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Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency he leads claim to have unearthed evidence to prove a longstanding conspiracy theory about Democrats orchestrating illegal voting by noncitizens on a scale large enough to swing national elections in their favor. But voting experts say the claims are highly dubious, and DOGE hasn’t released any evidence.

The allegation is pretty straightforward — but DOGE’s data may not be telling the whole story. Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who is working with DOGE, said the DOGE team matched Social Security numbers given to noncitizens with work visas against voter registration rolls in four sample states, and found thousands of crossovers.

Gracias said “many” of those people actually voted. Moreover, he and Musk allege that it is all part of a Democratic plot to influence federal elections.

DOGE says it provided the data to federal prosecutors for criminal investigation, but nothing has been shared publicly.

Without DOGE’s data, we can’t determine how many cases of noncitizen votes may have been uncovered. But voting and data experts warn that when matching millions of numbers in databases, even a small percentage of errors can distort things. That’s not to say there aren’t any noncitizens who wrongly register to vote, and that there aren’t some who actually do vote. But states that have performed detailed audits of voting records have found such instances to be relatively rare.

In some cases, officials in those states have found hundreds of noncitizens on voter registration rolls, a fraction of whom also voted. But hardly enough to have come close to swinging a national election.

And, voting experts say, the conspiracy falls apart when you weigh the benefit of any single vote against the potential legal consequences faced by someone who votes illegally as a noncitizen — fines, jail time and deportation.

“The evidence is that the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely low, not high enough to have changed the party outcome of any federal election in recent years,” Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute told us. “Audits and investigations in states like Ohio, Nevada, and North Carolina have found the numbers to be tiny in relation to votes cast. Analysis of voting statistics in parts of the country in areas with large noncitizen populations do not find results consistent with Musk’s claims, and do find results consistent with near-zero attempts by this population to participate in elections. States have many ways to cross-check databases and simply presenting a Social Security card or number will not make you a voter. The consistent experience has been that very few persons in this category mistakenly or deliberately vote.”

The DOGE Claims

In a town hall ahead of an April 1 Wisconsin state Supreme Court election, Musk and Gracias drew attention to a dramatic rise during the Biden presidency in the number of people provided Social Security numbers through the Enumeration Beyond Entry system, a program that provides Social Security numbers and cards to noncitizens who are granted work authorization by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The EBE program, begun in 2017 under the Trump administration, provided an expedited process for immigrants who obtained work permits to be assigned Social Security numbers (and thereby allow the federal government to track their earnings for taxation). That includes immigrants granted humanitarian parole or Temporary Protected Status due to civil unrest, violence or natural disasters in their home countries and immigrants who may have crossed the border illegally but who initiated an asylum application and were granted a work permit pending their asylum hearing.

As the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General explained in 2019, the EBE program allowed SSA to quickly offer Social Security numbers to these immigrants “because the information needed to assign the SSN” had already been “collected and verified by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency responsible for conferring lawful status and work authorization.” (The Trump administration recently suspended the EBE program.)

Here’s a version of the data Gracias posted on X:

We reached out to the Social Security Administration to confirm those numbers, and did not get a response. But it’s not surprising they would have risen dramatically under Biden, who expanded protections for immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Ukraine and Venezuela. The number of immigrants seeking asylum in the U.S. also soared during the Biden years.

“When we saw these numbers, we were like, ‘What is this?’ In ’21 you see 270,000 people goes all the way to 2.1 million in ’24,” Gracias said at the town hall. “These are noncitizens that are getting Social Security numbers.”

“Yeah, this is a mind-blowing chart,” Musk said.

“This is worth just reiterating,” Musk said. “People sometimes think that under the Biden administration that he was simply asleep with the switch. They weren’t asleep with the switch. It was a massive large scale program to import as many illegals as possible, ultimately to change the entire voting map of the United States and disenfranchise the American people, and make it a permanent deep blue one-party state from which there would be no escape.”

Gracias claimed DOGE found that many of the more than 5 million who had gotten Social Security numbers through the EBE program since its inception in 2017 were also getting various government benefits, including more than 1 million receiving Medicaid. He said he went a step further and decided to match the EBE list against voter records, and discovered many of those people had registered to vote.

“And who did vote,” Musk added.

“And we found some by sampling that actually did vote,” Gracias concurred. “And we have referred them to prosecution at the Homeland Security Investigation service. Already. Already. That is already happening right now.” (We reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to confirm an investigation but did not get a response.)

Musk said that once a noncitizen has obtained a Social Security number “from there you get on the voter rolls and then the basically Dem operatives will farm the vote.”

In an interview on “Fox & Friends” on April 2, Gracias provided a bit more detail, saying that DOGE “found in a handful of cooperative states that they were thousands of them on the voter rolls and that many of them had voted.” He noted that the search it performed was made possible by an executive order signed by Trump allowing inter-agency data-sharing.

“It’s never been done before where agencies could talk to each other and databases could talk to each other,” Gracias said. “That allowed us to connext all this data to find these people across the system, across the benefits system, all the way to the voting records.”

Privacy activists told NPR that despite the executive order, the search may have violated privacy laws and a court order.

Gracias provided still more detail about the alleged illegal noncitizen voting in an interview on the All-In Podcast on April 4.

“I’m talking about four states,” Gracias said, though he did not name the four “friendly states” DOGE sampled. “We looked at the voter rolls, we found these people, thousands of them, on the voter rolls. And we found many of those people had voted. In one state in particular well over a thousand voted. Yeah, I think this was a move to import voters.”

Asked in an April 1 interview about those DOGE findings, Republican Rep. Byron Donalds said, “My reaction is the disgust that every American has because we knew that what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the left were doing in the darkness of night was shoving illegal immigrants into every role possible, whether it be entitlements or voting rolls across the country. Now, we have the proof.”

The DOGE findings were also cited by Republican Rep. Aaron Bean in support of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, a bill aimed at preventing voting by noncitizens. (Opponents of the legislation, including voting rights advocate groups, say it could prevent voter registration by U.S. citizens by instituting hurdles.)

On the floor of the House, Bean said: “We are here because this previous administration, the Biden administration, imported 10 to 15 million illegal aliens who have come here and we have evidence that they are participating in our elections. … It ends today when we vote on the SAVE Act.”

The bill passed the House on April 10 mostly along party lines, 220-208.

Experts Dubious

Voting experts, however, say the DOGE findings likely aren’t the smoking gun Musk and Gracias make it out to be.

Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House, said what Musk and Gracias cited “isn’t evidence, it’s garden-variety conspiracy theory, and a very old and overplayed one at that.”

“It is possible that a handful of noncitizens have been mistakenly registered to vote – and by a handful, I really mean tiny numbers,” Levitt said. “I don’t know what records DOGE is referring to when they say they ‘took a sample’ of noncitizen immigrants and looked at voter registration records to see if they had registered and voted, but every time I’ve seen claims like this with any specificity, the results vanish into smoke when people actually look at the results: either it’s bad data, or bad matching, or bad assumptions, or all three. But it’s impossible to really evaluate at this level of specificity, which they know full well.”

Indeed, states that have looked into noncitizens voting or registering to vote have found the issue to be relatively rare. 

• In March, the Iowa Secretary of State announced that an audit had found 277 noncitizens had registered to vote in the state. And 35 of those noncitizens cast ballots that were counted in the 2024 election; five such ballots were rejected.

• In May 2024, the Ohio Secretary of State announced it had found 137 people on the state’s voter registration rolls who had twice confirmed their noncitizenship status to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. The press release did not indicate how many, if any, had tried to actually vote. But a grand jury indicted six people who legally and permanently immigrated to the U.S. for voting illegally as noncitizens between 2008 and 2020.

• In 2022, Georgia conducted a citizenship review of state voter rolls and found that 1,634 people had attempted to register to vote between 1997 and 2022 and could not be verified as citizens by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. None, however, voted. In October, the Associated Press reported that Georgia election officials said 20 out of the 8.2 million on the state’s voter registration rolls were not U.S. citizens, and that nine had voted in previous elections.

• In 2021, the Nevada Republican Party filed a complaint alleging that as many as 3,987 noncitizens had voted in the 2020 election. The allegation was based on people who presented an immigration document while obtaining a driver’s license over the previous five years. But a 13-page report issued by the Nevada Secretary of State concluded the allegation failed to account for a large number of noncitizens who were naturalized — and therefore became legal voters — in the time between obtaining their driver’s license and the election. “Without specific evidence to establish that identified individuals were foreign nationals when they voted in the November 3 election, there is nothing further that can be investigated,” the report stated. “In summary, the generalized information acquired from DMV cannot serve as a basis for an investigation into alleged voter fraud.”

“Multiple credible sources have documented that there is no evidence that unauthorized immigrants, green-card holders, or immigrants on temporary visas have registered and voted in U.S. federal elections in significant numbers,” Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, told us via email. “Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal in all states and, since 1996, has criminal penalties” that can include federal incarceration for even registering to vote, he said.

“There have been a small number of people who have wrongfully registered to vote, often by mistake, and far fewer actually casting ballots,” Ruiz Soto said, adding that “clearly more can be done to reduce the likelihood of immigrants erroneously registering to vote.” But, he said, “this is not a problem of millions of immigrants, and the scale is often blown out of proportion by critics. Musk’s and Gracias’ remarks oversimplify the process of migrants obtaining temporary status and work authorization, and they promote the inaccurate idea that most recent migrants would vote for the Democratic Party even if they were to lawfully become U.S. citizens in the future.”

A Brennan Center for Justice review found that of the 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 general election in 42 jurisdictions in 12 states, there were “only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting” that were referred for further investigation or prosecution. “The absence of fraud reinforces a wide consensus among scholars, journalists and election administrators: voter fraud of any kind, including noncitizen voting, is rare.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center analyzed a database of fraud cases compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and found “only 77 instances of noncitizens voting between 1999 and 2023,” the BPC said in a 2024 post on this issue. “Illegal voting, including by noncitizens, is routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that noncitizen voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome.”

Many states’ voter registration rolls do not even include Social Security numbers, and so matches in those cases — which would involve matching based on data such as names, addresses, birthdates or driver’s license numbers — can result in bad matches, experts said.

Experts: Risks Outweigh Rewards

The idea that large numbers of noncitizens are voting illegally is also highly dubious, experts told us, given the consequences faced by those immigrants for the payoff of a single vote.

Although it has long been illegal for noncitizens to vote, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 added some teeth to the prohibition against noncitizens registering to vote or voting in national elections. Violation can result in fines, up to a year in prison, deportation and revocation of legal status.

“Ockham’s razor says that noncitizens aren’t intentionally registering or voting, because it’s just not worth it,” Levitt told us, referring to the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the best. The conspiracy theory Musk and Gracias have “laid out for registering nets a noncitizen exactly one incremental vote. And in exchange, they’ve created a permanent paper record of a federal and state crime that’s an absolutely standard part of any record check for any change in immigration status, subjected themselves to deportation,” fines and potential prison time “and ensured that they’ll never get citizenship. The reason you don’t see actual evidence of noncitizen voting in any volume is that it doesn’t make any sense for any noncitizen to commit the crime.”

Olson, of the Cato Institute, said that while “Elon Musk has been spreading unverified and unverifiable claims about illegal voting by noncitizens for a year or more. … The actual political trends of recent years have been exactly the opposite of what Musk claims. As the share of foreign born persons resident in the U.S. has risen in recent years, the Republican share of the vote has risen, not fallen. Some of this is because new citizens who achieve naturalization have shifted in their voting propensity toward Republicans. But mostly it is because, by overwhelming majorities, those who lack citizenship neither attempt to vote nor succeed in voting.”

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While presenting a series of executive orders conceived to increase electricity generation from coal, President Donald Trump misleadingly suggested that environmental regulations were to blame for the industry’s decline, wrongly said that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany,” and misleadingly, and repeatedly, referred to coal as “clean.”

Experts agree the main culprit for the decrease in coal-fired power in recent decades was the surge of more cost-effective and cleaner kinds of energy, especially natural gas. In Germany, a handful of old plants were fired back up in 2022, but were closed again in 2024. Germany plans to end coal-fired power generation by 2038. Also, coal combustion emits more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, not to mention other pollutants.

“This is a very important day to me because we’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned despite the fact that it was just about the best — it is certainly the best in terms of power,” Trump, who promised and failed to revive the coal industry during his first term, said on April 8, surrounded by coal miners. “Today we’re taking historic action to help American workers, miners, families and consumers — we’re ending Joe Biden’s war on beautiful, clean coal once and for all.” 

Coal consumption and production in the U.S. have declined over the last two decades, according to the Energy Information Administration. Although coal fueled most of the country’s power plants until a decade ago, in 2023 only 16% of the electricity produced in the U.S. was generated by coal-fired plants. The coal workforce went from nearly 90,000 in 2012 to about 40,000 this year, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Trump’s new plan to boost the industry includes a series of actions that, as a Department of Interior press release details, include reopening federal lands in Montana and Wyoming to coal leasing, removing “regulatory burdens” for mines, and lowering the amount coal producers pay the government for extracting coal on federal lands. The plan also grants coal power plants a two-year reprieve from regulations that limit mercury and other toxic emissions. The administration said there was a need for an increase in electricity generated by coal to satisfy a growing demand for electricity for domestic manufacturing and artificial intelligence data processing centers.

During his speech, the president praised coal’s reliability and durability but also called it “clean,” “cheap” and “incredibly efficient,” adding that people have bemoaned and decimated the industry “for absolutely no reason.” He also criticized “the green new scam,” a phrase he used to refer to “restrictions” and climate change policies generally, and he blamed former President Joe Biden and Democratic lawmakers for trying “to abolish the American coal industry” and “destroying” the lives, and jobs, of “thousands and thousands of coal miners.” 

(During Biden’s presidency, however, the number of coal mining jobs increased slightly, by 3,400, to 41,300. In January, employment was 4,700 below the pre-pandemic level in February 2020. Coal mining jobs decreased by 13,100 over the entirety of Trump’s first term. Job losses were exacerbated by the pandemic, but even prior to the pandemic, there was a loss of 5,000 coal mining jobs under Trump.)  

