Week In Review

IN THE NEWS:

• President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order reducing the number of vaccines recommended for all children and directing federal agencies to implement the new recommendations. The order recommends 11 vaccines for all children and moves several others—including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, influenza, and COVID-19 vaccines—into categories based on individual risk or shared decision-making between families and health care providers. The order also calls for administering the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine as three separate shots once such products become available and directs federal health officials to reassess the timing and sequencing of childhood vaccines. This directive comes as the United States experiences its highest number of measles cases in decades.
• President Trump signed two executive orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship. The orders come after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution extends citizenship to children born in the United States to parents “for whom no extraterritorial fiction applies.” Citing Barbara, the first order states that birthright citizenship does not apply to children born to parents who are members of designated foreign terrorist organizations, foreign government employees with diplomatic immunity, or parents who arranged to be present in the United States to give birth. The second executive order delegates authority to the U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security to halt what the Trump Administration calls “birth tourism,” which occurs when foreign nationals give birth on U.S. soil while temporarily present in the country.
• The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a final rule ending Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) coverage of gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender minors. The rule preserves Medicaid and CHIP coverage for mental health treatment and phases out hormone treatment coverage for patients already receiving it after a limited transition period. CMS stated that the policy is intended to protect children from treatments that the agency considers unsupported by sufficient evidence. The rule, which takes effect on October 13, will extend federal coverage restrictions beyond the 27 states that already prohibit gender-affirming care for minors and is expected to face legal challenges from advocacy organizations.
• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed a rule rescinding and replacing the existing performance standards for Head Start programs. Head Start is a preschool program that was created as an anti-poverty measure to prepare children from low-income families for school. Under the Head Start Act, the federal government is required to set performance standards for Head Start programs. HHS’s proposed changes to the performance standards would eliminate federal regulations over areas such as adult-child ratios, background check requirements for Head Start employees, and transportation practices. HHS claimed that the revisions would eliminate burdensome requirements and give authority to states and parents, but critics argued that reducing federal regulations could lessen the quality of Head Start program services.
• The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) supplemented its earlier proposed rule that would eliminate federal regulations concerning disparate-impact liability under the Fair Housing Act. The Fair Housing Act bans discrimination in the sale or rental of homes. Previous federal regulations prohibited practices that affected protected classes differently, even without proof of intentional discrimination. In January, HUD proposed a rule eliminating those federal regulations, and, on Monday, HUD supplemented that proposal by eliminating additional references to discriminatory effects in the regulations and removing requirements that recipients of federal funds take action to address past discrimination.
• The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a rule that would require manufacturers to notify FDA when introducing food substances into interstate commerce and to explain why the substances should be considered safe for human consumption. Under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, substances that are generally recognized as safe do not need FDA approval before being introduced into the market. Under the existing regulations, manufacturers may notify FDA after concluding that a substance should be recognized as safe but are not required to do so. The proposed rule would make that notification mandatory. FDA stated that the notification requirement would increase transparency about food substances and allow the agency to determine if safety conclusions are supported by scientific evidence.
• The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged investment adviser Adit Ventures Management and affiliated general partners with defrauding investors in funds that invested in pre-IPO shares of companies including SpaceX and Klarna. The SEC alleged that the defendants misused client assets, charged millions of dollars in undisclosed fees, and purchased pre-IPO shares without required consent—causing client funds to buy those same shares at higher prices. The agency also alleged that Adit Ventures Management failed to register as an investment adviser. Without admitting the allegations, the defendants agreed to permanent injunctions and to pay financial penalties in amounts to be determined by the court. Adit’s chief executive, Eric Munson, also agreed to a three-year restriction on working in the securities industry.
• The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proposed a rule loosening restrictions on three FDA-approved prescription drugs for insomnia. The DEA classifies controlled substances into five categories called “schedules” depending on their acceptable medical use and the drug’s abuse potential. The proposed rule would reclassify suvorexant, lemborexant, and daridorexant as having a lower potential for drug dependence after a December 2025 evaluation by HHS found that their actual rates of misuse were more consistent with schedule V substances, which have the lowest potential for abuse. If the rule is finalized, manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies handling these sleep medications would remain subject to the same regulatory requirements, as well as criminal and civil sanctions, for their unauthorized handling.

WHAT WE’RE READING:

• In a recent report, the U.S. Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) listed five lessons from shared decision-making agreements between federal agencies and tribes concerning federal land and water management. Federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of the Interior manage public lands that have significance for tribes. Federal agencies sometimes enter into shared decision-making agreements with tribes through which tribes help inform federal resource management decisions. The report explained that shared decision-making agreements were more likely to succeed when each party to the agreement spent time developing personal relationships and understanding the other party’s perspective, the federal agencies and the tribes harmonized their procedures for agreement implementation, and federal agencies secured sufficient funds to cover necessary costs.
• In a recent Brookings Institution essay, Brooke Tanner, a research analyst at the Center for Technology Innovation, and Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center, argued that Congress should use children’s online privacy legislation as a foundation for comprehensive national privacy protections. Tanner and Lee explained that surveillance, data collection, and targeted advertising create privacy risks for children and adults, making protections focused on minors insufficient to address the underlying harms. They cautioned that relying on age verification, which could require platforms to collect sensitive identifying information, would pose risks given that broader data collection incentives would remain intact. Tanner and Lee recommended that Congress build on children’s privacy legislation by establishing a national privacy baseline centered on data minimization and limits on the collection and use of personal information.
• In a recent report, GAO found that the web page known as the “Wall of Receipts” run by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) contains savings estimates that are incorrect or lack supporting evidence. DOGE claimed $110 billion in federal savings from terminated contracts, grants, and leases as of July 7, 2026. GAO found that DOGE did not use its stated methodology to calculate the majority of contract savings and could not verify the method DOGE used to calculate 96 percent of grant savings in its web page, which included 108 leases already slated for termination before DOGE was created. GAO recommended that DOGE prominently display known data quality issues and limitations on the Wall of Receipts.

EDITOR’S CHOICE:

• In an essay in The Regulatory Review, Liz Fisher, a professor of environmental law at the University of Oxford, and Sidney A. Shapiro, the Frank U. Fletcher Chair in Administrative Law at the Wake Forest University School of Law, argued that public storytelling in the rulemaking process is an integral feature of American democracy. Fisher and Shapiro reviewed thousands of public comments from across 35 federal rulemakings and found that personal stories submitted by ordinary individuals frequently provided agencies with perspectives that aided in crafting more robust rules. They also explained that agencies themselves acknowledged the stories’ relevance in their final rules. Fisher and Shapiro contended that evaluating public stories requires a distinct form of institutional expertise that cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence tools or cost-benefit analysis. Fisher and Shapiro concluded that considering stories in the regulatory process reflects a fundamental American commitment to democratic participation that the current dismantling of the administrative state places at serious risk.