While unrest and new vaccine restrictions have kept US health agencies in headlines, there’s one vaccine program in particular that Robert F Kennedy Jr, secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently vowed to “fix”, which experts say could further upend the vaccine industry and prevent people experiencing rare side effects from vaccines from getting financial help.
While some changes to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which compensates people who suffer very rare side effects from vaccination, must come from Congress, Kennedy could take several actions to reshape or affect the program’s operations.
Kennedy “seems to be pursuing two opposite theories” on changing VICP, said Anna Kirkland, a professor at the University of Michigan and author of Vaccine Court.
“Make it easier and compensate more, versus blow it all up. And then maybe there’s a third way of, foment skepticism, undercut recommendations,” she said.
The moves represent the latest battle in “the war on vaccines that he’s been waging for decades”, Art Caplan, head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine said. Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist for about two decades, has reported more than $2.4m in income for referring vaccine-related cases to a law firm, for instance.
Making major changes to the program may open up vaccine makers to more litigation, making it difficult for them to keep existing vaccines on the market or to produce new ones.
In 1980, there were 18 companies in the US producing vaccines; a decade later, there were four. Congress passed a law in 1986 leading to the establishment of the VICP to prevent further instability in the vaccine market.
By making changes to the program, Kennedy “can scare the manufacturers”, and the market is “pretty fragile”, said Caplan.
Dorit Reiss, professor of law at University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that “VICP was adopted … because manufacturers were leaving the market over litigation” and that “this would mean manufacturers will pull out of the market and we’ll have less vaccine accessible”.
There aren’t many vaccine makers left in the US. Most vaccines are not very lucrative – either for the manufacturers or the doctors who administer them. Most routine vaccines are covered under the VICP.
Caplan said any vaccines could be vulnerable and these actions have major consequences for uptake even if vaccines remain on the market.
“The biggest problem is still undermining trust in mainstream science,” Caplan said.
Changing or even eliminating the program would also likely make it more difficult for patients to have their cases addressed. Yet a bill that would abolish the VICP entirely, introduced by the representative Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona, is gaining traction in anti-vaccine circles.
Reiss noted that “undoing VICP might mean there’s no vaccines available”.
A website about Gosar’s bill features a quote from Kennedy: “If we want safe and effective vaccines, we need to end the liability shield.”
HHS did not respond to the Guardian’s questions on whether Kennedy knows about this use of his quotation, or what his plan to “fix” the compensation program involves.
There are several actions Kennedy can take to “make vaccine availability much more difficult”, Caplan said.
Kennedy has mentioned two concrete plans: adding discovery to existing compensation claims, and removing the backlog of claims. The program rules already allow discovery at the discretion of the adjudicators, called special masters. Adding special masters could help speed up claim processing, but the number of special masters was set by Congress, not HHS.
In addition, the special masters answer to the US Department of Justice (DoJ), not HHS – though they represent the secretary in claims.
“The first thing [Kennedy] said he was doing was working with Pam Bondi at DoJ,” Kirkland said. “Bondi could certainly direct her own employees to stop contesting a lot of things, and just let as much as possible go through, because they represent the secretary against the petitioners. So they could certainly change the softer ways that they operate, try to be easier, try to be faster.”
In that case, Kennedy could ask the special masters to concede – effectively approving automatically – any claims about, for instance, diagnoses of autism or allergies after vaccination, Reiss said.
One way to argue that a vaccine caused severe side effects under VICP is to present in a causation hearing a preponderance of evidence demonstrating it’s more than 50% likely – a metric known as “50% and a feather” – that the vaccine is the cause of a side effect.
But “there doesn’t have to be existing literature that shows this connection. If you have a credible expert with a convincing theory, that’s enough” under VICP, Reiss said.
Reiss noted that the “program was intentionally and consciously designed to make it easy to compensate”.