“We will end the government bias against coal and we’re going to unlock the sweeping authorities of … the Defense Production Act to turbocharge coal mining in America,” he said, referring to a law first enacted in 1950 during the Korean War to give the president broad authority to “influence domestic industry in the interest of national defense,” as explained by the Library of Congress. 

But several experts told us blaming environmental regulations and claiming coal is cleaner, cheaper or more efficient than its alternatives is misleading. 

“The coal industry’s decline is due first and foremost to cheaper alternatives, namely natural gas but also renewable energy,” Sanya Carley, faculty director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, told us in an email. “It is more economically efficient and less carbon intensive to build gas units or renewable energy such as wind and solar than it is to build a coal plant.” 

Environmental Regulations Didn’t Kill Coal

Trump’s comments about “bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” ending “government bias” and “slashing unnecessary regulations that targeted the beautiful, clean coal,” leave a misleading impression about why coal production has decreased.

Studies analyzing the factors that led to the decline of the coal industry have concluded that although environmental regulations have played a role, it hasn’t been a significant one. 

As we reported in 2017, after Trump’s claims on reviving coal then, a Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy study found the main culprit for the collapse of the industry was cheaper natural gas production driven by the shale revolution, followed by lower-than-expected demand and the growth in renewable energy. 

Similarly, a 2017 policy brief by Charles D. Kolstad, an emeritus professor of economics at Stanford University, concluded that “environmental regulations did not kill coal”; progress did. 

Kolstad explained that the main environmental law affecting coal combustion is the Clean Air Act of 1970, signed by President Richard Nixon. Strong demand and a lack of competition fueled a boom in new coal-fired plants in the 1970s and 80s, despite the regulations, which resulted in an expansion of coal production. Plants met the limits on sulfur emissions by burning low-sulfur coal and then, after a requirement of a 1977 Clean Air Act amendment, by adding devices, known as scrubbers, that remove sulfur from smokestacks.

But coal-fired plants built before 1970 were exempt from sulfur regulations, which, as Kolstad explained, provided an incentive to keep them operating for longer rather than retire them. The eventual retirement of these old plants is what marked the decline of coal in electricity generation starting in 2015, he explained, not the additional environmental rules set to limit the pollution coming from them. 

At the same time, Kolstad explained, productivity in the coal industry increased due to innovations, which led to a reduction in the workforce. And the use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and the development of shale deposits led to a revolution in the oil and gas industry that resulted in a big drop in the price of natural gas. 

Kolstad told us his analysis still stands today. 

“While coal might be beautiful to some, the main reason production is down is that demand is down, mostly because of cheap gas,” he said in an email. “Employment is down further because of productivity gains (coal output per miner).”

Christine Shearer, project manager of the global coal plant tracker at the nongovernmental organization Global Energy Monitor, which compiles and analyzes energy data, agreed. “[T]he main thing that killed coal in the U.S. was gas,” she told us in an email.

“Low natural gas prices, capital costs, and build times of combined cycle gas-fired power plants in the 1990s led to a large expansion in U.S. gas-fired capacity in the beginning of this century. As new gas plants were built, aging coal plants were shut down,” she told us. Fracking further lowered the price and increased the use of natural gas to produce electricity, she added. 

Shearer shared a report co-authored by Global Energy Monitor that shows more coal power capacity was retired under Trump in his first term than under Presidents Barack Obama or Biden. That’s “because coal plants closing has primarily been a function of economics, and it is hard to reverse,” she said. 

Globally, coal power plants in the world have retired on average when they’re 37 years old, Shearer told us. Coal plants in the U.S. are now, on average, 43 years old, she added. 

“Not enforcing existing environmental regulations and further delaying pending regulations on carbon dioxide emissions,” she added, “might squeeze a few extra years of life out of these old coal plants, but it won’t bring back a coal renaissance.”

Germany Is Not Going ‘Back to Coal’

In his remarks on April 8, Trump referred to two other countries’ use of coal in recent years. While he correctly noted China’s continued reliance on coal and its construction of new plants, the president wrongly claimed that Germany is “back to coal” and that coal plants are being opened “all over Germany.”

Germany brought four previously closed coal plants back online in 2022, likely due to concerns about energy availability after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Those plants were closed again in 2024, and Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020, according to Global Energy Monitor. Germany is planning to end coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 or earlier.

But at the opening of his remarks at the signing of his executive orders, Trump said, “Other countries went to beautiful, clean coal, and they’ve stayed there for many years like China. China is opening two plants every week. Germany went green, very green. They went so green they almost went out of business. Germany was finished; they went to wind. The wind wasn’t blowing too much, and they went to all sorts of other things.”

Trump continued: “You know, the green new scam hit Germany too and guess what? Now they’re back to coal. They’re opening up coal plants all over Germany.”

It is true that China began construction of 94.5 gigawatts of new coal power projects and resumed 3.3 GW of suspended projects in 2024, the highest level of construction in that country in 10 years, according to a collaborative report issued in February by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air and Global Energy Monitor. That’s likely not “two plants every week,” as Trump said, since an average coal plant generates 1 GW but it takes a couple of years for a plant to be built and come online in China, Shearer, of Global Energy Monitor, told us in an email.

“Everybody else is moving away from coal and China seems to be stepping on the gas,” Flora Champenois, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor and one of the report’s co-authors, told NPR.

But Trump misrepresented Germany’s current and future plans for the use of coal.

Shearer explained that in recent years the U.S. has been replacing old coal plants with lower-cost natural gas, as well as solar and wind power. Germany, however, did not have “a big expansion in gas power like the US, and on top of that Germany has been phasing out its nuclear power. So what has been replacing coal (and nuclear) in Germany is solar and wind power.”

Germany did reopen four mothballed coal plants in 2022 to operate through 2023, “most likely to fill in for high gas prices following [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s invasion of Ukraine,” Shearer said. But those coal plants “were all retired in 2024. The year 2024 was actually a record year for coal power retirements in Germany, totaling 6.7 GW – 2 GW above U.S. retirements” under Biden.

Asked about Trump’s claim that coal plants are opening throughout Germany, Shearer said, “No, Germany has not opened a new coal plant since 2020.”

“Germany’s July 2020 Coal Power Exit Law established an end to coal-fired power generation in the country by 2038 at the latest, and possibly by 2035,” Shearer said. “A follow-up analysis expressed ambition to phase out coal ‘ideally’ by 2030.”

A spokesperson for the German economy ministry, responding to Trump’s remarks, said, “No new coal-fired power plants will be built” in Germany, the Associated Press reported.

We reached out to the White House for information to support Trump’s statements about Germany’s coal plants, but we didn’t receive a response.

‘Clean Coal’? Not Really 

On top of incorrectly suggesting that environmental regulations caused the downfall of the coal industry, Trump insisted on calling coal “clean.”  

“I call it beautiful, clean coal,” he said during his speech on April 8. “I tell my people, never use the word coal unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it.” 

But the reality is that coal is not clean. As the Energy Information Administration explains, producing and using coal has several negative effects on people’s health and the environment. When coal is burned to produce electricity, it emits pollutants, including gases and particulates. Coal mining sometimes requires removing mountain tops with explosives or altering valleys and waterways. Streams can be polluted by runoff from the mines.  

Coal combustion puts out more carbon emissions than any other fossil fuel used to produce power, the Environmental Protection Agency explains. Although carbon dioxide is naturally present in the atmosphere and is not directly harmful when breathed in normal concentrations, CO2 is the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, which trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. In 2022, coal combustion accounted for 55% of carbon emissions from the electric power sector, while representing only 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S. that year, according to the EPA. 

As the EIA explains, burning coal also emits toxic pollutants linked to respiratory illnesses and lung disease, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter — criteria air pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act —  and other pollutants such as coal ash and mercury. 

“At the present time, coal is not cleaner than its alternatives,” Joost de Gouw, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told us in an email, noting that most coal-fired plants already use systems to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide. “Compared with natural gas power plants that use combined cycle technology (the industry standard), current coal-fired power plants emit roughly 10 times more nitrogen oxides and 100 times more sulfur dioxide per kWh of electricity produced,” referring to kilowatt-hours.

A study published in Science in 2023 showed that exposure to the fine particulate pollution from coal plants is associated with 2.1 times greater mortality risk than exposure to such pollution from other sources. Lucas Henneman, an assistant professor of environmental and infrastructure engineering at George Mason University and one of the authors of the study, told us that although there are devices that can remove up to 99% of certain pollutants emitted during the combustion of coal, they don’t make coal “clean.”

Scrubbers, or flue gas desulfurization units, can remove about 95% of sulfur dioxide emissions from a coal plant before they’re released into the atmosphere. The installation of these devices, the closure of coal-fired plants and the decline of the industry have resulted in a significant decrease of pollution from coal-fired plants, as a separate study by Henneman and colleagues showed. 

But although these devices can reduce pollution from coal power plants “they do not eliminate them,” Henneman told us, adding that as his second study showed, “most of the exposure to power plant air pollution emissions after 2015 was from power plants with scrubbers.” 

The waste created from scrubbers, which needs to be stored near the power plants or placed in landfills, can also cause a problem when it spills and contaminates groundwater, he said. The trains used to transport coal also pollute, he added.

Trump said his administration will be “crushing Biden-era environmental restrictions” that target mercury and other toxic emissions because the regulations make it “impossible to do anything.” His plan includes a two-year delay (from July 2027 to July 2029) for coal plants to comply with a revision of the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards finalized last year. Trump said that the technologies needed to control emissions are “not commercially viable.” 

At the same time, the president said he directed Energy Secretary Chris Wright to use billions of federal dollars “to invest in the next generation of coal technology — which is an amazing technology in terms of getting the full potential of coal and also doing it in a very clean environmental way.”

We reached out to the White House to ask which technology Trump was referring to. In response, a press officer from the Department of Energy directed us to an April 8 CNBC interview in which Wright mentioned scrubbers. 

“Scrubbers do not do anything about carbon dioxide, so even a coal plant with a scrubber will still warm the planet,” Shearer, from Global Energy Monitor, told us.

Some carbon dioxide can be removed from coal power plants, but Shearer told us none of the techniques used globally result in coal being cheaper or cleaner than natural gas. 

“China now primarily builds ultra-supercritical coal plants that it calls ‘high efficiency, low emissions’ but at the end of the day they still emit more CO2 than a gas plant,” she wrote. “Japan and South Korea have also been pushing for ammonia co-firing at their coal plants, calling it ‘clean coal’, but again even 50% co-firing ammonia at a coal plant results in higher CO2 emissions than a gas plant, and it’s far more expensive.”

As we‘ve written previously, it’s possible to capture some carbon emissions and either store it or use it for another purpose. But experts told us that such carbon capture utilization and storage, or CCUS, technologies are very expensive, energy-intensive and haven’t been used on a large scale.  

“Coal without CCUS is already not competitive economically, so adding CCUS makes no sense economically,” Shearer added.

Despite his focus on the term “clean coal,” Trump also indicated in his remarks that climate change isn’t a problem.  

“You don’t have to worry about the air is getting warmer. The ocean will rise one-quarter of an inch within the next 500 to 600 years, giving you a little bit more waterfront property,” he said, repeating once again his absurdly low estimates of sea level rise. As we’ve explained, the current rate of sea level rise is already a bit more than one-eighth of an inch each year.

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Before President Donald Trump paused some new tariffs that he unveiled on April 2, several economic groups estimated that tariffs he has announced this year could raise between roughly $2 trillion and more than $4 billion in federal revenue over a 10-year period. But that’s well short of the $6 trillion or $7 trillion that White House trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed the tariffs would raise to help pay for tax cuts, including an extension of the 2017 tax law.

On April 6, during an interview on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Navarro talked about the revenue-generating potential of Trump’s tariffs on imports. Trump announced on April 9 that he was suspending some of his so-called “reciprocal” tariffs for 90 days. (We’ve written about how the tariffs aren’t really reciprocal.)

“These tariff revenues, by the way, Jackie, $600, $700 billion they are going to raise a year, $6 trillion to $7 trillion over the 10-year period,” Navarro told Jackie DeAngelis, who hosted the Fox News show that day. “They’re going to help pay for the tax cuts. I’ll tell you this, Jackie. Every single dollar that comes in, in tariff revenues that we take from the foreigners who have been cheating us, are going to go right to the American public in terms of tax cuts and debt reduction.”

Navarro is wrong to suggest that the tariffs would be paid by “foreigners,” though foreign businesses could decide to “lower their prices to absorb some of the tariffs,” as the Tax Foundation explains. He also ignored the fact that tariffs, also known as customs duties, are a tax increase on the U.S. importers who pay the tariffs – not foreign countries. And because those importers often pass at least some of those costs on to U.S. consumers through price hikes, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes that affect lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income.

“If you raise $600 billion more a year in revenue for the federal government, you are taking that amount away from individuals and businesses in the private economy,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in a late March piece.

Multiple economic analyses project that Trump’s tariffs will reduce the after-tax income of households by potentially thousands of dollars a year, on average.

Independent analyses also show that Navarro may be exaggerating the amount of money that the government may collect from the tariffs.

We asked the White House to explain Navarro’s revenue projection, but we did not receive a reply. We also inquired if Navarro’s estimate was the basis for the president’s April 8 claim that his tariffs are bringing in “$2 billion per day” to the U.S., which would add up to more than $7 trillion over 10 years, but the White House didn’t tell us that, either. (So far, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has said that it has collected about $200 million per day in “additional associated revenue” from 13 of the president’s tariff-related executive actions this year.)

Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow for the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, guessed that Navarro’s claim was based on “some simple math.” In an April 8 blog post, he said that the senior trade official may have taken the $3.3 trillion in U.S. imports of goods in 2024 and multiplied it by a tariff rate of 20%, “a rough estimate of all the Trump tariffs,” producing a revenue total of over $600 billion annually, or more than $6 trillion over 10 years.

“Simple. But wrong,” wrote Gleckman. He said that “Trump’s tariffs are likely to fall far short of Navarro’s prediction,” making it highly doubtful that there would be enough revenue to cover the cost of parts of Trump’s economic agenda, specifically an extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, as well as other tax-cutting proposals, such as the elimination of taxes on tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits.

