 45 minutes with fire on both sides of us trying to get out.” Even though her daughter was so happy at Pali — she was a cheerleader and had lots of friends — Kyle decided to enroll her at a public school in Manhattan Beach, where she will start next week. “She needs to be in school in person,” she told me. School disruption from natural disasters is becoming more common because of climate change, and America is not ready for it. In 2023, Jonathan T. Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, told The Times, “Pretty much anywhere in the United States you’re going to have to be more careful about this and perhaps change how we run our schools in order to accommodate climate change.” More than a year later, I don’t think we’ve changed much. I spent the past week talking to parents, teachers and teenagers who experienced major climate-related school disruptions — not just from the fires in California but also from Hurricane Helene, which caused billions of dollars of damage in the Southeast in September and kept some schools closed for weeks.These extreme weather events are fast-moving, and it would have been very difficult to anticipate the extent of their damage. “Having lived in California during drought and then wildfire, having lived in New York and seeing what happens with the hurricanes and things like that along the coast, I was like, maybe the mountains will be better,” said Jim Ray, who grew up in Asheville, N.C., and said he and his family moved back there in part because they thought it would be safer from climate-related disruption. They were not expecting a hundred-year flood triggered by a hurricane. Speaking to recently dislocated parents, it was clear that the disruptions brought on by Covid still loomed large in their minds — a symbol that they, their children and their schools remain an afterthought. In North Carolina, Buncombe County, where Asheville is situated, voted earlier this month to cut nearly $5 million — or 4 percent — from the school budget, despite protests. The local ABC station reported that the chair of the county board of commissioners said she would replenish the school budget once state and federal disaster funding came in. But considering the fact that President Trump proposed potentially eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency when he visited North Carolina last week, arguing that if disaster funding were left to the states, fixing problems would be “a lot less expensive,” it’s not looking good for those coffers to be refilled as much as they need to be. Stephanie Forshee, who lives in Asheville and has two children who are 9 and 6 and who were out of school for a month because of Helene, told me she feels like “the town is in limbo and the news cycle has obviously moved on.” She’s concerned about how the next few years are going to play out because of the school budget cuts and because her county is not a wealthy area to begin with. “Currently, kids don’t seem to be the priority,” she said. Beyond public K-12 budget cuts, preschool and child care programs are possibly more vulnerable in the aftermath of disasters because they’re so sensitive to enrollment changes. According to The Los Angeles Times, more than 300 child care facilities are still closed, and the damage is so extensive, there’s no telling when they might reopen. Furthermore, the child care industry already took a hit during the pandemic, when “California lost about 12 percent of its licensed child care capacity. The industry already struggles with such low profit margins — despite high prices for families — that any additional costs can destabilize providers and lead to closures.” I spoke to Estela Maldonado, who has worked in a variety of roles at Methodist Preschool of Pacific Palisades for 11 years, and whose son also attends the preschool. She told me that the school building burned in the fires and lost half of its student body because so many families were displaced from their homes. The preschool is currently operating out of a temporary location in Santa Monica. Without funding from the students to keep the school afloat, staff members have had their hours cut, and now Maldonado is worried about supporting her family while the school looks for a permanent home. Maldonado would like to see the government supporting early childhood educators financially in this moment of crisis with direct funding to make sure they can make it until they find a more permanent home and recoup their student body, but she is not optimistic. “To be honest, I don’t think any of us are really expecting it,” Maldonado said. But that does not mean she has lost hope. “You won’t find us giving up because it’s a job that we don’t see as a job. We see as the passion of our lives to serve the children and to serve their families,” she added. Despite the heartbreak and despair that came through in these conversations, I was touched by the fierce love that people — especially the kids — had for their school communities. Moksha Bruno and her son Lincoln, a freshman at Pali High, both told me that even though they’re unhappy with virtual learning, Lincoln has no desire to leave Pali. Bruno said she and Lincoln’s father gave him the option to find another school, but “there was no question in his mind he wants to help rebuild it.” She means that literally. Lincoln described the makerspace classes (a modern version of shop class, with woodworking, metalwork and arts and crafts) at Pali. He reached out to his makerspace teacher after the fire and asked if he and his fellow students could help with the rebuilding efforts. Lincoln is also a member of the school’s marching band, and he talked about how they’re working to source instruments and get together this week to practice at a park. “I’m a very social guy, and I need to see my friends and talk and hang out to be happy,” he told me. What heartens Bruno is the number of people who want to help. “People want to help and are willing to give and do whatever it takes,” she said. I agree it is a blessing. I just wish that these individual efforts were better supported by our government. Most critically, we can no longer greet national disasters of this scale as surprises. We can’t GoFundMe our way out of future climate disasters for our children. We need careful planning, and we need to recognize that kids only get one shot at an education — and that there is real mourning when they miss their first homecoming dance or their fifth grade graduation, when they don’t get to experience the normal and imperfect passage of each season. When people lose everything, the communities that parents, teachers and children form around schools are even more vital. Rebuilding these bonds needs to be a national effort, and it should start now.

