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Republicans say that able-bodied adults who don’t work would lose Medicaid coverage under the House tax-cuts-and-spending bill, while Democrats say the legislation would hurt vulnerable groups. The bill’s main target is those able-bodied adults, but other groups would lose coverage due to paperwork burdens and other provisions in the bill, health policy experts say.

The majority of coverage losses under the bill would come from those who became eligible for Medicaid due to an expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act — those enrollees would face new work requirements unless they were subject to an exemption.

“The challenge here is that these work requirements also become sort of a paperwork requirement,” Jennifer Tolbert, deputy director of the Program on Medicaid and the Uninsured at the health policy research group KFF, told us in an interview. In order to keep their Medicaid coverage, people have to document that they’re working the required number of hours or meet the criteria for an exemption. It’s not yet known what kind of documents will be required, she said, but it’s “quite likely that there will be people … who have reported disabilities, who have other chronic conditions, and … who are caring for children or elderly parents, who may also lose coverage” because they aren’t able to provide the correct documents.

Overall, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would lead to 10.9 million more people being uninsured in 2034, with 7.8 million of those due to the bill’s Medicaid provisions and the rest due to changes concerning the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces. The House narrowly passed the bill on May 22, and the Senate is now considering it.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republican lawmakers have said that those losing insurance coverage would be people who shouldn’t have received it in the first place.

“The numbers of Americans who are affected are those that are entwined in our work to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse,” Johnson said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on May 25. He claimed that “pregnant women and young single mothers, the disabled, the elderly … are protected” under the bill.

The House speaker and other Republicans have said the bill, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, actually saves the Medicaid program, even though it cuts federal Medicaid spending. In a May 20 statement, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said the bill “stops the subsidization of competent adults who are just choosing to not work.”

KFF estimated that the bill would reduce federal Medicaid spending by a net $793 billion over 10 years, based on CBO’s analysis. That’s a 12% reduction in federal Medicaid funding. Yet, Johnson has claimed that the spending cuts aren’t cuts at all. “There are no Medicaid cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill. We’re not cutting Medicaid,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 1. “What we’re doing is strengthening the program. We’re reducing fraud, waste and abuse that is rampant in Medicaid to ensure that that program is essential for so many people, ensure that it’s available for the most vulnerable.”

(Johnson has also cited “more than 1.4 million illegal aliens on Medicaid.” We’ve already written about that false claim. The CBO said those individuals would lose coverage from “state-only funded programs,” not from Medicaid. The bill would reduce federal Medicaid funding to states that continue their own health insurance programs for immigrants in the U.S. illegally.)

Democrats, meanwhile, have focused on potential impacts on “vulnerable” groups.

Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado said on CNN on May 25 that Johnson’s comments about “able-bodied adults” and “illegal aliens” were “not true.” Bennet said the House bill would drive “a lot” of health care providers “out of business,” and suggested that kids and families in poverty would be affected by the Medicaid provisions.

The bill has financial implications for some providers, such as community health centers and hospitals, but it’s unclear to what extent they would close as a result. Tolbert said “it will be hard to say” if closures are directly related to the bill.

In a May 27 press conference, Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that “every one” of the approximately 2 million people on Massachusetts’ Medicaid program “will be at risk of losing their health coverage” under the Republican bill.

Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us: “Basically every type of Medicaid enrollee could be at risk of coverage loss.” 

But, of course, the vast majority of Medicaid enrollees wouldn’t be expected to lose coverage, even if many are “at risk,” as Warren put it. The health insurance program for low-income individuals covers about 83 million people and is jointly funded by the federal government and the states. Coverage losses would vary by state – and there’s uncertainty about how states would react to the bill’s changes. But KFF estimated that Massachusetts’ enrollment would drop by 11% in 2034 under the bill. 

Nationwide, Medicaid projected enrollment would decline by 12% in 2034, KFF said. 

We’ll go through what the bill would do and how it could affect Medicaid enrollees.

The Bill’s Work Requirements

A large portion of the Medicaid savings in the bill come from new work requirements, or what the legislation calls “community engagement,” for adults who gained coverage under a Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. This aspect of the bill saves an estimated $344 billion over 10 years.

Forty states plus Washington, D.C., have implemented that Medicaid expansion. It broadened eligibility to adults under age 65 who earn up to 138% of the federal poverty level, and the federal government provides 90% of the funding for that population. The income eligibility threshold before that varied by state. 

The expansion population was estimated at 21.3 million people in 2024, according to KFF.

The House bill would require those in the expansion group ages 19 to 64 to work, or participate in community service or job training, for a minimum of 80 hours per month. Attending an educational program at least half-time would also qualify, as would earning income equivalent to 80 hours’ worth of minimum-wage work. 

States would be required to exempt certain groups, including pregnant people, parents and caretakers of dependent children and disabled family members, people with substance use disorders and some medical conditions, some people with disabilities, and those who had been in foster care as children, according to a breakdown of the bill by Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.  

States would need to confirm that requirements were met for at least one month before someone applied for Medicaid or renewed their eligibility, and those renewals must happen at least twice a year. The work requirements would have to be instituted no later than Dec. 31, 2026. 

Impact of Work Requirements

The CBO estimated that Medicaid coverage would drop by 5.2 million people in 2034 because of the work requirement provision, with 4.8 million being uninsured. Its June 4 letter on these figures said that 18.5 million would be subject to the requirement, though “some” would be exempt.

It’s unclear how many are “able-bodied” and choosing not to work.

Studies have found a small percentage of Medicaid enrollees would fit that description. In an analysis of 2024 Census Bureau survey data, KFF determined that 8% of Medicaid recipients under age 65 and not also getting Social Security disability benefits weren’t working because they were retired, unable to find work or another reason. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that half of that group was retired.

Nearly two-thirds – 64% – were working full-time or part-time, and the rest weren’t working due to a disability or illness, caregiving responsibilities, or being a student.  

Johnson has referred to “about 4.8 million able-bodied workers, young men, for example, who are on Medicaid and not working. They are choosing not to work when they can,” calling this “fraud.” But the 4.8 million figure is the CBO estimate of the number who would become uninsured due to the work requirements. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a post on X, said these were all “able bodied adults choosing not to work.” 

It’s unknown how many of those individuals fit Johnson’s description. We contacted the House speaker’s office about this figure and his other claims, but we haven’t received a response. 

Tolbert told us she didn’t know if a CBO breakdown would be able to provide details of what types of Medicaid enrollees will lose coverage under the work requirements, such as single adults, parents or those with disabilities. 

“It is patently false that the impact is only going to be on able-bodied individuals,” Cuello said, adding that many people with disabilities aren’t enrolled with an official disability determination and instead are in the expansion population. 

Michael Karpman, a principal research associate in the health policy division at the Urban Institute, told us that if there’s a group of enrollees in the expansion population that should be working but choose not to “it’s small.” The think tank has found that at least 90% of the adults in the expansion population “are working … are in fair or poor health or have a disability, likely have some caregiving responsibilities, or are looking for work. And so most people, the vast majority of people, are participating in the activities prescribed by the policy, or could potentially meet the exemption criteria from the work requirement.” 

But “in practice,” he said, “a lot of people who are likely to qualify for an exemption are not going to actually get that exemption” because they’ll have trouble with the reporting requirements. “That’s what we saw in states that previously implemented work requirements. Some people were automatically exempted by the state; most of those who weren’t had difficulty with the reporting bureaucracy in terms of showing that they were exempt or meeting the work requirement.”

Two states have tried such requirements. 

In Arkansas, which implemented work requirements for Medicaid in 2018, more than 18,000 adults were disenrolled that year. A federal court ruling stopped the program in 2019, after a group of Medicaid enrollees in the state sued. The case provided anecdotal evidence of the problems people had with the reporting requirements. One man in his 40s, who worked at a poultry business, successfully filed documentation at first but then lost coverage when he was unaware that he needed to keep doing so monthly. 

An Urban Institute study found that the work requirement was associated with an increase in the uninsured among the target group for the policy, 30- to 49-year-olds with low incomes. But researchers didn’t find changes in employment.

And in Georgia, which, like the House bill, requires proof of work before enrolling applicants, “very few people who are eligible for the program have been able to enroll,” Karpman said. 

As of April 30, the state had enrolled about 7,400 low-income adults since the program launched in July 2023, but the state had expected to enroll 47,000 in the first two years. The Georgia Budget & Policy Institute has said 240,000 people in the state are “potentially eligible.”

Jennifer Haley, also a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, told us that states won’t have perfect information on enrollees’ health conditions that would be subject to an exemption. There’s not ”a database of whether someone’s, quote, able bodied or not.”

Workers who are self-employed or gig workers also might have a hard time producing documents showing hours worked, these experts said.  

Karpman and Haley were co-authors on a March report from the Urban Institute that analyzed a more limited 2023 congressional proposal for work requirements. “Our findings suggest states will disenroll significantly more expansion adults who should be exempt or are already engaged in work activities relative to the disenrollment of adults who are not engaged in work activities and do not meet the exemption criteria,” the report said.

Under the current bill, the expansion population has to renew eligibility at least twice a year, instead of once a year, which could lead to more people losing coverage because they miss notices or don’t file the correct paperwork — or what’s known as procedural disenrollment — not because they aren’t eligible. 

This can have a ripple effect, where some children who are eligible could lose coverage when their parents are dropped from Medicaid for failing to complete the renewal process. If parents enroll, they are more likely to get their kids enrolled, and the reverse impact also occurs. “We know that when parents lose coverage, often their children still lose coverage as well,” Tolbert said.