Indefinitely extending tax cuts for individuals in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act alone would cost $4 trillion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

In fact, the Tax Policy Center has estimated that all tariffs Trump announced through April 2, including a tariff of at least 10% on all U.S. imports of foreign goods and higher tariff rates on specific countries, would raise about $3.5 trillion – $189.5 billion in 2025 and then $3.3 trillion from 2026 to 2035. That estimate, Gleckman said, doesn’t include the economic impact of any retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, which some countries have already announced, nor does it account for an anticipated decline in corporate profits and wages because U.S. firms have to pay the tariffs.

“If it did, tariff revenues would be even lower,” Gleckman noted.

And the TPC isn’t the only organization with tariff revenue estimates lower than Navarro’s.

• In an analysis updated on April 9, the Tax Foundation estimated that Trump’s 2025 tariffs, altogether, “will raise $2.2 trillion in revenue over the next decade on a conventional basis ($1.6 trillion on a dynamic basis) and reduce US GDP by 0.8 percent, all before foreign retaliation.” Projected revenue is lower on a dynamic basis, the Tax Foundation said, because that estimate reflects “the negative effect tariffs have on US economic output, reducing incomes and resulting tax revenues.”

• Meanwhile, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has said on April 7 that all of Trump’s announced tariffs, if made permanent, could raise $3 trillion from 2025 to 2034. Because the tariffs could reduce real gross domestic product by 0.6%, CRFB said its revenue estimate would decline to $2.7 trillion once those macro-dynamic economic effects are factored in.

• Likewise, the Budget Lab at Yale University said on April 2, “All tariffs to date in 2025,” if they remain in place, “raise $3.1 trillion [from 2026 to 2035], including the effect of retaliation to date.” That estimate falls to about $2.5 trillion when factoring in “$582 billion in negative dynamic revenue effects,” the Budget Lab said.

• And the Penn Wharton Budget Model, based on all tariffs announced prior to Trump’s April 9 pause, said it “estimates that the Combined Trump Tariffs will generate $4.6 trillion in revenue over 10 years, using recent time-varying demand elasticity estimates.” That’s based on imports declining by 29%. On the other hand, “If baseline import demand in the United States across all goods and services further stagnates over the next decade due to lower economic growth, total new tariff revenue will decrease to $4.13 trillion.” Those estimates include “partially dynamic” economic effects, Kent Smetters, a University of Pennsylvania economics and public policy professor, and the university’s PWBM faculty director, told us in an interview.

None of those analyses predicts as much as $6 trillion to $7 trillion in federal revenue, as Navarro claimed.

We don’t know exactly what tariffs will be put into place by the Trump administration after the 90-day pause on the April 2 tariffs. For now, goods imported from China will face a 125% tariff, and there’s a universal 10% tariff on all imported goods from other countries.

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Abrupt changes in staffing and some procedures at the Social Security Administration, coupled with false and misleading claims about widespread fraud, have prompted heated criticism from Democrats, with some statements leaving the wrong impression that benefits are being cut. Experts share a concern that disorderly actions by the Trump administration could cause administrative errors and disruptions, but there has been no proposed change to benefits mandated by law.

Democrats have cited several concerning actions taken by the Trump administration with regard to the Social Security Administration. In late February, the SSA announced it would cut 7,000 jobs (out of 57,000) as part of “massive reorganizations” that included reducing the number of regional offices from 10 to four. Meanwhile, White House adviser Elon Musk, who is leading the Department of Government Efficiency, and President Donald Trump have made exaggerated claims about people over 100 years old fraudulently getting Social Security benefits, suggesting there are significant savings to be had by going after waste, fraud and abuse in the system. And this month, changes in identify verification procedures that end some phone-based services could create burdens for some beneficiaries.

“They’re setting the groundwork to ‘eliminate’ Americans’ hard-earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare all to fund tax breaks for their ultra-wealthy backers,” the Democratic National Committee claimed in a March 17 statement that came after news of the identity verification changes.

A link on the word “eliminate” went to a story about an interview of Musk making unfounded claims about fraud and saying that eliminating “waste” from “entitlement spending,” including Social Security and Medicare, could yield $500 billion to $700 billion a year.

Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, in a March 21 rally in Colorado, referred to Musk in saying: “We will not accept the richest guy in the world running all over Washington making cuts to the Social Security Administration.” But he then went further, charging that the administration is “prepared to destroy Social Security,” along with Medicaid, Medicare and the Department of Veterans Affairs “in order to make themselves even richer.”

Several Democrats have speculated that the goal of the administration is to privatize some aspect of Social Security, or the entire agency. Rep. John Larson of Connecticut told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on March 20: “The plan, unlike previous plans to privatize Social Security, is to scuttle the agencies themselves.” Larson said the Republicans wanted to “make it appear that it’s not working and not answering people’s concerns” and then privatize it.

Senate Democrats have made similar claims. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden wrote in a March 23 letter to Frank Bisignano, the nominee to head the SSA, that they were “deeply concerned that DOGE and the Trump Administration are setting up the SSA for failure—a failure that could cut off Social Security benefits for millions of Americans—and that will then be used to justify a ‘private sector fix.’”

In a March 25 statement, Sen. Chuck Schumer said: “DOGE has claimed these efforts are to get rid of fraud and abuse but it is clear after a few months that their actions are little more than smoke and mirrors designed to rip away benefits from hardworking Americans.”

Most of these comments are speculative, and as other news organizations have reported, and as experts told us, there is reason to be concerned about rushed changes and false fraud claims leading to problems with Social Security. But despite those concerns, the administration hasn’t put forth any plan to privatize the SSA, nor any plan to change the amount of benefits now promised to retirees, as many of these claims suggest.

Romina Boccia, director of budget and entitlement policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, told us that concern is “warranted” that some of the administrative changes could affect people’s ability to apply for benefits, especially for disability benefits, which already face very long delays, sometimes years, before eligibility is approved. But that’s different from rules set in law that determine eligibility and the size of someone’s benefits. The administrative changes that are happening “won’t affect the statutory eligibility of people,” she said. That would have to go through Congress.

“A lot of the writing on the left on this is intentionally conflating these two issues to engage in fearmongering,” Boccia said. She said it was “dishonest” to imply there had been cuts to benefits.

At the same time, experts say there may be good reason to fear the actions taken by the Trump administration could harm the operations of the Social Security program.

“I genuinely have never been this concerned about the ability of that agency to function,” said 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, in an interview. “Yes, I think people are right to be worried about it.”

Herd cited the agency’s tasks of managing retiree and disability benefits (for more than 68 million Americans), issuing Social Security numbers to newborns, and keeping track of workers’ earnings, calling it an “enormous” amount of work. “And we’ve seen a fairly careless, and I think that’s generous, treatment of that agency over the past six weeks,” she said.

Cuts, Changes and Concerns at Social Security

In the interview of Musk cited by the DNC — which aired on Fox News on March 10 — Musk made unsupported claims about Democrats using Social Security and Medicare to “attract and retain illegal immigrants by essentially paying them to come here.” He also repeated an incorrect suggestion that Social Security payments could be going to millions of people listed as deceased, and he claimed that hundreds of billions of waste per year — up to $700 billion — could be cut from the programs.

“The waste report in entitlement spending, you know, which is … most of the federal spending is entitlements,” Musk said. “So that’s like the big one to eliminate, that’s the sort of half trillion maybe $600, $700 billion a year.”

In response to those comments, the White House pointed to a Government Accountability Office report that estimated the entire federal government “could lose between $233 billion and $521 billion annually to fraud.”

Reports from the SSA’s Office of the Inspector General have estimated significantly smaller amounts of Social Security improper spending — which includes mistakes, not only fraud. A July 2024 report from the IG’s Office of Audit said the rate of improper Social Security payments was 0.84% over fiscal years 2015 to 2022, which added up to $71.8 billion — or about $9 billion per year. Billions of overpayments were also recovered by the agency.

In February, the IG released a report on overpayments in the retirement and disability programs, finding that 3% of them, or nearly $102 million a year on average, were due to fraud. The report covered fiscal 2020 to 2023.

These reports indicate that while SSA could find some savings from fraud or abuse, the amount is relatively small. Social Security benefit payments in fiscal 2024 totaled $1.5 trillion, or about 22% of the federal budget that year.

“I think a lot of the statements of fraud that Elon Musk has put forth are exaggerated as well,” Boccia told us. While there are opportunities to streamline the SSA, she said, the question is whether DOGE was thinking of the long-term impact or “almost randomly slashing and cutting where they can.”

“It’s not clear to me that the DOGE team implementing these changes is talking to experts that understand how the Social Security system works,” Boccia said, and whether the changes will be effective. This “chaotic approach to cuts” could lead to mistakes and “undermine the bigger reform effort that will be necessary to ensure that vulnerable seniors don’t face automatic benefit cuts” when the Social Security trust fund is depleted.

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.

Spokespeople at Sanders’ and Larson’s offices pointed to more reports about changes at the SSA when we inquired about the lawmakers’ claims.

For instance, the reduction of 7,000 jobs, with an agency-wide offer of early retirement and incentivized resignations, and a reorganization were announced in February. The SSA said the changes were being made to “prioritize customer service by streamlining redundant layers of management” and “reducing non-mission critical work.” It said, “SSA is committed to ensure this plan has a positive effect on the delivery of Social Security services.” The Washington Post reported on April 4 that there are plans in the works for additional layoffs of potentially thousands of staffers. (The SSA press office hasn’t responded to our inquiry about that report and other questions about Democrats’ claims.)

The Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity was closed in late February, though Lee Dudek, the acting SSA commissioner, said that the office’s legally required tasks would be reassigned. The Office of Transformation, whose work included initiatives on the SSA website, was also closed.

There have been news reports of upcoming field office closures, but those remain unconfirmed. The Associated Press analyzed a DOGE list of federal real estate leases it wanted to cancel, finding the list included 47 SSA field offices, with 26 of them expected to be closed in 2025. But on March 27, the SSA said it hadn’t closed or announced the closure of any field offices, adding that it “works closely with local congressional delegations before closing any office permanently.” The SSA said it had provided a list of “underutilized office space,” mostly “small hearing rooms with no assigned employees,” to the General Services Administration for closure.

New ID Verification Procedures

There’s also a change to identity verification practices for some beneficiaries, starting April 14. Those applying for retirement and survivors’ benefits for the first time, and anyone wanting to set up or change their direct deposit information, will have to do so through a “my Social Security” account online or in person at a field office, rather than over the phone, which has been an option.

The SSA has said the ID verification changes are part of an effort to combat fraud. But advocates for beneficiaries have argued it could hurt those who can’t use the online system and have trouble traveling to a field office, which for rural beneficiaries could be far away.

Herd, at the University of Michigan, told us that a lot of people struggle with the online system and there’s evidence that it doesn’t prevent fraud.

The SSA’s Office of Audit reported in 2019 that $33.5 million in benefits for nearly 21,000 beneficiaries was diverted over about a five-year period because of unauthorized changes made to their direct deposit information through the online “my Social Security” system.

The ID verification changes, for those who can’t use the online system, will mean having to go to field offices, which “are already overwhelmed,” Herd said.

Dudek told reporters in March that the SSA “is losing over $100 million a year in direct deposit fraud,” which would be a fraud rate of about 0.007% of benefits paid. All but about 500,000 monthly benefit payments now go through direct deposit, and an executive order from Trump calls for the elimination of paper checks throughout the federal government by Sept. 30.

Herd said that a lot of the changes at the SSA, which have happened in a short period of time, “are further weakening an agency that was already operating on a kind of barebones administrative budget.” She pointed to SSA data showing the agency’s overhead is 0.5% of the combined trust fund cost.

The SSA could “effectively fail to deliver on promises” made to deliver benefits through administrative changes, she said. “The promise of Social Security benefits is only as good as the ability to deliver them.”

But, again, the Trump administration hasn’t proposed cutting legally required benefits, as some claims by Democrats imply.

Press reports have noted that the SSA website has been crashing, and beneficiaries have faced long wait times on customer service phone lines.

Boccia told us that fearmongering on the part of Democrats was contributing to the large call volumes. She noted a “political incentive to exaggerate the effect of the changes” at the SSA to increase support for Democrats.

Privatization

As for speculation by some Democratic lawmakers that the administrative changes at SSA are part of an effort to “privatize Social Security,” Boccia said she has seen no evidence for that at all. She said the claims were “not based in reality.”

Bisignano, the nominee for SSA commissioner who is the CEO of Fiserv, a financial technology services company, was asked about this at a March 25 confirmation hearing. “I’ve never thought about privatizing. It’s not a word that anybody’s ever talked to me about. And I don’t see this institution as anything other than a government agency that gets run for the benefit of the American public,” he said.

He later said, “I don’t believe anybody’s thinking about that,” when asked again about privatization.

And during questioning from Warren about beneficiaries potentially having trouble getting benefits they were entitled to, Bisignano said, “I will commit to have the right staffing to get the job done.”

Larson’s office pointed us to a March 23 article by MarketWatch in which some experts voiced concern about a path to privatization. Staffing cuts and other changes at the SSA “could erode customer service, impact benefits and — eventually, experts say — diminish consumer confidence to the point the federal government chooses to hand the program off to the private sector,” MarketWatch reported, quoting, among others, Jason Fichtner, who was an acting deputy commissioner at the SSA under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. However, the article said other experts didn’t agree with the privatization speculation.

Herd told us it was “not unreasonable that some folks in Congress are sort of questioning the end game here about Social Security.”

We can’t predict the future, but there has been no plan put forth by the administration to privatize some aspect of Social Security, or the entire agency.

The president, meanwhile, has repeatedly said that he’s only interested in getting rid of fraud. “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something we’re going to find. It’s going to be strengthened,” Trump said in a February interview on Fox News.

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In his Rose Garden announcement of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” President Donald Trump held aloft a misleading chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. will now impose against those countries.

“Reciprocal. That means they do it to us and we do it to them,” Trump said in his April 2 speech. “Very simple. Can’t get any simpler than that.”

Trump said the U.S. would begin charging a “minimum baseline tariff of 10%” on all imported goods. But he said the U.S. would also tariff countries at a rate equal to half of tariff rates that countries charged for U.S. goods “including currency manipulation and trade barriers.” That, according to Trump’s chart, would mean tariffs of 50% on imports from some countries.