A month after Kimberly Diei enrolled as a doctor of pharmacy student at the University of Tennessee, the college’s professional conduct committee received an anonymous complaint about her posts on social media. The college reviewed her posts, which included racy rap lyrics and tight dresses, and concluded that they were vulgar and unprofessional. It threatened to expel her. For the last four years, Ms. Diei has been fighting her school in court, arguing that her posts were fun and sex-positive, and unconnected to her status as a student. Now she has won a settlement: On either Wednesday or Thursday, she expects to receive a check for $250,000 — both vindication and relief, she said. She has also graduated from pharmacy school at the university and is now a practicing pharmacist at a Walgreens in Memphis, a job where she says her comfort with her own sexuality has been an asset. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Viagra, that’s a very, very big seller,” she said, chuckling. “Sexual lubricants, condoms, all of that. I can’t say every day somebody’s asking me about sexual products, but it’s fairly frequent across the age range.” Her lawsuit against the university, filed in February 2021, tested the boundaries of free expression for students in the age of social media. With the pro bono help of a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech group, Ms. Diei challenged the university’s authority to punish her for messages posted on her own account, on her own time, and not representing her as a student. The suit argued that the public university had violated her constitutional right of free expression “for no legitimate pedagogical reason.” About a month before she sued, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case of a high school cheerleader in Pennsylvania who was removed from her school’s junior varsity squad after she posted vulgar complaints about not making the varsity team. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor, indicating that courts should be skeptical of schools’ efforts to punish students’ off-campus speech. Ms. Diei’s complaint was initially dismissed by the district court where she filed it. She appealed, and the appellate court found last September that her speech “was clearly protected by the First Amendment,” and permitted the case to go forward. Melissa Tindell, a spokeswoman for the university, said that in line with its general practice, it would not comment on a legal matter. Ms. Diei acknowledges that she is an unlikely poster child for freedom of expression. “I never had a strong interest in politics,” she said in an interview. Even so, she said, she never doubted that she was doing the right thing by refusing to back down. “I knew what was happening was unfair,” she said. “Personally, I never felt shame. But I did not appreciate the fact they were wanting me to feel shame.” She said she is too busy these days to post on social media, and her followers on Instagram have stagnated at around 18,000, about where they were when she got into trouble. She is not sure what she will do with her settlement money: Pay off her student loans, perhaps, or invest in the stock market. But she knows she would like to take a vacation. “Somewhere tropical, with a piña colada in my hand,” she said. “That’s where I see myself in the near future.”

With a now-rescinded White House directive that threw millions of federal dollars for education and research into uncertainty, President Trump and his allies tried to prove they were not bluffing with their campaign threats to target universities. But before President Trump even returned to office, many of the nation’s well-known universities were already preparing to fight back. While few college presidents are especially eager to spar with Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance in public, schools have been marshaling behind-the-scenes counteroffensives against promises of an onslaught of taxes, funding cuts and regulations. Some universities have hired powerhouse Republican lobbying firms. Others are strengthening, or rebuilding, their presences in Washington. Many are quietly tweaking their messaging and policies, hoping to deter policymakers who know it can be good politics to attack higher education — even when they themselves are products of the schools they castigate on cable television. Rutgers University, for example, announced last week that it would cancel a conference on diversity, equity and inclusion, a focus of the new administration. A spokeswoman for the university said the decision, which prompted criticism, was made after many speakers from a federally funded program withdrew from the conference, citing an executive order that targets the topic. “There’s a concern among a lot of campuses,” said Kenneth K. Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown. Some efforts to rehabilitate higher education’s reputation were already in the works, a response to attacks leaders in Congress made after campus protests over the war in Gaza. But now university officials are confronting an administration whose leaders have made clear their contempt for some wings of higher education. Mr. Trump has said schools are dominated by “Marxists, maniacs and lunatics,” and Mr. Vance has called them “insane.” The ominous saber rattling from Mr. Trump and his allies includes threats to endowments, federal research funding, student financial aid, diversity initiatives and the potential deportation of roughly 400,000 undocumented students enrolled in U.S. schools. Several major universities have responded by hiring lobbyists whom Republican leaders might view favorably. Harvard University has turned to a Capitol Hill heavyweight, Ballard Partners, the former firm of both Mr. Trump’s attorney general-designate, Pam Bondi, and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Columbia University signed up with BGR Government Affairs, which counts Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee chairman, among its co-founders. Duke University, which has an in-house government relations effort, brought in DLA Piper as an adviser. One of the firm’s executives is Richard Burr, a Republican who represented North Carolina (where Duke is located) in the Senate for 18 years. The University of Notre Dame recently registered its own lobbyists for the first time since Mr. Trump’s previous term. And Yale University is beginning its own theater of operations in Washington. “The university decided to open an office in Washington, D.C. after conducting benchmarking among peer institutions,” Karen Peart, a Yale spokeswoman, wrote in an email, citing upcoming higher education “issues” on Capitol Hill. The latest activity in Washington came after some other schools ramped up lobbying efforts. As recently as 2022, Washington University in St. Louis paid $50,000 for its lobbying in the capital. The next year, it raised that spending to $250,000. That exploded to $720,000 in 2024, federal records show. A university spokeswoman did not comment.Across the country, university officials and their allies said that they were somewhat more prepared for what to expect under Mr. Trump than they were when he first ascended to power in 2017. Eight years later, they said, they had a better sense of Mr. Trump’s approach to the presidency and have also looked for insights into his administration’s ambitions in the “Project 2025” plan, which is closely linked to many of his appointees. The administration wasted no time in launching those plans with a flurry of executive orders in its first week. One seeks to ban diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, including those run by contractors that receive federal student aid funding — a category that includes virtually every campus. Mr. Trump also ordered federal agencies to compile lists of “nine potential civil compliance investigations” of organizations, including higher-education institutions with endowments over $1 billion. In a public conference call on Monday sponsored by DLA Piper, Mr. Burr said that while the rest of the Trump administration’s higher education policy was not yet entirely clear, “we believe that endowments are a target of revenue, potentially, in a tax bill.” Few topics are as alarming to the leaders of the country’s wealthiest universities. Endowments were largely exempt from taxation for years. But in 2017, during Mr. Trump’s first term, Republicans led a charge to impose a 1.4 percent excise tax on the investment income of large private university endowments. Now there are discussions of raising it to 14 percent, or even 21 percent.As a senator, Mr. Vance was a leading proponent of increasing the endowment tax, proposing an increase to 35 percent for endowments of $10 billion or more. Despite his Yale law degree, funded partly by the university, Mr. Vance has previously called for an “attack” on universities. “Why is it that we allow these massive hedge funds pretending to be universities to enjoy lower tax rates than most of our citizens, people who are struggling to put food on the table?” he said when he was a senator, adding: “It’s insane. It’s unfair.” At least 56 schools were forced to pay the 1.4 percent tax in 2023, totaling more than $380 million, according to an analysis by the National Association of College and University Business Officers. Records show that representatives of major universities were busy presenting their anti-endowment positions on Capitol Hill last year. In the fourth quarter, about 10 top schools, including Stanford and Cornell, lobbied on the tax. They have often built their case around what they contend would be lost if universities had to pay more of the government’s bills: money that they use for research and tuition support, particularly for low-income students. At Wesleyan University, for example, that amounted to $85 million last year that served 1,500 students, according to Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan’s president. “So it’s real money,” Dr. Roth said, adding that a tax increase would make it harder for the university to support students. He added, “It means we will be serving fewer worthy applicants.” Dr. Roth said that Wesleyan would not be hiring outside lobbyists but, instead, would use that money to assist students. Mr. Burr also said universities would be affected if the Trump administration targeted funds for research. He noted that the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had both recently issued directives to suspend public communications, research-grant reviews, travel and training for scientists. On Monday evening, the administration also issued a sweeping pause on trillions in federal grant funding, which a federal judge blocked about 24 hours later — but only after a day of chaos and tumult for campus leaders. Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, which represents more than 1,600 campuses nationwide, called it the “most irresponsible public policy” he had ever witnessed. The organization called for the order’s reversal; the White House backed away from the order on Wednesday. The pause had been designed to give the administration time to determine whether grants align with Mr. Trump’s priorities. In the 2023 fiscal year, universities received close to $60 billion in federal funding for research. Barbara Snyder, the president of the Association of American Universities, which includes dozens of the most prominent schools in the country, noted that the explosion of anger in Washington toward universities was not necessarily new. “It’s more challenging than it was 20 years ago,” she said, but added: “I don’t think this has all been an overnight change.” Even as universities muster defenses, no consensus has emerged among them about how best to approach the second iteration of Mr. Trump’s Washington. “Our institutions,” Ms. Snyder said, “have their own ways of doing these things.”

