Trump is seeking to gain approvals for his ballroom in just over two months that have taken other large projects years to complete.

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Over the course of the year, the Trump administration cut billions in funding for the National Institutes of Health, and $500 million worth of mRNA vaccine research. “There has been erosion of trust in science and public health and medicine,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at the Texas Children’s Hospital. “But it’s not random, this occurred deliberately by bad actors for political motivation.” Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the NIH, said he’s never seen anything like this. Cuts to NIH resulted in the cancellation of 383 clinical trials affecting 74,000 trial participants. “Many of these people very serious cancers for which we don't have a great answer, but maybe we're in the middle of discovering one, and then the trial gets stopped, and all that data is lost, and those people are basically left to drift,” Dr. Collins said. “This is immoral to drop somebody into that space.”

President Trump calls America’s affordability crisis a “hoax,” but two recent legal cases that have come to light suggest his administration may be fueling it. Critics say antitrust enforcement has weakened under Trump, resulting in higher prices for millions of Americans consumers. Former FTC chair Lina Khan goes further and accuses the administration of “handing out special favors to corporate lawbreakers.”

What politics, loss, and distance taught me about myself, power, and being human