The first column next to the list of countries purported to represent “Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A.” as a percentage. A cursory look revealed, however, that the percentages are far higher than the average tariff rates published by the World Trade Organization. Smaller print under the “Tariffs Charged” heading notes — as Trump did — that the figures include “Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers.” Those last two factors are harder to quantify, but it turns out that’s not how the White House arrived at its figures anyway.

“You see the numbers, the numbers are so disproportionate, they’re so unfair,” Trump said.

According to a fact sheet provided by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, the reciprocal tariffs were “calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners. This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing. Tariffs work through direct reductions of imports.”

USTR said that while computing trade deficit effects for every country “is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

To approximate that, USTR said it divided the size of a country’s trade imbalance with the U.S. in goods by how much America imports in goods from that nation.

Take the European Union, for example. The chart lists its tariffs charged for U.S. imports (again, including currency manipulation or trade barriers) as 39%. Trump said the U.S. would charge countries half of what they are charging the U.S., because charging the full reciprocal amount “would have been tough for a lot of countries.” So in the case of the EU, the “USA Discounted Reciprocal Tariffs” is 20%, the chart states.

According to the World Trade Organization, the EU’s trade-weighted average tariff rate is 2.7%. Trump also noted that European countries charge a value-added tax of about 20% — it varies by country but that’s roughly accurate. But those taxes are levied on imports as well as domestic production, so the VAT does not provide any trade advantage. In any case, neither of those numbers factor into the White House’s math.

How does the White House arrive at 39%? In 2024, the U.S. goods trade deficit with the EU was $235.6 billion. That year, the U.S. imported $605.8 billion worth of goods from the EU. So, $235.6 divided by $605.8 is 38.9%, or, rounded up, 39%.

Economists told us that’s not a legitimate way to calculate reciprocal tariffs for countries.

“Those listed numbers are simply not tariffs, but some other made-up measure based on a formulaic trade deficit calculation,” Kimberly Clausing, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told us via email. “In almost every instance, countries’ true trade barriers are far, far lower.”

“This is not a legitimate way to calculate trade barriers, and the vast majority of subject matter experts (I would wager >99% of international economists) would reject this methodology as profoundly flawed,” Clausing said.

“For example,” she said, “imagine you have completely free trade with an island that produces mangos but lacks sufficient income to buy US goods. The US buys $100 in mangos and sends only $20 in exports. This would imply a tariff rate of 40% by the Trump method, (80/100 divided by 2), but the imbalance of trade represents only the fact of distinct comparative advantage in trade, not any trade barriers.”

Or, as the New York Times put it, “The difference between exports and imports doesn’t necessarily reflect trade barriers; Americans may simply want to buy more stuff from, say, Japan than the Japanese want to buy from the United States.”

“The Trump administration’s calculations are a fundamentally nonsensical way to calculate ‘reciprocal’ tariffs,” Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy at the Tax Foundation, told us. “Absolutely none of the factors the White House purports to be looking at, like tariffs, non-tariff barriers, or other unfair practices, factor in to the tariff rate they calculate in any way. They are invented numbers that have zero relationship to real policies.”

William Reinsch, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former president of the National Foreign Trade Council, concurred.

“We do not believe it is an appropriate or accurate measure of trade barriers,” Reinsch told us via email. “We believe their methodology basically has nothing to do with reciprocal tariffs as the administration had previously discussed. The most charitable interpretation of what they are saying is ‘this is the tariff rate that would be necessary to balance bilateral trade with each partner.’”

Countries with which the U.S. has a trade surplus – such as the U.K. and Singapore – are still listed on the chart as charging 10% tariffs.

According to York, if the aim is to balance trade with every country, these proposed tariffs won’t work.

“Tariffs will not reduce the US trade deficit because tariffs, either through their effects on the US dollar or through retaliation, will also reduce US exports,” York said. “That’s a result borne out in economic literature, and in recent US experience with the 2018-2019 tariffs.”

Economists also noted that the White House equation focuses only on goods, and ignores trade in services, where the U.S. enjoys a trade surplus.

“That skews the results. A lot,” Clausing, of the Peterson Institute, told us. “The US has a comparative advantage in services, and this ignores our substantial trade surpluses in that sector.”

“Excluding services is simply wrong and doesn’t give the full picture,” Stuart Malawer, a professor emeritus of policy and government at George Mason University, told us via email.

U.S. Trade Representative Fact Sheet

The USTR fact sheet on the reciprocal tariff calculations cited a handful of academic studies, but when we reached out to the authors of several of them, they balked at the Trump administration’s conclusions.

“The tariffs charged to the USA column certainly does not represent legislated tariffs faced by the US,” Anson Soderbery, an economics professor at Purdue University and author of the research paper “Trade elasticities, heterogeneity, and optimal tariffs,” told us via email. “Those are much smaller than reported and take into account bilateral agreements (e.g., USMCA, WTO preferential duties, etc).  

“If they are using the USTR formula proposed this morning to adjust those numbers, I am even less sure how to go about evaluating what they mean,” Soderbery said. “That is, suggesting trade imbalances are only due to trade barriers is not founded in any economic theory or methodology. And, further suggesting the reductionist formula exports-imports/imports can be used to back out all trade barriers and equivalent tariff rates is misguided.”

Ina Simonovska of the University of California, Davis, and co-author of “The elasticity of trade: Estimates and evidence,” told us via email, “The formula that the administration uses is correct under the assumption that the objective is to arrive at a zero bilateral trade balance with a given trade partner, holding fixed any other effects.” But there will be other effects, she said, including “the changes in exports that would occur due to the domestic price increases caused by the tariff as well as changes in trade flows with other trade partners than the one that the tariff targets. … These effects are harmful so they would result in a lower optimal tariff compared to the reported one” in the White House chart.

The USTR fact sheet also cites as a reference for its estimates a paper published in American Economic Review, “The Long and Short (Run) of Trade Elasticities.” One of the authors of that paper, Andrei Levchenko, a professor of international economics at the University of Michigan, told us via email that the “elasticity estimate” in the paper and used by the USTR “should not be directly applied in this tariff calculation.”

“The key reason is that the concept of the trade elasticity holds everything else constant,” he explained. “In practice, everything else will not be constant. In particular, US exports could change. That can come from a variety of channels, but one important one is tariff retaliation by trading partners. If a trading partner puts tariffs on US exports to it, they will fall, (at least partially) un-doing the impact of lower imports on the trade deficit.

“Beyond this, there are many other ways in which the change in US imports and exports will differ from the formula that directly applies a partial equilibrium trade elasticity,” he said. “For example, trade elasticity estimates do not account for any impact of the change in tariffs on wages, prices, exchange rates, and the stock market. Those can go in different directions depending on the country, the product, the production technology used, etc. For small tariff changes on individual products from individual countries, these changes might be small and could reasonably be ignored. However, the change in imports and in the bilateral trade balance implied by the partial equilibrium trade elasticity is likely to be
unreliable when the tariff change is large and comprehensive (covering all goods), as is the case today.”

Repeated Claims

Trump got other things wrong in his tariff announcement. He continued to wrongly frame his tariffs as a way to raise “trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes.” Tariffs are a tax. And because U.S. importers pay the tariffs, and often pass at least some of their increased costs onto consumers through higher prices, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes, affecting lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income.

A Tax Foundation analysis projected that the tariffs announced on April 2, combined with earlier tariffs announced by Trump, would raise nearly $3.2 trillion in revenue over 10 years. But the tariffs would also reduce Americans’ after-tax income, amounting to “an average tax increase of more than $2,100 per US household in 2025,” the Tax Foundation said.

Trump also repeated false or misleading trade claims that we’ve already covered. 

He said Canada “imposes a 250 to 300% tariff on many of our dairy products,” referring to rates that would only be charged if U.S. exports to Canada ever exceeded predetermined quotas. He said tariffs made the U.S. “proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” between 1789 and 1913, even though  real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product per capita is many times higher today than it was more than a century ago. And he claimed that during his first term he “took in hundreds of billions of dollars” from tariffs on China, which he said “never paid 10 cents to any other president.” But the U.S. has long collected billions from customs duties on Chinese imports — and the tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, not China. 

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Misinformation is nothing new. It has, however, become ubiquitous and, in some cases, more difficult and time-consuming than ever to debunk. 

When we first started publishing in 2003 — which predated Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006) — viral misinformation took the form of chain emails. Although they were a problem at the time, chain emails were to misinformation what the Pony Express is to ChatGPT.

As the popularity of social media platforms has grown, so too has the scope of viral misinformation and the speed with which it travels. And this falsehood-fraught environment is increasingly where people get their news.

In a survey of U.S. adults last year, the Pew Research Center found that “just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media.”

The incredible growth of podcasts also has helped spread misinformation on social media. According to the Pew Research Center, 42% of Americans 12 and older said they had listened to a podcast in the past month in 2023 — up from only 9% in 2008. In February, YouTube — the largest video platform — announced that it had more than 1 billion monthly podcast users. 

The emergence of artificial intelligence, or AI, makes it even more difficult for social media users to separate fact from fiction. 

“AI technologies, with their capability to generate convincing fake texts, images, audio and videos (often referred to as ‘deepfakes’), present significant difficulties in distinguishing authentic content from synthetic creations,” Cathy Li and Agustina Callegari of the World Economic Forum wrote last year in an article on how to combat AI misinformation. 

Our work aims to inform the public and debunk political falsehoods. But we can’t fact-check everything. Here’s our advice on how to identify bogus posts and factual distortions.

Think before sharing. We have long advised our readers, “Be skeptical, not cynical.” When it comes to online content, that means: Think twice before you share that social media post.  

“Don’t hit reshare until you stop and think to yourself, ‘Am I reasonably sure that this is accurate … does this seem plausible?’” David Rand, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, told PBS Newshour last year. 

We know that this can be hard to do, particularly if the content evokes a powerful response in you and aligns with your beliefs — which is often the case. There’s two reasons for that: 

• Seeking clicks, content providers give us text, images and videos that often provoke a reaction from us. 

• Using algorithms, social media platforms feed us what they think we want to see and hear.

As a result, social media posts often play to our emotions, and, as humans, we are susceptible to confirmation bias — which is the tendency to give too much weight to information that confirms our beliefs. The combination of the two makes misinformation go viral. 

But resist the urge to immediately reshare. 

Consider the source. Who shared the claim? What do you know about this person or organization? Do they have any partisan or financial conflicts? What qualifies them to write or speak about the subject?

We’ve seen a lot of misinformation from people who draw conclusions and share opinions, despite a lack of expertise in the subject or a clear conflict of interest, or both.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we debunked bogus claims about the virus from several chiropractors. A multiple offender, chiropractor Eric Nepute, was sued by the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission for violating the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act. In a settlement, Nepute agreed to pay a fine and stop making false claims about supplements that he advertised and sold as preventatives and treatments for COVID-19. The civil complaint said Nepute and his companies “have earned a substantial amount of money from selling these and other Wellness Warrior Products.”

If someone is making claims in an effort to sell you something, that’s a red flag to be skeptical.

Of course, we also see a lot of misinformation from partisans — so be wary of liberal and conservative social media accounts making claims about the other side. 

For example, we recently debunked the misleading claim spread by President Donald Trump and conservative commentators that Politico, an online news outlet, was being “completely” or “massively funded” by the U.S. Agency for International Development under the Biden administration. In fact, the media payments were for subscriptions that were common at many federal agencies under the Trump and Biden administrations. 

Evaluate the evidence. Does the person making the claim provide any evidence, such as links to articles, published research or other sources? Are some sources mentioned, but no links provided? How credible is the evidence provided?

It’s a red flag if no sources are provided. If sources are cited, find the source material and see if the evidence supports the claim. You would be surprised how often the “evidence” doesn’t support the claim. (Be careful in clicking on links. Make sure they lead to a legitimate website.)  

Last month, we did a story on social media posts that falsely claimed Trump ordered former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s release from the International Criminal Court. The posts cited “Executive Order 2025-03” — which doesn’t exist. That’s not even the numbering system for executive orders. 

You should also check the credibility of the source material provided in the social media post. 

We recently debunked misleading claims about measles in a video posted to X by Mary Holland, the CEO of the anti-vaccine advocacy group Children’s Health Defense that was founded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Holland based her claims on an article written by Sayer Ji, the founder of an alternative medicine website who was named in the Center for Countering Digital Hate’s “Disinformation Dozen,” a list of top spreaders of vaccine misinformation on social media. Ji has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Rutgers University.

Ji’s history of spreading misinformation and his lack of expertise in the area of infectious diseases are red flags. 

In another case, we wrote about an article in a peer-reviewed journal that made numerous false claims about COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The article — which was later retracted — was written by known vaccination opponents who have spread misinformation about the mRNA vaccines, and it was published in a journal that did not have the same standards as more reputable journals.

If the social media post includes an image that you suspect might be a fake, then you can use reverse image search engines, such as Google and TinEye, that may help you find the original image and where and when it appeared online. We have used such tools numerous times over the years.

Evidence or opinion? Cable TV commentators, podcasters and columnists have blurred the line between news and opinion. 

If the evidence cited in the social media post comes from a news source — or purports to come from a news source, sometimes falsely labeled “breaking news” — you should consider if the social media post is sharing fact-based reporting or someone’s opinion of the news. 

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but we’ve found that many partisan websites, podcasters and commentators – whether they are pushing a liberal or conservative agenda — aren’t telling the full story. Their version of the facts is often slanted to benefit their side. 

Consult the experts. If you are still uncertain about the veracity of a social media claim, then you should consult the experts. That includes FactCheck.org — we’re on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, BlueSky, WhatsApp and TikTok.

A good place to start is Google or the search engines of FactCheck.org and other fact-checking websites.

The search should include keywords or a short excerpt of the social media post, podcast or video. For example, social media posts claimed the Department of Government Efficiency stopped “royalties” to former President Barack Obama for “Obamacare,” formally known as the Affordable Care Act. The top two results of a recent Google search of “royalties + Obama + Affordable Care Act” turned up articles by FactCheck.org and AFP Fact Check, a France-based fact-checking organization.  

Google has also created a tool called “Fact Check Explorer” — a searchable database of fact-checking articles from around the world. The same search for “royalties + Obama + Affordable Care Act” on Google’s Fact Check Explorer turned up six fact-checking articles – all debunking the claim about Obama. 

