Trump uses ‘contested’ power to cut more funding to HHS

Late Friday night, the Trump administration clawed back nearly $1 billion in spending approved by Congress, targeting several HHS programs focused on immigrants and diversity — including a study on barriers to primary care among people of color, a project on racism in emergency medicine, and money to improve access to transgender care for youth of color in rural areas. The administration cancelled the spending using a "pocket rescission," which the AP described as a "rare and contested power." The Office of Management and Budget said the cuts focused on "the most harmful government spending," but Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) pushed back in a fiery statement, calling the rescission another attempt by OMB to "undermine Congress's Constitutional power of the purse."

Separately, STAT's Elaine Chen examined how Novo Nordisk and other companies have reframed their marketing of GLP-1 medications. Once promoted as tools to address obesity as a medical issue, GLP-1 drugs are increasingly being seen — and marketed — as a way to look and feel better generally, with slogans like "Live lighter" and "summer glow up." Elaine's reporting weaves in how insurance companies' coverage decisions have shaped the way these medicines are used and why the marketing shift is happening.

On the AI-research front, Anthropic announced last week that Claude had found a new enzyme system featuring a series of repeats in DNA, describing it as "a pattern reminiscent of CRISPR" — the laboratory DNA-editing technology adapted from naturally occurring bacterial editing systems. Some experts were disappointed by how Anthropic is marketing the discovery. "Finding a weird cluster of genes and repeats is often the easy part," wrote Lucas Harrington, co-founder of Preventive and Mammoth Biosciences, who earned his Ph.D. in CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna's lab. "The hard part, and where the real discoveries come from, is figuring out what the system actually does." Anthropic itself says it does not yet know the system's function, leaving open the possibility that it amounts to nothing.