President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed vandals for damaging the new blue lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is now peeling, as well as for algae in the water. But the administration has not provided evidence to back up the president’s claims. Experts say the pool’s ills have a variety of plausible explanations that do not involve intentional harm.

Installing linings on pools and making sure they properly adhere is challenging, experts in pools and waterproof coatings have told news outlets, and improper surface prep or water intrusion can cause peeling, they said. Meanwhile, algae would be expected in a shallow, still, unshaded pool fed by nutrient-rich water that had been painted dark blue, Steven Chapra, a water quality modeler and professor emeritus at Tufts University, told us.

Despite these competing explanations, Trump has repeatedly asserted that vandals are to blame. “You know, we have 100- … I think 290-, 300-foot slit right through it,” Trump said at a June 22 press event, after news reports surfaced of blue pieces of the pool’s lining separating from the bottom. “Probably a box cutter or a knife of some kind.”

He claimed at the same event that someone may have put fertilizer in the pool, part of a series of claims that someone had poured in some substance or chemicals. “They did something to create the algae,” he said.

Trump’s comments on vandals cutting the pool’s coating with a knife echoed theoretical statements he had made on May 4, before reports of damage to the pool. “It’s very strong. You couldn’t — if you had a knife — I don’t want to give anybody ideas,” he said, referring to the pool’s new coating. “If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it, so strong, so powerful.”

The president has since spoken or posted about alleged cuts in the pool at least daily, with the “gash” — or “numerous slashes” — growing to cover a length of 350 feet and the possible implements used including “a very sharp knife or razors.”

On June 24, Trump posted a photo of the dark blue bottom of the empty pool, stating, “This is the hard rubber surface — No Paint — Before the Vandals cut and pulled it apart!” On June 25, he specified that the vandals had gone to the “bottom” and “started ripping it up,” as well as cut “this very expensive stuff” at the “side of the pool right at water level.”

The White House replied to our request for more information on the vandalism with a June 25 press release claiming to have surveillance video, previously shared by the Department of the Interior with Fox News, of someone vandalizing the pool. The June 19 video, taken in the middle of the afternoon after news had broken of the damage to the pool, appears to show a person reaching into the water and pulling something out. However, it is unclear whether this individual was engaged in vandalism. The White House has not provided evidence of people causing long gashes or a series of gashes. The press release also included links to images of damage to the pool, including a jagged line on the bottom of the pool posted by a TMZ DC reporter on X, but it was unclear what had caused it. Nor has the administration provided evidence someone illicitly dumped something in the pool to cause algae growth.

The White House press release linked to a court filing from Frank Lands, deputy director of operations for the National Park Service, stating that police on June 9 responded to an “NPS report of damage to the reflecting pool, including a caulk over the foam sealant that was cut with a sharp knife or razor and destruction of delaminating surface material.” Lands also said that “approximately 70 fence post tops were thrown into the pool.” It is unclear who is alleged to have made these cuts or thrown the fence post tops.

The Department of the Interior sent us a link to one of its X posts, which said, “Six individuals have been arrested for vandalism at the Reflecting Pool.” The post added that seven others were given federal citations and that 17 police reports for vandalism had been filed. The department would not give us further information about these arrests and citations, including any details of the individuals’ alleged infractions. Nor did they provide the names of the alleged vandals. The White House press release said that there had been at least seven arrests, seven federal citations and 18 police reports filed but again did not provide more details, other than to link to multiple news stories mentioning an Olympic canoeist who has disputed that he vandalized the pool. Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department referred us to the NPS.

Brady McCarron, a spokesperson for the United States Marshals Service, told us that as of the morning of June 24, “we are showing 5 arrests” listed as being by the DC Safe Task Force, including one on June 19 for “vandalism (attempted destruction of property/defacing public property)” and four on June 20 for “Destruction of government property.” He did not provide further details on these arrests. The DC Safe Task Force is a multi-agency federal body created by Trump “to surge law enforcement presence in public spaces, strictly enforce ‘quality-of-life’ laws, and maximize federal immigration enforcement within the District.”

Meanwhile, experts in pools, waterproof coatings and algae have said that there are many possible causes for the reflecting pool’s issues that have nothing to do with vandalism. Below, we will discuss competing explanations.

Peeling Problems

Despite Trump’s claims of vandalism to the more than 100-year-old reflecting pool, it’s not clear what caused damage to its new lining. When pressed on June 22 on whether he had proof that vandals had made cuts in the pool, the president seemed to suggest the cuts themselves were the proof.

“Well, let’s put it this way. When you have a 350 — I think it’s 350, not 250 — a 350-foot slit from one end to the other, you think that’s proof? You think that’s proof?” Trump said to a reporter. He later suggested that there was photographic evidence, but when a reporter asked the president to release those photos Trump said, “You’ll see it in court.” He also suggested contacting the Interior and Parks departments.

What is known is that the Department of the Interior awarded a no-bid contract on April 3 to Atlantic Industrial Coatings to paint the reflecting pool, with supplemental agreements issued through June 15 to total $14.7 million. The agency justified not getting bids from various contractors by saying the project was urgent and needed to be completed by July 4.

The plan was to install an epoxy primer on top of the pool’s concrete slabs, followed by a polyurea lining tinted “American flag blue,” Superintendent of National Mall and Memorial Parks Kevin Griess explained in May 18 court filings.

“The rehabilitation incorporated a combination of repair materials, epoxy priming technology, elastomeric waterproofing systems, and protective finish coatings,” a June 18 press release from Rhino Linings, the company whose products were used for the new liner, said.

The idea of installing the lining over the full bottom of the pool was first suggested by the Trump administration, Griess said, and not initially by his staff. The original focus was on replacing the failed expansion joints, a major source of leakage. The project did not address the pool’s leaking pipes.

On June 18, around two weeks after the pool was refilled following the renovation, news outlets began reporting that blue material was peeling off the pool’s bottom. The New York Times later reported on June 23 that workers had identified the peeling at least two days earlier, while also noting separate damage to foam in the pool’s expansion joints as of June 9. These joints — which go around the perimeter of the pool and horizontally across it in several places — allow the pool’s concrete slabs to expand and contract as the weather changes.

However, experts in pools and waterproof coatings have said that there are many possible reasons that a coating can improperly adhere.

“You have to account for ambient conditions like rain, sun, humidity, moisture control in your substrate, thickness, evenness, and chemical compatibility,” Steve Goodale, a swimming pool consultant, told Wired, speaking about the difficulty of applying a waterproof pool lining. “There are so many things that can go wrong with that process. If the material hasn’t bonded to the substrate for any number of reasons, then ultimately, the entire system will fail.”

Goodale told the Washington Post that improper surface preparation or water seeping into the lining from the pool or from under it could also contribute to the peeling. He also said that the hydrogen peroxide that the Interior Department had used to try to treat the algae in the pool could have had an impact on the coating, although he said that this would be more likely to lead to “fading, hazing or breakdown of the material” than peeling. News outlets reported that the department had said it was using hydrogen peroxide to treat the algae starting as early as June 16.

David McFayden, CEO of the paint and inspections services company KTA-Tator, told Scientific American that the available information was too limited to blame any one factor for the peeling, but he said issues worth investigating include how the surface was prepared before applying the coating and the water chemistry.

Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the contractor for the project, said in a June 21 statement that it and the NPS had “identified some areas in the Reflecting Pool that require repairs,” which will be done under warranty, and that these “do not indicate a failure of the liner.” The following day, Rhino Linings, the company that made the pool’s liner, said in a statement that the issues constituted “localized areas of finish coat separation,” and not an issue with the “underlying waterproofing membrane.”

“Was it manual intervention that made those few places peel, or was that the chemical composition of what was in the water?” Rhino Vice President Francois Rivard told Politico. “We don’t know until we have further results at this point, but it is not problematic,” he said, explaining that the peeling only appears to affect the outer blue layer that is for aesthetic purposes.

Unclear Timeline of Damage

Concerns about the pool’s new coating predate the most recently identified peeling issues.

Tim Auerhahn, chairman of the pool training and consulting company the Aquatic Council, told the New York Times for a May 8 story that he would want to look closely at the impact of Trump driving his motorcade over the newly coated surface of the pool the day before. The Times reported May 12 that Department of Interior staff had expressed concerns about bubbling and small holes in a layer of the waterproofing material. And the Times report from June 23 and court document linked to in the White House press release indicated that Park Police were aware of damage to or near the pool’s foam expansion joints by June 9.

This timeline indicates the new material in the pool had problems before the June 19 and 20 arrests the U.S. Marshals spokesperson mentioned, and before the June 19 surveillance video of someone removing something from the pool the White House press release linked to.

Few details are available about the arrests. An Olympic canoeist, David Carter Hearn, told news outlets that he was arrested on June 19 for alleged destruction of government property. He said a piece of the blue lining had already partly peeled off and he touched it out of curiosity. He said he did not destroy anything.

There are some images and videos from reporters that indicate people on June 19 — once the peeling pool was already a major news event — broke off already-peeling coating or held pieces in their hands. However, there isn’t evidence of people making gashes with a knife.

The Washington Post also reported on June 20 seeing a U.S. Marshal detain someone for allegedly taking paint out of the pool and on June 21 seeing a Park Police officer issue someone a citation for allegedly removing something from the water.

A Surge in Algae 

Beyond stopping leaking, Trump’s reflecting pool project aimed to reduce algae, which has been a recurring issue for the reflecting pool.

The project included $1.7 million in funding to Greenwater Services to install a new system for algae control. Nanobubble systems for algae control, such as the one installed by Greenwater Services, work by introducing tiny ozone bubbles to a body of water, which can kill algae.

But despite efforts to mitigate the algae, an analysis done for the Washington Post indicated that the level of algae on June 13 — the week after the pool was refilled — was higher than in other June images going back to 2021.

Trump claimed that someone may have added fertilizer to the water to cause the algal growth, but he didn’t provide any evidence for this claim.

Chapra, the water quality modeler from Tufts, told us that the reflecting pool represents “the recipe for growing algae,” without needing to invoke vandalism.

The pool is “shallow, there’s no flushing, they don’t run water through it on a permanent basis,” he said. “There’s no mixing, because they want to keep it nice and flat, so you get a reflection.” Furthermore, he said, “there’s no shading anywhere to keep solar radiation out, and somebody decided to paint the bottom dark blue,” even though this makes the pool retain more heat. The pool probably also uses high-nutrient water, he added.

The president has blamed the pool’s past algae problems on a change to the pool’s water source made under former President Barack Obama. In 2012, the government switched from filling the pool with municipal DC water to ozone-treated water from the Tidal Basin, which is fed by the Potomac River.

“He took the water from the river,” Trump said of Obama on June 22. “It turned out to be putrid and it destroyed the whole thing. Spent over $100 million.”

That total is incorrect. As we previously wrote, the Obama-era restoration, which also reinforced the pool’s sinking foundation and replaced its concrete bottom, cost around $35 million.

When the reflecting pool was refilled in early June, a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told us, it had been filled with “DC Water,” or municipal water. Even after the Obama-era renovations, the pool had periodically been filled with city drinking water when there was substantial algae in the Tidal Basin.

Chapra said that feeding the pool from the Tidal Basin would be the “worst” in terms of algae, given that the Potomac River has “plenty of nutrients” and algae.

However, using DC Water does not eliminate the potential for algae. Ashley Bair, a researcher at the water treatment company Usalco, told Vox that a type of phosphorus added to municipal water to form a coating on the inside of lead pipes could feed algae if the water were not treated properly. DC Water has added orthophosphate since 2004, according to its website, after a switch in disinfectant and a change in water chemistry caused lead to be released into the water from pipes.

Chapra also said that regardless of water source, feces from animals and fine particulates with phosphorus in the air can add to the nutrients in an open pool. He added that he was skeptical of the ozone nanobubble technology for the project. “High enough concentrations of ozone will break the cell walls of the algae, but that releases the nutrients back into the water, and it’s not going to kill all of them,” he said. Ozone also breaks down in sunlight, he added.

Given all these factors, he said, vandalism simply “wasn’t the first thing that popped into my mind” upon seeing the algal growth in the pool.