Fact-checking articles take time to produce, so in some cases you may not immediately find a fact-checking article on the topic. You may, however, find some news articles on the subject — but make sure you are using trusted sources, such as the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Associated Press, New York Times and other established news outlets. 

We know that trust in the media is low, but the fact is that legitimate news organizations, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, have written policies and procedures for such things as newsgathering, editing and corrections, as well as standards for ethical conduct and conflicts of interest. 

Even when using such trusted sources, you might want to check more than one source to see what others are reporting. Multiple news outlets will report on breaking news and major news developments, so be wary if only one news organization is reporting on the “news” that you are seeing on social media.

AI-Generated Images  

As we mentioned earlier, online content may be created by generative AI, which “can create original content — such as text, images, video, audio or software code — in response to a user’s prompt or request,” as IBM explains on its website. 

We’ve already covered text in the section above. The same rules apply to text created by humans or AI services. Here we focus on AI-generated images, videos and audio.

We have been writing about fake photos for years. In the early years, the fakes were real images that were altered using Photoshop or other editing programs. 

In 2008, for example, we wrote about an image that purportedly showed then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wearing a red, white and blue bikini and holding a rifle. But it wasn’t her. Her head had been Photoshopped onto the body of another woman. 

Using AI, people looking to entertain or cause mischief can create entirely new images, video and audio. Experts say you may be able to spot a fake by looking closely for red flags.

“It is possible to create realistic appearing images, audio, and video with today’s generative AI tools,” Matthew Groh, an assistant professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, told us in an email. “One of the best ways to spot a lie (and likewise AI-generated media) is to search for contradictions.”

Groh and his colleagues published a research paper in February that measured the accuracy of more than 50,000 participants who were asked to identify whether images were real or AI-generated. The participants were given “unlimited time, 20 seconds, 10 seconds, 5 seconds, and 1 second.” The paper found that “longer viewing times” improved the participants’ accuracy.

Unnatural body parts. Groh and his Northwestern colleagues identified telltale signs of AI-generated photos for an article last year in Kellogg Insight, a school publication. They advised social media users to look closely at various body parts for “anatomical implausibilities.” 

“Are there missing or extra limbs or digits? Bodies that merge into their surroundings or into other nearby bodies? A giraffe-like neck on a human? In AI-generated images, teeth can overlap or appear asymmetrical. Eyes may be overly shiny, blurry, or hollow-looking,” the article said.

If the person is a public figure, you can compare facial features with existing news photos to spot discrepancies, the article also noted. 

Odd objects. There may also be oddities in the way that body parts interact with objects, or even problems with the objects themselves.

For example, the Kellogg Insight article included an AI-generated image that showed a person’s hand inside a hamburger. The hamburger itself is improbably large.

“When there’s interactions between people and objects, there are often things that don’t look quite right,” Groh told Kellogg Insight, referring to these oddities as “functional implausibilities.”

Irregular shadows and reflections. AI also has difficulty with shadows and reflections. Shadows may be cast in different directions, and reflections may not match the object they pretend to reflect, Groh and his colleagues said.

For example, an AI-generated image in the Kellogg Insight article shows a person wearing a short-sleeved shirt, while his mirror image is wearing a long-sleeved shirt. The Northwestern research paper describes these irregularities as “violations of physics.”

The researchers also identified two other telltale signs of AI-generated images: “stylistic artifacts,” which refer to “overly glossy, waxy, or picturesque qualities of specific elements of an image,” and “sociocultural implausibilities,” which are “scenarios that violate social norms, cultural context, or historical accuracy.”

Nonsensical words. Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator with McGill University’s Office for Science and Society, explained in an article on the university’s website last year that AI-generated images have trouble with words. In his article, Jarry asked an AI service to create a photo of Montreal circa 1931. One problem, however, was that the lettering displayed on background signage was “gibberish.”

(Think you can tell real photos from bogus AI-generated images? Take the “Detect Fakes” test on Kellogg School’s website.)

AI-Generated Video and Audio

Unlike fake images, bogus video and audio are fairly new phenomena.   

We recently wrote about an audio clip circulating on social media that purported to show Donald Trump Jr. saying “the U.S. should have been sending weapons to Russia,” instead of Ukraine. But we found no evidence that Trump ever made such a comment, and a digital forensic expert told us it was likely fake.  

Look for contextual clues. Determine if the text of the post or the audio or video clip itself offers some contextual clues — such as where and when the words were allegedly spoken.

In the case of the fake Trump audio, one red flag was the claim that the president’s son made his remark about Russia on a Feb. 25 episode of his podcast, “Triggered with Donald Trump Jr.” However, Trump did not make any such comment about Russia during that episode.

Listen for audio anomalies. The European Digital Media Observatory, a project of the European Commission, offers tips for detecting AI-generated audio and video. When listening to audio, it says to “[p]ay attention to choices of words, intonation, breaths, unnatural pauses and other elements that can manifest anomalies.”

Watch for quality of video. The EDMO suggests checking “the quality of the video” to spot “out of focus contours, unrealistic features” and poor “synchronization of audio and video,” i.e., when the lips don’t match the audio.

Look for disclaimers. Some social media platforms — including Meta, YouTube and TikTok — require users to add a label on AI-generated content. Check to see if the platform you are using has such a policy and, if so, look for the disclaimers.

For example, Meta, which owns Facebook, Threads and Instagram, uses an “AI info” label “for content we detect was generated by an AI tool and share whether the content is labeled because of industry-shared signals or because someone self-disclosed.”

Groh, the Northwestern assistant professor, said that Community Notes on X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — can be useful at flagging AI-generated content.

“Community notes can be very useful for adding context and directing people’s attention to possible tells,” such as this note in response to an image posted following Hurricane Milton, Groh said. “Likewise, context and insights from trusted sources like fact checkers or digital forensics experts can be useful for helping people on social media make up their minds about whether what they’ve seen online is AI-generated or real.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to lift a District Court judge’s order blocking the use of an obscure 18th century law to summarily expel Venezuelan immigrants. Earlier this month, the administration sent hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvador prison because, officials alleged, they were members of a dangerous gang.

In response to a lawsuit, the lower court temporarily blocked any further deportations while the court considers the merits of the case, and it ordered planes carrying migrants deported under the law to be returned, which the administration did not do.

The lack of due process and the apparent disregard for the court order has led some legal experts to forecast a deterioration of the rule of law in the U.S., while the Trump administration maintains that it is within its rights to deport dangerous criminals.

We’ll lay out the facts as we know them regarding the key issues.

On Saturday, March 15, the Trump administration sent three planes carrying more than 250 immigrants to El Salvador, bound for the country’s largest prison.

The administration claimed that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which is active primarily in South America, but has had an increasing presence in the U.S., were on board. The Treasury Department designated it as a transnational criminal organization in July 2024, and the State Department designated it as a terrorist organization on Feb. 20.

The same day as the deportations, the White House posted a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act — a rarely used law that dates back to 1798 — to expel members of Tren de Aragua. It said that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA” and aren’t U.S. citizens or permanent residents “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” According to the Federal Register, the proclamation was signed the day before the administration posted it.

The secrecy and pace of the deportations could suggest that the administration was trying to avoid preemptive legal challenges, the judge handling the case disputing the deportations said. “Why is this proclamation essentially signed in the dark on Friday night, early Saturday morning, when people [were] rushed on the plane?” U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg asked at a March 21 hearing. “To me, the only reason to do that is if you know the problem and you want to get them out of the country before a suit is filed.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward had filed a lawsuit on the same day of the deportations on behalf of five Venezuelan men who were being held in Texas and “threatened with imminent removal under the President’s expected Proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act.” The suit sought class action status for all affected immigrants and asked the judge to block the administration’s use of the act.

Boasberg granted both of those requests on March 15. He issued a ruling from the bench ordering any planes carrying immigrants being deported under the Alien Enemies Act to be returned to the U.S.

The planes did not return and, when Boasberg requested details from the Trump administration about when the planes took off and landed, lawyers for the administration withheld that information and invoked the state secrets privilege.

What is the Alien Enemies Act?

The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws passed in 1798 as the newly formed U.S. prepared for a potential war with France. That conflict, which entangled the U.S. in a dispute between France and Britain, took place at sea and never became a declared war. It is often called the Quasi War.

The four laws that came from it are referred to collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. They include:

• The Naturalization Act, which extended the amount of time it would take immigrants to become citizens. It was repealed in 1802.
• The Alien Act, which allowed the government to deport noncitizens who were deemed to be dangerous. It expired in 1801.
• The Sedition Act, which censored speech that was critical of the government. It expired in 1801.
• The Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the government — in times of war — to detain, relocate or remove those who were from the enemy nation.

The Alien Enemies Act is the only surviving law of the group.

It 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.

It has been used three times throughout U.S. history — first, during the War of 1812 when British immigrants were required to move away from the coast to areas designated by federal marshals; second, during World War I, when German immigrants were required to register with the government and comply with restrictions on where they could work and live; third, during World War II, when the government rounded up Japanese, German and Italian immigrants, leading to the use of internment camps.

Can Trump use the act this way?

This is a question for the courts, which haven’t yet conclusively ruled.

As we said, there’s a class action lawsuit on behalf of the deported immigrants challenging the administration’s use of the act. The federal judge handling the case — Boasberg, the chief judge of the District Court for the District of Columbia — issued an opinion on March 24, saying, “The President’s unprecedented use of the Act outside of the typical wartime context … implicates a host of complicated legal issues, including fundamental and sensitive questions about the often-circumscribed extent of judicial power in matters of foreign policy and national security.”

Boasberg went on to say that the court probably wouldn’t have to decide that question since the immigrants who brought the case are likely to prevail on a different issue. “Before they may be deported, they are entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all,” he said. “As the Government itself concedes, the awesome power granted by the Act may be brought to bear only on those who are, in fact, ‘alien enemies.’”

However Boasberg ends up ruling, though, the case will almost certainly be appealed. The government, in fact, already appealed Boasberg’s initial order blocking further use of the Alien Enemies Act. A split panel of the appeals court upheld Boasberg’s order, and the administration on March 28 filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.

Legal experts have described the administration’s use of the wartime act as an overreach, noting that the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela.

“The legal problems with the deportations are obvious: The US is not at war with Venezuela; the gang isn’t a government; and in any case it’s not threatening the US with invasion or incursion in any ordinary English language sense of those words,” wrote Harvard Law School Professor Noah Feldman in a March 17 column.

The Trump administration, however, had endeavored to link Tren de Aragua to Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president. Tren de Aragua “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus,” the proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act says, going on to call Venezuela a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States.”

Gangs have flourished in Venezuela as Maduro’s government has struggled, but it’s worth noting that his administration conducted a raid on Tren de Aragua’s home base — the Tocorón prison — in 2023.

“If our government has evidence of a coordinated invasion into this country that was engineered by a foreign nation, it must have proof. Otherwise, it is fiction,” Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina Chapel Hill constitutional law professor, told PolitiFact.

For years, President Donald Trump has been claiming without evidence that other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending people to the United States. In particular, he has targeted Venezuela. Experts in the country told us last year that there’s no support to back up Trump’s claim.

And other legal experts have weighed in on the implications of the proclamation. “The president is invoking the Alien Enemies Act to try to dispense with due process. He wants to bypass any need to provide evidence or to convince a judge that someone is actually a gang member before deporting them,” Katherine Yon Ebright, a lawyer in the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said in a statement.

“Trump is trying to use the post 9/11 terrorism playbook for immigration,” Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent and current associate dean at Yale Law School, wrote on Substack. By using the Alien Enemies Act, “Trump may try to ignore or sidestep the courts altogether, giving him immense ‘wartime’ authority (in peacetime) without any judicial check,” she said.

Tren de Aragua in the U.S.

Tren de Aragua began around 2014 in Venezuela’s Tocorón prison in the state of Aragua and, by 2023, had grown to be one of the county’s most powerful criminal organizations, according to the investigative reporting think tank InSight Crime.

“Tren de Aragua’s expansion turned transnational around 2018, when the gang attempted to establish itself on the Venezuela-Colombia border between the Venezuelan state of Táchira and the Colombian department of Norte de Santander,” according to InSight Crime. “Between 2018 and 2023, Tren de Aragua built a transnational criminal network, setting up cells in Colombia, Peru, and Chile, with further reports of a sporadic presence in Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil.”

As of 2021, the gang had about 4,000 members in Latin America, according to the anti-corruption advocacy organization Transparencia Venezuela.

Estimating the size of Tren de Aragua in the U.S. is difficult, in part because members don’t adhere to traditional gang behavior, like wearing specific tattoos, Mitchel P. Roth, a professor at Sam Houston State University who researches organized crime, told us in an interview.

In October, the Department of Homeland Security had reportedly identified about 600 members across the U.S., although that number may be too low.

We reached out to DHS asking for updated figures, but we didn’t receive a response.

Of the 194 migrants with gang affiliations who have been apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border Protection between October and February, 16 have been members of Tren de Aragua, according to CBP statistics. For context, that’s about half the number of MS-13 members who have been apprehended in the same time frame, and, assuming all 16 were from Venezuela, that’s .02% of the roughly 64,000 Venezuelans who were apprehended.

Who was deported?

There’s been little official information made available about those who were deported on March 15. But CBS News published 238 names from an “internal government list,” and an unnamed official told the network that 137 of them were deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a March 17 press briefing that the administration wasn’t releasing names due to “privacy concerns.”

News outlets have reported on a handful of deportees, revealing that their families, lawyers and even judges presiding over their asylum cases have almost no information on their detention by the U.S. government.

As USA Today reported on March 21, a judge presiding over an asylum hearing was unaware that the claimant, Jefferson José Laya Freites, wouldn’t be present. A lawyer with an immigrant rights organization told the judge that Laya Freites’ wife believed he’d been sent to El Salvador after he was detained following a traffic stop because she saw him in a video the president of El Salvador posted of deportees being taken to the prison there. She said he’s never been in a gang.

Similar stories were reported by the Washington Post, which described how Henrry Albornoz Quintero was arrested and detained after a routine check-in with immigration officials in January, then didn’t show up to a bond hearing. Neither the judge nor the government’s attorney knew where he was. His wife, pregnant with their first child, identified him in one of the photographs released by the El Salvadoran government.