The CBO estimated an increase in the uninsured of 700,000 people in 2034 due to the eligibility redeterminations.

There are a lot of unknowns with how the work requirements could play out, Tolbert said. States have the option to require more frequent eligibility renewals or proof of more than one prior month of work. “State choices here could have significant implications in terms of who is able to meet the requirements or not,” she said.

And federal guidance will come later on specific medical conditions that qualify for an exemption or what documents states will accept.

Other Provisions

While the work requirements are expected to have the largest impact on enrollment, there are other provisions that could lead to lost or reduced coverage.

The bill delays the implementation of some Biden-era rules until 2035. One of those made it easier for seniors or people with disabilities with Medicare coverage who are also eligible for Medicaid to enroll in the latter. In these cases, Medicaid pays for supplemental benefits and Medicare cost-sharing. A preliminary CBO report estimated that 1.3 million in 2034 would lose their Medicaid coverage due to this provision but retain Medicare.

That Biden-era rule also streamlined enrollment and renewals for children and eliminated waiting periods for kids to enroll in the Children’s Health Insurance Program. “The eligibility enrollment rule would fix those problems, and they are repealing that rule,” Cuello said. “So again, that is absolutely going to impact the eligibility of children. Less children will have coverage under the Children’s Health Insurance Program because of those policies.”

The CBO estimated that this provision would increase the number of uninsured by 600,000 in 2034.

Cuello’s center also wrote that the bill prohibits Medicaid payments from going to Planned Parenthood clinics for 10 years, limiting at least some people’s access to care.

And there are the 1.4 million immigrants in the country illegally who CBO estimated would lose coverage through state-only programs. These aren’t Medicaid or CHIP enrollees, but the bill uses Medicaid to pressure states to drop those programs. As we’ve explained, the bill proposes reducing the federal Medicaid match for states’ ACA expansion populations from 90% to 80% if they provide health coverage to people living in the country illegally, regardless of how that program is funded.

According to KFF, there are 14 states, plus Washington, D.C., that have such programs to cover children regardless of immigration status, including seven states and D.C. that also cover some adults.

In addition, the bill increases cost-sharing for expansion enrollees with income above the federal poverty level, adding a $35 co-pay for services, but exempting primary care, and services for mental health or substance use disorders.

Impact on Health Care Providers

Democrats have said that the bill would force health care providers, such as nursing homes, community health centers or rural hospitals, to close. On CNN, Bennet said the legislation would drive “a lot” of health care providers “out of business,” while Warren, in her press conference, said that “hospitals and community health centers” would be “forced to close.” The bill could hurt the finances of these providers, but how many would close their doors as a result is unknown.

Tolbert told us that “it will be hard to say that any hospital closures or other providers going out of business … is directly related to these Medicaid changes.” But there will be financial implications, she said.

Community health centers, for example, are required to provide care regardless of someone’s ability to pay, she said. So centers that see a decrease in their patients’ Medicaid coverage would face increased financial pressure.

Rural hospitals also could be at risk. The bill would prohibit states from increasing or instituting new provider taxes, which states have used to supplement payments to hospitals to cover uncompensated care, Tolbert explained.

Cuello said that some rural hospitals will go bankrupt because of the bill’s provisions. “I can say with a good degree of comfort that if you have, at current level of funding, a lot of hospitals at risk of closure, and you massively decrease funding … we can safely assume that there will be some greater number of hospitals that closes.”

Cuello pointed us to a June report from the Center for Healthcare Quality & Payment Reform that said about a third of rural hospitals in the U.S. “are at risk of closing because of the serious financial problems they are experiencing,” and 14%, or 314 rural hospitals, are “at immediate risk of closing.”

Similarly, Bennet’s and Warren’s offices pointed to the financial frailty of rural hospitals and health centers and how a reduction in Medicaid payments and increased uncompensated care costs would hurt them.

For instance, Warren’s office cited a report from the Urban Institute that estimated that spending for health care services would decline by $771 billion over 10 years due to the bill and uncompensated care costs for the uninsured would go up $198 billion.

The senator’s office also cited comments by Shade Cronan with the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, who said the average community health center gets about a third of its revenue from Medicaid. Cronan told New England Public Media in April that the state probably wouldn’t be able to cover a cut in that revenue stream. “And then health centers will have to make really difficult decisions, potentially to reduce services, to close sites, to lay off staff.”

About 19% of hospital care spending in 2023 came from Medicaid, KFF reported, and half of rural hospitals in non-ACA-expansion states and 41% in expansion states had negative margins that year.

All of that shows that a reduction in Medicaid revenue would have a financial impact. But it’s unclear to what extent health care providers would be forced to close because of it and, as Tolbert said, difficult to determine later.

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In a salient moment with the leader of South Africa, President Donald Trump played a video that he said showed “burial sites” for a thousand white farmers — the victims of what he has called a genocide — along a roadside in South Africa.

It actually showed a 2020 demonstration bringing attention to the issue of violence against farmers of all races in South Africa.

Trump made his comments during a May 21 Oval Office meeting with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa a week after the U.S. accepted the first white South African refugees, whom Trump has described as victims of genocide. Ramaphosa pushed back against the claim that there is a white genocide happening in South Africa, and in response, Trump had a staffer dim the lights to play a video.

Pointing to the screen, which showed an aerial view of a rural highway dotted on each side with white crosses, Trump said, “These are burial sites, right here. Burial sites — over a thousand of white farmers. And those cars are lined up to pay love on a Sunday morning. Each one of those white things you see is a cross and there’s approximately a thousand of them. They’re all white farmers. The family of white farmers.”

“I’d like to know where that is, because, this — I’ve never seen,” Ramaphosa said.

“I mean, it’s in South Africa,” Trump said.

Rather than burial sites, as Trump claimed, the video showed a demonstration following the August 2020 murder of Glen and Vida Rafferty, who had been killed during a robbery at their farmhouse in Normandien, a rural area about 200 miles southeast of Johannesburg. The crosses along the road were meant to memorialize and draw attention to the many farmers who have been killed over the years.

There is a real issue with South African farmers being killed. Although some have cast the killings as a “white genocide,” experts say that’s not accurate, as we wrote recently. Rather, they said, most of the violent acts are committed during robberies in a country where most of the wealth and land post-apartheid are still owned by a relatively small white minority. White people own about 72% of the farm and agricultural holdings despite making up about 7% of the population, according to a 2017 land audit report commissioned by the South African government.

And, experts told us, while there is a high rate of murder and violence in the country, there is no evidence that white farmers are being singled out. According to police data, murders of farmers are less than 1% of all murders in South Africa. There were 51 murders on farms in 2022-23, figures that aren’t delineated by race, out of a total of nearly 27,500 murders in the country.

“On average, 76 people are murdered in South Africa every day according to 2023/2024 official police statistics,” Lizette Lancaster, of the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa, told us in an email.

“Robberies and murders on farms are recognised as a serious problem by all sectors of society,” she said, going on to explain, though, that “almost all South Africans from all walks of life will agree that there is no white genocide. The government has reacted to persistent claims of a white genocide and the conflation of that with farm murders since Democracy in 1994.”

In an interview with South Africa’s public broadcasting news service, Darell Brown, a farmer who helped organize the demonstration featured in the video Trump showed, said, “The message we’re trying to convey is: farm murders must stop. I don’t mean just murders of white commercial farmers. Farm murders must stop.” He explained that the roadside crosses were representative of farmers who had been killed and called on the government to take the issue seriously.

The demonstration was held on Saturday, Sept. 5, 2020, and took place along the P39 highway between the Raffertys’ home and the nearby town of Newcastle.

The South African news website IOL quoted a participant in the demonstration, Bob Hoatson, as saying that the initiative was not about white farmers: “It was for people from all walks of life who were concerned about farm murders,” he said.

During the Oval Office exchange, Trump asserted, “When they kill the white farmer, nothing happens to them.”

But according to Lancaster, it’s not true that “the government is willfully ignorant (e.g. police) or the security sector is actively complicit in the crimes committed against vulnerable groups.” In South Africa, she said, “government, public sector and community partnerships are yielding results. Farm murders have gone down, rural safety strategies are now in place, and there is nothing particularly exceptional about how gruesome these murders are when you look at the scale of violence in townships, for example.”

In the case of the Rafferty murders, three men have been convicted and are serving time in prison.

“The lives of farmers, farm workers and farm dwellers as well as every citizen of the country, black and white, matters,” then Deputy President David Mabuza said after the Rafferty murders, as he convened a meeting to discuss programs to curb violence against farmers. “It is for this reason that government will continue to work with the Justice, Crime Prevention and Security Cluster to ensure prevention as a priority in dealing with farm murders.”

While violence remains a serious issue in South Africa, the video Trump played did not show 1,000 “burial sites” or prove there is a white genocide in the country.

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When the Washington Post reported via anonymous sources that a government intelligence assessment concluded the Venezuelan government was not directing the migration of members of the Trenreport de Aragua gang to the United States, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, dismissed such reports and said those “behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence” had “twisted and manipulated [the information] to convey the exact opposite finding.”

But a redacted copy of the intelligence memo shows that the Washington Post’s reporting was accurate. 

The April 7 intelligence assessment broadly concluded that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s “regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The six-page memo from the National Intelligence Council, “Venezuela: Examining Regime Ties to Tren de Aragua,” was released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on May 5 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Freedom of the Press Foundation. The foundation provided us a copy of that memo.