“Like I said at the beginning, shallow, no flushing, no mixing, high-nutrient water, no shading, dark blue bottom, go figure,” he said.

Update, June 29: After this story was published, the New York Times reported that prior to the noticeable algal growth in the pool, NPS had asked Greenwater Services on June 12 to remove several large nanobubbler machines from the edge of the reflecting pool. This occurred in advance of an event at the Lincoln Memorial promoting Trump’s Ultimate Fighting Championship birthday party. The machines, which were temporary because a permanent system wasn’t yet ready, were reinstalled within 36 hours. Algae, however, had already bloomed in the meantime — although it is unclear what role the machines’ removal played. A permanent system, located farther away from the pool, took over in full on June 25, according to CNN.

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President Donald Trump signed a preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran on June 17. The 14-point memorandum of understanding outlines the conditions under which the U.S. and Iran have initially agreed, and gives them 60 days to negotiate additional terms.

But some of what is included in the framework — or not — is at odds with what Trump said about a potential deal prior to approving the memorandum of understanding last week.

For example, in an NBC News interview earlier in June, Trump said that he would not “unfreeze any Iranian assets” or “lift any sanctions” against Iran “upfront” as part of a deal to end the conflict. But the agreement says that the U.S. Treasury Department will “immediately” grant waivers permitting Iran to resume exports of crude oil and other petroleum products, allowing Iran to make billions of dollars in revenue. A schedule for potentially billions of dollars in additional sanctions relief is to be worked out over the next two months.

Also, Trump initially called news reports that the agreement included a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran “false.” However, the fund is mentioned in the memorandum of understanding, and Reuters, citing an unnamed source, has reported that “more than half” of that money “has already been committed” by private-sector investors around the world, including in the U.S.

Furthermore, the agreement says little about the future of Iran’s nuclear program — a key source of contention between the two countries, and part of Trump’s justification for launching airstrikes on Iran in February. During his first term as president, Trump withdrew the U.S. from a nuclear deal with Iran, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, that was negotiated and implemented during the Obama administration.

For years, Trump has lambasted the Obama-era pact as “horrible,” “defective” and one of the “dumbest” ever. But Trump’s current agreement says Iran “reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons” just as former President Barack Obama’s deal said Iran “under no circumstances” would “ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”

Sanctions Relief, Unfreezing Assets

In a June 5 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said “no” when asked if he would “unfreeze any Iranian assets or lift any sanctions upfront as a part of any deal” with Iran.

“If they behave, if they do a good job, we start talking,” Trump said about future negotiations.

But Trump didn’t completely stick to that promise.

The memorandum of understanding that he signed has lifted U.S. sanctions that were limiting how much crude oil and other petroleum products Iran could sell on the global market. The agreement says the U.S. “undertakes that immediately upon the signing of this MoU, and until the termination of sanctions, the U.S. Department of Treasury will issue waivers for the export of Iranian crude oil, petroleum products, and derivatives, and all associated services including banking transactions, insurances, transportation, etc.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran could now make $60 billion per year from oil and fuel sales at current prices, assuming that it returns to pre-war production levels. Iran could earn $8 billion in just the first two months under the deal, the Journal said, according to estimates from Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar with Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy and a former U.S. deputy special envoy for Iran in the Biden administration.

In addition, the agreement says, “The United States of America undertakes to make fully available for use, the frozen or restricted funds and assets of the Islamic Republic of Iran upon the implementation of this MoU.” Iran has tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets around the world, including an estimated $20 billion to $50 billion in China, according to the Wall Street Journal, which said Iran’s “priority is to unblock an initial $24 billion in phases.”

As for the timing of the release of those assets – which a senior administration official reportedly said was contingent on “good behavior” from Iran – the agreement says, “The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran will mutually agree on the procedures related to the release of these funds during the negotiations.”

“We have taken their money, it’s not our money, it’s their money, and we froze it,” Trump told reporters at a June 17 press conference during the summit of G-7 nations in France. “At a certain point in time, I guess we’re going to have to give it back.”

But in November 2015, while campaigning in Iowa, Trump criticized billions of dollars of Iranian assets that were unfrozen as part of the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran. 

“I would have never given them back the money,” Trump said. “I would have said, “The money is off the table. Let’s start negotiating.’”

Also, the agreement that Trump signed says that the U.S. “undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” including “all unilateral U.S. sanctions … in an agreed upon schedule as part of the final deal.”

It remains to be seen which sanctions will be removed and when.

$300 Billion Fund

The agreement further says, “The United States of America undertakes, with regional partners, to develop a definitive mutually agreed plan with at least USD 300 Billion, for the reconstruction and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The mechanism for the implementation of this plan will be finalized as part of final Deal within 60 days.”

But Trump initially denied that the fund was part of the deal during a June 17 press conference with the Egyptian president in France. 

“Well, it’s false,” Trump said in response to a reporter who asked about the $300 billion fund, which was mentioned in a draft of the memorandum of understanding that had been leaked to members of the press.

“It’s false. People, you can invest if you want. What am I going to do, say nobody’s ever allowed to invest? We’re not invest[ing]. We’re not putting up 10 cents. People can decide to do that, but that’s up to them,” Trump said. “We are not investing in it, and we do not have a fund.”

While the memorandum of understanding says that the U.S. will help develop the plan for the $300 billion, and grant all “required licenses, waivers and permissions needed for the relevant financial transactions,” Trump and Vice President JD Vance have insisted that none of the money intended for Iran’s reconstruction and economic development will come from U.S. taxpayers.

“We’re not investing any money,” Trump said in a June 16 meeting with the emir of Qatar. “We didn’t pay for it like Obama did. He paid billions of dollars. He paid 1.7 billion from an airplane, all green cash. It was crazy.”

In an exclusive on June 16, Reuters – citing an anonymous source familiar with the negotiations – reported that “more than half” of the $300 billion “has already been committed and that it will be comprised entirely of private-sector funds.” Private companies in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa have already agreed to commit financing, a source told Reuters, adding that no government ⁠money or grants would be included. 

As for the $1.7 billion that Trump has repeatedly said Obama “paid” to Iran in 2016, we’ve written that that was to formally settle a decades-old dispute over Iran paying the U.S. $400 million for military equipment that was never delivered. The U.S. refused to provide the equipment after the Shah of Iran was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

The $1.7 billion that Iran received, all in cash, but not in U.S. currency, included the original $400 million and an additional $1.3 billion for interest. 

The $1.7 billion is sometimes conflated with the sanctions relief that Iran received for complying with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated under Obama.

As we’ve written, as part of that deal, the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union agreed to lift sanctions on Iranian assets that were frozen and being held mostly in foreign banks. In a September 2015 op-ed about Obama’s deal, Trump claimed that the U.S. had given Iran “a windfall of $150 billion, which will no doubt fund terrorism around the world.” 

But the U.S. Treasury Department estimated that Iran would end up with a lot less – about $50 billion in “usable liquid assets,” according to 2015 testimony from Adam Szubin, who was then the acting under secretary of treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.

Iran’s Nuclear Program

Trump has repeatedly derided the JCPOA, claiming that it would have put Iran on “a path to a nuclear weapon.” (We have written about that before.) By comparison, Trump said his deal would be “a wall to a nuclear weapon.”

“The Obama deal was one of the dumbest deals I’ve ever seen; it was a road to a nuclear weapon,” Trump said on June 17, referring to the JCPOA, which he pulled out of in 2018. “My deal is a wall to a nuclear — you’re not going to have it, it’s a wall to a nuclear weapon.”

But that remains to be seen. The memorandum of understanding says only: “The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons.”

That closely mirrors the language in the JCPOA, which stated, “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.”

The current agreement goes on to say, “The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled, enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon … with the minimum methodology to be down-blending on site under the supervision of the [International Atomic Energy Agency],” which is a reference to Iran’s enriched uranium, up to 60%, according to the IAEA just before the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites last year. Uranium enriched to 60% is just short of weapons grade material.

“The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to the Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear needs, based on the statutory framework being agreed upon in the final deal,” the memorandum of understanding states. “The final deal will confirm the provisions of this paragraph. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States of America acknowledge the critical importance of the nuclear issues above mentioned, and express their intention to immediately address these issues in the negotiation in order to achieve mutual agreement on them.”

While Trump stated on June 15 that “the main thing is that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” and that Iran “fully agreed to that, with strong policing powers,” there are no details at all in the agreement about Iran agreeing to “strong policing” of their nuclear program, or what that might entail.

The details of what the two countries will agree to regarding Iran’s nuclear program are to be determined over the course of the 60-day negotiation period, Kelsey Davenport and Daryl G. Kimball, of the Arms Control Association, explained in June 22 brief. “The MOU is, fundamentally, a non-nuclear deal that leaves key nuclear issues unresolved,” they wrote.

Similarly, Nephew, the international and public affairs scholar at Columbia University, told us in an email, “The JCPOA had detailed, specific requirements for verification and what Iran would do. The closest this has is that Iran agrees to keep its nuclear program static, in exchange for static sanctions, but there is no verification and there is no specificity.”

“Everything else is to happen in the future as part of a longer term deal,” he said. “I suppose you could say that this longer term deal already has a forward looking commitment on managing Iran’s enriched uranium stocks, but everything else is ‘for discussion.’”

So, until firmer details are negotiated with Iran regarding its nuclear program, it’s premature for Trump to claim his deal is “a wall to a nuclear weapon,” particularly when it lacks verification requirements that were in already place with JCPOA, prior to any new conflict with Iran.

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As he has done for years, President Donald Trump claims – without evidence – that the federal Right to Try law he signed in 2018 has “saved thousands of lives.” But the White House provided no support for Trump’s claim about the law, which provides an alternative route for seriously ill patients to access unapproved drugs outside of clinical trials. 

Researchers who have long studied access to investigational drugs say the president is greatly exaggerating.

“It’s not that nobody is using Right to Try. There have been a handful of reported cases,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, associate professor of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, told us in an interview. “But certainly it has not been thousands of patients … who’ve received drug therapy, let alone had their lives saved by these products.”

Alison Bateman-House, co-chair of NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Working Group on Compassionate Use & Preapproval Access, said in an interview that Trump’s claim about the law saving thousands of lives is a “gross misestimate.”

Dr. Jeffrey A. Singer, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who said he supported passage of the 2018 federal law, now says that it “fail[ed].” In a May opinion piece for Reason magazine, Singer argues for changes to the Right to Try law, writing that the promise of a right to try potential life-saving drugs “often exists more on paper than in practice.”

Reason, May 12: The sales pitch was sweeping. When President Donald Trump signed Right to Try in 2018, surrounded by patients, he promised a “fundamental freedom” that would give dying patients hope.

Eight years later, the record is far thinner than the rhetoric. The [Food and Drug Administration] reports only a handful of uses each year—12 drugs from 2018 to 2022, and just a few more annually since. It wasn’t a new pathway so much as a permission slip that rarely translates into access.

The FDA is required to publicly report the number of investigational drugs used under the Right to Try law – but not how many patients have been treated. FDA annual summaries show that 21 investigational drugs have been used from May 30, 2018, through Dec. 31, 2024.

The FDA did not respond to our request for the number of patients treated under the federal law. 

We asked the White House for the number of patients treated under the Right to Try law and evidence that thousands of lives were saved. But it provided no support for Trump’s claim — which he repeated throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, including in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention. Most recently, the president said in April that Right to Try has “saved thousands and thousands of lives,” and he said it again in May, when he claimed the law has “saved thousands of lives,” but “nobody talks about it.”

“President Trump is right: Right to Try was a historic victory from his first term, which has allowed many Americans to access treatments that would have otherwise been blocked by the regulatory approval process,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in an email.

The Goldwater Institute, which takes credit for helping to enact 41 state Right to Try laws prior to passage of the federal law, provides some examples on its website of patients using Right to Try laws on the state and federal level. But the institute – which claims the “Right to Try law has a proven track record” – doesn’t know how many patients have received investigational drugs through the federal law.