Stephan Thernstrom, a Harvard history professor and author who, with his wife, the political scientist Abigail Thernstrom, vaulted to national prominence during the 1990s as a leading critic of affirmative action, died on Thursday in Arlington, Va. He was 90. His daughter, the author Melanie Thernstrom, said his death, at a care facility, was from complications of dementia. Professor Thernstrom and his wife were among the earliest, most vociferous and most prolific critics of affirmative action in the 1980s and ’90s, when the policy came under sustained attack from the right. In a stream of opinion essays, magazine articles and books, they argued that the left had embraced a form of racial pessimism that sought to right imbalances through quotas and preferences, rather than do the harder work of education reform. “If you need double standards in admission, should we also have double standards in grades, graduation requirements, even professional accreditation tests such as the bar exam?” Professor Thernstrom asked in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998. “Our point is that racial preferences are a Band-Aid over a cancer.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT He was already a highly regarded historian of social mobility in 1988 when he found himself at the center of one of the first battles of the so-called political correctness wars of the late 1980s and early ’90s. An article in The Harvard Crimson reported that a group of students from one of his courses said he had made “racially insensitive” comments in class, including reading from white plantation owners’ journals. Scandal swirled as outside commentators picked up the story, using it as an example of political correctness run amok. Professor Thernstrom stopped teaching the course and criticized the university for not doing enough to support him. He repeated those allegations to the conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza for his book “Illiberal Education” (1991). The affair made him a darling of the anti-P.C. right. He and his wife began writing for conservative publications like Commentary and The Public Interest, as well as skeptically liberal outlets like The New Republic. The Thernstroms’ 1997 book, “America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible,” was a touchstone of the conservative critique of race relations and higher education in the late 1990s. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT They followed that book with “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning” (2003), which pointed the finger at teachers’ unions, education bureaucracies and, again, racial preferences. They advocated ideas like using vouchers and raising teaching standards to improve educational performance among racial minorities.Many of their arguments became intellectual fuel for the social and education reforms pushed by the George W. Bush administration, including the No Child Left Behind Act. “The structure of American urban education is a fortress against fundamental reform,” the Thernstroms wrote in The Boston Globe in 2003. “The alternative to a radical overhaul is too many Black and Hispanic youngsters continuing to leave high school without the skills and knowledge to do well in life.” Professor Thernstrom’s early work took issue with the notion of the American dream as a rags-to-riches story. His meticulous research showed that moving up the economic ladder was much harder than most people believed — but that it did in fact happen, incrementally and unevenly, with some ethnic groups climbing faster than others. Indeed, he saw himself as an avatar of that American dream. Stephan Albert Thernstrom was born on Nov. 5, 1934, in Port Huron, Mich., and raised in Battle Creek, where his father, Albert, worked for a railroad. His mother, Bernadine (Robbins) Thernstrom, managed the home. He excelled at school, especially in debate, winning a scholarship to study speech at Northwestern University. He graduated with top honors in 1956. He then studied history at Harvard under Oscar Handlin, whose groundbreaking work on the impact of immigration on American history and emphasis on scholarship “from the ground up” greatly shaped Professor Thernstrom’s own work. He received his doctorate in 1964. As a student, Professor Thernstrom identified firmly with the left; he met Abigail Mann at a talk by the progressive journalist I.F. Stone in 1959. They married two months later. Abigail Thernstrom died in 2020 at 83. Along with their daughter, Professor Thernstrom is survived by their son, Samuel, and four grandchildren. Professor Thernstrom’s dissertation, on social mobility in Newburyport, Mass., became his first book, “Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City” (1964). It won the Bancroft Prize, a top honor in history writing.That book and his next, “The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970” (1973), drew on mountains of raw census data to chart changes among everyday Americans over time. That approach to history, which involved formatting stacks of IBM punch cards to run through a mainframe computer, was pioneering at the time. “I wanted to test the Horatio Alger myth,” Professor Thernstrom told The Boston Globe in 1981, “but not on the basis of Andrew Carnegie.” He taught at Harvard and then at Brandeis and the University of California, Los Angeles, before returning to Harvard in 1974. He remained there until taking emeritus status in 2008. He also served as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Though he began his career on the left, by the 1980s Professor Thernstrom was describing himself as a neoconservative and, like his intellectual compatriots, criticizing many liberals for abandoning the principle of colorblind equality that he said underwrote the civil rights achievements of the 1950s and ’60s. “That seemed to me then absolutely the ideal — you admit people without any reference to their race,” he told The New York Times in 1998. “And it still seems to be the ideal to me. What’s different is that it was a radical idea in 1963, and now it’s a so-called conservative idea.” A correction was made on Jan. 29, 2025: An earlier version of this obituary misstated Professor Thernstrom’s middle name. It was Albert, not August.