The conclusions in the National Intelligence Council memo — the shared assessment of 18 U.S. intelligence organizations — undercut the basis for President Donald Trump’s March 15 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelan immigrants suspected of affiliation with Tren de Aragua. In that proclamation, the Trump administration argued that TdA is “conducting irregular warfare” in the U.S. and operating “in conjunction” with the Maduro regime, and in support of “the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.”

As we have written, the Alien Enemies Act is an 18th century law that says that in times of war or during an “invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government,” the president can apprehend, restrain, secure and remove any immigrants who came from the enemy country.

Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act hinges on two assertions: that TdA is “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States” and that it is acting “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”

As we said, the National Intelligence Council memorandum broadly contradicted that second statement.

What the Memo Says

According to the NIC memo, “While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The NIC memo listed several reasons for its conclusion.

First, it said, “Venezuelan intelligence, military, and police services view TDA as a security threat and operate against it in ways that make it highly unlikely the two sides would cooperate in a strategic or consistent way.” The memo noted that in late January, “at least two Venezuelan National Guard units arrested TDA members in Venezuela in separate operations.”

The memo further noted — citing press reports and redacted sources — that “[s]ince at least 2016, Venezuelan security forces have periodically engaged in armed confrontations with TDA, resulting in the killing of some TDA members.”

The memo stated that the intelligence community “has not observed the regime directing TDA, including to push migrants to the United States, which probably would require extensive coordination, and funding between regime entities and TDA leaders that we would collect.” The memo stated that “the decentralized makeup of TDA … would make such a relationship logistically challenging.” The memo also noted that the IC “recognizes the regime appreciates migration as a safety valve, allowing discontented Venezuelans to leave.”

In her April 21 social media post criticizing press reports about the then unreleased memo, Gabbard contradicted those assessments, saying, “The Office of the Director of National Intelligence fully supports the assessment that the foreign terrorist organization, Tren De Aragua, is acting with the support of the Maduro Regime, and thus subject to arrest, detention and removal as alien enemies of the United States.”

“Illegal immigrant criminals have raped, tortured, and murdered Americans, and still, the propaganda media continues to operate as apologists for them,” Gabbard said in a released statement. “It is outrageous that as President Trump and his administration work hard every day to make America safe by deporting these violent criminals, some in the media remain intent on twisting and manipulating intelligence assessments to undermine the President’s agenda to keep the American people safe.”

But the released NIC memo shows the media reports were not twisting the intelligence assessments. As the Washington Post reported on April 17, “The intelligence product found that although there are some low-level contacts between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua, or TdA, the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader. The product builds on U.S. intelligence findings in February, first reported by the New York Times, that the gang is not controlled by Venezuela.”

The FBI’s Position

The FBI was the lone agency among the 18 U.S. intelligence organizations on the National Intelligence Council that offered partial dissent. (Other NIC organizations include the CIA, the five Department of Defense armed services, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence, and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.)

According to the memo, “While FBI analysts agree with the above assessment, they assess some Venezuelan government officials facilitate TDA members’ migration from Venezuela to the United States and use members as proxies in Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and the United States to advance what they see as the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing governments and undermining public safety in these countries, based on DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and FBI reporting as of February 2024.” (The italics are the memo’s emphasis.)

On April 23, Fox News Digital said it talked to an unnamed “senior administration official” who shared unclassified portions of an FBI report in which “[t]he FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of Maduro and his regime.”

In a speech in Michigan on April 29, Trump referenced that report, saying, “The FBI recently assessed that these vicious gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela to foment violence and instability in the United States of America.”

The NIC memo, however, said that “most of the IC” has concluded that “intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible.”

“Some regime officials are probably willing to capitalize on migration for personal financial or other benefits, even though the Maduro regime probably is not systematically directing Venezuelan outflows, such as to sow chaos in receiving countries,” the NIC memo stated. “The intelligence record indicates Venezuelans have migrated voluntarily, often at great personal risk, to flee political instability and near-collapse of Venezuela’s economy. The IC attributes increased migration flows, including the spike in US arrivals from 2021 to 2024 of Venezuelan nationals –which could include some TDA members — to a variety of push and pull factors including socioeconomic conditions, family ties to the United States, and migrants’ perceptions of US and regional enforcement.”

But the NIC said that while Maduro may not have been directing the migration of Venezuelans, neither has he sought to stem it, saying that migration “helped him retain power by having dissidents leave the country.”

“The Maduro regime may have also welcomed the logistical, financial, and political headaches that unregulated migration has caused for the US Government, its perceived principal adversary, even if not a principal intent,” the memo stated.

Even in cases of “limited IC reporting suggesting a link between TDA and some Venezuelan officials aimed at facilitating TDA migration to the United States,” the memo noted that “in some cases, reporting warns that these sources could also be motivated to fabricate information.”

An official in Gabbard’s ODNI, however, said there’s reason to put more credence in the FBI intelligence than the assessment from the umbrella National Intelligence Council. The FBI assessment is based on its domestic law enforcement operations against TdA in the U.S., an ODNI official told us. “This information and intelligence are the most robust and accurate given their focus on domestic security and crimes, versus limited intelligence assessments from other intelligence elements who by law focus solely on foreign intelligence collection, and who until President Trump took office, had very limited resources focused on TdA,” the official said.

The ODNI official argued that the Venezuelan government is “aiding and abetting” TdA by creating conditions in the country that enable it to thrive — much the same way that the Taliban government in Afghanistan was providing sanctuary to al Qaeda, and thereby enabling al Qaeda to carry out its Sept. 11, 2001, attack in the U.S. The official also pointed to comments that José Gustavo Arocha, a former lieutenant colonel in the Venezuelan army, made to Fox News Digital in December. Arocha said that TdA is “a state-sponsored Maduro regime organization. The real boss of the Tren de Aragua is in Caracas, Venezuela. It is the Maduro regime, because they created TdA, and they use the TdA as a blackmail [tool] for any situation.”

The NIC memo acknowledged, “The lack of transparency and accountability in Venezuela has created an environment for widespread corruption and for regime officials to benefit from a variety of illicit activities, an environment fueled by Maduro’s illegitimate and autocratic grip on power. This persistent outflow of migrants probably offers opportunities for some regime officials in capacities to facilitate migration movement to look for and receive personal kickbacks for their services, and to conceal the benefits they receive.”

The memo noted that U.S. law enforcement reports claim members of the regime “have cooperated with TDA by providing financial or material support, but we cannot verify the sources’ access. Even so, these reports do not claim that these figures direct the group.”

And, the NIC memo warned, “Some reports come from people detained for involvement in criminal activity in the United States or for entering the country illegally, which could motivate them to make false allegations about their ties to the Venezuelan regime in an effort to deflect responsibility for their crimes and to lessen punishment by providing exculpatory or otherwise ‘valuable’ information to US prosecutors.”

Courts on Use of Alien Enemies Act

The question of whether the Maduro regime in Venezuela is coordinating with TdA is central to the Trump administration’s argument for invoking the Alien Enemies Act in order to — as Trump put it — “expel every foreign terrorist from our soil as quickly as possible.” As we said, the act pertains to times of war or an “invasion” by a “foreign nation or government.”

The act has been used three times in U.S. history, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II.

In his March 15 proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump declared that “TdA is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States. TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.” And as a result, the proclamation said, “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”

Trump invoked the act in March to summarily deport 238 Venezuelan migrants alleged to be members of TdA, who were then sent to a mega prison in El Salvador. But the New York Times found no evidence that a vast majority of the men had any connection to Tren de Aragua.

Some federal judges have ruled that the administration can’t use the Alien Enemies Act in this way.

On May 1, a federal district judge in Texas — who was appointed by Trump — concluded that Trump had improperly applied the Alien Enemies Act.

“[T]he historical record renders clear that the President’s invocation of the AEA through the Proclamation exceeds the scope of the statute and is contrary to the plain, ordinary meaning of the statute’s terms,” U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. wrote. “As a result, the Court concludes that as a matter of law, the Executive Branch cannot rely on the AEA, based on the Proclamation, to detain the Named Petitioners and the certified class, or to remove them from the country.”

In similar cases in other states, two more federal judges have since concurred.

“Since Respondents have not demonstrated the existence of a ‘war,’ ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion,’ the AEA was not validly invoked by the Presidential Proclamation,” Judge Alvin Hellerstein, a federal judge in the Southern District of New York who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, wrote in a May 6 ruling.

“Petitioners have not been given notice of what they allegedly did to join TdA, when they joined, and what they did in the United States, or anywhere else, to share or further the illicit objectives of the TdA,” Hellerstein wrote. “Without such proof, Petitioners are subject to removal by the Executive’s dictate alone, in contravention of the AEA and the Constitutional requirements of due process.”

The same day, a federal district judge in Colorado, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said she found “unpersuasive” the Trump administration’s definition of “invasion” to broadly include “hostile entrance,” or “hostile encroachment.” U.S. District Judge Charlotte Sweeney said she agreed the word “invasion” meant military action against the U.S.

These decisions can all be appealed by the Trump administration, and the question of whether the president can use the Alien Enemies Act may ultimately end up before the Supreme Court.

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To commemorate his first 100 days in office this term, President Donald Trump gave a speech in Michigan and granted interviews to several news outlets. In our review of his remarks, we found false and misleading claims, including quite a few Trump has made before:

• The president insisted that an immigrant who was deported to El Salvador has tattoos on his knuckles that say “M-S-one-three,” but the actual letters and numbers in a photo Trump shared are an “obvious digital manipulation,” an expert told us.

