PhilipTheBucket

Instead of doing things like protecting consumers or telecom and media market competition (you know, his purported job), Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent his first few months in office abusing agency authority to threaten companies that refuse to kiss the Trump administration’s ass, or harass telecom companies that aren’t sexist or racist enough for King Trump’s liking.

Carr’s also been busy abusing the FCC merger review process to threaten and harass media companies and journalists for the crime of doing very basic journalism. He’s been particularly focused on attacking CBS (which is eyeing an $8 million merger with Skydance) over some bogus claims that that the network, which has ironically increasingly pandered to Republicans, is being unfair to Republicans.

A bipartisan roster of former FCC Commissioners recently filed a complaint that Carr is attacking journalistic principles and the First Amendment. Carr has also clearly annoyed fellow FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, who had plenty to say this week at a major broadcaster conference:

“There’s been an administration-wide campaign to censor and control,” Gomez said. “The weaponization of the FCC’s licensing authority is just a component of that campaign to censor and control.”

Carr is trying to claim that minor edits for brevity done by CBS to a pre-election Kamala Harris interview violate a longstanding “Broadcast News Distortion” policy that’s almost never enforced by the agency. The policy in question says violations must involve clear distortion of “a significant event and not merely a minor or incidental aspect of the news report.”

That means hard proof of something like a bribe by a company or politicians to change news coverage, and that clearly doesn’t apply here. Trumpism is just making baseless accusations against CBS, knowing that even if CBS isn’t actually found guilty of anything, it allows the vast GOP propaganda machine to generate entire news cycles suggesting that 60 Minutes did something nefarious to Republicans, feeding into the modern right’s vast pseudo-victimization and “censorship” grievance complex.

It’s part of a broader trend where the U.S. press goes out of its way to hire Republicans, coddle Republicans, and normalize unpopular and even dangerous Republican ideals (in a clumsy bid to avoid being falsely accused of “liberal bias”), only to be punished in a very Lando Calrissian deal with the Empire sort of way by intractable and insatiable right wing zealots.

When Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel left the FCC, I noted she couldn’t be bothered to even mention that any of this was problematic in her departure statement. The same goes for soon-to-depart FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks. Generally, many Dem FCC officials have been hesitant to acknowledge reality lest it impact their future revolving door employment opportunities.

So it’s nice to see Gomez leveraging her platform and being blunt about Carr’s bizarre, free speech trampling zealotry:

“They are being used to harass and then bully in order to get broadcasters to alter their editorial decisions in order to provide content that is favorable to this administration or not disfavored by this administration,” Gomez said. “And that’s a warning … That is completely contrary to the freedom of the press. You do not want regulators like me interfering in your journalistic decisions.”

Again, this is all wildly hypocritical for Carr, who spent his term in the first Trump administration by whining that absolutely any effort to protect U.S. consumers or impose oversight on giant terrible telecom monopolies was a grotesque abuse of government power (see: net neutrality, privacy). Now he’s busy abusing FCC power in ways even many of his terrible predecessors believe to be extreme.

Some of the supplemental lawsuits supporting this kayfabe, like the one by the right wing Center For American Rights, simply asked for a light fine and scolding of CBS for its nonexistent offense. Carr’s gone even further, leveraging FCC power to threaten merger transactions and even pull local broadcast licenses (something even his predecessor, Ajit Pai, believed to be a bridge too far).

Traditionally you need a 3-2 voting majority to get much done, which Carr doesn’t have until Congress confirms Republican Olivia Trusty to the commission. Trump is signaling he won’t replace Starks, likely leaving the FCC with a 3-1 voting majority by Spring, at which point Carr can get to work implementing even more unpopular ideas, like gutting all remaining oversight of predatory telecom monopolies, or implementing a new tax on streaming companies so we can give Elon Musk some more subsidies.

Until then (and thereafter) it’s just a game of finding some way to direct something vaguely resembling accountability Carr’s direction, which begins with a recently announced House investigation that might unearth some background on Carr’s many radical and problematic decisions.