President Trump signed several executive orders on Wednesday aimed at reshaping American schools, including restricting how racism is taught in classrooms, curbing antisemitism and allowing taxpayer dollars to fund private schools. The orders are designed to advance the Trump administration’s goal of shaking up the nation’s education system, which Mr. Trump has long derided as fostering left-leaning ideologies. One of the orders, titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling,” sought to withhold funding from any schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” It directed agencies to produce an “ending indoctrination strategy” that would focus on uprooting instruction about transgender issues, “white privilege” or “unconscious bias” in schools, and to “prioritize federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” Another laid the foundations to deport international students accused of “antisemitic harassment and violence” in connection to protests over the war in Gaza, part of a wider crackdown on what the administration has deemed antisemitic speech. And a third directed agencies to search for grants and discretionary programs that could be repurposed for use by states to fund voucher programs. Such programs allocate public funds to families to pay for children's education at home or at private and religious schools. The orders on Wednesday unleashed the Education Department to enforce penalties against schools that stray from the themes of “patriotic education” that Mr. Trump has said should be the underpinning of American history classes. And they appeared designed to send schools scrambling to check course catalogs for any content that could invite the government to rescind federal funds. The order related to antisemitism was broad and enlisted many federal agencies in an effort to identify and punish demonstrators who caused disruptions amid nationwide protests against Israel and the war in Gaza — a group that could include students involved in campus protests. It directed the State Department, Education Department and Homeland Security Department to guide colleges to “report activities by alien students and staff” that could be considered antisemitic, so that they could be investigated or deported. Conservative lawmakers have urged universities to crack down on demonstrations against Israel. A report released by House Republicans in December floated the idea of deporting international students who it said expressed support for Hamas, whose attack on Israelis in October 2023 ignited more than a year of war. The order cited existing law, under which the government is authorized to deport a person on a visa who “endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization,” which the report said should include expressing sympathy for Hamas.Under the Biden administration, the Education Department investigated dozens of colleges and public school districts over complaints of antisemitism or anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination. The department consistently sided with complainants, directing colleges to take a firmer stance against antisemitism and other forms of harassment or intimidation on campus. Legal scholars and civil rights groups have regularly warned that federal investigations into schools over antisemitism can have a chilling effect on protected speech. But a growing number of universities, including N.Y.U. and Harvard, have changed their policies to try to respond to criticism and curb protests. Among other policies, some have adopted a definition of antisemitism that considers some criticisms of Israel — such as calling its formation a “racist endeavor” — to be antisemitic. “It’s just crystal clear that they’re targeting people based on their viewpoint and their speech supporting Palestinian rights,” Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney with the group Palestine Legal, said Wednesday after the order was released. “And they’re trying to drag all federal departments into it.” The second order on Wednesday directed the Education Department to end what it said were efforts in American schools to compel children “to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.” It also condemned classroom instruction that it said had led children to “question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed.” The order further warned that K-12 schools that defy the order could face investigation by the Education Department and ultimately a loss of federal funding. The order also revived an effort to rewrite history syllabuses that Mr. Trump pursued during his first term. The effort, known as the 1776 Commission, is a road map created by a group of right-wing Trump allies meant to challenge how slavery is taught and portray left-wing social and political movements as subversive. The order reinstated the commission and directed the Education Department to fund it to the extent that was legal. The bulk of federal funding to public school districts comes through the Title I program, which provides grants that help prop up high-poverty and rural schools in areas with weaker tax bases. That funding is set by Congress, and using it to enforce the president’s orders could present an uphill and possibly unwinnable battle. But the Department also provides a slew of discretionary grants aimed at helping low-income students and minority groups, as well as students with disabilities. Many of those programs are currently under review by the agency to determine whether they defy Mr. Trump’s executive order to rid the government of “diversity, equity and inclusion” and other efforts. Mr. Trump’s orders showed how he plans to leverage the education agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which has wide-ranging power to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws, as he seeks to empower his conservative base. The office is charged with enforcing some of the nation’s bedrock civil rights laws, and can withhold federal money from schools that don’t comply with the administration’s interpretation of them. In the first week of Mr. Trump’s new term, the Education Department has been among the most vocal among federal agencies about its support of his plans to eradicate programs seen as “radical” and “wasteful.” The department has sent a series of releases touting actions it had taken to comply with an earlier order to purge efforts to increase diversity, racial equity in hiring and accessibility across the government. Among other moves to, as it said, “end discrimination based on race and the use of harmful race stereotypes,” it took steps toward firing staff and identified 200 websites that it would take down. And in an extraordinary step, the Education Department announced that the Office for Civil Rights had dismissed pending complaints people had filed to the office over efforts to ban books about race and gender. The office — which under Mr. Trump’s previous administration bolstered its stated mission to be an apolitical “a neutral fact-finder”— announced last week that it had ended what it called “Biden book ban hoax.” The moves have been applauded by right-leaning groups. Nicole Neily, founder and president of Parents Defending Education, called the executive order a “vindication” of parents concerned about the way racism is taught about in schools, and a “tremendous first step in rooting out this poison from the American education system.” The group had filed several complaints to the office under the previous administration alleging that schools’ diversity programs violated federal civil rights laws. An array of organizations slammed the president’s order on classroom instruction on Wednesday, saying that it promotes distorted views of history and condemns practices that do not reflect the reality facing public students. James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, said the executive order misrepresented how American history and civics are being taught. The group’s recent survey of educators “found little evidence that teachers are doing any of the things that are being banned in this executive order,” he said. In a statement on Wednesday, Lambda Legal, an L.G.B.T.Q. legal advocacy organization, described the promotion of patriotic education as “whitewashing the chapters of our nation’s documented history related to race, gender, sexism, homophobia and related injustices.” Mr. Trump’s third order on Wednesday directed agencies, in their review of discretionary spending, to find ways to allocate more federal funds to “expand education freedom” through voucher programs. The order cited a National Assessment of Educational Progress report, also released on Wednesday, as evidence that public schools are failing students and that the government should fund alternative options. The report found that students’ proficiency in reading had floundered. “Too many children do not thrive in their assigned, government-run K-12 school,” the order stated. Expanding school choice programs has been a key conservative education policy for years, and was a main priority of Mr. Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Many states already have policies in place allowing families to home-school their children or enroll them in private or religious institutions using public funds. Proponents say the programs allow parents to find the education options that are best for their children and to opt out of public schools that haven’t served them well. Critics blame the programs for hurting the public school system and diverting badly needed funding to schools that are rarely required to meet state performance standards and often produce poor student achievement. “Instead of stealing taxpayer money to fund private schools, we should focus on public schools,” said Rebecca Pringle, the president of the National Education Association, a teachers’ union.