• Trump said the FBI had confirmed that “gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela” to the U.S. Anonymous sources told one news outlet that the FBI backed up Trump’s claim, but other unnamed sources have said 17 intelligence agencies disagreed with that assessment.

• Trump took credit for recent increases in military recruiting, but those gains began under his predecessor and before he won reelection in November.

• He misleadingly said that a House Republican budget resolution that aims to cut about $800 billion in Medicaid spending over a decade would “look at waste, fraud, and abuse,” adding that “nobody minds that.” One expert told us the cuts are “orders of magnitude too large to not be destructive.”

• The president claimed that since January, “job gains for native-born Americans now exceed job gains for foreign workers … for the first time in nobody even knows when.” But there were several two-month periods in 2024 when native-born employment exceeded gains in foreign-born employment, which includes U.S. citizens born abroad.

• Trump claimed that there were “$7 to $8 trillion” in business investments in the U.S. since he took office, but the White House said more than $5 trillion in future investments have been announced. He also falsely claimed that under former President Joe Biden “nobody was really investing in this country,” including Apple.

• He misrepresented Democrats’ concern about deportations, wrongly saying that they were “claiming we’re not allowed to deport illegals.” Democrats have been critical of the lack of legal due process afforded to those who were deported.

• Trump said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced that we’re banning eight major artificial dyes from our food supply.” The administration wants food companies to eliminate the dyes, but there’s no agreement and no broad ban.

• The president cited a Trump-friendly polling firm to boast that “for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction.” Other polls show most people think the country is on the wrong track.

• He wrongly said “we’re doing great” with international tourism, which he said would become apparent in the next six months. But there were 11.6% fewer overseas visitors to the U.S. in March than there were the previous March.

Trump also repeated claims we’ve checked before about inflation, gasoline and egg prices, trade deficits, education, illegal immigration and more.

We reviewed his speech in Warren, Michigan, on April 29, and his recent interviews with ABC News and Time.

Knuckle Tattoos

The president claimed in his interview with ABC News that Kilmar Abrego Garcia — an immigrant who was deported without a hearing to El Salvador in March — had tattoos on his knuckles that labeled him as a member of the gang MS-13.

“He said he wasn’t a member of a gang and then they looked and on his knuckles he had MS-13,” Trump said.

The president was referring to a photo that he first shared on his social media platform, Truth Social, on April 18 and then shared again on April 21.

The photo appears to show tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s left hand, with each one labeled — “Marijuana,” “Smile,” “Cross,” “Skull.” Above each tattoo is text that shows a letter or number — “M,” “S,” “1,” “3.”

In the exchange between Trump and Terry Moran, ABC News’ senior national correspondent who conducted the interview, it appeared that the president understood the “MS13” to be part of the tattoo rather than text added to show an interpretation of the meaning of the tattoos.

Moran tried to point out that the actual letters and numbers were Photoshopped onto the image Trump shared, but the president insisted Moran was wrong, that his tattoos actually said “MS13.” When Moran tried to move on, saying, “We’ll agree to disagree,” the president refused to let the point go and said Moran’s corrections were an example of “why people no longer believe the news.”

See the full exchange here:

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics, described the text in the photo as an “obvious digital manipulation” in an email to us.

“What was done here is that the Trump administration took what appears to be a real photo (although I’m not able to authenticate that because what we are seeing here is a printout of a photo), ‘interpreted’ the four tattoos to be MS13, and then digitally added that annotation to the image,” Farid said.

We asked the White House to clarify whether or not the photo had been annotated, but we didn’t receive an answer. Instead, we got an emailed statement from White House spokesman Kush Desai saying, “Ask any law or immigration enforcement official who’s been on the ground about Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s tattoos: they’re MS-13.”

The Washington Post asked eight law enforcement officials and gang researchers for their interpretations of the tattoos and got mixed responses, with some saying that the tattoos could be interpreted as showing an affiliation with MS-13 and others saying that they are not a code for gang affiliation. Other news outlets have also reported on expert analysis of the tattoos, with most concluding that the tattoos do not signify gang affiliation.

Even though we don’t know what the tattoos mean — if they mean anything at all — we do know that Abrego Garcia had only the depictions of a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull tattooed on his left hand when he was photographed at the prison in El Salvador in April. He did not have “MS13” displayed on his knuckles.

Intelligence Reports on Gangs and Venezuelan Government

Trump claimed the FBI has confirmed that the Venezuelan government has been emptying its jails and sending gang members to the U.S., which Trump has been saying for more than a year. Anonymous sources told one news outlet that the FBI backed up Trump’s claim, but other unnamed sources have said 17 intelligence agencies disagreed with that assessment.

In a presidential proclamation issued on March 15, Trump designated the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization and claimed the gang “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus,” referring to the president of Venezuela.

While we have reported that Trump has provided scant evidence for this explosive claim, in his speech in Michigan, Trump said, “The FBI recently assessed that these vicious gangs have been sent by the foreign regime in Venezuela to foment violence and instability in the United States of America.”

On April 23, Fox News Digital said it talked to an unnamed “senior administration official” who shared unclassified portions of an FBI assessment that “some Venezuelan government officials ‘likely facilitate’ the migration of members of the violent gang Tren de Aragua from Venezuela to the United States to advance the Maduro regime’s objective of undermining public safety in the U.S.”

According to the news report, “The FBI assesses that in the next six to 18 months, Venezuelan government officials likely will attempt to leverage Tren de Aragua members in the United States as proxy actors to threaten, abduct and kill members of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States who are vocal critics of Maduro and his regime.”

The Fox News report came a week after the Associated Press reported just the opposite.

Citing anonymous “U.S. officials,” the AP reported, “A new U.S. intelligence assessment found no coordination between Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government, contradicting statements that Trump administration officials have made to justify their invocation of the Alien Enemies Act and deporting Venezuelan migrants.”

According to the AP, the classified assessment was the work of 18 agencies that make up the intelligence community. “It repeatedly stated that Tren de Aragua … is not coordinated with or supported by the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, or senior officials in the Venezuelan government. While the assessment found minimal contact between some members of the gang and low-level members of the Venezuelan government, there was a consensus that there was no coordination or directive role between gang and government,” the story stated.

The report noted that of the 18 agencies that make up the U.S. government’s intelligence community, “only one — the FBI — did not agree with the findings.” According to the Washington Post, which relied on “two people familiar with the matter,” the FBI “assessed a moderate level of cooperation between the gang and the Venezuelan government.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard criticized the National Intelligence Council report highlighted in the AP story, telling Fox News, “The weaponization of intelligence to undermine the President’s agenda is an assault on democracy. Those behind this illegal leak of classified intelligence, twisted and manipulated to convey the exact opposite finding, will be accountable under the full force of the law.”

Inflating Impact on Military Recruitment

Near the end of his Michigan speech, Trump turned to the military and took credit for recent increases in recruiting that began under his predecessor.

“After years of missed targets, our military suddenly has the best recruiting numbers in 30 years,” the president said.

He’s right that recruitment numbers have been up following a slump from the COVID-19 pandemic, but the increase predated his election in November.

At the end of the most recent fiscal year, which finished in September, the Defense Department announced that it had recruited 12.5% more people than it had the previous fiscal year.

Every branch of the military reached its recruitment goal for fiscal year 2024, except for the Navy, according to the Defense Department.

A chart complied by the Congressional Research Service shows that the Army, Air Force and Space Force exceeded their goals.

Taren Sylvester, a researcher at the Center for a New American Security, told Military.com in March, “The incoming administration is claiming all of these upticks are a result of the election swing and people now thinking they want to go into the military after the policy changes.”

But, they said, “Whether or not that holds out, we won’t see for another six, 12, 18 months. The shifts that we’re seeing now are reflective of the work that’s been done over the past two to five years.”

Medicaid

In the Time interview, Trump was asked about the House Republican budget resolution that aims to cut about $800 billion from Medicaid over 10 years, as part of the process of extending expiring tax cut provisions and enacting some new tax cuts. “I don’t think they’re going to cut $800 billion. They’re going to look at waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump said, adding that “nobody minds that.” That’s misleading.

While it’s still unknown how specifically Republicans would trim the Medicaid budget, experts told us such large cuts in federal funding would have a significant impact, leaving states with tough choices on raising revenue, cutting other parts of their budgets or cutting their Medicaid programs.

As we’ve explained, the budget calls for the Energy and Commerce Committee to cut $880 billion in spending over 10 years, and the committee’s options for those reductions are mostly limited to Medicaid, a federal-state program that provides health care for low-income people. Medicare, the federal program that covers seniors, could also be cut, but that’s even more politically challenging.

“The place where they have the ability to make cuts is going to be in Medicaid,” Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy’s Center for Children and Families, told us. Cuello said an $880 billion cut is “gigantic” and “orders of magnitude too large to not be destructive.” It would be about an 11% cut to federal Medicaid funding over the decade.

Native- and Foreign-Born Workers

In Michigan, Trump claimed that because of his administration, employment growth for U.S-born workers is now higher than for foreign-born workers.

“In three months, we have created 350,000 jobs,” Trump said. “For the first time in recent memory, job gains for native-born Americans now exceed job gains for foreign workers. This is for the first time in nobody even knows when. Americans now are doing better than foreign workers.”

Although he said in three months, Trump appears to be referencing the two-month increase in employment from January to March, which is the most recent data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that period, native-born employment increased by 613,000 and foreign-born employment — which includes foreign-born American citizens — increased by 451,000. But it hasn’t been long since that last happened.