Photo: Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg/Getty Images

In theory, the experts at the Elon Musk–helmed Department of Government Efficiency are reviewing federal-government operations and getting rid of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” along with any policies inconsistent with Donald Trump’s directives, in order to reduce federal budget deficits and public borrowing. By now, it’s clear there isn’t much actual “reviewing” going on. Instead, DOGE is following the Silicon Valley model of “moving fast and breaking things,” hoping to strip the bureaucracy down to the studs and then let Trump’s people figure out what’s next. DOGE is relying heavily on stealth and terror to put the fear of God, or of Musk, in nearly every federal employee or contractor, good, bad, brilliant, lazy, or indifferent. There’s no telling how much productive work for the American people is not being performed as the public sector reels from the chaos DOGE has deliberately induced.

So is all this disorder, distraction, and pain worth it? Musk’s own claims of likely DOGE “savings” have steadily dropped from his original (and hallucinatory) $2 trillion estimate to today’s $150 billion. But more important, is the bigger object of slowing the growth of federal spending being achieved? According to a new and damning report from The Wall Street Journal, the answer is an emphatic “no”:

Federal spending is higher since President Trump took office even as the Department of Government Efficiency slashes contracts, cuts jobs and ends diversity programs.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of daily financial statements issued by the Treasury Department found government spending since the inauguration is $154 billion more than in the same period in 2024 during the administration of former President Joe Biden.

That’s partially because one big chunk of federal spending, for interest due on existing debt, obviously can’t be cut. And other big chunks, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, have been placed off-limits to Musk for the time being and have automatic spending escalators built in. Defense spending, another big chunk, is an area in which Team Trump most definitely wants to spend more. But even where DOGE has been very active, the results are not impressive:

Federal salary payments are $2.8 billion higher than a year ago in part because of a Biden-approved 2% pay raise in January. Additionally, thousands of other employees who took buyout offers remain salaried through September.

There is a chance that the buyout offers actually increased salary costs this year, said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the left-of-center Budget Lab at Yale. Some employees who had planned to retire or leave the federal government may have instead accepted a buyout and remained on payroll.

In a section of the report entitled “Small DOGE Wins,” the Journal has some revealing data on how DOGE does wring dollars from the deep state:

Spending by the Transportation Security Administration nearly flatlined for several weeks in February and March. Since Trump took office, the agency spent $22 million less in part by delaying spending on new uniforms, as well as curtailing travel and training costs, said Joe Shuker, a regional vice president for the American Federation of Government Employees TSA Council 100. In March, the Department of Homeland Security canceled the union contract that protected TSA airport security workers’ benefits.

A TSA spokesman said spending is also down because of a pause in paying invoices until a system for reviewing them is in place.

So DOGE disrupted the agency responsible for keeping air travel safe and efficient by (a) abrogating an existing employment contract and (b) not letting TSA pay its bills. That’s what, in practice, “a pause in paying invoices,” which is happening in a lot of other federal agencies too, really means. Uncle Sam is welching on contracts and stiffing creditors. What a great example of genius management! And with such impressive results!

The more we watch DOGE, the clearer it becomes that reduced federal spending and budget deficits aren’t the point (recall that the administration is demanding a $5 trillion increase in the debt limit to accommodate its tax-cut agenda). The object of all this chaos and cruelty is political and cultural, not economic or budgetary. It is to turn the federal government into a terrorized instrument of Trump’s will with salaries and fat federal contracts being freed up to reward MAGA loyalists, who in turn have the opportunity to enjoy the torment and ruination of their presumed enemies in the public sector. Forget about “savings.” As Adam Serwer once said about Trump’s immigration policies, “The cruelty is the point.”

I was recently surprised to learn that my wife is still on Facebook. “I’m not,” she replied. “I’m on Facebook Marketplace.”

Facebook Marketplace has emerged as a major planet within the Facebook universe. Its conceit recalls that of Craigslist, a virtual classifieds page that reached its cultural peak during the early aughts. Accessible and affectless, Craigslist rewards the dogged; successful navigators might refresh a page multiple times a minute. I used it long before the age of smartphones, and bruised my poor mouse smacking those blue links.