The tide has largely turned against alcohol. Drinking, at least in moderation, was once seen as a harmless—or even healthy—indulgence that could strengthen your heart and even lengthen your lifespan. But in many scientific circles, consuming virtually any amount of alcohol is now seen as toxic. On Jan. 3, outgoing Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released an advisory warning that alcohol consumption raises the risk of at least seven types of cancer. Shortly afterward, a second federal report warned that people who consume more than nine drinks per week have a one in 100 chance of dying from their habit, due to alcohol’s links to a range of health problems. Increasingly, reports like these conclude there is no safe level of drinking. Even moderate consumption—no more than one alcoholic beverage per day for women, and no more than two per day for men—comes with dangers, and the situation snowballs the more a person sips. But alcohol is an ancient and natural beverage, made by fermenting grains, fruits, or vegetables—all of which are part of a balanced diet in their original forms. So what’s so bad about booze, exactly? It creates a toxic byproduct After you drink any kind of booze—vodka, wine, sake, you name it—enzymes in your body get to work metabolizing the alcohol (chemically known as ethanol) in your system. Most of this process happens in the liver. Ethanol breaks down into a byproduct called acetaldehyde, and that’s where the trouble begins, says Dr. Eden Bernstein, an assistant professor and internal-medicine physician at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “If I were to point to one thing that alcohol does that’s harmful to the body,” Bernstein says, “it would relate to the production of acetaldehyde.” Acetaldehyde is “very toxic to a lot of different tissues,” says Dr. Sarah Wakeman, senior medical director for substance-use disorder at Mass General Brigham. It can damage body parts that are directly involved in alcohol metabolism, such as the liver, pancreas, and brain, as well as DNA itself. Exposure to acetaldehyde can result in DNA damage and mutations that lead to cancer, Bernstein explains. Alcohol-in-the-body Lon Tweeten for TIME; Getty Images Plenty of factors influence how damaging acetaldehyde is to the body, Wakeman says. The most obvious is the amount of alcohol consumed; a heavy drinker will be exposed to more acetaldehyde than a light drinker, leading to more damage. But even two people who drink the same amount may be affected differently, depending on their genes and other risk factors. After ethanol becomes acetaldehyde, it continues breaking down into non-toxic byproducts. But some people’s enzymes work more slowly than others, which leaves them exposed to acetaldehyde and its toxic effects longer, Wakeman says. Damage can also compound if someone has multiple risky habits, like drinking heavily and smoking cigarettes, she adds. Alcohol creates inflammation Drinking alcohol also leads to inflammation in the body. This, too, happens when booze is metabolized. The process creates what’s known as oxidative stress, or an imbalance between different types of molecules that results in inflammation. Alcohol also disrupts the colonies of microbes that live in your mouth, intestines, and gut, Bernstein explains, which can lead to overgrowth of “bad” bacteria. Booze can also damage intestinal cells, allowing pathogens that are normally confined to the GI tract to travel throughout the bloodstream. These effects can result in inflammation-causing immune responses. Read More: 9 Things You Should Do for Your Brain Health Every Day, According to Neurologists “Inflammation can really be an enemy,” Wakeman says. “It can lead to tissue changes over time that can increase the risk for cancer” and other health problems, such as liver scarring known as cirrhosis. Among very heavy drinkers, alcohol metabolism and the resulting inflammation may even contribute to serious brain damage, possibly including shrinkage of the brain or alcohol-induced dementia, Wakeman says. Drinking may affect hormones Drinking-related cancers are typically seen in parts of the body that alcohol directly touches: the mouth, throat, stomach, and so on. But there’s also a “unique relationship around breast cancer risk and alcohol use,” Wakeman says. Read More: Some Early Forms of Breast Cancer May Not Need Treatment Drinking alcohol seems to change the way the body metabolizes estrogen, leading to higher levels of the hormone. This may translate to an increased risk of estrogen-related breast cancers. Researchers are still learning about exactly how alcohol affects hormones, according to the recent Surgeon General report. Alcohol and injury In addition to the complex domino effect that alcohol sets off inside the body, intoxication has “direct effects on health through people falling and crashing cars and getting in all kinds of other accidents,” says William Kerr, scientific director of the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute in California. More than 30% of alcohol-related deaths recorded in the U.S. from 2020 to 2021 were due to acute issues including accidents and injuries. What about those heart benefits? For a long time, researchers thought moderate drinking—that nightly glass of red wine—improved heart health, and some studies continue to suggest that. In contrast to other recent reports on alcohol, a December 2024 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded with “moderate certainty” that moderate drinking is associated with a lower risk of dying from any cause, including cardiovascular disease, compared to never drinking. (It also found, however, that moderate drinking likely raises the risk of some cancers.) But many researchers now believe that design flaws in older studies falsely inflated the cardiovascular benefits of drinking. In some studies that correct for those flaws, booze’s apparent health benefits disappear. “Contrary to popular opinion, alcohol is not good for the heart,” the World Heart Foundation wrote in a 2022 policy brief. Drinking in excess is, in fact, linked to high blood pressure, abnormal heart rhythms, and sometimes even heart failure, according to American Heart Association researchers. Read More: How Stress Affects Your Heart Health Scientists are still learning about the true relationship between drinking and heart health, Wakeman says. But given all of the other known risks, it’s safe to say that “drinking is not a health-promoting activity,” Wakeman says. “No one should fool themselves into thinking that they are starting to drink for their health.” Does that mean everyone should quit drinking immediately? Not necessarily. Like other potential health hazards—such as spending time in the sun or eating not-so-nutritious foods—moderate or light drinking can fit into an otherwise healthy lifestyle, Wakeman says. “It’s not this binary, all or nothing” issue, she says. Ultimately, people must make their own decisions based on their personal risk factors and tolerances, ideally with the help of a trusted health professional.