“It increases vaccine trust when we have a quick, generous compensation program – when we can tell people: ‘Look, if the worst happens, if you’re the one in the million where things actually go wrong, you can be quickly and generously compensated, whereas if you instead get a vaccine-preventable disease, you don’t have any compensation.’ I think that can help trust. It’s also the right thing to do,” she said.
The other way to settle a claim is the table of injuries, which lists the vaccines included in ACIP [the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices], potential injuries and time periods.
“If the injury occurs within that time, then causation is presumed,” Reiss said.
Kennedy could change the table, adding more or different side effects. This would require publishing public notice and accepting comments. If a new injury is added to the table, cases are allowed to be submitted for the past eight years, rather than the usual three years.
The table is “the one that’s the most straightforwardly under his control”, Kirkland said. The last time a government agency tried to change the table, it failed. “That’s got to mean something,” she added.
If the ACIP no longer recommends a routine vaccine, it may be removed from the table. Claims would then need to go through the regular court system.
There is a higher bar in the regular courts, where claimants have to show fault, demonstrating a defective product or negligence, for instance. The rules of evidence are stricter. Claimants also have to hire a lawyer and pay the lawyer costs and the experts.
With the private US healthcare market, “if you don’t win your case, you’re going to then get stuck with gigantic medical bills”, Caplan said.
In a country like the US, where the burden is on the individual to pay their medical bills, VICP is a safety net for people having medical events after vaccination, he said.
Many of the claims now handled under VICP are for relatively low amounts of money that law firms – especially the rare firms with the expertise to take on large pharmaceutical companies – might not find worthwhile in representing.
There are aspects of VICP that need reform, Reiss said. The program needs more special masters, the caps on payments need to be updated from original levels set in the 1980s, and the statute of limitations should be expanded beyond three years – especially because it is difficult to diagnose side effects in young children in that amount of time, she said.
“The statute of limitations, special masters and caps need to be changed, and there have been efforts to do that,” she said. “They just, I think, didn’t get enough attention, and that’s probably not what he’s focusing on.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/rfk-jr-vaccine-injury-compensation
The Trump administration is drawing up plans to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, according to a White House official, following up on the president’s push to revive a name last used in 1947.
Restoring the discarded name of the government’s largest department could be done by an act of Congress, but the White House is considering other avenues to make the change, according to the official.
Trump has broached the idea repeatedly since taking office. “As Department of War, we won everything. We won everything,” Trump said Monday, referring to wars fought before the creation of the Department of Defense after World War II. “I think we’re going to have to go back to that.”
The Pentagon began developing legislative proposals to make the change in the early weeks of Trump’s second term, according to a former official. One idea was to ask Congress for authority to restore the former name during a national emergency, while also reviving the title of secretary of war for the department’s top civilian official, the former official said.
The old name “has a stronger sound,” Trump said Monday in an Oval Office meeting with South Korean President Lee Jae-myung. He added the change would be made “over the next week or so.”
The structure of the military has evolved considerably since the Department of War was created in 1789, and so has the name for the bureaucracy overseeing it. Initially the Department of War oversaw the Army, while a separate Department of the Navy ran naval forces and the Marines.
After World War II in an effort to increase efficiency, President Harry S. Truman put the armed forces under one organization, initially called the National Military Establishment under a bill passed by Congress in 1947. The legislation merged the Navy and War Departments and the newly independent Air Force into a single organization led by a civilian secretary of defense.
Much of the opposition to the changes arose over ending the Navy’s status as an independent department. “We shall fight on The Hill, in the Senate chamber, and on the White House lawn,” read an inscription on a blackboard of a Navy captain who opposed the new system, according to a December 1948 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article. “We shall never surrender.”
Congress discarded the National Military Establishment in 1949 and renamed it the Department of Defense, giving the cabinet-level secretary more power to oversee the services, including their procurement procedures. That ignited concern that the enhanced powers would make the defense secretary a “military dictator,” according to a July 1949 article in the Los Angeles Daily News.