“[U]nfortunately the Goldwater Institute is not able to track utilization of Right to Try given patient privacy laws,” Goldwater Institute spokesperson Ryan Mills told us in an email.

Right to Try and the FDA

The federal Right to Try law was controversial from inception because it removes the FDA from the oversight and approval process for the use of unapproved drugs outside of clinical trials. Under Right to Try, unapproved drugs can be used without FDA approval to treat patients diagnosed with a “terminal illness,” which is defined as a “life-threatening disease or condition,” who have exhausted approved options and are unable to participate in a clinical trial.

Critics say Right to Try is unnecessary – and potentially dangerous – because the FDA has long had an expanded access program that allows patients to use unapproved drugs outside of clinical trials.

In 2016, when a Senate committee was considering Right to Try legislation, then-FDA official Peter Lurie credited the expanded access program for making unapproved drugs available quickly to thousands of seriously ill patients, while protecting “desperate patients” from “unnecessary risks” and exploitation by “unscrupulous individuals.”

“FDA has authorized more than 99 percent (7110/7176) of single patient expanded access Investigational New Drug (IND) requests received in Fiscal Years 2010-2015. Emergency requests are usually granted immediately over the phone and non-emergencies are processed in a median of four days,” Lurie, who was associate FDA commissioner for Public Health Strategy and Analysis, said in written testimony. 

Since then, the number of requests has increased and approval rates have remained largely unchanged.

For fiscal years 2019 through 2023, the FDA approved 99% (17,806/17,964) of single-patient expanded access IND requests, the most recent FDA data show. Several experts on FDA law and policy told us that these figures suggest that Right to Try hasn’t had much of an impact.

“If you look at the information FDA publishes about expanded access requests, you see that FDA authorizes the overwhelming majority of them. You know, many years, 99%,” Patricia Zettler, a law professor at Ohio State University who teaches public health and FDA law courses, told us in an interview. “Given that, there’s … no logical reason to think Right to Try would change the landscape dramatically.” (Zettler served as deputy general counsel at the Department of Health and Human Services, covering the FDA, during the Biden administration.)

Under both pathways – Right to Try and the expanded access program – companies developing new drugs are not required to make them available to patients. As a result, pharmaceutical companies — not the FDA — remain “the larger obstacle” to giving patients access to unapproved drugs, Lurie told us in an interview.

“Companies are more likely to say no than the FDA, by far,” Lurie said. “The claim that FDA is the obstacle is not true.” 

Bateman-House told us that “large biopharmaceutical companies are not using Right to Try … because if you’re trying to bring a product to market through the FDA, you don’t really have any incentive to avoid the FDA when you’re handing out your unapproved product.”

One incentive for biopharmaceutical companies to seek FDA oversight, she said, is that the agency can draw upon confidential proprietary information it has from clinical trials and other expanded access treatments to require companies to change proposed treatment plans prior to approving expanded access requests. That protects patient safety and benefits the development of the investigational drug, Bateman-House said.

Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, for example, have said that they support FDA oversight when providing investigational drugs outside of clinical trials. 

In 2015, Johnson & Johnson created a bioethics panel headed by Arthur Caplan, co-chair of NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s Working Group on Compassionate Use & Preapproval Access, to develop a policy on the use of investigational drugs. In its policy statement, Johnson & Johnson said FDA oversight is required “to assure full consideration of available safety data of which the FDA may be uniquely aware.”

In an article last year for the American Health Law Association, Barbara Bierer, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and her co-authors wrote that physicians are also reluctant to use Right to Try, in part because of “the abrogation of regulatory and ethical oversight.”

The article, which said “data on the prevalence of RTT are scant,” cited a survey of community oncologists that found 46% of 238 respondents attempted to use the expanded access program, while only 14% of the respondents attempted to use Right to Try. The paper also cited the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s opposition to Right to Try.

American Health Law Association, Jan. 24, 2025: Current data on the prevalence of RTT are scant, but the data that are available suggest that oncologists are considerably more likely to request access to an unapproved drug via EAP than they are via RTT. Given that the major difference between EAP and RTT is FDA oversight, a threshold question is whether FDA acts to deter or delay the approval of EAP requests. Evidence suggests that as many as 99% of all EAP requests are approved by FDA often within the first few days.

Despite its social media presence and visibility, demand for access via RTT has yet to materialize. Some experts have explicitly advised physicians to “steer patients away from RTT and toward [EAP]” while others claim they would never encourage a patient to avail themselves of RTT. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) released a public statement condemning RTT, stating “ASCO supports access to investigational drugs outside of clinical trials when adequate patient protections are in place . . . We don’t support right to try legislation, however, because these laws ignore key patient protections without actually improving patient access to investigational drugs outside of clinical trials.”

One thing that critics and supporters of the Right to Try can agree on is that the push for such laws on the state and federal level has raised awareness of the FDA’s expanded access program.

“The most charitable thing I can say is, I think the Right to Try law probably increased awareness of the idea that it is possible to use unapproved drugs outside of clinical trials,” Bateman-House told us. “Maybe some number of people were able to experience a positive health benefit via that. But it wasn’t because of Right to Try. It was because they were asking for something that they had had access to all along. They just didn’t realize they had access.”

Singer, the Cato senior fellow, independently raised the same point in a separate interview with us.

Singer — who was a visiting fellow at the Goldwater Institute from 2017 to 2026 — told us that he still supports the “concept” of Right to Try, even though he believes “there haven’t been many instances of Right to Try” being used to make unapproved drugs available to seriously ill patients.

He added that he did not want to minimize the indirect benefits of the law. Singer said Right to Try had “an impact on the FDA” by raising public awareness of the expanded access program and forcing the agency to simplify its expanded access application process.

Singer sent us a link to the same survey of oncologists cited by the American Health Law Association. That paper said “awareness of the EA program was high among the community oncologists we surveyed.” It also said the “revised, simplified” expanded access application now takes only 45 minutes to fill out.

As we mentioned, there has been an increase in expanded access requests and approvals, so there is data to support the theory that the Right to Try law has had an indirect benefit. But there is no evidence to support the president’s claim that the law has “saved thousands of lives.”

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President Donald Trump has touted more than $500 billion in prescription drug savings over 10 years from his policies. But the savings are largely aspirational, and not based on the more limited actions the administration has taken so far.

The administration’s most favored nation policy seeks to bring down drug prices to levels paid in other countries. The bulk of the savings, estimated in a May 5 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, comes from assuming that all new drugs will be sold in the U.S. at MFN prices going forward, saving $529 billion. A smaller amount of savings, $64.3 billion, comes from applying MFN pricing to Medicaid.

“People are saving a lot of money,” Trump said at a May 18 event announcing the addition of more drugs to TrumpRx, the administration’s website directing people to cash prices for prescription drugs. “Over the next 10 years, the Council of Economic Advisers estimates that our most favored nation drug policies will save Americans over $500 billion. And this has been the greatest breakthrough in lowering healthcare costs in modern history.”

“Think about the $600 billion of savings to the average American over the next 10 years,” Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said on June 2 at an event announcing further additions to the TrumpRx website, while calling on Congress to codify MFN pricing.

“It’s just a massive number that they voluntarily, sort of, gave back because the president went after them and said: ‘You got to deal with this problem,’” Oz continued, referring to the president’s negotiations with drug companies. 

There isn’t evidence that drug companies have agreed to give back $600 billion in savings to Americans, much less savings that will go to “average” Americans. So far, the administration has made voluntary deals with 17 drug companies to lower drug prices. The White House and the companies have reported commitments to launch new drugs at MFN prices, as well as to offer MFN prices to states for Medicaid. However, the details of the deals have not been disclosed, and some companies have reported that they end after three years.

“Right now we just have a lot more questions than we have answers, and that makes it really difficult to assess the validity or accuracy or even ballpark-ness of this very large estimate of savings in the White House report,” Juliette Cubanski, vice president and director of the Program on Medicare Policy at the health policy organization KFF, told us. She added that it’s difficult even to evaluate the impact of the current voluntary deals given a lack of answers to key questions, such as “how many of these manufacturers’ drugs are subject to MFN pricing.”

When asked for more details on what has been done so far to achieve the savings in the report, White House spokesperson Kush Desai told us that “the research report lays out all of the assumptions underlying this analysis.” CMS did not respond to our request for comment.

The hundreds of billions in savings calculated in the CEA report do not come from offering people discounts on TrumpRx. As we’ve written previously, the prices on the site for brand-name drugs negotiated under the administration’s voluntary deals only represent savings for individuals in a few specific situations, such as when paying for fertility or weight loss drugs not covered by insurance, since many people will get better prices by using insurance rather than paying in cash. The CEA analysis only attempted to calculate 10-year savings from TrumpRx for Americans paying for fertility treatments, estimating these savings at $4.6 billion.

TrumpRx also recently started pointing people toward existing websites to access discounts on generic drugs. But as the CEA analysis itself acknowledged, generics are already cheaper in the U.S. than in other high-income countries, and they are not a target of MFN policies.

The U.S. does generally pay more for brand-name drugs than other nations. Prices in 2022 for these drugs were more than three times higher in the U.S. than in other high-income nations after adjusting for rebates, according to an analysis from the research organization RAND. But it is not clear how policies aiming to equalize drug prices will play out. As we have written previously, the president has repeatedly claimed broad victories over drug prices, even though they are hardly a done deal. There are significant uncertainties with his MFN approach, which still requires legislative action to further implement.

“We’ve seen no indication from pharma, from other key stakeholders, that this $600 billion number is real,” Jeromie Ballreich, an associate professor in the department of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told us, saying that one would expect companies to disclose to shareholders such an impact, which would be about 10% of U.S. pharmaceutical company revenue. “You would hear it outside of the White House, because $600 billion is, as Trump would say, huge.”

Missing Details From Trump’s Deals

Experts told us that it is difficult to evaluate the estimated nearly $600 billion in savings without more information on the president’s current or future MFN policies.

“This report is partly a report and mostly a press release,” Joseph Antos, a senior fellow emeritus at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, told us, adding that it is not possible to do an independent analysis based on the information provided.

Andrew Mulcahy, a senior health economist at RAND, told us that the hundreds of billions in savings are theoretically possible with a broad MFN policy but he said the administration’s actions so far only have “semblances” of accomplishing such a policy.

“Other countries’ prices are much lower than ours, and if policies are designed to piggyback on those prices, you can get savings in this order of magnitude,” he said. “That said, I don’t think that what’s happened so far — or plans for what will happen in the future — will align with that estimate in the CEA report for a variety of reasons.” 

One key question is the length of the voluntary deals the administration has made with drug companies.

To get to nearly $600 billion in savings, the “key assumption” is that MFN pricing “will be implemented through legislation and affect all new product launches going forward,” Jens Grueger, a partner at Boston Consulting Group and affiliate professor at the University of Washington, told us in an email. The deals, however, appear to be limited to Trump’s time in office, he said. 

Filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission from some of the companies have indicated the deals are limited overall, with two companies specifying they only last three years, STAT reported.

“It’s very unclear how you can estimate savings over a 10-year period based on deals that we understand to be lasting only for three years, unless you assume that Congress will actually codify MFN pricing,” Cubanski said. Meanwhile, she added, many Republicans in Congress even oppose legislation that allows the government to negotiate drug prices, much less price-setting.

Rena Conti, a health economist at Boston University Questrom School of Business, told us that the assumption of MFN legislation was “hypothetical at best, as there is no movement in Congress to pass legislation.”

A second question is what exactly the companies agreed to in their commitments to price newly launched drugs at MFN prices. As we’ve said, the bulk of the savings — $529 billion — estimated in the report come from assuming new drugs will be broadly offered at MFN prices over 10 years.

While Trump has claimed his administration has achieved the lowest drug prices in the world, the CEA report explained that his administration’s MFN pricing policies ask that companies offer U.S. payers the second-lowest drug prices among those paid in a small collection of countries: the G-7 nations, plus Switzerland and Denmark. The approach uses net prices after adjusting for gross domestic product per capita in comparison to the U.S., the report said.