The flu is always a nasty foe—and it’s particularly vicious this year. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have been at least 12 million flu infections since the fall in the U.S., leading to 160,000 hospitalizations and 6,600 deaths. Dr. Mahesh Polavarapu, medical director of emergency medicine at NewYork-Presbyterian Westchester, has mostly seen influenza A this year, a strain that causes more serious illness than influenza B. “If you’re getting flu-like symptoms, and you’re like, ‘This feels worse than before,’ you're not wrong,” he says. “It’s pretty harsh this year.” Fortunately, there are ways to alleviate at least some of the misery of the flu (besides, of course, getting your annual flu shot before you get sick). Doctors often prescribe Tamiflu, an antiviral that can treat both influenza A and B. Here’s what to know about how it works—and whether it might be right for you. How does Tamiflu work? Most people have flu symptoms for three to seven days. Tamiflu can shorten that by about 24 hours by blocking the virus from replicating in your body. “It’s basically stopping the virus from multiplying or shedding any more than it already has,” Polavarapu says. (Antibiotics, which treat bacterial infections, don’t work against a viral infection like the flu.) Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily Read More: When Should I Go to the Doctor With Cold Symptoms? Tamiflu starts working after the first dose, and within a day or two, it will have built up in your body enough to make a noticeable difference. But timing is crucial—you need to start taking it within 48 hours of symptom onset. “I tell patients to consider it a way to reduce the duration of their symptoms by hopefully a day,” Polavarapu says.Tamiflu (sold under the generic name oseltamivir) can be prescribed as a pill or in liquid form, and most people take 75 mg twice a day for five days, he adds. Who might benefit from taking Tamiflu? You’re most likely to benefit from Tamiflu if you have risk factors that predispose you to serious influenza infection. That includes being 65 or older, under 2, pregnant, or immunocompromised, or having a chronic condition like diabetes, heart disease, or asthma. Research suggests that starting Tamiflu within two days of developing symptoms can reduce the risk of death from a serious case of the flu; it also lowers ICU admission rates among hospitalized adults. Tamiflu is also available to people outside of these higher risk groups. It can be taken by anyone else who’s at least 2 weeks old and who’s had flu symptoms for no more than two days. Is it really worth it just to feel better one day sooner? “Flu makes you feel very crummy, and so a day less is certainly better than a day more,” says Dr. Helen Chu, a professor of medicine, allergy, and infectious diseases at the University of Washington. “But it’s not like a dramatic difference, so I understand why people have reservations about it.” Read More: The Supplements Doctors Actually Think You Should Take Whether it’s right for you comes down to your own priorities. “You have to weigh your pros and cons,” she says. “You have to go pick up the medicine”—an inconvenient task when you’re sick—“and it can make people nauseated.” Yet there’s another, often significant benefit to keep in mind: Tamiflu can be a way to help keep your family members safe. Does Tamiflu make you less contagious? You can still spread the flu to other people while you’re on Tamiflu, Chu says. Scientists aren’t sure exactly how much less contagious it makes you. However, research suggests that the antiviral helps prevent household outbreaks. In one study, it reduced secondary infections among people who lived in the same house by 50% if those who weren’t sick yet started Tamiflu within 24 hours. “You can use it to stop transmission,” Chu says. “If someone in your house has the flu, that person can take it for treatment, but you can also take it to prevent yourself from acquiring the infection.” Can you take Tamiflu to prevent getting the flu? If you haven’t been exposed to the flu and you’re simply desperate to avoid catching it, it doesn’t make sense to take Tamiflu. Your doctor won’t prescribe it for that reason—it’s not like a vitamin you might take in hopes of bolstering immune health. “It's not a preventive measure,” Polavarapu says. However, if you have been exposed to the flu—especially by someone in your household—many doctors will consider prescribing a prophylactic dose to lower your chance of infection. Read More: Is Zinc Good for Colds? Keep in mind, however, that Tamiflu isn’t a guaranteed way to stay healthy, so you still need to practice other healthy behaviors when flu is in your house: washing your hands frequently, wearing a face mask, cleaning high-touch surfaces like doorknobs and light switches. And for family members with the flu, don’t go out unless you absolutely need to: The CDC recommends staying home until your symptoms have been improving and you haven't had a fever for at least 24 hours. How do I know if I need Tamiflu? Thanks to the rise of at-home tests, it’s now easy to confirm whether you have the flu without even leaving your house. “The way the flu works, unlike some other viruses, is that it really hits you like a truck,” Chu says. “You're feeling fine, and then suddenly you just need to crash.” If you’re overcome with the urge to climb into bed, and your entire body hurts, it’s time to test, she says. If it turns out you do in fact have the flu, call your doctor and ask about Tamiflu. “The earlier you start it, the better,” she adds—so don’t spend too much time vacillating about the decision. When is it too late to take Tamiflu? The gold standard is to start Tamiflu within two days of symptom onset; if you’ve been sick longer than that, your doctor probably won’t prescribe it for you. But there are some exceptions. If you’re immunocompromised or so sick that you’re hospitalized with the flu, “then we start it any time,” Chu says. “Most people clear the virus very quickly, but people who have suppressed immune systems are shedding it for much longer, so you can start Tamiflu later on.” Can kids take Tamiflu? Yes—but at a slightly smaller dose than teens and adults. Children who are 2 weeks to 12 years old take a twice-daily dose based on their weight. As the CDC notes, taking Tamiflu curbs the incidence of ear infections in kids with the flu, and may also reduce more serious complications like pneumonia and hospitalization. Read More: What to Do If Your Doctor Doesn’t Take Your Symptoms Seriously Does Tamiflu have any side effects? Tamiflu is “a safe medication,” Polavarapu says, with a track record spanning more than two decades. It was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1999, and the generic version, oseltamivir phosphate, was approved in 2016. Still, like most medications, there’s a risk of side effects. You might feel nauseous and even vomit if you take Tamiflu. Diarrhea is also possible, though less common. “Essentially what I tell patients is that the medicine itself can make you feel kind of crummy, particularly the nausea,” Polavarapu says. Sometimes, if a patient doesn’t tolerate it well, he prescribes anti-nausea medication alongside it. Ideally, he says, treating one set of symptoms won’t cause another set to pop up, but it’s smart to be aware what kind of side effects are possible. “Medications like antivirals aren’t always the answer,” he says. “They’re an answer in a specific time duration,” and for certain people, but they’re not a magic, flu-dissipating bullet—and whether they’re right for you depends on your own unique circumstances.