Craigslist’s bare aesthetic feels as removed as hieroglyphs from our world of For You feeds and AI slop. But toggle over to the more popular Facebook Marketplace, with its thumbnails of wares photographed in gray basements on cloudy days, and see if the word janky—applied, perhaps proudly, to Craigslist—does not fit. I just did this, and found a post hawking a workout set with “$2,500” crossed out. The new price: $50. I believe neither number. Sponsored posts that don’t sell what’s in the description gum up the feed, just like the spam posts that have eroded Craigslist’s usefulness. Replies are clogged with scammers. One post claimed that the seller had “joined Facebook in 2024”; bless this innocent soul.

According to one report, Facebook Marketplace had grown to 1.2 billion monthly active buyers by 2023, eclipsing eBay; an estimated 16 percent of Facebook’s monthly active users access the platform solely to participate in Marketplace. Some of this is a case of being in the right place at the right time. Four years after the launch of Marketplace, the coronavirus pandemic disrupted supply chains, and then inflation raised prices. As new products became costlier and less available, used ones became more desirable—and, to those who’d once derided the term pre-owned, more acceptable. Meanwhile, Facebook suggests that Marketplace is gaining popularity with younger users, a demographic that has otherwise drifted away from the platform; perhaps its endless scroll of stuff reminds them of the endless scroll on the app that lured them away.

I take occasional breaks from Facebook. (Hold your applause; they don’t last. And as a full-blown trade war looms, I might be a Facebook Marketplace regular soon enough.) Each time I leave, I notice something different. In the past few months of refraining from thumbing through my feed, I have not missed status updates; most of my friends left the platform long ago, and Facebook’s heavily mediated algorithm shows me little from those still there. Instead, what I’ve noticed is the newfound stability of my bank account. Without Facebook, I spend less money, because what my news feed serves me is, and I cannot stress this enough, ads. I consider myself an über-savvy digital operator, yet Facebook’s fundamental calculation still works on me as intended: The more time I spend on the app, the better it knows me, and the better it knows me, the better it can sell me J.Crew corduroys and Walrus Audio delay pedals.

A feed creaking with ads, an infinite garage sale two tabs over: Facebook’s final form is not digital connector, but digital bazaar. The platform hosts not connections, but transactions. In fact, that seems to be the lesson Facebook has been gesturing at this whole time: Connections are transactions. Facebook introduced the “Like” reaction in 2009, and quickly seized on its potential to collect data on users’ preferences, which it then auctioned to advertisers. That addictive affirmation, which kept us refreshing the page to count the “likes” from our friends, masked a market. Click over to Facebook Marketplace, and the mask comes off entirely.

But as powerful as they are, social-media platforms cannot completely control their users’ behavior. To that end, Facebook has become the primary host for the hyperlocal giveaway clusters known as Buy Nothing groups, which embrace a gift-economy ethos and mutual aid—and, tellingly, prohibit advertising goods and services. My wife, a wizardess at these neighborhood exchanges, reports having made a treasury of friends from Buy Nothing interactions—porch pickups lead to playground playdates and blossom from there—but not from Facebook Marketplace. In other words, the groups least reflective of Facebook’s transactional ethos are the most effective at achieving its purported goal of actually linking people. Perhaps connections are not transactions after all.

Facebook promised to connect people as a means of selling them things; now people are giving things away as a means of connecting. This is far from the company’s original imagining of itself as a societal nexus. And it feels a tad subversive: We should be on our own feed less, and on one another’s porches more.

President Volodymyr Zelensky signed decrees imposing new sanctions on pro-Kremlin propagandists and the Russian shadow fleet on April 11.

The decrees put into effect a decision made earlier by Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council. Zelensky teased the sanctions announcement in his evening address on April 10.

The sanctions lists include 71 people and 18 outlets spreading Russian propaganda. Fifty-nine more people are on the list targeting the so-called shadow fleet, a network of ships that Moscow allegedly uses to circumvent Western sanctions and continue exporting oil and gas.

The latter list includes two Chinese captains of the shadow fleet.

"We are increasing pressure on war propagandists and those who justify Russia," Zelensky said, adding that more sanctions are expected soon.

The sanctioned entities are subject to an array of economic and civil penalties, including asset freezes, restrictions on trade operations, prohibitions on property acquisition, licensure terminations, transit bans, and prohibitions on media dissemination, among others.