The CEA report estimated the 10-year savings from new drug launches at MFN prices by comparing historical prices in these countries between 2021 and 2025 and imagining that this MFN policy had been applied, the report explained. (The analysis omitted Denmark due to a lack of data.) The White House economists then extended their estimate to 10 years, assuming a 3% growth rate.

In coming up with the hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, the CEA report “essentially said it’s going to be the second-lowest price out of the reference basket,” said Ballreich, the pharmaceutical policy researcher from Johns Hopkins. “There’s a number of question marks about whether or not these drug companies that came and met with the White House and did this agreement actually agreed to this.” 

Some of the White House announcements of the deals specify commitments companies have made to provide MFN prices on “all new innovative” or “all new” medicines. However, SEC filings have sometimes indicated limitations, saying that companies agreed to “price certain future medicines” at or below MFN levels or mentioning “certain exceptions” to promises to price new products at these levels.

Three companies recently declined to tell STAT whether three new drugs would be launched at MFN prices.

Questions About Medicaid Savings

There are similar questions about the $64.3 billion in estimated savings for Medicaid.

Press releases on the voluntary deals with drug companies indicate that the companies will provide MFN prices to state Medicaid programs for at least some drugs. CMS is launching GENEROUS, a voluntary Medicaid initiative running five years, and the companies that have signed deals are expected to participate for at least some of this time, according to a May 8 analysis from KFF. However, the KFF analysis said that it is unclear how many drugmakers and states will ultimately participate in GENEROUS and for how long, as well as which drugs will be included.

The prices states pay for Medicaid drugs are not publicly disclosed, but they are generally already the lowest in the U.S., researchers have previously told us, making it difficult to assess whether the MFN deals will be better than existing Medicaid prices.

“It feels very difficult to believe that companies are actually giving up a good chunk of revenue with these deals,” Mulcahy said. “What seems far more likely is that they are finding a way to formalize the discounts they are already offering” to Medicaid. 

Ballreich said that in a study that has not yet been published, he and his colleagues had estimated savings in the first year of the GENEROUS program at “just about a third” of what the CEA report projected for that timeframe. His group’s estimate assumed complete participation in GENEROUS by drug companies and states but also attempted to take into account some mechanisms Medicaid already has to reduce drug prices.

Roadblocks to Achieving MFN Savings

Even assuming the Trump administration enacted policies to require all drug companies to offer MFN prices to all payers, it’s not clear how much money the U.S. would save. MFN policies could affect global drug prices in ways the report did not take into account.

Trump has suggested that companies would make up for losses in revenue in the U.S. by increasing prices in other countries. However, researchers expressed skepticism that other high-income countries would agree to significantly higher prices.

In addition, Antos of AEI pointed out that MFN policies could lead some drugs to never make it to market. “I don’t believe they try to take into account the effects of this process on future innovation,” he said, referring to the CEA estimate.

A June 10 release from the White House listing Trump’s “recent wins” said his MFN initiative was “projected to save Americans $500 billion over the next decade while protecting innovation and expanding access.”

Cubanski, however, said that if the report is correct, and prices fall some 30%, “we’d be looking at a pretty significant hit to revenues for pharmaceutical companies, and that could translate to somewhat less innovation, or maybe significantly less innovation.”

The estimate also doesn’t take into account how drugmakers and other countries might push back against the policies.

The CEA report “assumes that companies continue launching products in reference countries and that prices in these countries would converge towards US prices,” Grueger said. He suggested that this could happen for some products “that address a high unmet medical need and provide transformative benefits for patients.” Other countries consider benefits to patients relative to costs in determining what they will pay for drugs.

“However, for the majority of products this will be difficult to achieve, and companies might consider not launching these products outside the US to protect US prices,” Grueger said, citing recent statements from pharmaceutical executives suggesting such delays. “As a consequence, lower prices in reference countries would not be available and prices in the US would not drop as much as projected in the CEA report.”

“Not only would you potentially impede access to new medications in other countries, but we wouldn’t end up with lower prices here in the US either,” Cubanski said. She added that it is already typical for drugs to launch in the U.S. before they are in other countries, making it difficult to figure out how to set an MFN price for new drugs in the first place.

The researchers also questioned the administration’s ability to assess whether companies had fulfilled promises to offer drugs at MFN prices. 

Companies provide list prices for drugs, but these are rarely paid. The CEA analysis said that drugmakers will report net prices, taking into account various forms of discounts. But experts said it was unclear how the government will independently evaluate these prices.

“The government obviously can try to compel [drug companies] to report this information, and there is some wording in there about auditing, but I don’t know how you audit something when you don’t have full disclosure or any basis for really determining in a systematic way whether numbers are correct or not,” Antos said.

Antos called it “telling” that the CEA analysis itself does not rely on net prices for its analysis. Rather, the report says, because of “the confidential nature of rebates, there are no existing data sets with net pricing information.”

Mulcahy explained that instead, the data the CEA used has gross prices a healthcare data company derives using complicated and varying methodologies in different countries. In general, he said, the numbers are based on invoices at various stages of the drug supply. He said that this dataset is the “best we’ve got” and is what he and his colleagues at RAND have used for international comparisons of drug prices, but it has limitations. 

“If you can put whatever number down you want on an invoice and then negotiate something secret later, you can make it look like you’re saving a ton of money,” Mulcahy said, expressing concern that the MFN pricing deals would incentivize even more secrecy about international drug prices.

“I think there will be ways to hide discounts and backchannel funds for this,” Ballreich said, suggesting various ways drugmakers could give money back to payers outside the U.S. For example, they could institute rebates or taxes that are not drug-specific. He also said that drugmakers will be restricted from disclosing the true price of their drugs in other countries due to confidentiality agreements and laws in those countries.

“If you want to make a claim about how launch prices are going to change or if a company wants to promise to change launch prices … that’s easy to fudge,” Mulcahy said. “And then you find creative ways on the back end to make yourself whole again.”

“It’s kind of like everyone wins except for consumers,” he added.

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President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that his administration has “cut” by 97% “the flow” of illegal drugs entering the U.S. “by water, by ocean and sea.” But available federal data do not support that claim.

There is no comprehensive data on the total amount of drugs trafficked to the U.S., including how much authorities don’t capture. Without that information, drug policy experts have told us that it’s not possible to know if the president’s claim is accurate.

“[W]e do not know the true amount of drugs coming into the country because we don’t know the amount that comes in undetected (the known unknown),” Katharine Harris, a fellow in drug policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, told us in an email.

She said the amount of drugs “seized” — which is what the federal government reports — is not equivalent to total drug “flow.”

However, Trump, based only on cherry-picked seizure data, continues to claim that his administration has almost completely stopped drugs from being brought into the U.S. by way of water.

“We cut the flow of fentanyl across our border by 59%, which is unheard of,” Trump said in May 22 remarks in New York. “And we cut the flow of fentanyl and drugs into our country by the ocean and the sea, in other words, coming in by water, by ocean and sea by 97%.”

Then, on May 28, in an interview with his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, on Fox News, he said, “We have drugs down 97%. Fentanyl and various drugs down 97% on drugs coming in by water.”

The president has made the 97% reduction claim more than a dozen times since late December.

We already addressed in February Trump’s unsupported claim that fentanyl coming across U.S. borders is down by more than half. 

The amount of fentanyl seized by Customs and Border Protection decreased by about 50% in the first full 15 months of Trump’s second term, going from 26,398 pounds seized in President Joe Biden’s last full 15 months in office to 13,216 pounds seized in Trump’s first full 15 months, according to the most recent CBP data. Also, based on provisional data, the National Center for Health Statistics estimates about a 22% decline in overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, or fentanyl, between 2024 and 2025 — from 48,913 to 38,084.

The seizure data is often used as a proxy for how much enters the country undetected. To some, fewer pounds seized indicates that fewer drugs are being smuggled in — not more.

The fact that the seized amount has declined could mean that less of the drug is being trafficked into the U.S., but it could also mean that authorities are catching less of it. In October 2024, we wrote about then-Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim that the Biden administration had cut the flow of illegal fentanyl “by half” because the amount seized by border officials had increased in Biden’s first two years as president.

But experts said there was also insufficient data to support her statement.

“If you don’t know the denominator” – meaning the figure for the total flow of a drug to the U.S. – “you can’t have an answer,” David Luckey, director of the RAND Rural America Partnership Initiative and professor of policy analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy, told us for that 2024 story. 

Trump’s claim about drugs coming by water is flawed for similar reasons.

When we asked for the source of his claim, a senior administration official sent only a hyperlink to the webpage with statistics on drugs seized by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations, which does aviation and maritime law enforcement.

Sometimes — such as in June 10 remarks in the Oval Office — Trump sounds as though he’s claiming that there has been a 97% cut in fentanyl coming by water. But that’s not really what he means.

Administration officials have told other fact-checkers that the president’s claim is based on the decrease in the amount of all drugs seized in July 2025 compared with November 2025. 

There were 4,476 combined pounds of cocaine, fentanyl, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine interdicted by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations last November, about a 98% drop from the 224,805 pounds seized four months earlier in July. But that particular comparison was cherry-picked. 

That July, there was a huge one-month spike in the amount of drugs seized – mostly marijuana. The total weight seized had increased 1,140% from 18,132 pounds in June. Using July as a starting point made the change in drug seizures under Trump look like a much larger decline.

“Picking a different month” to start “would have shown a smaller decline,” Harris, of the Baker Institute, said of the White House’s calculation. She added, “Generally it’s more informative to look at these trends over at least a 12-month period, especially when the data are available, in order to account for things like seasonal variation and outlier events.”

In fact, as of April, the most recent data available, there had been 547,603 pounds seized by CBP’s Air and Marine Operations in Trump’s first full 15 months back in office. That was an increase of about 81% from the 302,548 pounds seized in the last full 15 months under Biden. 

Even if the unusually large amount of drugs seized in July 2025 is excluded from that 15-month tally, the amount seized under Trump was still almost 7% higher than under Biden.

If an increase in seizures indicates more drugs getting into the country undetected – as some Republicans have said – that’s the opposite of what Trump has claimed is happening.

In addition, the U.S. Coast Guard says it — not CBP — is “the lead federal maritime law enforcement agency” responsible for water-based interdiction of illegal drugs. 

In fiscal year 2025, which included about eight months under Trump, the Coast Guard said it seized a record of almost 510,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean – more than three times its annual average of 167,000 pounds.

In September, the last month of that fiscal year, the U.S. military began striking boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean that it claimed were bringing drugs to the U.S. 

But the New York Times, citing epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public health experts, reported in May that cocaine is still widely available in the U.S., as drug smugglers have seemingly adjusted to the boat strikes by transporting their product in large shipping containers or using land routes through Central America.

Harris, the drug policy fellow, said the amount of drugs seized “can be paired with other data points, like the purity, price, and availability trends for a particular substance, to infer whether there has been a reduction in supply.” If drugs are more scarce, less potent and prices are higher, she said that could indicate a supply interruption.

“But the seizure data alone cannot substantiate claims about the true drug flow,” she said.

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President Donald Trump waded into the contentious “right to repair” your own auto debate, but he recounted a wildly inaccurate anecdote to bolster his support for consumers.

According to Trump, in remarks on June 4, “They gave a man seven years in jail, actually, because he fixed his own car.”

The following day, at a roundtable on agriculture in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, the president again referenced the case.

“I mean, they actually have, the Democrats, a restriction that if you get caught fixing your tractor, they bring you to jail,” Trump said. “You know that? Do you know that I pardoned a man last week who was sentenced to seven years in jail because he got caught fixing his car or his truck? I said — I like to always say, ‘What did he do?’ ‘Sir, he was fixing his truck.’ I said, ‘How long is he getting?’ ‘Seven years.’ I said, ‘Say it again.’ It’s the first time I’ve ever heard — like two weeks ago. I gave him a pardon because he had to go to jail because he was fixing his tractor or his truck. Can you believe it?”

The White House did not respond to our request for backup, but Trump appears to be referring to his Nov. 7 pardon of Troy Lake, a Wyoming diesel mechanic who served seven months of a one-year sentence — not seven years — after pleading guilty to violating the Clean Air Act by disabling emissions monitoring systems on hundreds of heavy-duty commercial trucks. (No other pardon in Trump’s second term fits the description.)