Trump has said his concern is that the title isn’t bellicose enough. In April, during an Oval Office event, he said that the Defense Secretary used to be known as the War Secretary. “They changed it when we became a little bit politically correct,” he said.
He raised the idea of reviving the title at a NATO summit in The Hague in June: “It used to be called Secretary of War,” Trump said at a gathering of foreign leaders. “Maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weighed in Tuesday during a cabinet meeting, saying Defense Department “just doesn’t sound right.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom took a swipe at President Donald Trump on Friday after an appeals court struck down his sweeping plan on global tariffs.
Why It Matters
The decision undercut a central element of President Trump’s unilateral trade strategy and could potentially raise the prospect of refunds if the tariffs are ultimately struck down.
The ruling set up an anticipated legal fight that could reach the Supreme Court.
What To Know
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that Trump had exceeded his authority by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act IEEPA to declare national emergencies and impose broad import taxes on most trading partners, the Associated Press reports.
The legal challenge centered on two sets of actions: reciprocal tariffs announced on April 2—including up to 50 percent on some goods and a 10 percent baseline on most imports—and earlier tariffs announced February 1 targeting selected imports from Canada, China and Mexico tied to drug and migration concerns.
Newsom’s press office reacted to the ruling on X on Friday, saying, “If it’s a day ending in y, it’s a day Trump is found violating the law!”
The rebuke comes amid weeks of back-and-forths from the pair as Newsom has taken aim at Republicans‘ redistricting efforts and Trump’s implementation of national guard troops in U.S. cities.
Taking to his social media platform Truth Social, reacting to the ruling, the president vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, saying in part that: “ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end. If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country. It would make us financially weak, and we have to be strong. The U.S.A. will no longer tolerate enormous Trade Deficits and unfair Tariffs and Non Tariff Trade Barriers imposed by other Countries, friend or foe, that undermine our Manufacturers, Farmers, and everyone else.”
What People Are Saying
Republicans Against Trump reacting to the president’s vow to appeal to the Supreme Court on X: “Grandpa is mad”
Retired U.S. Air Force General Robert Spalding reacting to Trump’s post on X: “Thank god”
William and Mary Law School Professor Jonathan Adler on X reacting to the ruling: “Whoa”
Justin Wolfers, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, on X: “BOOM. The federal appeals court rules Trump’s tariffs illegal, because they are. There’s no national emergency, and so the power to tariff a country rests with Congress. Trump admin has lost at every stage of the process, but stay tuned for the Supremes to chime in.”
Wolfers in a follow-up post: “This won’t end all tariffs. This ruling applies to tariffs applied to entire countries (which is most of the tariff agenda). The industry-specific tariffs use a different legal authority, and will remain. The White House has other (more limited) tariff powers it’ll dust off.”
What Happens Next
The appeals court did not immediately block the tariffs, however, allotting the Trump Administration until October 14 to appeal the decision.
https://www.newsweek.com/gavin-newsom-mocks-donald-trump-tariff-plan-struck-down-2121980
Trump cabinet officials told a federal appeals court that ruling president’s global tariffs illegal would seriously harm US foreign policy, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning of “dangerous diplomatic embarrassment.”
The administration on Friday filed statements by Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington. The court is expected to decide soon whether President Donald Trump exceeded his authority to impose tariffs under a 1977 emergency powers law.
Bessent, Lutnick and Rubio’s statements were filed in support of a request that any ruling against the administration be immediately put on hold until the US Supreme Court issues a final decision. Failing to do so would have “devastating and dire consequences,” Lutnick said.
During July 31 oral arguments before the Federal Circuit, the administration’s claims of broad tariff power were met with skepticism, suggesting the judges might side with separate challenges filed by a group of small businesses and a coalition of Democratic-led states. Friday’s filing seems to suggest the administration is worried about precisely that outcome.