Another case that has been widely reported in the media is that of Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and coach who was seeking asylum in the U.S. after he was allegedly tortured in Venezuela for demonstrating against Maduro, according to his lawyer, Linette Tobin. In a declaration filed in the case before Boasberg, Tobin said that a tattoo Barrios has depicting the logo of his favorite soccer team — Real Madrid — and a social media post in which he was showing the sign language hand gesture that means “I love you” were misinterpreted by Department of Homeland Security officers as indicating he was a member of Tren de Aragua. He has no criminal record, Tobin said.

The Trump administration, however, has maintained that those who were deported were gang members and criminals, whom Leavitt described as “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country.”

Trump has repeatedly referred to the deportees as simply “criminals.” A declaration filed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in the case challenging the deportations said that many of those who were deported did not have criminal records, adding that this was “because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time.”

The ICE declaration maintained that all of them were members of the Venezuelan gang. “Agency personnel carefully vetted each individual alien to ensure they were in fact members of TdA,” it said. “ICE did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.”

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

As fallout from a Trump administration group chat about a military attack in Yemen continues to unfold, some Democrats are saying the inadvertent inclusion of a journalist in the chat goes beyond incompetence — they say it was criminal.

Legal experts on national security issues say Democrats may have a point, that a case could be made that the chat violated a provision of the Espionage Act. But they say it is highly unlikely such a prosecution would be initiated by the Trump administration against one of its own.

Speculation about culpability for the chat that included Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, and whether any of the Trump administration officials involved in the chat should face any consequences continues to percolate on Capitol Hill. The chat between top administration national security officials took place on Signal, a private encrypted messaging app. Goldberg reported on March 24 that he had received a connection request through the app from National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who then added him to the chat.

On March 26, after several administration officials insisted the information shared in the chat was not classified, the Atlantic published more of the messages. In one of them, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared to provide a timeline for impending U.S. military strikes in Yemen on March 15.

Department of Defense regulations specifically prohibit use of the app to share “non-public DoD information.”

“Unmanaged ‘messaging apps,’ including any app with a chat feature, regardless of the primary function, are NOT authorized to access, transmit, process non-public DoD information. This includes but is not limited to messaging, gaming, and social media apps. (i.e., iMessage, WhatsApps, Signal),” according to a 2023 DoD memo. NPR reported that just days after the Signal chat on March 15, the Pentagon issued a warning that a “vulnerability has been identified in the Signal Messenger Application” and that “Russian professional hacking groups are employing the ‘linked devices’ features to spy on encrypted conversations.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said the use of Signal for the chat was “a mistake,” and President Donald Trump said that Waltz — who took “full responsibility” for the inadvertent inclusion of Goldberg in the chat — “has learned a lesson.” But Democrats say that’s not enough. Some have called for a formal investigation. On March 25, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sent Trump a letter calling on him to fire Hegseth “immediately.”

Some leading Democrats have gone even further, saying the chat was illegal or that its participants ought to be prosecuted.

• “This is blatantly illegal and dangerous beyond belief,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren posted on X on March 24. “Our national security is in the hands of complete amateurs.”

• “I am horrified by reports that our most senior national security officials, including the heads of multiple agencies, shared sensitive and almost certainly classified information via a commercial messaging application, including imminent war plans,” Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement on March 24. “If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way.”

• “At this moment, the White House and Secretary Hegseth are trying desperately to underplay a extraordinary blunder,” Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said at a press conference on March 25. “We cannot overstate how serious of a disaster it is. If an American service member texted classified information about an active military operation to an unknown number on an unclassified app, they would be dismissed, investigated and prosecuted.”

• “Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally – that would normally involve a jail sentence,” Sen. Chris Coons said in an X post that appears to have since been deleted.

Warren’s press office pointed us to stories that suggest participants in the Signal exchange may have violated a part of the Espionage Act that makes it illegal to inadvertently share “through gross negligence” sensitive national security information.

The section of the law related to the handling of defense information states: “Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense” and “through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed … Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”

Kevin Carroll, a lawyer who specializes in national security litigation and previously worked as a CIA officer, told us in a phone interview that the Signal chat was “100%” a violation of that law.

“In a society of laws, the FBI director would read this in the Atlantic Monthly, and … tell the FBI Washington field office to start an investigation of people, and the investigation would be managed by the counterespionage section of the national security division” in the Department of Justice, Carroll said. “And there’s just no question, zero question, that in any administration other than this, that is what would happen.”

“It’s absolutely the kind of thing where if Hegseth and others were junior military personnel, they would absolutely be court-martialed,” Carroll said. “If they were civilians, they’d absolutely be prosecuted by the counter espionage section of the Justice Department. … Hegseth and these other guys would absolutely be sent to prison if we were living in a society of laws, which we’re no longer living in.”

In a press conference on March 26, Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who participated in the chat — said that while “obviously someone made a mistake” by adding a journalist to the chat group, he was assured by the Pentagon that “none of the information on there at any point threatened the operation or the lives of our servicemen. And, in fact, it was a very successful operation.”

The same day, Hegseth posted on X, “So, let’s me get this straight. The Atlantic released the so-called ‘war plans’ and those ‘plans’ include: No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information. Those are some really shitty war plans.”

According to the Atlantic, two hours before the scheduled start of the bombing in Yemen, Hegseth shared this with the chat group:

• TIME NOW (1144ET): Weather is FAVORABLE. Just CONFIRMED w Centcom we are a GO for mission launch.
• 1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)”
• “1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)”
• “1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)”
• “1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)”
• “1536 F-18 2nd Strike Starts – also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.”

For Hegseth to claim that “the impending target and time and method of a manned aircraft attacking something is not classified is preposterous,” Carroll said. And in any case, he said, the information need not to have been marked as classified to run afoul of the Espionage Act.

“It’s obviously national defense information,” Carroll said. “So that’s the controlling criteria: Is it or is it not national defense information that could be helpful to an adversary.”

“Yes, it’s possible that the Espionage Act was violated here,” David Alan Sklansky, a professor who teaches criminal law at Stanford University, concurred in an email. “That depends on two things: first, whether the information carelessly disclosed to Jeffrey Goldberg was ‘information relating to the national defense’ within the meaning of the statute, and second, whether the information was provided to Jeffrey Goldberg through gross negligence.

“The first requirement is probably satisfied,” Sklansky said. “Courts generally treat information as falling within the protection of this statute if it relates to military facilities or activities, and if it is ‘closely held’ by the government, as opposed to being made generally available to the public. The information posted on the Signal chats appears to qualify.

“So the question comes down to whether one or more of the officials participating in the chat exhibited gross negligence in the handling of this information–in other words, whether they departed egregiously from the standard of care that would be expected,” Sklansky said. “That’s hard to assess definitively without knowing more about how all this happened, but there certainly are grounds for suspecting that gross negligence was involved. If the case were prosecuted, this would be a question for the jury.”

But neither Sklansky nor Carroll thinks any charges will be filed against anyone involved in the Signal chat.

“It is highly unlikely that this case will be criminally investigated, let alone prosecuted, because that would be the job of federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents, and the Trump Administration has, to put it mildly, shown little interest in holding itself to account for violations of the law,” Sklansky said.

Carroll put it more bluntly: “It would be more likely that a Jim Crow South sheriff would prosecute a murder by the Klan than that [FBI Director] Kash Patel and [U.S. Attorney General] Pam Bondi are going to investigate this.”

Trump was asked in a White House meeting on March 25 if he planned to investigate the matter.

“It’s not really an FBI thing,” Trump said. “It’s really something having to do with security — security like will somebody be able to break in? Are people able to break into conversations? And if that’s true, we’re going to have to find some other form of device. … But we’ll look into it.” Trump said he asked Waltz “to immediately study that and find out.”

In a press briefing on March 26, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said “the National Security Council, the White House counsel’s office and also, yes, Elon Musk’s team” were looking into the issue. “Elon Musk has offered to put his technical experts on this to figure out how this number was inadvertently added to the chat, again, to take responsibility and ensure this can never happen again,” Leavitt said.

There’s another legal issue being debated about the use of Signal, which allows messages to be deleted after a set amount of time. Messages in the chat in question were set to be automatically deleted in four weeks.

Federal open-records laws, including the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act, require records to be kept of all communication involving official government business, Alex Howard, deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, told NextGov in February.

According to the National Archives and Records Administration: “Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system.” Guidance from NARA in 2015 stated, “Employees create Federal records when they conduct agency business using personal electronic messaging accounts or devices. This is the case whether or not agencies allow employees to use personal accounts or devices to conduct agency business. This is true for all Federal employees regardless of status.”

An update of the federal records laws in 2014 allows federal employees “using a non-official electronic messaging account” to provide records of those communications to federal archivists within 20 days. So as Josh Gerstein wrote for Politico on March 25, “That means the officials involved in these discussions on Signal still have time to comply since these messages came about 10 days ago.”

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President Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on lowering egg prices, which increased significantly toward the end of the term of his predecessor, former President Joe Biden.

Where do prices stand now? What caused them to spike last year?

Here, we answer those and other questions about the cost of the popular food item.

Are egg prices going up or down?

That depends on which prices you’re talking about.

In remarks on March 16, Trump said that when he began his second term in January, the price of “eggs were through the roof,” but now “are down 35% over a short period of time.” Vice President JD Vance also talked about declining prices on March 14, saying, “Egg prices are lower than they were when we took office.”

What neither the president nor vice president made clear is that they were referring to wholesale prices, which is how much retailers pay to farmers and other egg producers to procure eggs to sell in their stores.

In its March 14 Egg Markets Review, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that average national wholesale prices for graded, loose, white large shell eggs declined to $4.15 per dozen – down roughly 39% from $6.85 per dozen on March 7. By March 21, average prices for those eggs, which had been as high as $8.17 on March 3, had dropped further to $3.27, the USDA said.

Before Trump took office, average wholesale prices rose from $1.07 as of Jan. 5, 2024, to $5.87 as of Jan. 17, 2025.

But during the campaign, Trump seemed to be focused on lowering prices for consumers — not retailers. So far, it’s not clear whether prices have gone down much for grocery shoppers. We won’t have March data on retail prices until April.

In February, retail prices paid by consumers were still increasing, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last month, the nationwide average price for a dozen grade A white eggs was about $5.90 – up more than 19% from $4.95 in January, the previous average price record in the U.S.

The USDA’s March 21 report on egg markets said that, just in time for the Easter holiday, “consumers are slowly beginning to see downward price adjustments.” Although, “it remains to be seen if the recent price drops will be sufficiently reflected in store shelves to encourage price-weary consumers to not limit their holiday celebrations,” the report said.

Some economists have said that retailers may not lower egg prices for consumers until current store inventories run out, or until retailers can recoup some of their lost profits.

Generally, consumer prices for eggs have been trending up since the fall of 2023. Current wholesale prices are also still higher than they have been on average in past years.

What caused egg prices to increase?

Many economists say the primary reason is the highly pathogenic avian influenza – caused by the H5N1 virus – that has been spreading among poultry, dairy cows and wild animals in the U.S. since January 2022. What is now the largest bird flu outbreak since 2015 has caused an egg shortage, as tens of millions of egg-producing hens have had to be killed to prevent further spread of the virus.

As of March 20, more than 168 million birds had been affected in total, according to USDA data. Over 30 million birds from commercial egg layer flocks have been lost in 2025 alone.

The diminished egg supply, coupled with consistently high consumer demand, led to price increases. There was a similar spike in prices in 2022 and early 2023, during the first months of the outbreak, when average retail egg prices reached a then-high of $4.82 per dozen.

Inflation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic played a role as well.

“Inflation is another, if less dramatic, factor driving up egg prices,” Bernt Nelson, an economist for the American Farm Bureau Federation lobby, wrote in a March 11 analysis. “While inflation has slowed over the last couple of years, it’s important to remember inflation is a measure of growth. Slowing inflation doesn’t mean prices are going down, it means they are getting expensive more slowly.”

On top of making eggs more expensive in grocery stores, inflation “also raises the cost of everything it takes to produce eggs on the farm and get them on grocery store shelves,” Nelson said. That includes the cost of replacing chickens that are bred to produce eggs, he said.

Is price gouging happening?

Farm Action and Food & Water Watch are two advocacy organizations that have alleged that corporations are making huge profits by intentionally keeping supply low and prices high.

In a March 7 post, Farm Action said: “While avian flu has been cited as the primary driver of skyrocketing egg prices, its actual impact on production has been minimal. Instead, dominant egg producers—particularly Cal-Maine Foods—have leveraged the crisis to raise prices, amass record profits, and consolidate market power. The slow recovery in flock size, despite historically high prices, further suggests coordinated efforts to restrict supply and sustain inflated prices.”

The Wall Street Journal and others reported in early March that the Department of Justice opened an investigation to determine if egg prices were being manipulated by large producers.

But Jeremy Horpedahl, an associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, said that there is a much simpler explanation for why prices have remained high: supply and demand.

“[Y]ou don’t need shadowy conspiracies of egg producers to understand the dynamics of egg-flation in the United States,” he wrote in a March 14 commentary piece for the Cato Institute. “Those same theories were trotted out in 2022–23 during the last big increase in egg prices, with many on the political left blaming a conspiracy of egg producers and corporate greed for high egg prices. That argument was wrong then, as we know, because egg prices quickly fell from almost $5 per dozen in January 2023 down to $2 per dozen in summer 2023. This change wasn’t because egg producers suddenly got less greedy: It’s because the supply shock of the major avian flu outbreaks ended.”

Horpedahl continued, “All you need to explain the price fluctuations of eggs is good old supply and demand. Avian flu is the biggest challenge recently, with around 68 million egg-laying chickens being affected in the past year, with 44 million of those in just the prior three months (December 2024 to February 2025). The USDA also tells us that there are 378.5 million egg-laying chickens in the US, so over 11 percent of the total supply has been reduced in a very short time.”

And, he said, “because so many consumers are willing to keep buying eggs as the price rises, the price has to rise a lot in response to an 11 percent reduction in supply and still have the market clear—which happens when enough buyers have decided they don’t need the good anymore.”

What is the Trump administration doing to address high prices?

