Food and Drug Administration

Could abortion pills be the sleeper issue for the midterms?

The politics of the abortion issue in the post-Dobbs environment has been dramatically altered, both by the introduction of state-level restrictions in Republican states and by pressure campaigns in Democrat-dominated states to increase the subsidization and solidification of existing lax abortion policies. But the most significant development in the abortion space in recent years wasn’t a decision that came from the Supreme Court, but from the Biden administration – first temporarily (with Covid as the justification) and then permanently granting the ability to dispense abortion-inducing pills via telehealth, without the previously required visit to a doctor.

One government agency is undermining Biden’s cancer moonshot

“I promise you if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes America: we’re gonna cure cancer,” then-candidate Joe Biden pledged in 2019. Virtually no one believed him at the time — and his administration is both complicating this promise and allowing China to leapfrog American medical innovation, potentially exposing the most sensitive health data of anyone who relies on Chinese companies for early cancer detection. Over halfway through his term in office, Biden’s own Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, is blocking a merger involving what advocates call a “cancer miracle” that could save up to 100,000 lives every year, concretely jeopardizing Biden’s already-unlikely promise to cure cancer.

ftc cancer moonshot lina khan

Telework is making government even lazier

Cockburn spent his long weekend the same way most Americans did: reading the Functional Government Initiative’s recent report. It found that “on any given day from March-December 2020, between 20-30 percent of HHS employees did not appear to be working.” Government inefficiency is nothing new, but in this case teleworking is exacerbating the problem. And that isn’t about to improve — at least not under this administration. Biden continues to push for more teleworking options, even as the pandemic finally begins to fade. The Washington Free Beacon reports that Brian Harrison, the former HHS chief of staff who commissioned the investigation of telework participation, speculates that many recent federal agency errors may be due to an inactive teleworkforce.