There were several times in 2024 when a two-month increase in native-born employment exceeded gains in foreign-born employment (August 2024-October 2024, May 2024-July 2024, March 2024-May 2024 and February 2024-April 2024). If Trump was just comparing previous periods of January to March, the last time it happened was January 2022 to March 2022. (The White House didn’t tell us which months Trump was comparing.)

Business Investments

Trump touted announcements of investments by private companies, wrongly claiming that under Biden “nobody was really investing in this country” and that Apple “never invested” in the U.S.

In his ABC News interview, Trump claimed that there has already been more private-business investment in the U.S. during his administration than there was in any year during Biden’s presidency.

“We’ve got $7 to $8 trillion being invested in our country in two months,” Trump said. “Biden didn’t have that over a year. I mean, if you look at Biden, nobody was really investing in this country.”

In his Time interview, Trump mentioned investments by chips companies, car companies and Apple. “Apple is investing $500 billion in building plants. They never invested in this country,” Trump said.

The White House said on April 29 that Trump “has secured over $5 trillion in new U.S.-based investments in his first 100 days.” These investments haven’t already happened; they’re announcements by companies of future investments, sometimes over several years.

Private companies also made such announcements when Biden was president. In a November 2024 statement, Biden announced that legislation he signed — the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act — had “helped attract over $1 trillion in announced private-sector investments.” In his final month in office, Biden’s administration issued a report on the results of his “Investing in America” agenda.

And Apple certainly has announced similar investments in the U.S. before. In April 2021, under Biden, the company announced a $430 billion investment over five years. That was after it announced a $350 billion investment under Trump in 2018. When it announced in February its latest plan to investment more than $500 billion in the U.S. over four years, the company said its “new pledge builds on Apple’s long history of investing in American innovation and advanced high-skilled manufacturing.”

Misrepresenting Democrats on Deportation

The president also touted the deportation of about 250 immigrants his administration has accused of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The men were flown to a mega prison in El Salvador on March 15.

During the Michigan rally, Trump played a video that had originally been posted by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele showing the immigrants arriving in shackles and having their heads shaved.

“The radical left Democrats, who are so bad for this country, are fighting to protect [Tren de Aragua] — you just saw that — and MS-13 criminals,” Trump said. “But the second we try to deport them, the radical Democrat party is racing to the defense of some of the most violent savages on the face of the Earth. … They’re racing to the courts to help them. … They’re claiming we’re not allowed to deport illegals.”

But that misrepresents what’s happened. Democrats who have opposed the administration’s action have largely expressed concern over the lack of due process for those who were deported, arguing that noncitizens who are targeted for deportation are, in most cases, entitled to a hearing beforehand.

“Due process is the language of a constitutional democracy, and so we have to speak that language so people can understand other people’s situations,” Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Politico in April. “And I do believe that if we don’t stand up for the due process rights of non-citizens, they will quickly trample the due process rights of citizens.”

A letter from Raskin and other House Democrats to administration officials echoed that sentiment. “Due process and separation of powers are matters of principle,” Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat of New York told the Associated Press on April 17. “Without due process for all, we are all in danger.”

Food Dyes

In his speech, Trump said that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “announced that we’re banning eight major artificial dyes from our food supply.”

There’s less here than meets the eye. The administration wants food companies to eliminate the dyes, but there’s no agreement yet and no broad ban of synthetic food dyes.

According to an April 22 Food and Drug Administration news release, the agency is starting the process of revoking authorization for two food dyes, Citrus Red 2 and Orange B, which are only approved for very narrow purposes. The agency is “[w]orking with industry to eliminate six remaining synthetic dyes,” the release said. (The FDA announced a ban of a ninth synthetic dye, Red 3, in January, and the new FDA release said the agency was requesting that companies remove it from food sooner than required.)

In remarks at an April 22 press conference announcing the new measures to phase out synthetic food dyes, Kennedy praised food companies “for working with us to achieve this agreement or this settlement.” But, when pressed, he said, “I would say we don’t have an agreement. We have an understanding.”

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said at the same press conference, “I believe in love, and let’s start in a friendly way and see if we can do this without any statutory or regulatory changes, but we are exploring every tool in the toolbox to make sure this gets done very quickly.”

Kennedy subsequently incorrectly claimed a broad ban of synthetic food dyes. “We announced last week the ban on the nine petroleum-based synthetic dyes, food dyes,” he said in an April 30 Cabinet meeting.

Some companies have announced decisions to phase out synthetic dyes in certain products. For instance, PepsiCo on April 24 said that it would no longer include the dyes in certain snack foods by the end of the year. And a spokesperson for WK Kellogg last week told the New York Times that the company would phase out synthetic dyes from cereals sold in schools.

Right Direction/Wrong Direction

Citing popular support for his agenda, Trump said at the rally in Michigan that “as a result of our policies, for the first time in modern history, more Americans believe that our country is headed in the right direction than the wrong direction. … Has never happened before.”

Trump is referring to a Rasmussen Reports presidential approval poll released in mid-February that found — for the first time in over 20 years (not ever) — a plurality of Americans (47%) believed the country was headed in the right direction, more than the 46% who felt it was headed in the wrong direction. However, that lead is within the poll’s margin of error of 3 percentage points, and it comes via a polling firm many consider to be conservative-leaning. Also, more recent polling from Rasmussen in late April has the “right direction” camp falling to 42%.

And other recent polls found widely different results.

Marquette University surveys have found that while the right track/wrong track divide has been narrowing over the last six months, a majority of Americans still think the country is on the wrong track. An early February survey found 38% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, while 62% believed it is on the wrong track. That narrowed even further to 42-58 in late March.

Surveys from YouGov also indicate a majority of Americans believe America is “off on the wrong track.” The most recent poll in late April found 36.5% of Americans believed the country is “generally headed in the right direction,” while 54% said it was “off on the wrong track.”

Gallup poses its question slightly differently, but in its most recent poll in early April, 34% said they were satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time, while 64% said they were dissatisfied.

Tourism

In his ABC News interview, Trump contradicted host Terry Moran’s claim that “travel is down into the United States from around the world.”

“We’re doing great,” Trump insisted.

“Tourism is gonna be way up,” Trump said. “Wait till you see the numbers. The tourism is way up. … Tourism’s doing very well. … Wait till you see the real numbers come out in about — in six months from now.”

We can’t predict what the tourism numbers will show in six months, but Moran was correct that travel to the U.S. is currently down. According to the Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office, there were 11.6% fewer overseas visitors to the U.S. in March than there were in March 2024. Those figures do not include data from Canada, nor land arrivals from Mexico.

Repeats

Inflation. Trump claimed that during the Biden administration the U.S. had “probably the worst inflation we’ve ever had.” Under Biden, the annualized rate of inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, which was less than 14.8% in March 1980 and 23.7% in 1920. When Biden left office in January, the rate was down to 3%, and it was down to 2.4% in March under Trump.

Gas and egg prices. Arguing that prices have declined, Trump claimed that “gasoline hit $1.98 in a few states … the last couple of days,” and the cost of “eggs are down 87%” since he took office. There are no states where the average cost of a gallon of regular grade gasoline has dropped below $2; the national average was $3.13 as of the week ending April 28, according to the Energy Information Administration. Also, the average retail price of eggs was up, not down, in March, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. Even the average wholesale price that retailers pay for eggs sold in stores has not decreased by as much as Trump said. As of April 25, it was down 61% from its peak in early March.

Trade deficit. Defending higher tariffs on imports of foreign goods, Trump, referring to the trade deficit, said, “We were losing $3 to $5 billion a day on trade. We were losing a trillion and a half to $2 trillion a year.” The trade deficit in goods and services was about $918 billion in 2024 and the trade deficit in goods alone was about $1.2 trillion. Divide either by 365 days, and you get an average per-day deficit of between $2.5 billion and $3.3 billion. Either way, economists have said a trade deficit doesn’t mean the U.S. is losing money.

U.S.-China trade. When talking about the 145% tariffs that he put on imports of Chinese goods, Trump said China was “making from us a trillion dollars a year,” appearing to again exaggerate the trade gap between the U.S. and China. The U.S. trade deficit with China in goods and services in 2024 was about $263 billion, and last year the U.S. imported a total of about $462.5 billion in Chinese goods and services combined.

No EV mandate. Trump claimed that he “terminated Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate,” but there was no such mandate. In March 2024, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency finalized new fuel efficiency standards for certain vehicles. The rules were expected to increase purchases of electric vehicles in the U.S., but there was no requirement for drivers to buy them. Carmakers could have met the new standards by also making more efficient cars that run on gas, experts told us.

Education. “Last month I signed a historic executive order to begin the process of eliminating the federal Department of Education,” Trump said. “We’re going to send it back to our states to run. I mean, how the hell bad can we do? We’re like in last place.” As we have written, U.S. high school students performed above average in science and reading, and a bit below average in math, according to the latest data compiled by the intergovernmental Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And in other international assessments, elementary students in the U.S. scored above average in math, science and reading.

DOGE Savings. Trump said that his new Department of Government Efficiency had “found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.” The DOGE website now claims $160 billion in savings, providing a “Wall of Receipts” that purports to back up about $63 billion of that. It’s unclear how much, if any, of these savings amount to fraud or abuse, as opposed to spending that the administration deems wasteful.