The cabinet secretaries said that a ruling invalidating tariffs would undo months of negotiations with the European Union, Japan, South Korea and other nations. Bessent said the president’s ability to quickly impose tariffs had prevented other nation’s from responding in kind.
“Suspending the effectiveness of the tariffs would expose the United States to the risk of retaliation by other countries based on a perception that the United States lacks the capacity to respond rapidly to retaliation,” the Treasury secretary said.
Trump’s tariffs were ruled illegal in May by the US Court of International Trade, which found that tariff power belongs to Congress and Trump improperly claimed authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. That decision was put on hold by the Federal Circuit for the appeal, allowing the administration to continue threatening tariffs during the negotiations cited by Bessent, Lutnick and Rubio.
Lutnick said tariffs had brought foreign powers to the negotiating table “in ways that no other president came close to achieving” and told the court that an adverse ruling would “send a signal to the world that the United States lacks the resolve to defend its own economic and national security.”
Rubio said Trump used his IEEPA authority in connection with highly sensitive negotiations to end Russia’s war in Ukraine and claimed there could be “severe consequences for ongoing peace negotiations and human rights abuses” if the court ruled against the administration.
A federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump has delivered a major legal blow to his own administration, ruling that it unlawfully withheld millions of dollars in congressionally approved funds from the National Endowment for Democracy.
The lawsuit
The NED filed suit against the Trump administration, arguing that the funding freeze violated the Administrative Procedure Act. According to the plaintiffs, the suspension created a “devastating” cash flow disaster that forced the organization to lay off 75 percent of its staff and suspend critical global pro-democracy programs.
The ruling
In response, the NED asked for emergency relief through a temporary restraining order and later a preliminary injunction to stop the administration from withholding the rest of its 2025 fiscal year funding. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee from 2017, granted the request. “The defendants have likely unlawfully frozen the Endowment’s funding,” Friedrich wrote in a 15-page decision.
Judge rebukes Trump admin
Friedrich’s ruling emphasized that Congress has authority to approve funding for the NED. At the same time, the organization’s board is responsible for compliance with the NED Act. The executive branch, she wrote, is charged with executing that funding — but instead, the Trump administration withheld it for “impermissible policy reasons.” She concluded, “The defendants have fallen woefully short of providing an ‘annual grant’ that ‘enable[s]’ the Endowment to fulfill its statutory purposes.”
Trump admin’s impact
Friedrich outlined how the funding freeze disrupted NED’s operations and undermined its mission. “It was unable to fund 226 approved grants, 124 grants recommended for approval by the Board, and 53 core institute projects,” she wrote. “These are activities that the Endowment, in consultation with Congress, has determined are ‘important and time-sensitive’ … to fulfilling the Endowment’s mission.” Friedrich concluded that the administration failed to provide the required annual grant to support NED’s obligations.
https://knewz.com/trump-appointed-judge-delivers-legal-blow-to-president
Donald Trump just made a “legally debated” move that will put us on the course toward a shut down next month, according to political experts.
The conservative New York Post reported in a “midnight scoop” that Trump had scrapped $5 billion in foreign aid in a “rare” action called a “pocket rescission.” According to Post reporter Steven Nelson, it is a “legally debated maneuver that hasn’t been used in 48 years.”
“President Trump is moving to cancel nearly $5 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid and peacekeeping spending in a rare ‘pocket rescission,’ The Post has learned — making use of a legally debated maneuver that hasn’t been done in 48 years,” Nelson reported. “Trump on Thursday night notified Congress of his request to cancel the funds, which had been tied up in a court case until earlier in the day.”
The report notes, “A pocket rescission is a request that’s presented to Congress so late in the fiscal year — which ends Sept. 30 — that it’s made regardless of whether Congress acts.”
But reporters were quick to sound an alarm.
Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman flagged the news over night going into Friday, saying, “This would be the first step toward a shutdown next month.”
Co-founder John Bresnahan agreed, writing, “This could very well lead to a shutdown.”