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will face questioning by Senators from both parties on Wednesday and Thursday, in one of the most anticipated confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Administration. If confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy would head the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees many of the country’s health agencies, from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). His nomination is already stirring fierce debate on both sides of the political aisle. Kennedy, 71, is one of Trump’s more controversial Cabinet nominees. Known for his anti-vaccine views, Kennedy has sparked backlash and outrage from the science and medical communities for spreading disinformation. In addition to repeating the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism—despite years of research proving that vaccines are both safe and effective—he has also accused the FDA of “aggressive suppression” of raw milk (the FDA warns that raw milk can have harmful bacteria, such as E. coli and listeria, that can lead to illness and even death). Kennedy has also said he would stop the safe and years-long practice of adding fluoride to the water supply, which, while done to protect oral health, Kennedy claims is tied to issues like IQ loss and bone cancer. Perhaps one area where Kennedy may be able to find bipartisan support is on his goals for food and nutrition. Kennedy, who initially ran as an independent in the 2024 presidential election before endorsing Trump, has promoted a plan to “Make America Healthy Again,” promising to “ban the hundreds of food additives and chemicals that other countries have already prohibited” and saying that he would “change regulations, research topics, and subsidies to reduce the dominance of ultra-processed food.” But while some health experts have been encouraged by Kennedy’s pledge to address this issue, most are alarmed and appalled that Kennedy is being considered to lead HHS. “We shouldn’t even be having this discussion,” says Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who has served on CDC and FDA vaccine advisory committees. “So how do I hope [the hearing] goes? The way I hope this goes is that he was never considered.” Kennedy can only afford to lose three Senate Republican votes if Democrats unanimously oppose his nomination. It’s currently unclear whether any Republicans will vote against him. TIME spoke with public health experts and lawmakers about the biggest issues likely to arise in the hearings this week. Vaccines and viruses Public health experts agree that Kennedy’s false claims about vaccines will be a major focus of the hearings. While Kennedy has said that he and the Trump Administration wouldn’t remove vaccines from the market, he has, for years, spread misinformation about them. In addition to promoting the debunked claim that vaccines are linked to autism, Kennedy falsely labeled the COVID-19 vaccine “the deadliest vaccine ever made,” even though data has proven and health experts have said that COVID-19 vaccines are both safe and effective. In 2021, he filed a petition with the FDA, requesting that the agency revoke its emergency-use authorizations for the COVID-19 vaccines. “The hospitals were overwhelmed with that virus," Offit says. “Our ICU was flooded, and here this man stands up and says, ‘I think that you should remove your authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine.’ I mean, that [vaccine] was a godsend. That was our way out of this pandemic.” “Let’s imagine that there was a bird flu pandemic—how would he handle that? Since he doesn’t believe in vaccines, which, by the way, is not a belief system—it’s an evidence-based system,” Offit says. Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, says he hopes the Senate committees “dig down” on vaccinations—not just asking Kennedy if he would ban certain vaccines, but more specific questions, like: would Kennedy appoint scientists with vaccine research expertise to the CDC vaccine advisory committee? Would he follow or undermine CDC recommendations for childhood vaccination schedules? When he says that he wants to make vaccine research more transparent, what would that look like? Read More: What Donald Trump’s Win Could Mean for Vaccines Kennedy has also suggested that AIDS may not be caused by HIV, despite overwhelming scientific evidence establishing the link between the two. Food and nutrition Kennedy has gained some support for his stance on food and nutrition. Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, acknowledges Kennedy’s controversial statements on vaccines and fluoride in water, but says he hopes that Kennedy’s more contentious comments “may have been partially [or] purposefully inflammatory to raise attention,” and hopes that Kennedy will follow “the evidence and the science” and focus on the issue of nutrition. “There’s broad consensus across the country, across the political spectrum, that our food is making us sick, and that we haven’t been paying nearly enough attention to this,” Mozaffarian says. “RFK Jr. has appropriately highlighted this is a true national crisis requiring urgent attention.” Gostin also anticipates that Kennedy’s comments on food will come up during the hearings, but says he hopes that Senators drill in on their line of questioning. “For me, again, I would ask the hard questions. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, I want to take out toxins and dyes from food,’” Gostin says. “What policies does he really want to put forward, and what is he prepared to do to fight for them?” Read More: The Power RFK Jr. Would Have Over Food Income and debt Kennedy’s financial disclosures could also be a point of discussion during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee. Recent financial disclosure forms filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics reveal that he reported up to $1.2 million in credit card debt, along with mortgages that could total up to $10.5 million. Kennedy's income, however, paints a different picture. Over the past two years, he reported earnings exceeding $12 million, with a significant portion of that coming from his law firm, Kennedy & Madonna LLP, which recently rebranded to Madonna & Madonna LLP. Despite his mounting liabilities, he continued to earn substantial income from referral fees, including nearly $9 million from legal cases. His ongoing involvement in the law firm, particularly cases involving vaccine manufacturers, has prompted Kennedy to vow to sever ties with the firm if confirmed to avoid potential conflicts of interest. What are lawmakers saying? Kennedy’s path to HHS rests with the Republican-controlled Senate, which holds a razor-thin majority. Senators from both parties have been vocal about their concerns, focusing on his past views on vaccines, food safety, and abortion. Some Republicans are demanding that Kennedy clarify his past support for abortion rights, given that he would play a key role in shaping the Trump Administration’s abortion policies if confirmed. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a staunch opponent of abortion, is lobbying against Kennedy’s nomination. Kennedy, like Trump, has flip-flopped on the issue, previously saying he would support a federal ban on abortion after the first trimester of pregnancy, before backtracking and saying that abortion should be legal up until a certain point. Read More: The Powers Trump’s Nominees Will Have Over Abortion Meanwhile, Democrats have questioned Kennedy’s qualifications for the role based on his past statements and unorthodox view of medicine. Democratic lawmakers told TIME that Kennedy’s position on vaccines is a dealbreaker. Asked if anything could change his mind on Kennedy’s nomination, Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, said: “Well, if he were to say I was totally misguided and mistaken on my criticism of vaccines.