WHO. In discussing his withdrawal from the World Health Organization, Trump repeated his claim that previously, China paid just $39 million, while the U.S. paid around $500 million. Those figures are inaccurate. While the U.S. has paid much more than China — most of it voluntarily — China has paid more than that. Trump also claimed that Biden “could have signed up for $39 million or less.” That’s not how the global health group’s funding works. Since 2020, the required dues for the U.S., based on GDP, have been more than $200 million for each two-year period.

Illegal immigration. Trump claimed that the Biden administration was allowing “gang members,” “murderers,” and people from “prisons, mental institutions” to illegally enter the U.S. “We had many murderers, 11,888, they think. Some murdered more than one person,” he said. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said last year that there were 13,099 noncitizens convicted of murder who were in the U.S. and not being detained by ICE. But the Department of Homeland Security told us that the “vast majority” of them entered the country and had their custody status determined “long before this Administration.”

Jan. 6 committee. Trump attacked the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying, “Nobody mentions the fact that the unselect committee of political scum … they destroyed all evidence, they burned it, they got rid of it, they destroyed it, and they deleted all evidence.” In fact, the committee made public a nearly 850-page report with evidence from its investigation. It also published videos, transcribed interviews, depositions and other documents. But the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, did acknowledge in a July 2023 letter that the committee “did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to launch a massive overhaul of the federal government if reelected president, and, he said, change would come fast.

To be sure, Trump’s first 100 days have seen a frenetic pace of change. But while Trump has boasted that some have called it “the most successful 100 days in the history of our country,” his agenda has also been challenged in the courts and by other economic and political realities.

Here, we look at a half dozen of Trump’s most consequential pledges – ones that he said would happen immediately — and the progress Trump has made toward fulfilling them.

Tariffs

In early April, Trump followed through on his August 2024 campaign promise that the U.S. was “going to have 10 to 20% tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years” — although the tariffs, a form of tax, are paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries.

On April 2, Trump issued an executive order implementing a minimum 10% tariff on U.S. imports of foreign goods, as well as higher tariff rates for goods imported from certain countries. A week later, after stock market declines partly attributed to his new policies, Trump paused for 90 days some of the higher country-by-country tariffs.

However, Trump didn’t pause the higher tariff rates for goods coming to the U.S. from China. Instead, he incrementally increased them to 145%, after China retaliated to Trump’s tariff announcements by raising its own tariffs on imports of U.S. goods. During the election campaign, Trump had floated putting at least a 60% tariff on Chinese imports.

Trump also has kept in place 25% tariffs on certain goods imported from Canada and Mexico that went into effect in March — tariffs that Trump initially paused after announcing them in February. (Goods from the two countries aren’t subject to the 10% rate for other imports.) Other previously announced tariffs still in effect include 25% tariffs on imports of steel, aluminum, automobiles and certain auto parts.

How long the 10% universal tariff remains in place, and what happens to the higher rates after the 90-day pause, is still to be determined. In his April 22 Time interview, Trump claimed to have since negotiated “200 deals” on trade that he said will be announced at a later date. He also has signaled that the 145% tariff on Chinese goods will “come down substantially.”

Ukraine-Russia War

On March 4, 2023 — just over a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland that he could and would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours once he was elected and even before he was back in the White House.

“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly. Quickly. I will get the problem solved and I will get it solved in rapid order and it will take me no longer than one day,” Trump said.

It was a claim he made repeatedly during his third presidential campaign — at least 53 times, according to a search of his public remarks by CNN.

But over three months into his second term in the White House, Trump has found ending the conflict more difficult than he claimed. The fighting continues, with more than 160 Ukrainian civilians killed and over 900 injured by Russian attacks in March, according to monthly data compiled by the United Nations.

The Trump administration has brokered indirect negotiations between the warring nations, but the president’s frustration over the process has vacillated between wrongly blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war to chiding Russian President Vladimir Putin for a missile and drone strike on Kyiv on April 24 while ceasefire talks were underway.

In recent days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has claimed “there are reasons to be optimistic” that a deal between the countries is getting closer, while also warning that the U.S. is ready to walk away if the war drags on. “We have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in or if it’s time to sort of focus on some other issues that are equally if not more important in some cases,” Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 27.

As for his campaign promise that he’d easily and quickly make peace between Ukraine and Russia, Trump told Time magazine in an April 22 interview, “Well, I said that figuratively, and I said that as an exaggeration, because to make a point. … Obviously, people know that when I said that, it was said in jest.”

Illegal Immigration

It was perhaps the most enduring of Trump’s campaign promises: “On Day 1, I will close the border and I will stop the invasion of illegal criminals coming into our country.” On his first days in office, Trump — among an array of other immigration actions — issued an executive order declaring a national emergency at the southern border and deploying military to help stem the flow of illegal migration.

In his first 100 days in office, illegal immigration has slowed to a trickle. Apprehensions of migrants who illegally crossed the border in February and March fell to 8,346 and 7,181 — the lowest monthly totals since at least the 1960s. That’s an 83% drop from November (46,615) and December (47,324) of 2024, the last two full months under President Joe Biden. The most recent monthly totals are a fraction of the figure in December 2023, when apprehensions of illegal border-crossers peaked under Biden at 249,740.

“Just as happened during the beginning of his first term, migration at the border has absolutely plummeted since January 20th,” Adam Isacson, a migration expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, told us via email. “The main reason for that is first, migrants and smugglers always stop and go into ‘wait and see’ mode when they know that a crackdown is imminent, and Trump was elected promising an enormous crackdown.”

But, “perhaps even more importantly,” Isacson said, Trump issued a proclamation declaring “that an invasion is ongoing at the southern border” as justification for shutting down the right of migrants to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. As a result, the Trump administration boasts that just nine migrants were released into the U.S. between Jan. 20 and April 1, a 99.9% decrease from the same period in 2024 under Biden.

“That is illegal,” Isacson said, noting that a legal challenge of the Trump asylum policy is currently before the courts.

Trump also promised to launch the “largest deportation program in American history.” The White House says the U.S. has deported more than 135,000 people in Trump’s first 100 days. That pace lags the average number of deportations over a similar period in fiscal year 2024 under Biden, but the Trump administration argues the Biden figures are inflated because so many more people were illegally crossing the border.

On March 15, Trump issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a rarely used law that dates back to 1798 — before sending hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The Supreme Court has said that detainees must get a court hearing before deportation, and in late April, the court temporarily blocked the administration from using the law to deport Venezuelan men being held in Texas.

Facing criticism for failing to provide due process rights, Trump has argued it’s not feasible to have hearings for all the migrants who want to challenge their deportation.

At a press conference on April 28, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt vowed the administration is “in the beginning stages of carrying out the largest deportation campaign in American history.”

Isacson said that while deportations are “nowhere near the million-a-year pace that the Trump people have been saying they expect to hit,” the House Judiciary Committee is beginning work on a spending bill, “which in the House version has $45 billion for detention and $14 billion for deportation.”

“Once that passes, they will have the resources—even if they have to call in the military to back it up—and we might see a gigantic increase in the tempo of mass deportation,” Isacson said.

Birthright Citizenship

In a May 30, 2023, video posted on Truth Social, Trump revived a pledge he hadn’t fulfilled in his first term: If elected, he would “sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”

And on Jan. 20, he did exactly that, signing an executive order that argues the longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment to grant birthright citizenship to all children born in the U.S. is incorrect. The order said that it’s U.S. policy to not issue or accept documents recognizing citizenship if a person’s mother was in the U.S. unlawfully, or in the country lawfully but only temporarily, and the father was neither a U.S. citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.

In signing the order, Trump acknowledged when asked by a reporter that the issue could face legal challenges (and several lawsuits were soon filed). “We think we have good grounds, but you could be right. I mean, you’ll find out,” Trump said. “It’s ridiculous. We’re the only country in the world that does this with birthright, as you know.” (The U.S. isn’t the only country with birthright citizenship. As we’ve written, about 30 countries have similar policies, including Canada and Mexico. The CIA World Factbook lists 38 countries, many of them in Latin America and the Caribbean.)

Within a few weeks of Trump’s order, four federal judges in four different states had issued preliminary injunctions, blocking the executive order from taking effect. The case is now on the Supreme Court docket, with oral arguments slated for May 15. A decision is likely to come this summer, as SCOTUSblog explained.

Most constitutional scholars have said that changing the birthright citizenship policy in the U.S. would require a constitutional amendment. A few experts disagree and have said Congress could pass legislation to change it. In 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship provision in a case involving a man born to parents who were citizens of China but legally living in the U.S. The court hasn’t specifically ruled on this issue concerning parents living in the U.S. without legal authorization.

Stock Market

Back in August 2024, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank more than 1,000 points, Trump blamed his presidential campaign rival, then-Vice President Kamala Harris, for the decline. “Of course there is a massive market downtown,” Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social on Aug. 5. “You can’t play games with MARKETS. KAMALA CRASH!!!”

Then, at a rally in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19, the eve of his first day back in office, Trump took credit for a rising stock market and referred to it, and other economic measures, as “the Trump effect.”

“Everyone is calling it the — I don’t want to say this. It’s too braggadocious, but we’ll say it anyway, the Trump effect. It’s you. You’re the effect. Since the election, the stock market has surged,” Trump said.

But the glow was short-lived, due partly to the uncertainty over Trump’s tariff policy. The S&P 500, an index that tracks the performance of the leading companies on U.S. stock exchanges, has had its “worst first-100-day performance for a new administration in over 50 years,” MarketWatch reported on April 29. At that time, the S&P 500 was down nearly 8%; the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 7.5%, and the Nasdaq Composite had fallen 11.5% since Jan. 20.