According to a Dec. 9, 2024, news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado, Lake and his company, Elite Diesel Service Inc., instructed company employees “to disable the computerized on-board diagnostic (OBD) systems on at least 344 heavy-duty commercial trucks. OBDs are required under the Clean Air Act to monitor emissions control hardware on vehicles to ensure that they are functioning properly.”

There were also eight co-conspirators, the release stated, who “hired Elite and Lake to manipulate the OBDs so that the OBDs would not detect the malfunctions.” Those co-conspirators, who cooperated with the investigators, were fined more than $500,000 in total.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Lake violated the Clean Air Act’s prohibition against tampering with monitoring devices.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, emissions control devices “are critical to maintaining air quality, and when these controls are disabled, the increase in excess tailpipe pollution is significant. A study of the effects of tampering with these 344 trucks showed that the conspirators in this case collectively caused an illegal increase in pollutants of at least 1,300 tons of excess nitrogen oxides, 30 tons of excess non-methane hydrocarbons, 600 tons of excess carbon monoxide, and 30 tons of excess particulate matter.”

“For years, the defendants led a large-scale conspiracy designed to violate the Clean Air Act by defeating emissions control equipment on hundreds of heavy-duty commercial trucks,” Special Agent in Charge Lance Ehrig of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Criminal Investigation Division in Colorado said at the time. “The actions by the defendants and their co-conspirators directly resulted in a significant increase in excess pollution, which diminished air quality and further placed vulnerable populations at risk of developing adverse health conditions.”

Lake maintained he was merely trying to spare small businesses from expensive and unnecessary repair bills.

“I didn’t want to be Robin Hood. I just felt that it was wrong for what the government was doing to American people that wanted to work,” Lake told Fox News on Oct. 27.

“All of us true Americans aren’t opposed against clean air. We want clean air,” Lake told Wyoming’s Oil City News in November. “But my problem with the deal was I just started seeing more and more — especially owner-operators or small companies — going out of business or struggling to keep this stuff running. It cost them $20,000 to fix it and I was charging them $2,500 or $2,800 to delete it and never have that problem again.”

Lake’s case caught the attention of Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, who petitioned the president in October for a pardon, casting Lake’s conviction as an example of the Biden administration’s “overreach into the daily lives of hardworking Americans in communities across the west.”

That same month, Lummis introduced the Diesel Truck Liberation Act, which would prohibit the federal government from “requiring manufacturers to install or maintain emissions control devices or onboard diagnostic systems” and remove “EPA authority to enforce Clean Air Act requirements related to vehicle emissions controls.” It would also bar the civil or criminal prosecution of those who violate “federal law for tampering or improving emissions equipment.” The bill has not made it out of committee.

On Jan. 21, the Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resource Division announced via X that it would no longer criminally prosecute cases such as Lake’s.

“Today, [the Justice Department] is exercising its enforcement discretion to no longer pursue criminal charges under the Clean Air Act based on allegations of tampering with onboard diagnostic devices in motor vehicles,” the post said. “DOJ is committed to sound enforcement principles, efficient use of government resources, and avoiding overcriminalization of federal environmental law.”

The post noted, however, that DOJ would “still pursue civil enforcement for these violations when appropriate.”

The same day as that DOJ announcement, the government dropped its case against Tracy Coiteux, a Washington woman who had appealed a 2024 conviction for tampering with diesel trucks’ emissions monitoring systems.

On Feb. 12 — two weeks before Lake was Lummis’ guest at the State of the Union Address — Trump also pardoned Lake’s company, Elite Diesel Services Inc., which was sentenced to five years of probation at the same time Lake was sentenced. Trump’s pardon forgives $50,000 worth of fines levied against the company.

No matter what one thinks about Lake’s case, he was not sentenced to “seven years in jail … because he fixed his own car,” as Trump framed it.

Right to Repair

Moreover, the case is only tangentially related to the so-called “right to repair” debate to which Trump tied it.

“We had the auto industry in yesterday,” Trump said in remarks on June 4 about a meeting he had that included the heads of Ford, General Motors and Penske Corporation. “They don’t want people to fix their car. I said, that’s strange, I’ve never heard of that. They have a thing to — nobody’s allowed to fix their car. They gave a man seven years in jail, actually, because he fixed his own car.

“Can you believe it?” Trump asked. “They want a bill that prohibits people from fixing. So if you’re mechanically inclined — you know, I grew up. I went to school with some guys; they were, in some cases, horrible students, but they could fix an engine blindfolded. … But they were great. And so there’s a move on to stop people from fixing their car. I didn’t understand it.”

The following day in Wisconsin, Trump asked local farmers at a roundtable, “Do you like it, the right to repair?

“It was a little strange,” Trump said. “I mean, some of you are better mechanics than the people at John Deere. … Let’s say you have a tractor, it’s broken and you know exactly how to fix it. You wouldn’t be too happy about being mandated to bring the tractor back to John Deere or wherever you got it, right? You’d like to fix it.

“I mean, they actually have, the Democrats, a restriction that if you get caught fixing your tractor, they bring you to jail. You know that? Do you know that I pardoned a man last week who was sentenced to seven years in jail because he got caught fixing his car or his truck?”

Again, Lake was not prosecuted for simply “fixing his car or his truck.”

The issue of “right to repair” is contentious and also more complicated than Trump’s description suggests.

As the National Conference of State Legislatures explains, “Right to repair legislation is directed at the ability of consumers to repair their own products instead of going back to the original manufacturer for service.”

“In the context of the aftermarket, it refers to consumers’ ability to select who repairs and/or maintains their motor vehicles,” the Congressional Research Service said in a 2024 report on the subject.

While, broadly, car buyers have the right to fix their own autos, or to take them to a repair shop of their choice (rather than to the dealer), a political debate has arisen over the “telematics” inside cars, “the wireless transmission of data to and from vehicles and data centers hosted by the vehicle manufacturers,” the CRS report said.

The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group representing most of the major auto manufacturers, argued in 2023 that public access to telematics would “create privacy and cybersecurity risks.”

As Todd Spangler, Washington correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, wrote on June 8, “The conflict comes down to who has the proprietary right to all that know-how, intellectual property and access: the manufacturer, whose business model may rely on it, or the owner, who buys it.”

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The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool began filling with water on June 4 following maintenance work that President Donald Trump called a “big project.” In late May, Trump claimed that “the Biden administration and the Obama administration spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to get it to work, and they failed,” adding that his administration was spending “$10 million, maybe, $12 million.”

But that exaggerates the amount spent by previous administrations. We could find no record of any major work done during former President Joe Biden’s term, and the total spent for an overhaul of the pool during former President Barack Obama’s term was about $35 million.

According to the publicly available federal contract, the Trump administration has spent about $14 million to repaint and seal the bottom of the pool, which has a history of leaks.

The pool was completely refilled with water by June 9, as shown in a PBS News timelapse of the progress.

Trump made his comments about prior work on the Reflecting Pool in a May 27 Cabinet meeting. “It’s embarrassing,” he said of the condition of the pool. “It was filthy, dirty. It was Biden. And they spent, between the two of them, they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to fix this thing. Now, when Biden — when Obama did it, he spent way over $100 million.” 

The work done by the current administration, Trump said, included sandblasting the surface and painting it blue. “We made the surface as good as it can be and we’re now covering it with the most beautiful blue, very thick,” he said. “You think of it as a very sophisticated form of rubber, no leaks, no problems. And it’s beautiful. It’s called American Flag blue. That was the color we chose.”

We asked the National Park Service for details about the scope of the recent work, but we didn’t get a response. Trump has mentioned repeatedly that the pool was being repainted, which is reflected in the publicly available information about the contract. Based on government documents it obtained, the New York Times reported that the scope of work also involves repairs to some of the leaking crevices between the concrete slabs at the bottom of the pool.

Extensive work to rebuild the pool started in 2010 and concluded in 2012 during the Obama administration. That project used funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — stimulus legislation enacted in response to the Great Recession — to essentially replace the original pool that was first built in the early 1920s.

“The old reflecting pool was built with an asphalt and tile bottom on poorly supported soil consisting primarily of marshes,” one of the companies that worked on that project had written at the time, explaining that the pool had sunk a foot into the ground over time.

That project also switched the source of the water from the city’s municipal system to the nearby Tidal Basin fed by the Potomac River, with an ozone water filtration system, according to the National Park Service. There was an unexpected amount of algae when the new pool first opened, according to a Washington Post report at the time, which said that the ozone levels in the filtration system needed adjustment.

Some maintenance issues over the years — such as a broken water line in 2019, according to the National Park Service — led to water quality issues in the pool that required repair.

During the May Cabinet meeting, Trump referred to the change in the water source during the 2012 project, saying, “the water from the Potomac was not suitable for this, to put it mildly. It was disgusting what happened.” But we couldn’t find any information indicating that the source of the water for the pool has changed under Trump. We asked the White House, the Interior Department and the NPS about the water source, but we didn’t get a response.

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President Donald Trump walked out of a sit-down interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” That happened after he made, or repeated, a number of false and unsupported claims — some of which Welker pushed back on.

• Trump seized on the slow vote-counting procedures in California to claim, without evidence, that its recent primary election was “rigged.”

• The president falsely claimed that he “didn’t guarantee” that he’d keep the U.S. out of “new wars” in his second term. There are several examples of him making such a promise in 2024.

• He claimed that Iran was “very close to having a nuclear weapon” under a multilateral agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama’s administration and wrongly said the country “got all of this uranium during Obama.” Arms control experts say Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment program after Trump withdrew from the deal.

• The president also said that if he didn’t launch airstrikes against Iran in June 2025, the country would “right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already.” That assessment is at odds with reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Intelligence Community, which said in March 2025 that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.”

• He provided no support for his claim that Jan. 6 rioters were “ushered into” the Capitol by “FBI agents.” A 2024 watchdog report said that FBI agents arrived to assist law enforcement after rioters had already broken into the Capitol.

• Trump repeated other claims we’ve written about before regarding gasoline prices, the economy under his presidencies and construction of factories.

The interview was recorded on June 5 and aired two days later.

No Evidence of ‘Rigged’ California Elections

Trump walked out of the interview after Welker repeatedly asked him to provide evidence for his claims that the California elections were “rigged.”

The “evidence” Trump cited, however — that California had not finished counting votes several days after a June 2 primary election — is not evidence at all.

It does take California longer than other states to count ballots, but that’s because the vast majority of votes are cast via mail-in ballots, which counties send to all active registered voters. Mail-in ballots are accepted so long as they are “postmarked on or before election day” and received “no later than seven days after election day,” according to state law. That alone causes some delay.

“California has the largest number of registered voters in the nation—more than 23 million registered voters,” according to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s website. “Ensuring that all valid votes cast by eligible voters are accurately processed and counted takes time.”

California is also one of 32 states that require signature verification for mail-in ballots, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. But California also allows voters to “cure” their ballot if a problem arises in signature-matching.

“If a signature is missing or does not compare to the signature on file, state law requires county elections officials to reach out to voters to verify their signature to ensure that their ballot can be counted,” the California secretary of state website states. “By law, and for most elections, voters are allowed to verify their signature up to eight days before the county certifies their results. These processes ensure that all valid votes cast by eligible voters can be counted.”

On election night, California shares “semi-official” tallies of the votes cast in-person at the polls on Election Day, the early votes cast in person, and mail-in ballots received and processed prior to Election Day. But in close elections, that’s often not enough for election prognosticators to “call” a race for the winners.

The top two vote-getters in the primary for both governor and Los Angeles mayor — regardless of party — square off in the general election. As of the morning of June 9, the Associated Press had projected Democratic gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra would advance to the general election, but it is yet to be determined whether he will face Republican Steve Hilton or Democrat Tom Steyer. In the Los Angeles mayoral election, the Associated Press projected a day after the election that incumbent Karen Bass will be on the November general election ballot. But it wasn’t until June 8 that the AP projected Nithya Raman, a city councilwoman, would grab the second spot over reality TV star Spencer Pratt.

