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Opinion by Rex Huppke, USA TODAY

It seems clear, based on my years of listening to conservatives holler about liberty, that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a nanny-state liberal who wants to tell Americans what they can and can’t eat.

In a recent statement, Kennedy said: “I urge every governor to champion legislation that bans ultra-processed foods and dyes in public schools, and submit a waiver to the USDA to remove soda from SNAP.”

Do you want government officials to control the ultra-processed and dye-delicious foods I want my kids to eat?  Sounds like the “K” in “RFK Jr.” stands for “Karl Marx.”

RFK Jr. goes full nanny state on America's school-lunch programs
A recent Kennedy opinion column published right here at USA TODAY, co-written with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, discussed childhood obesity and concluded this: “As the leaders put in charge of overseeing our nation’s food supply and human services, we have a duty to fix this.”

To make sure I was responding properly to what I assume is communism, I looked back on how my conservative friends responded to health and food-safety initiatives that came up while Barack Obama was president.
A simple math error has resulted in tariffs four times higher than they should be. Conservative economists claim the White House used the wrong elasticity value in their controversial formula.
Story by Katie Hawkinson

Companies across the country are adding a surcharge to customers’ bills in the wake of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

On April 2, Trump announced blanket tariffs of at least 10 percent on nearly every country, in what he called “Liberation Day” for the U.S. Then, on Wednesday he paused these tariffs for 90 days, citing Americans becoming “yippy” and “afraid.”

He only excluded China from the pause and is now engaged in a trade war with Xi Jinping as the U.S. levies 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods while Beijing has put a 125 percent retaliatory tariff in place.

Now, U.S. business owners say they’re passing along higher prices to customers as Trump’s trade war with China continues and they brace for the end of the 90-day pause.

Sexual wellness brand Dame has added a $5 “Trump tariff surcharge” to all purchases automatically, CBS News reports.

"Our whole industry is in China, so we've already seen the impact," Dame CEO Alexandra Fine told CBS.

"The intention of adding the Trump tariff surcharge as a line item at checkout was to remind people that this is an extra tax on us. I wanted people to understand why it's more expensive — that it's because of political decisions that were made," she added.
Story by Dave Michaels, Richard Vanderford, James Fanelli

Gordon Coburn and Steven Schwartz were on the verge of going to trial on charges of scheming to pay bribes in India when President Trump issued an executive order that put enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on hold.

It was a bolt of good luck for the former executives for Cognizant Technology Solutions, who had denied wrongdoing. The case had been dragging on for six years. Within two months, a new top prosecutor appointed by Trump dropped it.

“There was a tremendous sense of relief,” said Lawrence Lustberg, a lawyer for Schwartz.

The Trump administration is retreating from some types of white-collar law enforcement, including cases involving foreign bribery, public corruption, money laundering and crypto markets. In some cases, the administration is effectively redefining what business conduct constitutes a crime.

Trump’s executive order in February said bribery prosecutions hurt the ability of American companies to compete overseas, punishing them for practices that are routine in some parts of the world. That pronouncement could upend dozens of cases and investigations.

At the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered prosecutors to focus their anti-money-laundering and sanctions-evasion attention on drug cartels and international crime organizations.

A few themes are emerging: Prosecuting executives for wrongdoing that doesn’t have obvious victims is out. The Justice Department is open to arguments that a defendant has been targeted for political reasons, or that some prosecutions undermine economic competitiveness and national-security interests. And political connections within Trump’s world seem to matter.
Story by Janna Brancolini

President Donald Trump’s policies could cost the U.S. economy $90 billion this year in lost tourism and export revenue, according to analysts at Goldman Sachs. Many foreign visitors are avoiding the U.S. over concerns about increased hostility at the border, including reports about European tourists being detained for weeks in U.S. immigration centers.
Story by Mary Papenfuss

Angry voters pelted Iowa’s Republican Senator Chuck Grassley Tuesday with complaints and questions about the Trump administration’s apparent defiance of an order from the Supreme Court.

