Like many of you, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks, and especially the last couple of days following Friday’s reentry and splashdown, unexpectedly emotional watching the Artemis II mission and the crew.

It’s hard to fully explain why, but there’s something deeply moving about watching a group of incredibly capable, prepared, thoughtful, emotionally grounded people do something this complex and this high stakes, supported by thousands of equally brilliant people behind the scenes.

Especially right now.

Every time NASA posts a video or I watch a clip from the splashdown, I find myself getting emotional in a way that feels a little disproportionate, until I start to understand what it actually represents.

It’s about watching something go right.

Watching people who are deeply competent, who take their roles seriously, who communicate clearly, and who understand the weight of what they’re doing, execute something extraordinarily complex and do it well.

And I think for a lot of us, that hits differently right now.

There’s something about seeing that level of competence, clarity, and humanity all at once that reminds you what things are supposed to look like when they’re working. And for a moment, it felt like people collectively paused and appreciated science, not as an abstract idea, but as something real, human, and worth investing in.

Maybe even a reminder that expertise and excellence still matter, and that when we prioritize them, things can actually go right.

Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge that, because it’s been a real bright spot.

There has also been a lot happening this week across public health, food policy, and science that is worth paying attention to, and I want to walk through some of that here with a bit more context.

SNAP Cuts and Restrictions Show Early Impacts

Under the Trump administration, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has undergone significant changes, both through direct funding cuts and through new state-level policies that restrict how benefits can be used.

The Big Beautiful Bill cut nearly $186 billion from SNAP and eliminated SNAP-Ed, the program that provided nutrition education to low-income families. A major way those savings are expected to be achieved is through expanded work requirements, which are projected to reduce the number of people receiving benefits.

At the same time, states have been encouraged to pursue SNAP waiver programs that limit what people can purchase with their benefits. This is where the MAHA movement has focused its attention, promoting these restrictions as a way to improve Americans’ diets and a major public health win.

But the evidence behind these policies tells a different story.

We have decades of data showing that SNAP work requirements do not meaningfully increase employment. What they do is make the program harder to navigate, increasing administrative burden and confusion, which leads to eligible people losing benefits.

And when it comes to food restriction waivers, we don’t have strong evidence that they meaningfully improve diet quality. What we do know is that they make the program more complex, less efficient, and harder for both families and retailers to navigate.

Now, we’re starting to see the effects of these policies in real time.

• In Arizona, SNAP participation has dropped by 47% since the cuts took effect, meaning 424,000 people, including 181,000 children, no longer receive food assistance benefits.

• New research published this week found that the SNAP work requirements included in the One Big Beautiful Bill do not increase employment, but instead reduce participation by adding administrative barriers and confusion.

• In Texas, where SNAP food restriction waivers went into effect on April 1, families report confusion, stigma, and concerns about losing access to affordable foods, including items used to manage health conditions like hypoglycemia.

• In Montana, the governor has promoted SNAP restrictions as a way to reduce “junk food” consumption, but there is little evidence that these policies meaningfully change dietary patterns, and retailers are already facing new administrative burdens as a result.

We know from decades of data, as well as emerging evidence now, that a drop in participation does not mean a drop in need. It usually means people are getting pushed out of the program. When you take a program that is highly effective at reducing food insecurity and make it harder to access and more complicated to use, a rise in food insecurity is expected to follow.

CDC Delays COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness Report

A CDC report showing that COVID-19 vaccine significantly reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults last year has not been published despite being scheduled for release in the CDC Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on March 19.

The report found that COVID-19 vaccination reduced the risk of emergency department and urgent care visits by 50% and COVID-realted hospitalizations by 55% among healthy adults. CDC career scientists and other experts have raised concerns that the report is being delayed because its findings contradict RFK Jr. ‘s public anti-vaccine stance.

The acting CDC director, Jay Bhattacharya, has said there are “methodological concerns.” But this study already cleared the CDC’s internal scientific review process and used the same approach that’s been used in vaccine effectiveness research for years, including studies published in major journals like The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine.