In his “Meet the Press” interview, Trump revived his false and unproven claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and “dirty.”

Welker noted that “you’ve never presented evidence” that the 2020 election was “rigged.”

“It’s happening right now in California,” Trump said. “Right now, it’s, look at what’s happening in California.”

“Where’s the evidence to that?” Welker asked, adding that “the Republicans are doing well in California.”

“In California, it’s, no they’re not,” Trump said. “They’re dropping fast because it’s a rigged election. Let me tell you, it’s four days and they aren’t even close to coming up with the —”

Welker pushed back, saying, “That’s how they count the votes in California.”

“Do you know why they’re doing that? Because they’re cheating on the election,” Trump said.

“Do you have evidence to support that?” Welker said.

“All I have to do is look,” Trump responded.

“But that’s not evidence,” Welker said.

“And I listen. And I listen to people,” Trump said.

“But sir, that’s not evidence,” Welker said.

“We’re like a third world country,” Trump said. “Your elections are crooked and you’re crooked, and ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked. And so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re a one-sided crooked network. Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”

The unfounded claim about California was not new for Trump, who posted on Truth Social on June 4, two days after California’s election, “There’s BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California. Votes are all tied up. May not be in for weeks. Under investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Why the vote counting DELAY???”

The following day, Bilal “Bill” Essayli, first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, posted on X that his office “has multiple election fraud investigations underway” in coordination with the FBI in Los Angeles. “We will follow the evidence wherever it leads and prosecute any violations of federal election law to the fullest extent,” Essayli wrote.

No further details about the investigations were provided.

Essayli also lambasted the state’s “[u]niversal vote-by-mail with no voter ID requirements,” which he said “creates conditions where fraud can go undetected and unpunished, eroding public confidence.”

He added that the U.S. attorney’s office would be working with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division “to conduct a comprehensive audit of California’s voter rolls.”

A post from California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office on June 4 warned, “There is a lot of misinformation floating around about California’s election — including from the President.” The post linked to a CNN explanation of why it takes California so long to count ballots.

“And yes, for the record: we wish the votes were counted faster, too,” the governor’s press office post concluded.

‘No New Wars’

During an exchange about the Iran conflict, Trump repeatedly denied — wrongly — that he ever promised there would be “no new wars” in a second Trump term.

“One of your consistent campaign promises was no new wars, going all the way back to 2015,” Welker said, before asking the president, “Did you break that promise to the American people?” In response, Trump said, “No,” then he added: “I had to stop a country, very powerful, very dangerous country, from having a nuclear weapon because they’d use it.”

When Welker continued to press the issue, asking Trump “what changed” to make him go back on his promise to keep the U.S. out of “new wars,” he said, “First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

Later in the interview, Trump again said that he had made no such guarantee. “When you say I promised, I didn’t promise anything,” he said. “I don’t like these endless wars. This is not an endless war. We’ve been doing this for three months.”

Several times during his 2024 campaign, Trump was specific about wanting to “end” or keep the U.S. out of “endless” foreign wars. For example, during a Wisconsin campaign rally in September 2024, he said: “I will expel the warmongers from our national security state and carry out a much-needed cleanup of the military industrial complex to stop the war profiteering and to put always America first. … So, we’re going to end these endless wars, endless wars. They never stop. You ever see these wars? They’re going for 14 years, 20 years.”

However, to Welker’s point, there also were many times when Trump said that there would be no U.S.-involved wars at all in a second Trump administration.

When accepting the GOP nomination for president in July 2024, Trump said, “With our victory in November, the years of war, weakness, and chaos will be over. I don’t have wars.”

The following month, at an August 2024 rally in Pennsylvania, he told the audience, ”Under Trump, we will have no more wars, no more disruptions, and we will have prosperity and peace for all.” A few days earlier, during a campaign speech in North Carolina, Trump said that “we will end the era of inflation, mayhem and misery” under the Biden administration by having “no more wars” and “no more disruptions.”

Then, while giving his election victory speech in November 2024, Trump said that his political opponents were wrong to say that he would be the one to start a war. “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” he said.

But it was the U.S. and Israel that launched the airstrikes that began the fighting with Iran.

Iran Nuclear Capabilities

The president made several disputed and unsupported claims about Iran’s nuclear capabilities and the actions he and former President Barack Obama took.

Trump claimed that Iran was “very close to having a nuclear weapon twice.” The first time, he said, was under a 2015 deal with Iran negotiated by the Obama administration. Called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement was signed by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States — and Germany. In 2018, in Trump’s first term and two years after the JCPOA went into effect, Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the deal.

In the “Meet the Press” interview, Trump said the JCPOA was a “horrible deal. It was a path to them getting a nuclear weapon. They were very close to having a nuclear weapon. I terminated the deal.”

The deal put restrictions on Iran’s enrichment of uranium and required international inspections of the country’s nuclear facilities for 15 years. While there were critics of the agreement who said it didn’t go far enough, experts we interviewed disputed Trump’s claim that it was a “path” to Iran “getting a nuclear weapon.” In fact, they said, Iran accelerated its uranium enrichment program after Trump withdrew from the deal.

Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us that the 2015 nuclear deal “established an array of limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment and uranium stockpiling” and a rigorous monitoring and verification program. After the Trump administration’s withdrawal, “Iran began to reconstitute its nuclear capabilities, including by deploying large numbers of advanced centrifuges and stockpiling” highly enriched uranium.

Laura Rockwood, senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency for 28 years, told us: “Iran simply would not have been able to enrich to the point of possessing over 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium had the JCPOA remained in place.” That’s a reference to the amount of 60% enriched uranium Iran had before June 2025 airstrikes on the country’s nuclear program sites.

In July 2019, about a year after Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the Obama-era deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran had exceeded the deal’s limits on Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, and Iran’s foreign minister said the country would begin to enrich uranium beyond the low level needed for civilian nuclear power.

In the NBC News interview, Trump wrongly claimed that Iran “got all of this uranium during Obama.” When Welker said that Iran “escalated their development after the deal was ripped up,” Trump said that “they didn’t escalate anything.” That’s contrary to what arms control experts have said.

As we’ve explained before, to be weapons-grade, the 60% enriched uranium would need to be enriched to 90%.

The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation estimated that Trump’s withdrawal from JCPOA shortened the so-called “breakout time,” or the time Iran would need to produce weapons-grade uranium that could then be used for one bomb – if the country chose to do so. As of November 2024, the center estimated that the breakout time went from two to three months before the JCPOA to 12-plus months during the deal. After the U.S. withdrew from the agreement, the breakout time was reduced to just a couple of weeks.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean that Iran would have a nuclear weapon in a couple of weeks. Emma Sandifer, program coordinator at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us that once Iran had weapons-grade uranium, it “would then need to manufacture the rest of the weapon. This process would likely take much longer, perhaps months to a year.”  

Again, if Iran chose to do so. That brings us to another disputed claim by Trump. He said that Iran was close to having and potentially using a nuclear weapon before the June 2025 U.S. airstrikes. “If I didn’t go in there with the B2 bombers, they would right now have a nuclear weapon, and it could be that half of the world would be eradicated already,” Trump said.

The president’s view is at odds with the assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community — which is made up of 18 government intelligence agencies and departments — and the International Atomic Energy Agency.  

In late March 2025, the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and that [Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei has not reauthorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” In a March 25 congressional hearing, then Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reiterated that finding in her opening statement. Gabbard also said, “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

Similarly, a May 31, 2025, report from the IAEA said it “has no credible indications of an ongoing, undeclared structured nuclear programme” to develop nuclear weapons in Iran, but the group had concerns about “repeated statements by former high-level officials in Iran related to Iran having all capabilities to manufacture nuclear weapons.”

The agency said, “[T]he fact that Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon State in the world that is producing and accumulating uranium enriched to 60% remains a matter of serious concern, which has drawn international attention given the potential proliferation implications.”

The Iranian nuclear program sites targeted by last June’s U.S. airstrikes were damaged, but not “obliterated,” as Trump put it, according to experts, who told us the bombings likely increased the so-called breakout time. The operation didn’t “remove or help account for 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235 that Iran already had stockpiled,” Kimball said.

Trump has said he wants Iran to turn over its stockpile of enriched uranium as part of a peace deal to end the current U.S. military operation in the country.

Finally, Trump said that Obama sent a plane to Iran loaded with “$1.7 billion in cash, “adding that the administration “emptied out the banks” in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., for this payment. As we’ve explained before, the $1.7 billion payment, made in 2016, settled a claim that Iran had filed against the U.S. in an international tribunal in The Hague. It concerned a decades-old dispute over Iran paying the U.S. $400 million for military equipment, and the U.S. refusing to provide the equipment after the Shah of Iran was overthrown during the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

The $1.7 billion included the original $400 million and “a roughly $1.3 billion compromise on the interest,” according to a statement by John Kerry, the secretary of state at the time.

The $400 million came from a foreign military sales trust fund, and the $1.3 billion in interest came from Treasury’s judgment fund, which pays lawsuit settlements or judgments against the government. That’s according to a December 2016 Congressional Research Service report and September 2016 congressional testimony by the Treasury Department’s assistant general counsel for enforcement and intelligence.

The Treasury counsel, Paul Ahern, said the money was sent to European banks, which changed it to foreign currency to be remitted to Iran. He acknowledged that cash was involved because U.S. and international sanctions on Iran “had effectively cut off Iran from the international financial system.”

Jan. 6 Claims

Trump also claimed without evidence that some of the people who were arrested for entering the U.S. Capitol during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, had been “ushered into the building” by “FBI agents.”

After Welker asked Trump if people who attacked police officers that day should be compensated via a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that the Justice Department announced and then halted due to bipartisan backlash, Trump said, “I wouldn’t be inclined to say so, but I have to see it.” He then argued that some of the roughly 1,400 people who were charged with entering or remaining in a restricted federal building or grounds had been victims of government weaponization.

When Welker told Trump that “172 people did plead guilty to assaulting police officers,” he said: “They pled guilty because they were frightened. They went down. They were ushered into a building. Many of them were arrested without even going into the building.” Earlier, he said that there were “FBI agents ushering them into the building.”

But as Welker said, there is no evidence that FBI agents did that.

A December 2024 report from the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General said that “several hundred” FBI special agents and employees were deployed after the Capitol already had been breached by rioters who broke through windows and doors. The report also said that there were no undercover FBI employees at the Capitol on Jan. 6. 

In addition, there were 26 FBI informants, or confidential human sources, in Washington, D.C., that day “in connection with the events planned” for Jan. 6, the report said. However, those individuals are not agents or employees.

During the riot, 17 of the 26 informants entered the Capitol or a “restricted area” outside of the building. But the report said that none was authorized to do so or “to encourage others to commit illegal acts.” Only three informants were tasked with informing the FBI about suspects attending Jan. 6 events; other informants who went to the Capitol did so by choice.

As for Trump’s claim that “many” people “were arrested without” entering the Capitol, that ignores some of the serious offenses — such as assault — committed by people who were outside of the building. As an example, NBC News published photos of David Dempsey assaulting officers with a pole and pepper-spray just outside of a tunnel leading inside the Capitol. He later pleaded guilty to assaulting, resisting or impeding officers with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Dempsey was one of the many rioters who pleaded guilty to using weapons to assault officers, who — according to police statements and media reports — suffered cuts, bruises, sprains, concussions, bone fractures and other injuries.

When Trump took office in January 2025, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of every person charged with committing an illegal act during the Capitol riot. His executive order also directed the attorney general to seek dismissal with prejudice of all pending indictments against individuals for conduct related to Jan. 6 events.

More Repeats

There were more claims in the interview that we’ve fact-checked before:

Gasoline prices. Trump said that gasoline prices would “drop like a rock” once the war in Iran was over, saying they were “going to go lower than they were before.” Energy experts told us that prices will start to drop when the war ends, but it could take many months before the national average price is back to its pre-conflict level. The average U.S. price for regular grade gasoline was $4.15 per gallon as of the week ending June 8, according to the Energy Information Administration, up about 41% from the week ending Feb. 23, five days before the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes.

