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Senate rushes to act on big bill Trump wants passed by July 4

The Senate is scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. Monday to debate the bill, after working over the weekend to get enough Republican votes to proceed to consideration of the measure.

That vote dragged out for three hours on Sunday, as GOP holdout Sens. Thom Tillis, N.C.; Ron Johnson, Wis.; Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Rick Scott, Fla.; Mike Lee, Utah; and Cynthia Lummis, Wyo., heard from President Trump and Vice President Vance, The Associated Press reports.

“Fissures remain within the party over the cuts to social benefit and anti-poverty programs and the bill’s growing price tag,” says The Washington Post.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., says he won't seek reelection after he couldn't get changes to the bill to spare his state’s rural hospitals from funding cuts. 

The American Hospital Association sent a letter to senators Sunday urging them to vote against the bill. “There will be service line reductions and staff reductions, resulting in longer waiting times in emergency departments and for other essential services, and could ultimately lead to facility closures, especially in rural and underserved areas,” the letter says.

Meanwhile, instead of the regular Congressional Budget Office score, senators are assuming that all the expiring tax cuts are extended at no cost. That enables them to claim that the bill doesn’t increase deficits beyond 2034, an assertion that's essential to making the tax cuts permanent under Senate rules, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“In my 33 years here in the United States Senate, things have never — never — worked this way,” says Sen. Patty Murray, the longest-serving Democrat on the Budget Committee.

The latest CBO score of the bill says it would add at least $3.3 trillion to the national debt over a decade, much more than the House version of the bill and way more than fiscal hawks have said they’ll tolerate, according to The New York Times.

Here is what’s currently in the Senate bill, from AP.

Elon Musk panned the Senate’s bill on Saturday, calling it “political suicide for the Republican Party.”

Economic policy professor Robert Reich calls the legislation “the worst bill in history” in his Substack newsletter. 

Reich urges Americans to call their senators, urging them to vote “no” on the bill. The congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121. You can use the same number to call your House member when the bill heads back to the House in the next day or two.

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Good news on renewable energy, stroke treatment, 3D printing

In Fix the News’ 300th edition, the free section includes the decline of global poverty; shifting norms in China and India away from a preference for sons; the FDA’s approval of lab-grown salmon for human consumption.

Among the 33 items for subscribers:

— In the first three months of 2025, renewables generated more than a quarter of all electricity in the United States, reports Green Energy Times, citing data from the Energy Information Administration.

This means the mix of renewables has strengthened its position as the second largest source of electrical generation, behind only natural gas, with the gap closing rapidly, says Green Energy Times.

— Stanford University researchers have developed a new technique called the milli-spinner thrombectomy that could significantly improve success rates in treating strokes, as well as heart attacks, pulmonary embolisms and other clot-related diseases. 

The milli-spinner is an extension of work on millirobots – tiny, origami-based robots built to swim through the body to dispense medicine or assist with diagnostics. The milli-spinner can shrink blood clots without rupturing them. The research is published in the journal Nature.

— MIT engineers have developed a new 3D printing method that generates less waste. The details are published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies.

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RFK Jr.’s new vaccine advisers back flu vaccination, but not shots with rarely used preservative thimerosal

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RFK Jr.’s vaccine panel meets, he says U.S. won’t donate to global vaccination effort

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new vaccine advisers “alarmed" pediatricians on Wednesday by announcing inquiries into some long-settled questions about children’s shots, says The Associated Press.

Also on Wednesday, Kennedy said in an “inflammatory video speech” that the United States won’t contribute to Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, Politico reports. Gavi is a public-private partnership founded in 2000 that helps vaccinate half the world’s children against some of the world’s deadliest diseases, according to the World Health Organization.

Vaccine panel

Opening the first of two days of meetings of Kennedy’s handpicked seven-member panel, committee chairman Martin Kulldorff said he was appointing a work group to evaluate the “cumulative effect” of the children’s vaccine schedule — the list of immunizations given at different times throughout childhood.