Among the listed propagandists is Artem Marchevskyi, a Ukrainian media manager who used to work at one of pro-Kremlin oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk's TV channels. Marchevskyi fled Ukraine, while Medvedchuk was arrested and later sent to Russia in a prisoner exchange.

The two were accused by the Czech authorities of running a Moscow-paid propaganda network, Voice of Europe, from Prague. Last spring, the EU sanctioned Marchevskyi, Medvedchuk and the Voice of Europe site, reportedly used by the two men to spread pro-Russian propaganda in Europe.

Zelensky also imposed sanctions against the "Drugaya Ukraina" ("Another Ukraine") political project, led by Medvedchuk in Russia.

Ukraine's sanctions also targeted Russian war propagandists Aleksandr Sladkov, Daniil Bezsonov and Stanislav Smagin. Among the sanctioned propaganda outlets are EurAsia Daily, Readovka, and Pravda.ru.

Yurii Bardash, a Ukraine-born notorious producer and musician who fled to Russia after the outbreak of the full-scale war, is also listed on the decree. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) suspects him of spreading war propaganda and justifying Moscow's aggression.

In late January, Zelensky slapped sanctions on Ukrainian politicians who had spread Russian narratives for years, local media personalities said to be parroting Russian propaganda, and suspected Russian collaborators.

If the United States learned any lesson from HIV, it should have been that negligence can be a death sentence. In the early 1980s, the virus’s ravages were treated as “something that happens over there, only to those people,” Juan Michael Porter II, a health journalist and an HIV activist, told me. But the more the virus and the people it most affected were ignored, the worse the epidemic got.

Reckoning with that reality changed the course of the HIV epidemic—and transformed how American public health was practiced. AIDS forced public-health officials to confront how stigma can speed disease; it emphasized that not just mandated tests and quarantines but education, engagement, and community partnership could dampen transmission. It showed how activism could challenge and advance science—and how focusing care on vulnerable populations, domestically and abroad, was key to stopping a disease’s spread.

The Trump administration is now tearing down that legacy. It has cut funding and programs for HIV research, treatment, and prevention so deeply that “we’re watching the field burn to the ground,” Rebecca Fielding-Miller, a behavioral scientist and an HIV researcher at UC San Diego, told me. In doing so, it is also razing the foundational public-health principles that HIV work laid.

Just six years ago, President Donald Trump’s first administration declared its commitment to end HIV in the U.S. by 2030, by funneling more resources into at-risk communities—an initiative that, over the past few years, has successfully reduced new infections. When reached for comment this week, a White House spokesperson told me that “the fight to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic will continue” and that by centralizing work on HIV/AIDS under the newly created Administration for a Healthy America, the Department of Health and Human Services “will be better positioned to end this epidemic by 2030, which is a priority for this Administration.”

But researchers and activists described the president’s recent actions as a clear about-face—and potentially petty, if not outright vindictive. Trump and his allies have soured on fighting infectious diseases generally—and on the public-health establishment that came up during the peak of the AIDS era and then helped define the nation’s COVID response. Several researchers told me they suspected that the administration’s attacks on infectious-disease research have been partially driven by the president’s distaste for Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, and who was a key political adviser during the pandemic. (Fauci’s primary focus for decades was HIV. He declined to comment for this story.)

Current National Institutes of Health officials have echoed that idea, as they have watched several prominent leaders at NIAID—as well as Fauci’s wife, who until last week served as the agency’s chief of the department of bioethics—be dismissed from the agency. At best, the administration’s actions appear to be motivated by callousness and ignorance; at worst, they’re a kind of calculated enmity that will have widespread collateral damage.

Anthony Fauci examining an early AIDS patient at NIH, 1987 (American Photo Archive / Alamy)

Just months ago, the end of the HIV epidemic in the United States seemed within sight. Infection rates, although still substantial, remained in decline; of those living with the virus, nearly 90 percent knew their HIV status, and more than 75 percent were receiving care. The widespread availability of antiretroviral drugs has turned what was once a death sentence into a survivable chronic condition. Since the 1990s, HIV’s mortality rate has dropped nearly tenfold; for years, people living with HIV have been pursuing relationships with partners who remained HIV negative, and birthing children free of the virus. “I am as old as the nation’s HIV epidemic,” Nina Martinez, who has been living with HIV since 1983, when she acquired the virus through a blood transfusion at six weeks old, told me. “And I am alive after 41 years because I had access to treatment in childhood.” Six years ago, Martinez became the first American with HIV to become a living kidney donor.