“If I get a court order to pay $1,200, can I just say no? Because he [Trump] just got an order from the Supreme Court and he just said NO!” said a very perturbed gentleman in the crowd of about 100 at a packed town hall meeting in Fort Madison, Iowa.

He was referring to the Supreme Court order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return to the U.S. of Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to a notorious El Salvador prison in error.

Now the Trump administration claims it can’t get him back, and apparently hasn’t even tried, despite the order, and even though it’s paying El Salvador $6 million to imprison Abrego Garcia and others shipped out of the U.S.

“Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?” another man shouted to applause from the crowd at the Grassley town hall.

“The president doesn’t care,” still another said. “He’s got an order from the Supreme Court and he’s just said: ‘No, screw it!’”

“Why won’t you do your job, Senator?” one voter shouted.

“We would like to know what you, as the people, the Congress, who are supposed to rein in this dictator, what are you going to do about it?” one man asked Grassley. “These people have been sentenced to life in prison in a foreign country with no due process.”
Federal Judge James Boasberg said he’d found probable cause to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for showing “a willful disregard” toward his March 15 orders requiring it return to the U.S. the hundreds of Venezuelan migrants it sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador using an 18th-century wartime law. Marc Elias explains what happens now.
Story by Giulia Carbonaro

The deepening of President Donald Trump's trade war with China could push the country—the second-largest holder of U.S. debt—to dump its Treasury holdings, sending mortgage rates skyrocketing for millions of Americans.

While some experts believe that such an escalation is unlikely to happen, China's President Xi Jinping has promised to "fight" the Trump administration's escalation of tariffs "to the end"—and there is a chance he might do so through a very dangerous weapon the country has in its arsenal: more than $760 billion in holdings in U.S. Treasury securities.

Why It Matters
While backing away from other levies on individual countries beyond the 10 percent baseline tariff on all imports to the United States announced earlier this month, Trump has imposed 145 percent tariffs on Chinese goods. China has retaliated with its own 125 percent tariffs on imported American goods.

As tensions grow between the two nations over a budding trade war that has no apparent easy way out, some experts have raised concerns that Beijing may be better equipped to withstand the negative economic shocks caused by the tariffs—and may even be willing to use its Treasury holdings to strike back at Washington and weaken its opponent.
Opinion by John Chrastka, Marilyn Jackson, and Celina Stewart

Imagine walking into your local library to check out a book and finding the shelves stripped bare. Imagine taking your child to a museum, only to find all programs have been cancelled and the doors are locked. Imagine living in a rural community where there is no high school and the only accessible education is provided by a local museum that is now closed, or your only access to the internet is a library that's now shuttered by political decree. Imagine trying to teach a classroom about civil rights, women's contributions to science, or the Holocaust—only to be told those stories are "divisive" and banned.

This is no longer hypothetical. It's the path we're on right now.

Recent executive orders issued by the Trump administration—one misleadingly titled "Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" and another that guts the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) among other federal agencies—are not just orders on paper.

They are acts of erasure—coordinated, sneaky attempts to cherry-pick our shared stories and decide who matters, censor our classrooms, and strip our communities of the places we go to learn, to connect, and to remember. They are a direct attack on our democracy and our future. They are an insult to the American people who love their museums and libraries, and should decide for themselves what they want to learn.
Story by Stephanie Gauthier

According to a complaint filed by the organization Whistleblower Aid, Daniel Berulis, a former computer specialist at the US government agency National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), recently raised the alarm about a potential serious security breach involving the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk and his team.

EXCLUSIVE: A whistleblower tells Congress and NPR that DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data and hid its tracks. "None of that … information should ever leave the agency," said a former NLRB official.

— NPR (@npr.org) 2025-04-15T10:10:22.927Z

Berulis claims that he observed disturbing things in March 2025, when members of the DOGE team obtained extended access to the NLRB’s internal systems, allowing them to view, copy, and modify sensitive data.

According to the whistleblower, the data in question included files related to ongoing union cases, confidential testimonies, personal information about employees, and sensitive information about business owners.

According to the computer specialist, he immediately observed unusual activity on the NLRB’s computer network, including a significant increase in outgoing data volume, estimated by him to be around 10 gigabytes.
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