“For pre-war prices to show up, it could take beyond a year,” Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the fuel-price tracking service GasBuddy, told us, adding that there are “a lot of different potential” outcomes depending on what happens when the war ends.

Economy. He has said it over and over again — “I had a great first term. I had the greatest economy ever.” This time, the president added: “And you know what? This one’s blowing it away.” By the measure favored by economists — growth of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product — the U.S. economy wasn’t the greatest ever during Trump’s first term.

Annual real GDP growth peaked in that term at 3% in 2018, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Dating back to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, real economic growth has exceeded Trump’s peak year 17 times. 

As for this term “blowing … away” the first? Not so far. Real GDP growth was just 2.1% in 2025. The annual rate for the first quarter of 2026 was 1.6%, according to the BEA’s second estimate released in late May.

Factory construction. Trump mentioned that “we’re building more factories.” But that’s not what the Census Bureau’s manufacturing construction spending data show — data that the White House cited earlier this year when Trump made claims about this issue.

The monthly figures show a nearly 20% decline in manufacturing construction spending, from January 2025, when Trump was sworn in, to April, the most recent data available. On a quarterly basis, construction spending went down 18%, from the fourth quarter of 2024 to the first quarter of this year. And on a yearly basis, the drop was 6.6% from 2024 to 2025.

See our February story for more on what factors have affected this spending under the prior administration and under Trump.

Although there has been a slight uptick in manufacturing jobs this year of 23,000 jobs, overall manufacturing employment has declined during Trump’s second term by 68,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That comes after a drop of 202,000 jobs in Biden’s last year in office.

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Ohio voters are witnessing a battle of campaign television ads as each Senate candidate tries to tie the other to Jeffrey Epstein — by way of donations from those with some link to the late convicted sex offender.

Democrat Sherrod Brown’s campaign charges that Republican Sen. Jon Husted “took more money from Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators than anyone else in Washington, and then voted to keep the Epstein files secret.” The donations total $116,892 over more than 20 years. Husted’s TV spot, meanwhile, calls Brown “a liar,” saying that Husted “voted to release the Epstein files” and that Brown took $100,000 “from Epstein associates.” Those contributions date back to 2005.

Whether the campaign donations are problematic is a matter of opinion that we leave to voters to decide. We’ll lay out who gave the money.

In Husted’s case, the contributions all came from Les Wexner, the founder and former CEO of the retail company L Brands, which included The Limited and Victoria’s Secret and is based in Ohio. Wexner, who knew Epstein and hired him to be his financial manager for many years, was listed in a 2019 FBI document as a “co-conspirator,” hence the description in the Brown ad. But he has never been charged with a crime. In February, after his inclusion in the document became public, Wexner said he “never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity.”

This year, Husted donated about $34,000 of the more recent Wexner donations to a charity, his campaign said, noting this was “all the funds that were available.”

In Brown’s case, the Husted campaign mined the Epstein files for mentions of Brown donors. A few have a well-known connection to Epstein, such as Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary who announced in February that he would resign from Harvard University after some of his correspondence with Epstein was released. Summers also hasn’t been accused or charged with any crime related to his friendship with Epstein. Some of the others who donated to Brown have a tangential connection to Epstein, or it’s unclear if they knew him, such as being mentioned by Epstein in an email.

As for Husted’s votes on the Epstein files, neither campaign tells the whole story. Husted voted against a Democratic amendment to release them — in a largely party-line vote — and, two months later, supported releasing them — in a unanimous consent vote on standalone legislation.

Brown was a longtime Ohio senator, from 2007 to 2025. Husted was appointed in January 2025 by Gov. Mike DeWine to fill the Senate seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance. The race is rated a toss-up by the Cook Political Report.

Both of the TV ads we examine here started airing in late May, according to AdImpact.

Husted’s Votes

We’ll start with the issue that’s easier to explain: whether Husted “voted to keep the Epstein files secret” or “voted to release the Epstein files,” as the TV ads from each campaign say. The senator essentially did both. The campaigns, though, point only to the vote that supports their position.

On Sept. 10, Husted — and all but two Republican senators — voted to block a Democratic amendment to a defense budget and policy bill. The amendment, proposed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, called for the attorney general to release all unclassified documents related to Epstein, including Department of Justice investigations of him and his associates, and information related to Epstein’s suicide.

In July 2019, federal authorities charged Epstein, a wealthy financier, with sex trafficking of minors, alleging that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money” between 2002 and 2005. A month after his arrest, Epstein died in prison. His death was ruled a suicide by the DOJ and the New York City medical examiner.

The Brown campaign has linked Husted’s September vote to a $3,500 contribution from Wexner two months earlier. “Just last year Husted took a maximum donation from Epstein’s co-conspirator and weeks later voted to block the release of the Epstein files. The record is clear,” Patrick Eisenhauer, Brown’s campaign manager, said in an email to us. (That is the maximum amount an individual can give to a candidate committee per election.)

At the time of the September vote, President Donald Trump was opposed to the DOJ releasing its files on Epstein. The two Republicans who voted in favor of releasing the files were Sens. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley.

Asked in a Feb. 18 deposition before a congressional committee whether he lobbied Husted or anyone else to block the release of the Epstein files, Wexner said, “Absolutely not.”

The Husted campaign noted that the September vote wasn’t on the standalone Epstein Files Transparency Act and said that it was “inappropriate” for Schumer to try to add the act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. “The NDAA is a bipartisan piece of legislation that covers military pay and benefits, and national security policy. Given that it is completely inappropriate and irresponsible to toy with military benefits and our country’s national defense, the Senate voted to table the amendment,” Amy Natoce, the campaign’s communications director, told us in an email.

Natoce contended that there was “a single recorded vote on releasing the Epstein files” — the Nov. 19 vote on the bill on its own. In a May 29 CNN interview, Brown argued this was “no real vote.” On Nov. 19, the bill passed by unanimous consent, meaning that no senator objected. Husted, therefore, along with the rest of the Senate, supported it.

The bill was signed into law the same day by Trump, who had changed his position and backed the legislation. The House had passed it by a 427-1 vote.

Donations to Husted

The Brown ad says that Husted “took more money from Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators than anyone else in Washington,” and on screen, it says the contributions were 10 times more than what any other sitting senator got from “co-conspirators.” It doesn’t mention a specific dollar amount. The campaign sent us support for the ad, which details $116,892 in donations from 2001 to 2025 from Wexner.

That total includes $3,500 to Husted’s Senate campaign, $76,400 in donations for Husted’s state campaigns, and $36,992 that went to DeWine’s gubernatorial campaign when Husted was running on the ticket for lieutenant governor or to the DeWine-Husted transition fund.

The Brown campaign lists other “co-conspirators” or potential co-conspirators in FBI documents and then provides figures showing Husted’s total donations from Wexner are 10 times or more than what any other sitting senator received. For this article, we’re not delving into what other senators received. We’ll focus on the donations to Husted. 

The Husted campaign hasn’t disputed the amount received from Wexner. And it’s not surprising that the Ohio-born billionaire would donate money to politicians in his state. Wexner is a well-known figure in the Buckeye State. His name graces three buildings on the campus of Ohio State University.

He also has made some sizeable contributions to Republicans. Wexner gave $250,000 in October to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the Senate, according to Federal Election Commission data, and $250,000 in 2024 to a super PAC supporting Matt Dolan, who ran (and lost) in the Republican primary for Senate that year.

As for the “co-conspirator” label, it’s true that an August 2019 FBI email listed Wexner among eight Epstein “co-conspirators.” Wexner’s name was unredacted and made public in early February. The email listed him as a “secondary” co-conspirator and said that “[t]here is limited evidence regarding his involvement.” It also said that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York “is currently in contact with his attorneys and a subpoena has been served.”

Wexner’s attorney has said that he cooperated with the Justice Department and was told in 2019 by a federal prosecutor that he wasn’t considered a co-conspirator. He hasn’t been charged with any crime related to his relationship with Epstein, whom he had hired as a financial adviser decades ago.

About a week after Wexner’s inclusion in the August 2019 FBI document came to light, Husted, along with other Ohio lawmakers, said he would donate Wexner’s contributions to charity. The campaign told us he had donated $34,300 to Freedom a la Cart, a nonprofit that helps survivors of sex trafficking. “Those are all the funds that were available because the remainder were received in previous campaign cycles and spent during those cycles,” Natoce said.

In his prepared statement to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Feb. 18, Wexner said: “I was naïve, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein. He was a con man. And while I was conned, I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.” He said he “never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity. I was never a participant nor co-conspirator in any of Epstein’s illegal activities.”

Wexner met Epstein in “the mid-to-late 1980s,” he said, and later hired him to manage his personal finances, giving Epstein power of attorney. Wexner claims that Epstein stole “vast sums” of money from his family but later returned a “substantial amount.” Around late 2007, Wexner said, he ended his association with Epstein, who was charged in Florida in 2006 with solicitation of prostitution. He pleaded guilty two years later to that charge and to solicitation of prostitution with a minor. “In light of his eventual guilty plea and deception of our family, we completely severed our relationship with Epstein,” Wexner said in his statement.

Donations to Brown

In pushing back on the Brown campaign’s criticism of the Wexner donations, the Husted campaign has cited contributions to Brown from what it calls “Epstein associates.” The Husted TV ad claims Brown “took a hundred grand” from these associates, citing on screen a March 7 New York Post article that puts the figure at “more than $124,000.” The article says that “Brown and Husted are far from the only politicians who took money from individuals with close ties to Epstein.”

A few of the people on the list the Husted campaign provided to us do have established, close ties to Epstein. But many don’t, and it’s unclear whether some on the list knew him.

The campaign cited 14 people who gave contributions to Brown, including Abigail Wexner, Les Wexner’s wife. She donated $10,200 to Brown’s campaigns from 2011 to 2017, and additional funds to his leadership political action committee from 2017 to 2019. The Husted campaign argues that this counts as also taking money from Les Wexner. “As a married couple, Abigail and Les Wexner share assets,” Natoce told us.

In a press release about the ad, Natoce said, “Brown is literally using Epstein money to run TV ads about Epstein money!”

None of the donors the Husted campaign identified has been charged with a crime related to Epstein, nor has any been identified as a co-conspirator. As we said, many have weak links to the late sex offender. For instance, one donor is mentioned in the Epstein files because Epstein asked an assistant for her email address. Another was invited to a dinner party Epstein was having and said he couldn’t attend. Another was among a list of names Epstein emailed to himself titled “billionaire.”

The campaign also flagged $20,400 in donations from billionaire philanthropist George Soros, citing a September 2019 FBI interview with a person who said he was a victim of Epstein and claimed Soros was present on a yacht with Epstein and several others and witnessed him being sexually abused. The FBI document said the alleged victim’s conversation with the FBI, which occurred after Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, “suggested some degree of possible mental illness or emotional instability.” The document also said this person wasn’t able to provide supporting evidence or “the identities of any witnesses to support his claim of victimization.”

Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in 2021 for helping Epstein to recruit, groom and abuse minors, told the DOJ that she didn’t think Epstein knew Soros.

Some on the Husted campaign’s list either had a documented relationship with Epstein or what appear to be stronger links. Summers, the former Treasury secretary who resigned from his position at Harvard this year, had a friendship with Epstein, who hosted a 60th birthday dinner party for Summers in 2014. The released Epstein documents show Summers had dinner with Epstein in 2018, appeared to get romantic advice from Epstein that year and was corresponding with him in 2019. Epstein was arrested that July by federal law enforcement. Summers has called his relationship with Epstein a “major error in judgement.”

Summers gave $10,300 to Brown’s campaigns in 2024 and 2025.

Two others that the Husted campaign cited, including in the press release about the TV ad, are Casey Wasserman, an entertainment executive, and attorney Brad Karp, who donated $5,400 and $2,000 to Brown’s campaigns, respectively. Wasserman exchanged emails with Maxwell in 2003 in which he said he missed her and asked, “can we book that massage now?” He told the Hollywood Reporter early this year that he regretted the correspondence, which took place “long before her horrific crimes came to light,” adding that he “never had a personal or business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.”