Holding down HIV rates, though, has demanded continuous management. Each year, the federal government dedicates more than $28 billion to combatting HIV, the large majority of which goes to care and treatment. Since January, the Trump administration has been dismantling that infrastructure. It has cut funds to hundreds of HIV-related research grants, forced multiple clinical trials focused on HIV to halt, and pulled support back from studies that include LGBTQ populations, still among those hardest hit by the virus. It has all but obliterated the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the largest funder of HIV prevention in the world. It cut billions of dollars from federal grants to states that had been used to track infectious diseases, among other health services. (A federal judge has since temporarily blocked the cuts.)

And last week, as a part of a mass restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services, the administration slashed the U.S. Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy, ousted three top officials at the NIAID (two of them longtime HIV researchers), gutted the CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention, and reassigned the director of the agency’s National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. NIAID, which, under Fauci’s leadership, went from one of the agency’s least well-resourced centers to one of its largest and best funded, has now been stripped of its leaders, cannot fund high-priority research, and is vulnerable to further political attacks. Its future looks fragile, several officials told me. (The White House said that HHS “is consolidating and streamlining operations to provide better service to the American people.” )

If the U.S. and other countries continue to slash HIV funds, the virus could cause up to 10.8 million new infections and nearly 3 million deaths within the next five years, recent estimates suggest; as many as 500,000 of those deaths could be children’s. Cut off from antiretroviral therapy, people living with HIV—even those who have reached undetectable status—can experience rebounds in their viral load within weeks, to levels that make it possible to pass on the pathogen and to eventually develop AIDS. One online tracker has calculated that since the start of the funding freeze on PEPFAR—which supported more than 20 million people living with HIV, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa—more than 30,000 adults, cut off from lifesaving treatment, and 3,000 children, including those newly born to infected mothers, may have died.

Highly effective treatments can decrease the risk that pregnant women living with HIV will pass the virus to their baby to less than 1 percent. Skip drugs for just a few weeks, though, and those rates rise to roughly 30 percent. “You end up with an infected infant and a dead mother, then a dead infant as well,” Lynne Mofenson, a senior HIV technical adviser to the research program at the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, told me. Without treatment, up to half of babies with HIV will die before their second birthday. The Trump administration has issued PEPFAR a limited waiver meant to restart some HIV-preventive services for pregnant women. But that trickle of aid has taken weeks to restart, and many clinics have already closed. And among the federal employees laid off in last week’s purge were teams of experts that managed programs designed to reduce mother-to-child HIV transmission.

Here in the U.S., the immediate toll might be less stark than abroad. But experts still expect domestic HIV-transmission rates to rise under the new administration, which has slashed much of the CDC’s HIV workforce, including entire branches devoted to behavioral and clinical surveillance, research, and prevention communication. At a minimum, those cuts will compromise the nation’s ability to educate the public on preventive behaviors—which “people need in order to keep themselves safe,” Martinez, who is also a former CDC official, told me. And should transmission rates rise in the U.S., a shrunken public-health workforce will be far less equipped to track and contain outbreaks, Joseph Cherabie, the medical director of the St. Louis STI/HIV Prevention Training Center, told me. The Foundation for AIDS Research has estimated that severe cuts to the CDC’s HIV-prevention funding could lead to as many as 14,000 additional AIDS-related deaths in the U.S. by 2030.

Many researchers expect that more assaults on HIV are ahead. Republicans have proposed deep cuts to Medicaid, which helps ensure access to HIV care and treatment. And several experts told me they worry that the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program, a multibillion-dollar initiative that provides medical care, drugs, and support services, could be at risk, too. Scientists also worry that some people may attempt to ration their pills, which will render the regimens less effective and allow the virus the leeway to evolve wide-scale drug resistance, Wafaa El-Sadr, the director of ICAP at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told me. (ICAP, a global health research center, recently received a termination notice from the NIH for a grant that supports several clinical trials studying HIV prevention in New York and Eswatini, a southern African country with the highest HIV burden in the world.)