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that he “cannot recall a nominee more dangerous to the health of Americans than Mr. Kennedy.” “He is neither a doctor, neuroscientist nor a public health expert, nor a policy expert of any kind,” he said. “When I met with him, he would not answer many questions directly, saying he would defer to the president, who also is hardly a leader… Nobody should believe this 11th hour conversion of Mr. Kennedy on vaccines.” Several Democrats declined to say how they will vote on Kennedy. Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who previously said he agreed with some of Kennedy’s positions on food policy—particularly his criticism of how the food industry prioritizes profits over public health—told reporters Monday that he will be tracking the hearings closely this week and confirmed that he spoke with Kennedy about his past debunked claim that vaccines can cause autism. What are public health experts saying? Gostin hopes that, in addition to asking Kennedy about his controversial statements, Senators also question him about the Trump Administration’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, which has drawn sharp criticism from public health experts. Senators may question Kennedy about abortion but Gostin says any line of questioning on the issue will likely be “predictable,” since he expects that Kennedy will repeat Trump’s view that abortion policy should be left up to the states. While some public health experts are uneasy about how the hearings will go, they hope that Senators across the aisle will grill Kennedy on his controversial claims. “For me, the headline should be: do you believe in science, and will HHS policies and guidelines be based on evidence and solely scientific evidence?” Gostin says. “And then secondarily, just under that is: will you rely on career scientists at U.S. public health agencies? Will you rely on their judgment and their research?” “This is the head of HHS—we shouldn’t have to force the head of HHS to embrace science and evidence and the public health mission of the agency,” Gostin says.

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. starts the first of two days of confirmation hearings on Wednesday, it won’t be just a big moment for the former environmental lawyer and presidential candidate. It will also be a breakthrough event for the once-fringe anti-vaccine movement, as Senators weigh allowing one of its most high-profile boosters to head the nation’s top health agency. Vaccines prevent tens of thousands of deaths and millions of cases of disease each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Medical experts are concerned that those gains are in jeopardy. The percentage of Americans who consider childhood vaccines important has declined in the past two decades. According to polling from Gallup released last year, about 40% of Americans say it is extremely important for parents to have their children vaccinated. That is down from 58% in 2019 and 64% in 2001. For decades, Kennedy has been one of the most well-known anti-vaxers in the country, helping spread doubts about their safety in the face of decades of medical data that shows they have saved lives and improved public health. He has also helped legal efforts to tear down vaccine mandates. After a 2015 measles outbreak at Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. showed that a large number of infected patients hadn’t been vaccinated, Kennedy helped lobby to block several state efforts to close loopholes in vaccine requirements. In 2019, Kennedy helped spread anti-vaccine sentiment in Samoa as the Pacific Island nation was in the midst of a deadly measles epidemic. Kennedy will appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday and the health committee on Thursday. Whether or not he is confirmed, those high-profile hearings could amount to an advertisement for the anti-vax movement, some fear. Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the current president and CEO of the health nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives, warns against the dangers of feeding anti-vax sentiment, which he describes as “a matter of life and death.” Branded Content XPRIZE at the 2025 TIME100 Summit: Making the Impossible, Possible By XPRIZE “Undermining confidence in vaccines undermines the health and safety of children and all Americans,” Frieden says. “False and misleading claims about vaccines also divert energy and attention from figuring out what really causes chronic illnesses such as autism.” Trump told voters during the campaign that he would let Kennedy “go wild” on health care. While Kennedy has in recent months talked often about a desire to target ultraprocessed foods, many of his supporters expect him to make major changes to the course of U.S. vaccine policy. Kennedy’s allies have encouraged him to dismantle the government’s panel on vaccine safety and recommendations, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. If confirmed as HHS secretary, Kennedy would be able to stack the panel with vaccine skeptics. Read more: Trump Draws False Link Between Vaccines and Autism in TIME Interview Advocates who have been working to undermine public faith in childhood vaccine requirements for decades have been giddy to find themselves welcomed into Donald Trump’s revamped Republican Party. They even had their own ball last week during Trump’s inauguration festivities. The MAHA Inaugural Ball, using the acronym for Make American Healthy Again, was sponsored by MAHA Action, the political action committee Kennedy started last year after suspending his own fledgling presidential bid and endorsing Trump. Del Bigtree, the founder of the Informed Consent Action Network that promotes allowing parents to opt out of childhood vaccine requirements, described the ball as an “amazing moment” during a broadcast of his online show The HighWire. Bigtree was also a former spokesman for Kennedy’s presidential campaign. “Media covered it, there was Vogue articles and Fox and so many different reporters covered the MAHA ball, very very exciting, and all the who’s who of holistic health and fitness and wellness and nutrition, all in one building—many of the O.G.s of the vaccine risk-awareness movement.” Anti-Vaccine Demonstration On The National Robert F. Kennedy Jr., speaks during an anti-vaccine mandate rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 23, 2022. Eric Lee—Bloomberg via Getty Images In his testimony before his Senate hearing on Wednesday, Kennedy plans to say he’s not “anti-vaccine or anti-industry” and that he’s “pro-safety,” according to Bloomberg News. That is an abrupt shift from his years of public skepticism and advancing the debunked claim that the measles vaccine is linked to autism and the false idea that the polio vaccine is more deadly than polio itself. Kennedy is all but certain to face questioning at his hearings from multiple long-time vaccine supporters, including Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who has promoted vaccines in his home state of Louisiana. Cassidy will have the chance to question Kennedy both days, as he is chairman of the Senate health committee and sits on the finance committee. It is unclear how much Cassidy will focus on vaccines during his questioning, but he said on Fox News Sunday earlier this month that Kennedy was “wrong” on vaccinations.