Trump has typically touted the stock market as a measure of his economic prowess. But in a March 9 interview on Fox News, Trump said, “You can’t really watch the stock market,” and suggested a longer-term view. “If you look at China, they have a 100-year perspective. We have a quarter. We go by quarters. You can’t go by that.”

Prices

At another campaign rally in August 2024, Trump promised, “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down and we will make America affordable again.” Then, in a December interview after he was elected, Trump said, referring to prices, “I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.”

Indeed, the price of many products hasn’t declined under Trump, according to the latest federal data. For one, egg prices, which Trump frequently claims are down by large percentages, were still increasing, on average, for consumers, as of March. Average wholesale prices, which retailers pay for the eggs they sell in stores, have declined by 46% since Trump was sworn in. In March, the Department of Agriculture credited “no significant outbreaks” of the bird flu for declining wholesale prices. But that hasn’t yet translated to lower prices for grocery shoppers.

Average grocery prices overall, which Trump has claimed “are down,” were up in March as well, according to the Consumer Price Index for at-home food items.

For drivers, the average price of gas, which Trump also mentions often, hasn’t declined, either, according to the Energy Information Administration. The EIA said the national average price of a gallon of regular grade gas was $3.14 for the week ending April 21 — up from $3.11 during the week ending Jan. 20, which is the day that Trump began his second term. The price of crude oil, however, has dropped, after OPEC+ announced it would move up a planned production increase due to recent tariffs imposed by the U.S. and China.

Inflation growth has come down since Trump took office, leading Trump to claim on April 14 that “we’ve already solved inflation.” The inflation rate of 2.4% for the 12 months ending in March was lower than the annualized rate of 3% in January, but that doesn’t mean prices are going down. It means prices are increasing at a slower pace. Economists also said that the tariffs Trump announced in April could cause inflation to rise again, as importers pass along most of the tariff costs to consumers in the form of higher prices.

In a campaign rally last July, Trump had said, “Starting on Day One, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.”

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The Supreme Court ruled on the evening of April 10 that the Trump administration must comply with a lower court’s order to “facilitate” the release from custody of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an immigrant who was deported without a hearing to a mega prison in El Salvador. The case underscores the issue of due process and what legal protections are afforded to noncitizens.

Here, we’ll explain what due process means, any limitations in its application to noncitizens, and the details of the Abrego Garcia case. In the process, we’ll fact-check some comments officials have made about the case.

The Trump administration, which has said that Abrego Garcia was accidentally deported due to an “administrative error,” has stalled on bringing him back despite court orders, arguing that U.S. agencies do “not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.” Abrego Garcia was among the more than 250 immigrants who were deported by the administration to El Salvador on March 15.

“That’s up to El Salvador, if they want to return him. That’s not up to us,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said during an Oval Office meeting between President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on April 14. At the same meeting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio emphasized the diplomatic implications, saying, “The foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court.”

But the case highlights what some legal scholars see as an effort by the Trump administration to erode due process — or the constitutional right to contest an arrest by the government — and set a precedent for making people unreachable by imprisoning them outside of the U.S.

“Why hasn’t the Trump administration acted to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release? After all, he is there because of a government screw-up,” law professors Erwin Chemerinsky and Laurence H. Tribe asked in an April 9 opinion piece published by the New York Times.

“The answer can only be that it is using this case to establish a truly chilling proposition: that no one can stop the Trump administration from imprisoning any people it wants anywhere else in the world,” they answered.

We reached out to the White House for a response to that proposition, but we didn’t receive a reply.

Some Trump administration officials, though, have suggested that there may be limits to due process. Border czar Tom Homan, for example, said that immigration agents are the “principal” judges of whether or not a detainee has gang affiliations and, if they determine that there is an affiliation, that detainee’s rights to due process are limited.

“People who are enemies of the United States don’t have the same level [of] due process [as in] the normal process,” Homan told Axios in an April interview, making an apparent reference to the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel immigrants it alleges are gang members. A challenge to the use of that law is currently working its way through the courts, as we’ve explained.

And Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, posted on X on April 1: “Friendly reminder: If you illegally invaded our country the only ‘process’ you are entitled to is deportation.”

But immigrants — including those who crossed the border without authorization — have a right to due process, legal experts say.

“The thing about due process is that it either applies to everyone present in the United States or it applies to no one,” Amy Grenier, of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told us by email.

What Is Due Process?

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution establish the right to due process — the Fifth Amendment says that “[n]o person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment extends this obligation to the states.

“There is no way to have due process and decide a group of people are not entitled to it. Due process includes the opportunity to know the charges against you and to argue against them. If a government is ensuring due process, every individual removed will know why they are removed, and they will have an opportunity to make their case on why they should not be prior to removal,” Grenier said. “This is true even for the undocumented, even if someone is here without authorization.”

She noted that the Constitution uses the word, “person,” not, citizen — meaning that it applies to everyone.

“If due process applied only to citizens, or people who are here lawfully, yet at no point is there an opportunity to be heard or prove your case, how would a citizen prove they are a citizen prior to removal?” she asked.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, agreed. “Constitutional protections apply to everyone and that’s the baseline,” she told us in a phone interview.

But, Bush-Joseph said, the legal process can differ, depending on how a person entered the country. For example, someone who overstayed a visa and has been present in the U.S. for years generally would go to immigration court before they could be deported, while someone who has been in the U.S. illegally for less than two years could be subject to an expedited removal process. Under that process, an immigration officer can order a noncitizen to be removed, unless that person expresses a credible fear of returning to their home country and seeks asylum.

Previously, the expedited removal process had applied to those who were apprehended within 100 miles of the border within 14 days of having entered the country. However, Trump expanded expedited removal shortly after taking office to include anyone who illegally crossed the border within the prior two years and is apprehended anywhere in the country. The policy is being challenged in court as a violation of due process.

Bush-Joseph also noted that some other actions the Trump administration has taken suggest it may be trying to speed up the deportation of immigrants: namely, the executive order Trump signed on Jan. 20 calling the arrival of immigrants in the U.S. an “invasion” and the requirement that “all foreign nationals present in the United States longer than 30 days” must register with the government.

“President Trump and I have a clear message for those in our country illegally: leave now,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement urging compliance with the registration rule.

“So, the Trump administration is saying that immigrants affected by these announcements don’t have the same protections as U.S. citizens,” Bush-Joseph said.

Abrego Garcia

In Abrego Garcia’s case, he came to the U.S. without authorization in 2012, fleeing gang violence from Barrio 18, which had targeted his family’s pupusa business in El Salvador, according to court documents.

He went to live with his brother, a U.S. citizen, in Maryland and, in 2019, was arrested while waiting outside of a Home Depot to be hired as a day laborer. The Department of Homeland Security then moved to deport him under Title 8 — which codifies immigration laws, including those that govern asylum, removal and naturalization — because he was in the U.S. without having been legally admitted. Abrego Garcia then applied for asylum.

The Trump administration has highlighted a claim made in the arguments over whether he should be detained or let out on bond while awaiting the outcome of his asylum case. At the time, Abrego Garcia argued that he should be freed on bond, saying that he wasn’t a flight risk since he had lived in the U.S. for eight years and intended to marry his then girlfriend who was a U.S. citizen and was five months into a high-risk pregnancy. He also argued that he wasn’t a danger to the community, citing his lack of a criminal record.

DHS, however, argued that he should be kept in custody pending the outcome of the case because, it alleged, he was a member of the Salvadoran gang MS-13. Abrego Garcia and his now wife denied the allegation at the time and continue to do so today.

Two pieces of evidence were presented to support the claim that he was a member of MS-13. First, what he was wearing at the time of his arrest — “a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations. Officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture,” the arrest record said. Second, a statement from a now suspended officer who cited an unnamed informant who said that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang’s “Westerns clique,” which is based in New York — a state, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers say, he’s never been to.

The docket for his 2019 immigration case isn’t public, but documents from it have been filed in the current case. Bondi posted some documents from it on social media. They show that an immigration judge who handled his bond hearing found that DHS’ contention that he was a member of MS-13 “appears to be trustworthy,” while also acknowledging that there were inconsistencies in the report DHS relied upon. The judge denied Abrego Garcia’s bond, and an immigration court appeals board issued a two-page order upholding her ruling.

Bondi overstated the findings from the bond hearing when she said in the Oval Office meeting, “In 2019, two courts — an immigration court and an appellate immigration court — ruled that he was a member of MS-13.” The courts didn’t “rule” on the issue; rather, they said that the report relied upon by DHS was inconsistent but “appears to be trustworthy” enough to deny bond.

A different immigration judge handled Abrego Garcia’s asylum claim. That judge didn’t rule on the issue of whether or not the government had proved Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, but the judge reviewed all the evidence presented in the case and found that Abrego Garcia “provided credible responses to the questions asked” and that his testimony was “consistent with his asylum application and other documents.” The judge didn’t grant asylum because Abrego Garcia had filed his application seven years after entering the U.S., “well-beyond the one-year filing deadline.”

However, the judge did grant him “withholding of removal,” which is a form of relief for migrants who fear persecution, as explained by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Such a ruling prevents deportation to a person’s home country and allows that person the right to remain in the U.S. and work legally, but according to the American Immigration Council, “the government is still allowed to deport that person to a different country if the other country agrees to accept them.” It does not allow a path to permanent residence or citizenship in the U.S.