Some four decades into the fight against AIDS, “we were actually talking about eliminating HIV globally,” Mofenson told me. Now, though, decades’ worth of progress seem to have “just disappeared overnight.” That includes the work the public-health establishment has done to collaborate with affected communities. “It has taken us decades to be able to build the trust,” El-Sadr told me. “Now it’s like we are rolling back the years.”

A crowd of ACT UP activists march down a Manhattan street during the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of the Stonewall Uprising. (Mark Peterson / Corbis / Getty)

Before HIV, America had a strong handle on some of the country’s worst infectious diseases. Public-health officials could deploy vaccines against smallpox, measles, and polio; they could catch and isolate the sick. But AIDS, both chronic and infectious, and concentrated among marginalized populations, defied those strategies.

Before researchers understood how the virus could and could not be transmitted, misinformation fueled discrimination, and vice versa: Children with HIV were barred from schools; rumors swirled that poppers, a party drug, were a root cause of AIDS (a debunked idea that the current secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has nevertheless suggested is true). But pressuring people to hide their infection status—even punishing them for revealing their illness—meant that the virus had more liberty to silently spread. To curtail a disease that was spreading so quickly, and that was so tightly linked to behavior, public-health professionals had to directly seek out partnerships among those most at risk. People who had the virus couldn’t just be treated as transmission “threats”; they needed protection, privacy, and support.

At the same time, communities dealing with AIDS needed the cooperation of public health’s professional class and of the government to advance care and treatment. Activists pressed for attention and investment in stopping the disease: more, larger clinical trials; speedier access to drugs; subsidized medical care. “Without better drugs, we were all gonna die,” the AIDS activist Rebecca Denison said in a recent talk, but “even if better drugs were discovered, those who couldn’t access them would still die.”

The modern architecture of public health has been built on these insights. As Mitchell H. Katz, a former director of San Francisco’s public-health department, wrote in 2005, housing assistance and other support services—crucial components of the HIV response—still prop up programs for people with mental illness or drug addictions. Under pressure from activists, the FDA began to make certain experimental HIV drugs available outside of clinical trials, and sped up their approval pipeline—then later borrowed from that same blueprint when reviewing treatments for Alzheimer’s, cancer, and other diseases. After strides in treating AIDS in the U.S. prompted the country to extend help abroad, the federal government expanded international funding for diseases such as tuberculosis and malaria. HIV was also, perhaps, the 20th century’s starkest reminder of “the importance of engaging with communities, if you’re government, at all levels,” James Curran, an epidemiologist at Emory University, who in 1981 led the CDC task force that investigated the first known cases of AIDS in the U.S, told me. Whenever that public-health tenet has been dismissed, disparities have deepened—including in each of the country’s most recent infectious threats: COVID-19, mpox, H5N1 bird flu, and now even measles.

The Trump administration, however, is abandoning many of these core principles. Since January, its actions—especially those that have disregarded LGBTQ populations and research efforts aimed at improving health equity—seem bent on disenfranchising some of America’s most marginalized groups. And by going after HIV more directly, the administration is cementing its commitment to letting infection spread in the communities that can least afford to be neglected. Although some HIV inequities have lessened, the virus still disproportionately affects certain groups of Americans—among them, transgender women, men who have sex with men, and people of Black and Latino descent.

The strategy of “if we don’t pay attention, it will die off and disappear” has never worked for infectious disease, Porter said. If the Trump administration continues to ignore the reality of infectious disease, and whom it most affects, it will only legitimize stigma, and worsen its effects, Denison said. Many of the same groups most at risk of contracting HIV are also vulnerable to other sexually transmitted infections, and other infectious diseases—tuberculosis, viral hepatitis, even seasonal flus—tend to concentrate among groups that have been historically neglected or distanced from medicine. That the nation’s new leaders are willing to upend HIV’s legacy also signals how little interest they have in sparing any realm of public health from destruction. (AIDS, after all, was—and still is—one of the world’s most devastating and deadly diseases.) As the Trump administration reveals what its priorities are, its leaders are also making clear whom they are willing to sacrifice along the way.