One X user, District of Aluminum, added, “Vainglorious Russ Vought has decided to jeopardize a government shutdown with a $5 Billion ‘Pocket Rescission’ of foreign aid. He should have worked with Congress through appropriations. The villainy lies in his certainty that he alone knows the soul of America.”
https://www.rawstory.com/legally-debated-trump-shutdown-rescission
President Donald Trump has moved to unilaterally cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid authorized by Congress, escalating the fight over who controls the nation’s spending.
In a letter posted online late Thursday, Trump told House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson that he plans to withhold funding for 15 international programs.
The U.S. Constitution grants funding power to Congress, which passes legislation each year to fund government operations.
The White House must secure Congress’ approval if it does not want to spend that money. Congress did this in July when it approved the cancellation of $9 billion in foreign aid and public media funding.
The latest move — known as a “pocket rescission” — bypasses Congress entirely.
Trump budget director Russell Vought has argued that Trump can withhold funds for 45 days, which would run out the clock until the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The White House said the tactic was last used in 1977.
According to a court document filed on Friday, the money at issue was earmarked for foreign aid, United Nations peacekeeping operations, and democracy-promotion efforts overseas. Most of that had been handled by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Trump’s administration has largely dismantled.
“This is going to make our budget situation or liquidity situation that much more challenging, but we will follow up with U.S. authorities to get more details,” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said on Friday.
Democrats say the administration froze more than $425 billion in funding overall.
Most Republican lawmakers have said they support spending cuts in any form even if it erodes Congress’ authority.
But Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who oversees spending legislation as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said the action is illegal.
“Instead of this attempt to undermine the law, the appropriate way is to identify ways to reduce excessive spending through the bipartisan, annual appropriations process,” she said in a statement.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Trump is aiming to force a government shutdown at the end of September by indicating that he is willing to ignore any spending laws passed by Congress.
“Republicans don’t have to be a rubber stamp for this carnage,” Schumer said in a statement.
A federal appeals court on Friday blocked the Trump administration’s plans to end protections for 600,000 people from Venezuela who have had permission to live and work in the United States.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that maintained temporary protected status for Venezuelans while the case proceeded through court.
An email to the Department of Homeland Security for comment was not immediately returned.
The 9th Circuit judges found that plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had no authority to vacate or set aside a prior extension of temporary protected status because the governing statute written by Congress does not permit it. Then-President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration had extended temporary protected status for people from Venezuela.
“In enacting the TPS statute, Congress designed a system of temporary status that was predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics,” Judge Kim Wardlaw, who was nominated by President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, wrote for panel. The other two judges on the panel were also nominated by Democratic presidents.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco found in March that plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their claim that President Donald Trump’s Republican administration overstepped its authority in terminating the protections and were motivated by racial animus in doing so. Chen ordered a freeze on the terminations, but the Supreme Court reversed him without explanation, which is common in emergency appeals.
It is unclear what effect Friday’s ruling will have on the estimated 350,000 Venezuelans in the group of 600,000 whose protections expired in April. Their lawyers say some have already been fired from jobs, detained in immigration jails, separated from their U.S. citizen children and even deported. Protections for the remaining 250,000 Venezuelans are set to expire Sept. 10.
Congress authorized temporary protected status, or TPS, as part of the Immigration Act of 1990. It allows the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security to grant legal immigration status to people fleeing countries experiencing civil strife, environmental disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevent a safe return to that home country.
In ending the protections, Noem said that conditions in Venezuela had improved and that it was not in the U.S. national interest to allow migrants from there to stay on for what is a temporary program.
Millions of Venezuelans have fled political unrest, mass unemployment and hunger. Their country is mired in a prolonged crisis brought on by years of hyperinflation, political corruption, economic mismanagement and an ineffectual government.
Attorneys for the U.S. government argued the Homeland Security secretary’s clear and broad authority to make determinations related to the TPS program were not subject to judicial review. They also denied that Noem’s actions were motivated by racial animus.