The judge found that Abrego Garcia had “suffered past persecution as he was threatened with death on more than one occasion” and that “the facts here show that the Barrio 18 gang continues to threaten and harass the Abrego family over these several years, and does so even though the family has moved three times.” The judge ruled that he could not be sent back to a country where he would be likely to suffer persecution.

The government did not appeal that ruling, and Abrego Garcia has been living and working in Maryland ever since.

When Abrego Garcia was arrested on March 12, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers didn’t provide a warrant and “told him only that his ‘status had changed,’” according to U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis’ explanation of her April 4 decision that he should be returned from El Salvador. He was shuttled between detainment facilities before being flown to El Salvador on March 15, without having seen a judge.

“Although the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal,” Xinis wrote, concluding that “his detention appears wholly lawless.”

Vice President JD Vance misrepresented the situation when he posted on X, “Because he is not a citizen, he does not get a full jury trial by peers. In other words, whatever ‘due process’ he was entitled to, he received.” It’s true that Abrego Garcia received due process after being apprehended in 2019 — ultimately getting a judgment of withholding from removal — but he was not given due process before being removed from the country in March.

“The government could have presented its evidence before an immigration judge, the federal district court in Maryland, or in criminal proceedings as it has done in prosecuting cases of other alleged MS-13 members,” foreign affairs expert Tom Joscelyn and law professor Ryan Goodman recently explained in the online publication Just Security.

Since Abrego Garcia was removed under Title 8, that case would have been brought to an immigration court, which doesn’t have jury trials. Rather, those cases are decided by immigration judges.

At this point, the Supreme Court has upheld Xinis’ April 4 order that the government should “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia and said it should “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The high court instructed the District Court to clarify the order to “effectuate” his return, “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” and said the federal government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

So far, the government hasn’t explained such steps. In a court filing on April 21, lawyers for the administration maintained that since Abrego Garcia got to El Salvador “his detention was no longer a matter of the United States’ confinement, but a matter belonging to the government of El Salvador.”

Bukele, the country’s president, said in the Oval Office meeting on April 14 that he wouldn’t release Abrego Garcia and suggested the man was a “terrorist.”

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In his first speech since leaving office, former President Joe Biden criticized the Trump administration’s staffing cuts and other changes at the Social Security Administration, but he made several misleading claims in the process.

• Biden made the misleading claim that during his presidency some Republicans “wanted to let Social Security expire every five years … unless reauthorized by the Congress.” A 2022 proposal from Sen. Rick Scott called for sunsetting all federal programs after five years, unless Congress extended them. But Scott said he wanted to “fix,” not end, Social Security, and a later proposal specifically exempted Social Security.

• The former president claimed that Republicans “threatened to raise the retirement age.” The conservative Republican Study Committee has proposed gradually raising the full retirement age for years, but that hasn’t gained enough support in Congress, even among Republicans.

• Biden said the Social Security Administration had its “lowest staffing levels in 50 years” when he took office as president. He failed to mention that staffing ended up even lower his last year in office.

• He said that staffing cuts and other changes under the Trump administration had caused concern that “Social Security benefits may be delayed or interrupted.” It’s true that experts have shared that concern over possible administrative errors. But a few of Biden’s comments could leave the misleading impression that monthly benefits for millions of people had nearly been, or were about to be, cut off.

Biden spoke April 15 in Chicago at the Advocates, Counselors and Representatives for the Disabled conference.

Old Chestnut on Letting Social Security Expire

Biden repeated a familiar talking point in misleadingly claiming that during his presidency some Republicans in Congress “wanted to let Social Security expire every five years. That was the proposal, let it expire every five years unless reauthorized by the Congress.”

That’s a reference to a 2022 policy proposal, called “An 11-Point Plan to Rescue America,” from Republican Sen. Rick Scott to sunset all federal programs after five years, unless Congress voted to extend them. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again,” Scott’s plan said. But there was never any serious effort to implement that policy, especially as it pertains to Social Security.

Scott, who then was the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said at the time that he didn’t want to sunset those programs — and he didn’t know anyone who did — but rather he wanted to “review,” “fix” and “preserve” them so that they are financially solvent for the long term. Shortly after Scott introduced his plan, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said that a bill sunsetting Social Security (and Medicare) in five years “will not be part of a Republican Senate majority agenda.”

By the following year, Scott had revised the language in his plan to specifically exclude Social Security and Medicare, and other programs. “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years, with specific exceptions of Social Security, Medicare, national security, veterans benefits, and other essential services,” the 2023 version of Scott’s plan said.

Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage out of that proposal, particularly during the 2022 midterms, making false and misleading claims about Republicans wanting to “end” these popular programs, as we’ve written. In his remarks in Chicago, Biden said this five-year-expiration plan was part of the “constant threat” his administration faced from Republicans who wanted to “cut and gut Social Security.” But there was no threat of Social Security being terminated, as Scott has made clear.

Retirement Age

Biden misleadingly claimed that Republicans “threatened to raise the retirement age as well. Now, that might not be a hardship for someone working in a comfortable job, but if you’re on your feet all day, you’re doing manual labor all day, you’re working with a disability, it’s a very different matter.”

As we wrote when Biden made a similar claim in his reelection announcement in 2023, the conservative Republican Study Committee has proposed budgets for years that have included gradually increasing the full retirement age, to either 69 or 70, and indexing it after that for life expectancy. The “full retirement age,” when a beneficiary can get full benefit payments, is age 66 to 67, depending on the beneficiary’s birth year. (Early retirement, with reduced Social Security benefit payments, is available starting at age 62.)

The most recent RSC proposal, for fiscal 2025, said it would “make modest adjustments to the retirement age for future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy.”

But raising the retirement age has failed to attract enough support in Congress, even among Republicans. In late December, Sen. Rand Paul introduced an amendment to raise the full retirement age, and it garnered just three “yes” votes.

Legislators will need to take some action in the near future if they want the program to continue to pay all of its promised benefits, and it’s possible that raising the retirement age, or raising taxes, will be under discussion. The trust fund for retirees’ and survivors’ benefits is expected to be depleted in 2033, at which point SSA will only be able to pay 79% of benefits, according to the Social Security trustees’ latest estimate.

On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump said he “will not raise the retirement age by one day” and wouldn’t cut “one penny” from Social Security. Since taking office, he has said that he’s only interested in getting rid of fraud. “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud,” Trump said in a February interview.

More to the Story on Staffing Level

The former president said: “When we came into office, the Social Security Administration had its lowest staffing. … Lowest staffing levels in 50 years. And demand was going through the roof because of my generation, the Baby Boomer generation, reaching the retirement age.” He didn’t say anything more about a change in SSA staffing during his administration, but it’s worth noting that the number of full-time staffers was even lower his last year in office.

Full-time staffing at the SSA was 58,952 in fiscal year 2021, which began nearly four months before Biden took office. That was the lowest dating back to at least 1995, the earliest year in an SSA table on staffing levels. A report from the Associated Press from last year indicates that it was also probably the lowest level since the early 1970s.

But the total full-time staff was 57,148 in fiscal 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, 2024. The peak under Biden was 60,026 in fiscal 2023.

Under Trump, the SSA announced in February it will cut 7,000 jobs, with an agency-wide offer of early retirement and incentivized resignations, and the Washington Post has reported that thousands more in reductions are planned.  

Misleading Claims on the Threat to Monthly Benefits

Biden criticized the Trump administration for staffing cuts, website crashes and computer glitches at the Social Security Administration that the former president said had left beneficiaries “genuinely concerned for the first time in history, for the first and only time in history, that Social Security benefits may be delayed or interrupted.” As we’ve written, experts are concerned about SSA reorganizations, rushed changes and false fraud claims leading to administrative problems with Social Security, including the delivery of benefits. But a few of Biden’s comments could leave the misleading impression that monthly benefits for millions of people had nearly been, or were about to be, cut off.

“In the 90 years since Franklin Roosevelt created the Social Security system, people have always gotten their Social Security checks. They’ve gotten them during wartime, during recessions, during the pandemic. No matter what, they got them. But now, for the first time ever, that might change. There’ll be calamity for millions of families, millions of people,” Biden said.

There is no plan to stop monthly benefits, but, as we said, experts are worried that abrupt changes at the SSA, in the name of cutting staffing or finding fraud, could lead to operational mistakes. “I genuinely have never been this concerned about the ability of that agency to function,” Pamela Herd, a professor of social policy and faculty associate at the Institute for Social Research’s Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan, told us for an earlier story on the issue. “Yes, I think people are right to be worried about it.”

The former president also was largely accurate in citing comments by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, but one line by Biden could leave the wrong impression that there was a “possibility of Social Security checks not going out this month.”

Biden said of Lutnick: “But the current secretary of commerce doesn’t seem to get it, or based on his comments, he doesn’t seem to even care. … But when he talked about the possibility of Social Security checks not going out this month, he shrugged it off. Here’s what he said. He said that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t complain. It wouldn’t bother her.”

Lutnick, in an interview on the All-In Podcast on March 20, raised the hypothetical of checks not going out that month, saying that a “fraudster” would be the one to complain about it.

Lutnick said: “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up and she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling and complaining. … Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. Because whoever screams is the one stealing.”

Biden also said Lutnick, a billionaire, was “paying 8.5% in taxes.” We don’t know what rate Lutnick pays in federal taxes, but Biden’s figure refers to a White House calculation for the 400 wealthiest families in the U.S. that factors in earnings on unsold stock as income, as we’ve explained.

Alan Jaffe contributed to this story.

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