On Feb. 26, the USDA announced a $1 billion, “five-pronged strategy” focusing on biosecurity to minimize outbreaks, relief for farmers, vaccine research and regulation reductions.

The department said that up to $500 million would be used to expand wildlife security measures, including free biosecurity audits to egg-producing facilities to protect flocks from virus transmission from wild birds. The plan also calls for up to $400 million to be used to help farmers speed up the chicken repopulation process, and as much as $100 million could go to exploring potential vaccines and therapeutics that may protect chickens from future outbreaks.

In addition, the USDA said that it would explore temporarily importing egg products to increase the domestic supply. The department already has reached import agreements with Turkey and South Korea.

Is the Trump administration responsible for lower wholesale prices?

A White House post on March 21 mentioned several “resounding wins” that were attributed to Trump’s “economic agenda.” The first item highlighted on the list: “Wholesale egg prices dropped for the third straight week — down more than 50% since President Trump took office.”

Before that, on March 12, the president said from the Oval Office, “We have a great secretary of agriculture, and we did a lot of things that got the cost of eggs down very substantially.”

But it’s not clear that the decrease can be credited to the administration’s policies.

The USDA said in its March 14 report that wholesale prices had gone down because “no significant outbreaks” of the bird flu were reported in March, “rapidly improving” the supply situation. The report also said that high retail prices had weakened consumer demand for eggs, which also helped with store inventories.

And when the USDA’s plan was announced last month, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said that the administration’s strategy was not an immediate fix.

“This five-point strategy won’t erase the problem overnight, but we’re confident that it will restore stability to the egg market over the next three to six months,” she wrote in a Feb. 26 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal.

Furthermore, the Des Moines Register reported that, in a March 20 call with reporters, Rollins acknowledged that prices for consumers could remain high for some time.

“While calling lower wholesale prices a move ‘in the right direction,’ Rollins said grocery store prices could, in fact, continue climbing, given increased demand ahead of the upcoming Easter holiday,” the newspaper said about her remarks. “In addition, she noted that the spring migration of wild birds is imminent, bringing the threat of increased bird flu outbreaks, the main reason for the egg-price runup.”

“While [wholesale] prices are exponentially down, and we’re really, really encouraged by that, there’s always a possibility that prices could tick back up,” Rollins said, according to the Register.

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Legal experts say there is nothing to President Donald Trump’s claims that several of former President Joe Biden’s pardons are “VOID” because they were signed via autopen.

White House lawyers during the George W. Bush administration said the use of an autopen is perfectly legal, and constitutional scholars say that nothing in the Constitution even requires pardons to be signed anyway. And, they note, pardons cannot simply be overturned by a subsequent president.

Trump is correct that pardons would be invalid if, in fact, as he has claimed, any pardons were signed by a staffer without Biden’s knowledge or consent. But Trump has offered no evidence of that.

Trump has repeatedly invoked the autopen issue in the last several days. As NPR explains, autopen is “a generic name for a machine that duplicates signatures using real ink, making it easy for public figures to autograph everything from correspondence to merchandise in bulk. They are printer-sized machines with an arm that can hold a standard pen or pencil, and use it to replicate the programmed signature on a piece of paper below.” Trump acknowledged that he himself uses an autopen, but “only for very unimportant papers.”

In a post to Truth Social on March 17, Trump claimed that some pardons issued by Biden were “hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.” He specifically put members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol on notice that “they are subject to investigation at the highest level.”

Biden’s Late-Term Pardons

On Jan. 19, a day before he left office, Biden issued a series of preemptive pardons for members of Congress who served on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, staff of the committee and law enforcement officials who provided testimony to the committee. (Preemptive pardons are extended to people who have not been formally charged with a crime and are meant to shield them from potential prosecution.) That day, Biden also preemptively pardoned Gen. Mark Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci and several of Biden’s family members.

Biden has used an autopen in the past, albeit rarely, according to a 2024 CNN story that said staffers flew legislation to South Korea and St. Croix to ensure Biden could personally sign the bills. We could not independently confirm whether the pardons in question were signed via autopen.

Trump has said that members of the Jan. 6 committee — including Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chaired the committee, and then-Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, Republicans on the committee — illegally “destroyed evidence and deleted everything” and “they should be punished.” (As we have written, claims that the committee destroyed “all the evidence” are wrong.)

But legal scholars say there are several problems with Trump’s claim that using an autopen would nullify these pardons. For starters, they say, presidents don’t need to sign pardons for them to be official.

Article 2, Section 2, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution states that the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.” It makes no mention of needing a signature to issue pardons, which stands in contrast to the Constitution’s requirement that a president sign a bill in order to make it a law.

“Nothing in the Constitution requires the president to sign pardons by hand,” Jeffrey Crouch, a professor at American University and author of the book “The Presidential Pardon Power,” told us via email.

A 2024 ruling in a case before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. On the question of whether a signature is required for a president to exercise clemency, the court said, “The answer is undoubtedly no. The plain language of the Constitution imposes no such limit, broadly providing that the President ‘shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.’ … The constitutional text is thus silent as to any particular form the President’s clemency act must take to be effective.”

Moreover, Crouch said, “The practice of using an autopen to sign presidential pardons seems perfectly legitimate.”

Indeed, other presidents have used an autopen. Former President Barack Obama was believed to be the first to use it to sign legislation in 2011 when, while in France, he used an autopen to extend the Patriot Act. Then-Rep. Tom Graves, a Republican, wrote Obama a letter asking him to confirm that the bill was “presented” to him “prior to the autopen signing.” We couldn’t find that the White House responded.

A White House Legal Opinion

Kermit Roosevelt, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, told us that the White House Office of Legal Counsel “has opined, based on the original understanding of ‘sign,’ that the president can delegate the act of signing. So autopens are fine.”

In 2005, the White House Office of Legal Counsel, at the request of then-President George W. Bush, looked into the issue. After a review of the Constitution and other legal opinions, it concluded “that the President need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature to a bill he approves and decides to sign in order for the bill to become law. Rather, the President may sign a bill within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to such a bill, for example by autopen.”

“We emphasize that we are not suggesting that the President may delegate the decision to approve and sign a bill, only that, having made this decision, he may direct a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to the bill,” Howard C. Nielson Jr., deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, wrote in the legal opinion.

And that gets to the second issue Trump raised: whether Biden was aware of or had instructed a subordinate to approve the pardons.

In a press conference on March 17, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The president was begging the question that I think a lot of journalists in this room should be asking about whether or not the former president of the United States who I think we can all finally agree was cognitively impaired. … But the president was raising the point that did the president [Biden] even know about these pardons? Was his legal signature used without his consent or knowledge? … So I think it’s a question that everybody in this room should be looking into because certainly that would propose perhaps criminal or illegal behavior if staff members were signing the president of the United States’ autograph without his consent.”

In interviews after his Truth Social post, Trump argued that Biden was “grossly incompetent” and that pardons he signed in his final days in office were “null and void because I’m sure Biden didn’t have any idea that it was taking place.” He acknowledged that ultimately, whether the pardons are illegitimate is “not my decision. That’ll be up to court.”

However, neither Trump nor Leavitt has offered any evidence that Biden did not know about or approve the pardons.

“The president can’t delegate the decision of whether to sign, or whether to grant a pardon,” Roosevelt said. “A pardon granted without the president’s knowledge is invalid. But there’s no reason to think that’s what happened here—Biden spoke publicly about the pardons.”

Biden’s Public Comments

While we could not find that Biden spoke publicly about the Jan. 19 pardons after they were issued, he did share publicly, in the days preceding the pardons, that he was considering them.

In an interview on Jan. 5, for example, USA Today’s Susan Page asked Biden, “Some of your supporters have encouraged you to issue preemptive pardons to people like Liz Cheney and Anthony Fauci, who Trump has threatened to target. Will you do that?”

“Well, a little bit of it depends on who he puts in what positions,” Biden said. He said that in a post-election conversation with Trump, “I tried to make it clear that there was no need, and it was counterintuitive for his interest to go back and try to settle scores.” But Biden said Trump did not commit to that.

And during remarks on Jan. 10, a reporter asked what pardons Biden was considering in his last 10 days in office.

“One is that it depends on some of the language and expectations that Trump broadcasts in the last couple of days here as to what he’s going to do,” Biden said. “The idea that he would punish people for not adhering to what he thinks should be policy as related to his well-being is outrageous, but there is still consideration of some folks, but no decision.”

Those comments are consistent with a Biden statement released by the White House on Jan. 20 explaining some of his 11th-hour pardons.

“Our nation relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day. They are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Biden stated. “Yet alarmingly, public servants have been subjected to ongoing threats and intimidation for faithfully discharging their duties.

“In certain cases, some have even been threatened with criminal prosecutions, including General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, and the members and staff of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol,” Biden said. “These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions.”

Members of the Jan. 6 committee acted with “integrity and a commitment to discovering the truth,” Biden said. “Rather than accept accountability, those who perpetrated the January 6th attack have taken every opportunity to undermine and intimidate those who participated in the Select Committee in an attempt to rewrite history, erase the stain of January 6th for partisan gain, and seek revenge, including by threatening criminal prosecutions.”

“Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances,” Biden stated, explaining that this was his reason for issuing the preemptive pardons. “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

Trump can’t simply revoke pardons issued by Biden, experts told us.

“A completed pardon is not able to be revoked,” Crouch said. “If it was, then any sitting president could try to revoke pardons granted by their predecessors. A president who can undo the clemency decisions of their predecessors would weaken the clemency power for every president.”

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The return of astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore after an extended stay on the International Space Station has been the subject of competing claims about the actions of the Trump and Biden administrations in bringing them home.

White House adviser Elon Musk, whose SpaceX company aided the astronauts’ return, said he had offered last year to bring the two astronauts home much sooner but the Biden administration declined for “political reasons.” NASA and space experts, including the two astronauts themselves, dispute that the decision was based on politics.

In a press conference on March 4, NASA officials said safety, budget concerns about a separate mission to retrieve the astronauts and a desire to keep a crew on the space station were the reasons driving the decision to have Williams and Wilmore return with a SpaceX crew, which is expected to land on Earth today.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly claimed that he expedited the return of the astronauts after making a personal appeal to Musk. The mission to return the two astronauts has been in the works since late last summer, and the timeline for their return is roughly in line with that plan.

We’ll lay out what we know about the mission and the role the Biden administration, Musk and Trump may have played in it.

A Delayed Return

Williams and Wilmore left Earth on June 5, 2024, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on a mission that was supposed to last eight days. The purpose of the mission was to evaluate if the spacecraft could be used for regular astronaut rotation missions. However, shortly after liftoff, the Starliner experienced multiple helium leaks, which caused the return mission to be halted until further testing could be conducted.

Although the helium leaks stabilized after arrival, problems with the thrusters convinced NASA to send the Starliner aircraft back to Earth empty. That’s when Musk came into the picture, as NASA and SpaceX officials huddled last summer to determine a plan to return the astronauts.

In August 2024, NASA announced that it would be using SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to bring back the astronauts in February 2025. In September, the mission launched Crew-9 with NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who successfully reached the International Space Station on Sept. 29. The capsule was launched with two empty seats for the crew, including Williams and Wilmore, to return in February, after being replaced on the space station by astronauts from Crew-10. NASA officials said late February was the earliest the crew could return on SpaceX without interrupting other scheduled missions.

In recent months, Musk and Trump have claimed the Biden administration decided to leave the astronauts on the space station until after the November election to avoid bad publicity.

Trump and Musk Comments

During a Fox News interview with host Sean Hannity on Feb. 18, Trump said he gave Musk the “go-ahead” to accelerate a mission to retrieve the astronauts, claiming that they had been abandoned on purpose by former President Joe Biden to avoid political backlash. Trump said, “They didn’t have the go-ahead with Biden. He was going to leave them in space. I think he was going to leave them in space. … He didn’t want the publicity. Can you believe it?”

It was not the first time Trump had made such an accusation. On Jan. 28, Trump took to Truth Social to post, “I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration.”

During the Hannity interview, Musk claimed that at Trump’s request “we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed, kind of, to a ridiculous degree,” saying that “they were left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”

In response to Musk’s claims, several astronauts took to X to refute the idea that the astronauts were purposefully abandoned. Andreas Mogensen, a former SpaceX astronaut from Denmark, posted: “What a lie. And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.” In response to Mogensen, Elon replied: “You are fully retarded. SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”

Mogensen responded by stating, “Elon, I have long admired you and what you have accomplished, especially at SpaceX and Tesla. You know as well as I do, that Butch and Suni are returning with Crew-9, as has been the plan since last September. Even now, you are not sending up a rescue ship to bring them home. They are returning on the Dragon capsule that has been on ISS since last September.”

The White House has not responded to our inquiry about Trump’s and Musk’s claims.

Williams and Wilmore Weigh In

In an interview on CNN with Williams and Wilmore on Feb. 13, host Anderson Cooper asked if they felt abandoned by the Biden administration.

“We don’t feel abandoned. We don’t feel stuck. We don’t feel stranded,” Wilmore said from the space station, which orbits the Earth and acts as a science laboratory. “I understand why others may think that. We come prepared. We come committed. That is what your human space flight program is. It prepares for any and all contingencies that we can conceive of, and we prepare for those. So if you’ll help us change the rhetoric, help us change the narrative, let’s change it to prepared and committed like what you’ve been hearing. That’s what we prefer.”

Williams reiterated that “Butch and I knew this was a test flight” and “that we would probably find some things [wrong with Starliner] and we found some stuff, and so that was not a surprise.”

As for the prospect of sending up a SpaceX flight just to bring them back earlier, Wilmore said, “We would never expect to come back just special for us, or anyone, unless it was a medical issue or something really out of the circumstances along those lines.”

In a news conference from the space station on March 4 with Williams, Wilmore and NASA’s Nick Hague — one of the two astronauts who arrived via a SpaceX capsule in September — Wilmore said he had no reason to doubt Musk’s claims about an offer to bring them home earlier, though Wilmore said he was not privy to such an offer.

“We have no information on that though, whatsoever,” Wilmore said. “That’s information that we simply don’t have. So I believe him, I don’t know all those details, and I don’t think any of us really can give you the answer that maybe that you would be hoping for.”

Asked about the claims of political motivations for their extended stay, Wilmore said that Musk and Trump may have information “that we are not privy to.”