Karp sent an email to Epstein in 2015 thanking him for an invite to an event at Epstein’s home that Karp called “truly ‘once in a lifetime’ in every way.” Epstein responded that “there are many many nights of unique talents. you will be invited often.” The same year, Epstein asked Karp if it was possible to revoke a woman’s tourist visa, and Karp responded that he would work on it. 

A 2003 email in the files said that media executive Barry Diller “would like to take a hike on the island” and indicated that Epstein had approved it. Diller — who donated $5,400 to Brown — said this year that “I am probably the only one who went to the island to see the architecture rather than the inhabitants.”

Husted’s camp also cited Reid Hoffman, who gave $7,000 to Brown’s campaign in 2025. Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and a well-known Democratic donor, had meetings with Epstein as late as 2018. He said this year that he knew Epstein “because of a fundraising relationship with MIT, which I very much regret.”

In the Husted campaign press release, Husted accuses Brown of “hypocrisy,” saying, “Why won’t he donate the money he received from Epstein associates to charity?”

When asked by CNN about donating contributions from Abigail Wexner or Summers, Brown said that those donations are “not tied in any way the way the co-conspirator” donations are. He said it was “not real reporting to make those comparisons.”

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Legislative efforts to make daylight saving time permanent year round got a boost with support from President Donald Trump, who criticized the twice-yearly clock switching as cost-prohibitive.

But there is no strong evidence that Trump’s solution — switching permanently to daylight saving time — would provide the economic boost Trump suggests it would.

The Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent year round unless states opt out, was folded into a motor vehicle safety bill that passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 21 with a 48-1 vote.

Shortly after, Trump posted his support on Truth Social.

“This is so important in that Hundreds of Millions of Dollars are spent every year by people, Cities, and States, being forced to change their Clocks. Many of these Clocks are located in Towers, and the cost of renting, or using, Heavy Equipment to do this twice a year is prohibitive!” Trump wrote.

“I am going to work very hard to see The Sunshine Protection Act signed into Law,” Trump added. “It’s time that people can stop worrying about the ‘Clock,’ not to mention all of the work and money that is spent on this ridiculous, twice yearly production. It will also be a very nice WIN for the Republican Party. Take it! We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day — And who can be against that — This is an easy one!”

We should note that while Trump framed the legislation as a potential “WIN for the Republican Party,” the bill has bipartisan support (and bipartisan opposition, as well). But it would still need support from the House and then the Senate, plus the president’s signature, in order to pass. Similar past efforts in Congress have stalled.

We could find no credible analysis of the cost of using heavy equipment to physically change municipal clocks located in towers, as the president mentioned. In fact, David Prerau, author of the 2005 book “Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time,” told us that in the decades he has spent researching and speaking publicly about daylight saving time, “no one has mentioned that particular point.” While there may be a cost to changing such municipal clocks, he said, it’s also “very rare” and the cost is negligible in the larger scheme of the topic.

A “back-of-the-envelope” calculation by an economist with the Independent Institute updated in 2013 by the American Enterprise Institute estimated the “opportunity cost” of daylight saving time at about $2 billion per year. The estimate assumed people spent 10 minutes twice a year changing their clocks, and it assigned a lost wages figure to that time. (We would note that many digital clocks nowadays automatically make the time shift, so the lost-time argument has dissipated over time.)

More commonly, though, economists have attempted to estimate the cost of switching back and forth between standard and daylight saving time related to impacts on health, driving and work. (Most of the country moves the clock forward by an hour on the second Sunday in March, and back an hour the first Sunday in November.)

For example, an analysis by Chmura Economics & Analytics, a labor market research firm, updated in 2024, looked at evidence of economic loss from peer-reviewed journals — increased heart attacks, strokes, workplace accidents and traffic accidents attributed to switching times — and concluded daylight saving time costs about $672 million annually in all U.S. metropolitan statistical areas.

Although extending daylight saving time is often touted as an energy-saver, a Department of Energy analysis in 2008 concluded, “The electricity savings are small compared to the national total for the year, representing about 0.03 percent of the total national electricity consumption.” Some other studies have also found a small electricity savings.

But still other studies have found the opposite. Research published in 2011 looked into the effect of daylight saving time in Indiana and concluded that “if anything, the policy seems to have the opposite of its intended effect” and that electricity demand increased about 1%.

Nevertheless, the authors wrote, “there are other arguments made in favor of DST. These range from increased opportunities for leisure, enhanced public health and safety, and economic growth.”

There’s another facet to the daylight saving debate: If you do away with switching back and forth, do you go with standard time or daylight saving time?

Weighing the Options

Trump himself appears to have been conflicted on which route is best.

On Dec. 13, 2024, he posted to Truth Social, “The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t! Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.”

But shortly after taking office for a second term, Trump was asked on March 6, 2025, when he’d be getting rid of daylight saving time.

“This should be the easiest one of all, but it’s a 50/50 issue,” Trump said. “And if something’s a 50/50 issue, it’s hard to get excited about it. I assume people would like to have more light later, but some people want to have more light earlier because they don’t want to take their kids to school in the dark. … But a lot of people like it one way, a lot of people like it the other way. It’s very even. And usually I find when that’s the case, what else do we have to do?”

By the following month, though, Trump seemed to have picked a side.

“The House and Senate should push hard for more Daylight at the end of a day,” Trump posted on Truth Social on April 11, 2025. “Very popular and, most importantly, no more changing of the clocks, a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!”

Trump is correct that switching permanently to daylight saving time is the “more popular alternative.” In a 2022 poll by CBS News, 46% of Americans said they’d like daylight saving time all year around, while 33% preferred standard time all year around. Just 21% said they would like to keep switching back and forth. A Monmouth University poll that same year similarly found 44% of Americans favored year-round daylight saving time, while 13% favored year-round standard time and 35% said they’d like to keep changing the clocks twice a year.

Currently, 19 states have enacted legislation to switch to year-round daylight saving time, if Congress votes to allow it, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Two states — Hawaii and most of Arizona — and several U.S. territories already observe permanent standard time.

Effects on Health, Traffic, Work

Dr. Beth Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics in the Vanderbilt Sleep Division who testified before the House in 2022 in favor of a permanent switch to standard time, told us via email, “Moving permanently to DST would not be a cost savings and in fact, is associated with decreased productivity” due to disruption of sleep cycles. It also “increases healthcare costs,” she said. And, she noted, energy cost analyses are less relevant now that “energy use with computers etc is 24/7” than “when we were focused on electrical lighting, as we were in the 1900s.”

Groups such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine also prefer switching permanently to standard time.

“Although the chronic effects of remaining year-round in daylight saving time (which shifts daylight hours later in the evening) have not been well studied, sleep experts say that standard time (which shifts daylight hours earlier in the morning) aligns best with human circadian biology,” the AMA wrote in 2022. “Data show that the sudden change from standard time to daylight saving time in March is associated with significant public health and safety risks, including increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events, mood disorders, and motor vehicle crashes. Some studies suggest that the body clock does not adjust to daylight saving time even after a few months.”

“Eliminating the time changes in March and November would be a welcome change. But research shows permanent daylight saving time overlooks potential health risks that can be avoided by establishing permanent standard time instead,” AMA Trustee Alexander Ding said at the time. “Sleep experts are alarmed. Issues other than patient health are driving this debate. It’s time that we wake up to the health implications of clock setting.”

In a 2024 position statement, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine wrote: “[T]he United States should eliminate seasonal time changes in favor of permanent standard time (ST), which aligns best with human circadian biology. Evidence supports the distinct benefits of ST for health and safety, while also underscoring the potential harms that result from seasonal time changes to and from daylight saving time (DST).”

Legislators Weigh In

There is far from a consensus in Congress.

At a House Energy and Commerce Committee markup on May 21, Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida lobbied for a permanent switch to daylight saving time.

“Like clockwork twice a year, I hear from my constituents — I know you do too — on their dread of having to change the clocks,” Bilirakis said. “For decades, Americans have long criticized this switch as disruptive to families, businesses, schools, and public health. Studies have also shown that the economic productivity increases with more evening daylight, while reducing traffic accidents and improving overall quality of life.”

Democratic Rep. Nanette Diaz Barragán of California provided the counterpoint.

“Like many Americans, I too am tired of changing our clocks twice a year,” Barragán said. “Parents hate it, workers hate it, our bodies hate it. But making daylight saving time permanent poses health and safety issues. Doctors, neurologists, sleep scientists, and major medical organizations have warned Congress that permanent daylight saving time would hurt public health and public safety. … Why? Because our bodies are built to wake up with morning light. When sunrise gets pushed later into the morning, especially in winter, it turns off our sleep, our mood, our concentration, and even our health, our heart health. Sleep experts have linked the shift to daylight saving time with higher risk of heart attacks, strokes, depression, and car crashes, and for millions of Americans, permanent daylight saving would mean going to school and work in darkness for months. It would put sunrise in many states past 8am for over three months.”

The country tried year-round daylight saving time in the early 1970s, and it didn’t go well.

In 1973, Congress passed — and then President Richard Nixon signed — the Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act — which made daylight saving time year-round as a response to the ongoing fuel crisis at the time. It was supposed to last for two years. But just a few months into it, widespread public support for the switch collapsed, and Congress pulled the plug.

“The experiment … ran afoul of public opinion—parents became concerned about traffic accidents involving their children, who were going to school in the predawn darkness on winter mornings,” the New York Times reported at the time.

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton cited that history lesson in an Oct. 28, 2025, speech from the Senate floor, opposing a plan to switch permanently to daylight saving time.

“In January of 1974, millions of Americans traveled to work and school in darkness. Commuter trains were delayed. Schoolchildren carried flashlights. Tragically, some of these kids were struck by cars and killed while walking to school in the dark,” Cotton said. (Indeed, Time reported in February 1974 that eight children died in pre-dawn traffic accidents that winter in Florida alone.)

“It’s said that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” Cotton said. “If permanent daylight savings time becomes the law of the land, it will again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans.”

In a June 1 article, economist William Shughart, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and professor at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University, argued for year-round standard time, writing: “Few, if any, general benefits of DST have been identified. But physiologists, sleep medicine specialists, and other experts have emphasized the human costs of springing time forward by an hour in March, only to set it back again eight months later. Misaligning body clocks (circadian rhythms) with sunlight has been associated with brain fog, strokes, heart attacks, and more workplace and road accidents. The adverse effects are especially troublesome for older people, who take longer than their younger compatriots to adjust to the time shocks. … Permanent daylight saving time holds a false promise of energy savings, bustling stores, and enhanced social welfare.”

There is, of course, a third camp in this debate — those who argue to just leave things as they are.

Prerau, the daylight saving time expert, told us that while there are undeniable social benefits to daylight saving time in the spring, summer and fall, the effects are intolerable in the winter. During the summer, sunrise gets pushed an hour from, say, 4:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m., and so most people don’t even notice it. But in the winter, it can push sunrise until after 8:30 a.m or even 9 a.m. “Everyone gets up in the dark,” he said. “Adults drive to work in the dark. Kids go to school in the dark.” Switching the clocks may be disruptive, Prerau said, but it’s worth that price to enjoy daylight saving for eight months.

“In my opinion, stick with the way it is now,” he said. “Once a year you lose an hour of sleep. But that’s worth the benefit of having daylight saving for eight months out of the year.”

Daylight Saving Time Does Not Provide ‘Longer, Brighter Day’

As for Trump’s statement that switching permanently to daylight saving time “gives you a longer, brighter Day — And who can be against that,” that is, of course, not accurate. The president has more clearly said on other occasions that the switch would mean “more Daylight at the end of a day.”

“Clocks merely advance an hour, shifting sunlight from the morning to the evening,” Shughart wrote. “The length of the day doesn’t change a single nanosecond.”

The term “daylight saving time” is “a misnomer if there ever was one, given that daylight isn’t saved, it’s just moved from morning to evening,” Jon Nese, a teaching professor of meteorology at Penn State University, explained in 2022.

“The length of day (ie, the length of daylight) doesn’t change whether you’re on Daylight Saving Time or Standard Time – it’s just that an hour of daylight is moved from the beginning to end of the day,” Nese told us this week via email.

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