This delay raises real concerns about scientific independence and whether these agencies can still do what they’re meant to do, which is to transparently inform public health decisions.

The U.S. Forest Service is Being Restructured

The Forest Service is undergoing a major restructuring that will close all nine of its regional offices and relocate its headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Forest Service manages about 193 million acres of public land across 174 national forests and grasslands. That’s one of the largest public land systems in the country, significantly larger than the entire national park system.

The reorganization would halt much of the agency’s experimental forest research and close research stations, which are critical for understanding wildfire behavior, forest health, drought, and climate impacts. All of this is happening within an agency that is already understaffed and stretched thin.

And it’s happening at a time when those functions, according to experts, are becoming even more important. This past winter was the warmest on record, with below-average snowpack in many regions, conditions that are strongly associated with increased wildfire risk heading into summer and fall.

So we are reducing the infrastructure, staffing, and research capacity of the agency responsible for managing wildfire risk, while entering a period where that risk is expected to increase.

On top of that, there are legal questions being raised, as some advocates argue that parts of this restructuring may violate provisions in the FY 2026 budget that explicitly prohibited certain changes.

The White House’s newly released proposed FY 2027 budget, meanwhile, emphasizes the need to “combat the wildfire crisis.” But if wildfire mitigation is actually a priority, dismantling core parts of the agency responsible for it is a very strange way to approach that problem.

CDC’s Vaccine Panel Gets New Rules

RFK Jr. signed a new charter this week for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the group that makes recommendations to the CDC on vaccine use in the United States, including the childhood vaccine schedule and which vaccines are covered by insurance.

Last year, RFK Jr. attempted to replace all 17 members of ACIP with a new group that included several vaccine-skeptical figures. A federal judge blocked that effort, ruling that the panel had been created unlawfully and raising concerns about whether the appointees met the qualifications required for the role.

ACIP charters are typically renewed every two years, but this version includes some notable changes.

It expands the scope of the committee beyond its traditional role in disease prevention to include advising on vaccine safety, “serious vaccine injury,” evaluation of the childhood vaccine schedule, and vaccine ingredients.

It also broadens who can participate. The updated charter expands the types of expertise considered eligible for membership and allows outside organizations, including those with a history of vaccine skepticism, to serve as nonvoting liaisons.

It’s hard to view this as anything other than an attempt by RFK Jr. to work around the earlier ruling and rebuild the committee under a different set of rules. The earlier version was blocked in part because of concerns about qualifications and vetting. By broadening the types of expertise allowed and expanding the committee’s scope, it becomes much easier to appoint people who wouldn’t have qualified under the previous charter.

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RFK Jr. Launches a Podcast

Ahead of the midterms, our HHS Secretary is launching a podcast called The Secretary Kennedy Podcast, which the department says will promote “radical transparency” and expand the reach of the MAHA agenda. According to RFK Jr., it will focus on exposing failures in public health, government corruption, and chronic disease.

I did a video response to the announcement that you can see here.

His conspiratorial, government corruption framing is, of course, not new. It’s the same set of ideas that built the MAHA movement in the first place. What is different now is that this is coming from someone currently running the Department of Health and Human Services.

And that context matters, because the administration is now well into its second year, which means there is an actual policy record to evaluate alongside the messaging. And that record does not match its stated goal of improving American health. Even if you ignore the dozens of actions negatively impacting public health, science, and health policy over the last 15 months, as I outlined here, they haven’t actually done much on MAHA’s own pet priorities either.

Not one synthetic food dye has been banned (because banning them requires evidence). Seed oils are still in infant formula (because they are safe and provide essential fatty acids to infants). Glyphosate regulations have expanded, not tightened (and RFK Jr. publicly supported that move). There is still no federal definition of ultra-processed food (which is necessary if you want to actually regulate it). And environmental rollbacks are on track to increase heavy metals and pollutants in our air and water.

As midterms approach, and reporting shows they’re starting to lose support within the MAHA movement, this reads as a shift back to what has always worked for them: focusing on corruption, conspiracies, toxins, and distrust in institutions, and tapping into fear and anxiety instead of being evaluated on their actual record.

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