But, he said, “from my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all. From our standpoint, I think that they would agree, we came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short.”

Hague added that “when I launched in in late September, our planned return date was the end of February, and given the amount of training that’s required to get a crew ready and the complexities associated with getting a spacecraft ready to launch and operate in space, targeting a March return is pretty much on target.”

NASA’s Explanation

Several leaders at NASA said they were unaware of Musk’s offer to bring the astronauts home sooner.

Bill Nelson, who served as NASA administrator last summer when the decisions about what to do about Williams and Wilmore were being made, told the Washington Post that the option of an earlier return “certainly did not come to my attention.” Nelson said, “There was no discussion of that whatsoever. Maybe he [Musk] sent a message to some lower-level person.”

In the March 4 NASA news conference, NASA officials were asked repeatedly about Musk’s claim that he offered to bring Williams and Wilmore home earlier, and what went into the decision officials ultimately made.

Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said, “I think there may have been some conversations that I wasn’t part of.” But he said the option to fly a separate mission to the space station to retrieve the astronauts was “ruled out pretty quickly.”

“When it comes to adding on missions or bringing a capsule home early, those were always options, but we ruled them out pretty quickly, just based on how much money we’ve got in our budget and the importance of keeping crews on the International Space Station,” Bowersox said. “They’re an important part of maintaining the station, so we like to keep our crews up there.”

Steve Stich, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said after the determination was made that Williams and Wilmore should not return on the Boeing Starliner, NASA officials met with SpaceX officials and considered “a wide range of options” and ultimately decided to attach the astronauts to the previously scheduled Crew-9 mission.

“When we looked at the situation at the time, we had a Crew-9 launch in front of us, it made sense to take the opportunity to bring Crew-9 up with just two seats and have Butch and Suni fill in and do the rest of the long duration mission,” said Dana Weigel, manager of NASA’s International Space Station Program.

“We thought the plan that we came up with made a lot of sense, and that, especially for Butch and Suni we know they’re experienced astronauts, they’re great in space,” Bowersox said. “We knew they’d be great additions to the crew and we knew that for most astronauts, spending extra time on orbit’s really a gift. And we thought they’d probably enjoy their time there. So we thought it was a good way to go … for a lot of reasons.”

Also at the NASA press conference was Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of building flight reliability at SpaceX, but he declined to provide specifics about Musk’s offer to bring the astronauts home earlier.

Gerstenmaier said SpaceX was “always ready to support NASA in any way we can.” He said NASA and SpaceX “collectively” came up with “the idea of just flying two crew up on Crew-9, having the seats available for Suni and Butch to come home, and that’s what NASA wanted, and that fit their plans. That allowed them to use Suni and Butch in a very productive manner, make them part of the crew on board station and make really a seamless integration and keep the science going on station and keep pushing research.”

Trump’s Role in the Mission

NASA officials said Trump’s involvement did not expedite the mission that would bring the astronauts home.

Again, Williams and Wilmore, along with members of Crew-9, were waiting to hand off to Crew-10 before leaving the space station for home. But Crew-10’s mission was originally delayed in December 2024 to “give the teams time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission,” according to Reuters. In a statement released in December, NASA wrote, “NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 now is targeting no earlier than late March 2025 to launch four crew members to the International Space Station.” (Originally, Crew-10 was supposed to launch in late February.)

But in February the agency announced that “NASA and SpaceX are accelerating the target launch and return dates for the upcoming crew rotation missions to and from the International Space Station.”

The agency, in collaboration with SpaceX, was able to move up the launch by adjusting the original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft and instead fly a previously tested Dragon spacecraft called Endurance. Endurance has flown four missions to the station, including the Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights. NASA stated the decision was made by “mission management” and joint teams were working to complete assessments on the previously flown craft to ensure it “meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements.”

NASA said the change also “will allow SpaceX, which owns and operates the Dragon fleet, to complete the new spacecraft’s interior build and perform final integration activities, while simultaneously launching Crew-10 and returning Crew-9 sooner.”

Asked if Trump’s call on Musk to expedite the mission played a factor, Stich, the program manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said that when the schedule for upcoming space missions was laid out, based on when a capsule was ready and a launch pad freed up, “we ended up with March the 12th. And so it really was driven by a lot of other factors. And we were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the president and Mr. Musk.”

Bowersox said Trump’s comments “added energy to the conversation” but didn’t affect the decisions NASA made.

“I can verify that Steve had been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a good month before there was any discussion outside of NASA,” Bowersox said. “But the president’s interest sure added energy to the conversation, and it’s great to have a president who’s interested in what we’re doing.”

Crew-10 reached the space station on March 16, and Williams and Wilmore — along with Hague and Gorbunov — have since left the space station aboard the SpaceX Dragon capsule. They are expected to land off the coast of Florida on March 18.

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Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino.

In arguing for more tariffs on goods imported to the United States, President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that the U.S. was its “richest” or “wealthiest” during the late 1800s and early 1900s because of tariffs. In multiple ways, his claim is wrong or misleading.

In terms of the overall U.S. economy, real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product per capita is many times higher today than it was during the so-called Gilded Age, which was a post-Civil War period of economic prosperity – largely for the wealthy – amid the nation’s industrial expansion.

In addition, several economists have said that Trump and others have given too much credit to tariffs for the economic growth that did occur in America more than 100 years ago. For example, in a 2000 paper, Douglas Irwin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, wrote: “That tariffs coincided with rapid growth in the late nineteenth century does not imply a causal relationship.” Irwin and other economists and historians have said that other factors, such as immigration and increased labor productivity, contributed more to the growth in that era.

But the way Trump tells it, the U.S. was at its best economically many, many years ago, because tariffs, otherwise known as customs duties, were a significant source of federal revenue.

“Our country is going to become rich again, very rich,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22, when talking about new tariffs that he announced this year on imports from China and imports of steel and aluminum from all foreign countries.

He continued, “The word tariff is my favorite word in the dictionary. You know, we were richest, the richest, relatively, from, think of this, from 1870 to 1913. That was our richest because we collected tariffs from foreign countries that came in and took our jobs and took our money, took our everything, but they charged tariffs.”

Trump has even made the dubious suggestion that tariffs could be used to replace the federal income tax, which became law in 1913, with the ratification of the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Federal income taxes account for about half of federal revenue each year.

“But you could wipe out your income tax. You could maybe not even have an income tax system when this thing works out,” Trump said while discussing tariffs at a dinner with Republican governors on Feb. 20.

“Because in the old days that’s what happened. Our country was the richest ever from 1870 to 1913. That’s when we were actually the richest and we were a full tariff country.”

Tariff revenue accounted for no more than about 60% of federal receipts during that period, according to a 2024 analysis by the White House Council of Economic Advisers. And more importantly, economists have said that it’s highly unlikely that the U.S. could raise enough money from tariffs on imported goods to match current income tax revenues.

In fiscal year 2024, just 1.7% of the more than $4.9 trillion in federal receipts came from customs duties on imports.

The ‘Richest’ Claim

We don’t know exactly how Trump defines the terms “richest” or “wealthiest.” We contacted the White House press office, but have not received a response.

When the New York Times wrote about Trump’s tariff remarks at this year’s CPAC, the newspaper said, “A White House spokeswoman noted [to the Times] that wages and the economy grew rapidly during the Gilded Age, but did not provide evidence of unparalleled prosperity in that era.”

In addition, based on real GDP per capita, Trump’s claim is false – because it is much higher now than it was more than a century ago.

As of 2022, it was $58,487 – nearly six times higher than $10,108 in 1913 and more than 12 times higher than $4,803 in 1870. That’s according to inflation-adjusted data from the Oxford University-based project Our World in Data, which calculated historical real GDP per capita based on international prices in 2011.

Trump has said that, because of tariffs, the U.S. had “so much money” at that time that “we didn’t know what to do.” In that context, he may have been alluding to the fact that in many of the years between 1870 and 1913, the federal government had budget surpluses, which occur when federal receipts exceed outlays.

The president has also falsely claimed that the U.S. had “no debt” during that period, and he has often mentioned a legitimate debate that occurred in 1888 over what to do about excess federal revenue due to high tariffs. Democrats wanted to cut tariff rates to lower revenue while Republicans wanted to raise tariffs more to discourage imports and reduce revenue.

But the U.S. also has had surpluses in years when tariffs were a significantly smaller share of federal revenues — such as in the 1920s, which was after the federal income tax was enacted in 1913 and became the primary source of funding for the government by far.

“This is just a function of government revenue growing faster than government spending,” Jeremy Horpedahl, associate professor of economics at the University of Central Arkansas, wrote about the surpluses in a February blog post about Trump’s “richest” claims. “And the growth of revenue during the 1870s and 1880s was largely driven by a rise in internal revenue — specifically, excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco (these taxes largely didn’t exist before the Civil War).”

Most recently, the U.S. had four consecutive budget surpluses in fiscal years 1998 to 2001. At that time, tariffs made up about 1% of annual federal receipts.

‘Other, Bigger’ Economic Factors

In general, some economists have said that supporters of tariffs, including Trump, have left the inaccurate impression that tariffs alone were the reason for the wider economic growth that occurred after the Civil War.

For example, in 2018, during Trump’s first term in office, Dartmouth’s Irwin did a podcast interview with American Enterprise Institute senior fellow James Pethokoukis, in which Irwin said said it was a “simplistic argument” to say that tariffs were responsible for rapid growth in the late 1800s:

Irwin, Aug. 31, 2018: But when you look at that era actually in the late 19th century the U.S. was very open. We were open for immigration and we indeed had massive immigration. We were open to capital from the rest of the world and were able to borrow and purchase a lot of technology. So, it’s not as though we were an isolationist country with big barriers. Yes, we did have fairly stiff tariffs on imported manufactured goods, but otherwise we were very open to what was going on in the world economy.

In fact immigration, as I point out in the book [“Clashing Over Commerce: A History of US Trade Policy“], was actually a key instigator in terms of the development of many manufacturing industries in the United States. …

In addition, it’s become very hard actually to attribute U.S. economic growth in the late 19th century to those higher tariffs. A lot of the key improvements in technology and a lot of the growth was in the service sector: telecommunications, railroads, and things of that sort. Manufacturing really didn’t grow much as a share of GDP in the late 19th century. A lot of that grew actually in the pre-Civil War period when tariffs were actually much lower — only in the range of 20% or so.

So, there is the simplistic argument that one encounters a lot — that tariffs allowed us to grow rapidly in the late 19th century — but the more you look into it you see it’s a really tough case to make. A lot of other factors were involved and the tariffs were probably third or fourth order. And it’s not even clear they had a positive impact as opposed to a negative impact.

In his 2000 paper, Irwin said he found “that growth then was driven largely by labor force expansion and capital accumulation, while productivity growth was undistinguished when put in a comparative perspective.” He ultimately concluded that tariffs were “probably not a key factor.”

Likewise, in a 2024 commentary piece, in which he cited work by Irwin and other economists, Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics and trade policy studies at the Cato Institute, wrote: “In sum, U.S. tariffs imposed after the Civil War likely helped some American manufacturers and harmed others, but they were generally neither a major driver of nor drag on the sector’s and economy’s growth, which was instead driven by other, bigger factors, such as increasing productivity and an expanding labor force.”

Lincicome said that “no one should expect tariffs – whether back then or today – to drive the U.S. economy given all the other, bigger factors at play and the fact that trade just is a relatively small share of economic output.”

Tariffs vs. Income Taxes

Economists have been just as critical of Trump’s suggestion that the revenue from higher tariffs could be a substitute for federal income tax collections.

In October, after Trump had suggested on a number of occasions that tariffs could replace the federal income tax, Erica York, vice president of federal tax policy for the Tax Foundation, wrote a column explaining why the math wouldn’t work.

“Donald Trump has floated a proposal to replace the U.S. income tax system with a new system of tariffs, moving the United States back to the tax mix of the late 19th century. The plan, simply put, is a mathematical impossibility,” she wrote.

York noted that, in fiscal year 2023, the government collected $2.2 trillion from the individual income tax and only about $80 billion from tariffs. To make up the difference, Trump would have to impose an across-the-board tariff of 70% on all imported goods, she said.

What Trump suggested “is unworkable because of the sharp difference in the size of the respective tax bases,” York wrote, noting that projected adjusted gross income was $15.6 trillion and goods imports were $3.1 trillion in fiscal 2023.

Substantially higher tariffs would also likely lead to a reduction in imports. “Trump’s calculation ignores the precipitous drop in imports a tax increase of this magnitude would cause,” she said.

Kimberly Clausing and Maurice Obstfeld, both senior fellows at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, made similar points in a June post that asked, “Can tariffs replace the income tax?”

“Simply put, no,” was their answer. “It is literally impossible for tariffs to fully replace income taxes. Tariff rates would have to be implausibly high on such a small base of imports to replace the income tax, and as tax rates rose, the base itself would shrink as imports fall, making Trump’s $2 trillion goal unattainable.”

Clausing and Obstfeld said that scrapping the income tax in favor of higher tariffs would cause job losses, higher inflation, larger federal deficits and a recession.

“It would also shift the tax burden away from the well off, substantially increasing the tax burden on the poor and middle class,” they argued.

The income tax is considered to be progressive because higher-income households have a higher tax burden. On the other hand, tariffs are considered to be regressive taxes because they affect lower-income households more than others as a percentage of income. U.S. importers pay the tariff, but the costs are usually passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

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Here’s our fact-check of President Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress, in video form.

The video, produced by FactCheck.org Social Media Manager Josh Diehl, is based on our article on the president’s March 4 speech.

Our staff found that Trump made exaggerated, misleading or unsupported claims about finding fraud in government spending, including in Social Security; U.S. versus European aid to Ukraine; the state of the economy when he took office; the closure of power plants; fentanyl coming across the border with Canada; the Panama Canal — and more. We had written about many of these claims before.

For more details, see our full article: “FactChecking Trump’s Address to Congress.”

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org does not accept advertising. We rely on grants and individual donations from people like you. Please consider a donation. Credit card donations may be made through our “Donate” page. If you prefer to give by check, send to: FactCheck.org, Annenberg Public Policy Center, P.O. Box 58100, Philadelphia, PA 19102. 

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