Also to be evaluated, he said, is the way two other shots are administered — one that guards against liver-destroying hepatitis B and another that combines chickenpox protection with MMR, the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

The announcement reflected a common message of vaccine skeptics, says AP: that too many shots may overwhelm children’s immune systems or that the ingredients may build up to cause harm. Scientists say those claims have been investigated repeatedly with no signs of concern.

Children now are exposed to fewer antigens — immune-revving components — than their grandparents despite getting more doses, because of improved vaccine technology, says Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. 

The American Academy of Pediatrics announced on Wednesday that it would continue publishing its own vaccine schedule for children but now will do so independently of Kennedy's panel, calling it “no longer a credible process.” 

“The narrative that current vaccine policies are flawed and need ‘fixing’ is a distortion,” says the AAP’s Dr. Sean O’Leary. “These policies have saved trillions of dollars and millions of lives.”

The AAP boycotted the meeting, says Reuters.

Gavi

In his video, Kennedy accused Gavi of neglecting vaccine safety, making questionable recommendations around coronavirus vaccines and silencing dissenting views.

“I call on Gavi today to re-earn the public trust and to justify the $8 billion that America has provided in funding since 2001,” he said. “And I’ll tell you how to start taking vaccine safety seriously: Consider the best science available, even when the science contradicts established paradigms. Until that happens, the United States won’t contribute more to Gavi.”

Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon who led global health work in the Biden administration and served on Gavi’s board, says Kennedy’s remarks are “stunning and calamitous.”

“This establishes an official U.S. position against childhood vaccination and its support,” he says. “In the face of demonstration that vaccines are the single most lifesaving technology for children, over half a century, he is asserting a position that the U.S. will not support vaccination. This is utterly disastrous for children around the world and for public health.”

The United States has been the largest donor to Gavi, whose work is estimated to have saved the lives of 17 million children around the world, says The New York Times.

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Adversaries eager to pick up 'soft power' megaphone the U.S. dropped

The United States was a pioneer of global message management, says The New York Times.

But the Trump administration has gutted the agency overseeing government-funded media outlets like the Voice of America and the Radio Free stations, which reached hundreds of millions of people internationally each week.

And now, many global powers see a better chance to “wage friendship,” as one researcher puts it, without competition from the United States.

For example, Sputnik, a Kremlin-backed media outlet, opened an office in Ethiopia in February and says it's planning more in South Africa and maybe Tanzania, according to the Times. And Turkey’s national public broadcaster, TRT, which delivers online news in dozens of languages, started a broadcast channel in Somalia this spring.

“The soft power suicide of the U.S. will be incomprehensible to future historians who will be dumbfounded in their attempts to explain why the global leader voluntarily wrecked one of its greatest national assets,” wrote Jamie Shea, a British former official at NATO and current senior fellow at Friends of Europe, a think tank.

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Supreme Court lets Trump deport migrants to countries not their own

The court on Monday blocked, at least for now, a lower court order requiring 15 days notice to people the Trump administration is trying to deport to countries other than their own.

The high court's action reverses the lower court's order requiring that people being deported have enough time to contact their lawyers and present evidence that would show their lives would be in danger if they were deported to certain countries.

The Supreme Court’s unsigned order puts that decision on hold while the legal process continues in the lower courts.

"Monday's Supreme Court order is the latest example of its willingness to allow President Trump to accelerate deportations and minimize due process, based on the administration's assertion that it will be irreparably harmed by interventions from the lower courts while the cases are fully litigated through the appeals process — a process likely to take months," says longtime Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg of NPR.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, on behalf of herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson: "The government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone, anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard."

She wrote: "The Due Process Clause represents 'the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.' By rewarding lawlessness, the Court once again undermines that foundational principle."

"Apparently, the Court finds the idea that thousands will suffer violence in farflung locales more palatable than the remote possibility that a District Court exceeded its remedial powers when it ordered the Government to provide notice and process to which the plaintiffs are constitutionally and statutorily entitled," Sotomayor wrote. "That use of discretion is as incomprehensible as it is inexcusable."

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