What else could the government pay for with the $150 billion it just forked over for mass deportation?

We’re not a financial publication—so Rewire News Group Editorial Director Catesby Holmes called up a numbers guy to do the math. And, as it turns out, $150 billion could fund a lot of health care, from reopening every shuttered rural hospital and running them for 12 years to providing 40 million people with annual breast cancer screenings for a decade.

“Government budget decisions inherently involve tradeoffs,” health-care economist Graham Gardner told Holmes. “And concerned citizens should be thinking about where our money is going, and how it could potentially be used better.”

Read RNG’s latest analysis on how mass deportation funding could instead pay for some of the country’s health care here.

Anti-democratic actions

• Trump on Aug. 11 said he will take federal control of Washington, D.C.’s police department and deploy 600 National Guard troops to the nation’s capital, citing “out of control” crime, the New York Times reported. Data shows crime in D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.
• Attorney General Pam Bondi has ordered federal prosecutors to launch a grand jury investigation into claims that Obama administration officials invented intelligence on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, CNN reported on Aug. 4.
• The New York Times revealed on Aug. 6 that President Donald Trump has privately considered interceding in New York City’s mayoral race to stop Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic primary and is now running as an independent candidate, privately told business leaders that “personally, I don’t want to fight with [Trump],” according to the New York Times.
• Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said the Federal Bureau of Investigations will help find the Texas Democratic lawmakers who fled Texas to block a vote on a controversial congressional redistricting map that would heavily favor Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections, the Texas Tribune reported.

Pro-democracy wins

• New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing the federal government to prevent it from investigating and halting gender-affirming care. The lawsuit, filed with more than a dozen other states and Washington, D.C., accuses the Trump administration of attempting a “backdoor strategy” to restrict such care by skirting state laws that protect transgender patients, The 19th reported.
• The Stanford Daily, Stanford University’s student newspaper, sued Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week over alleged free speech violations, saying that deportation threats and visa revocations have caused staffers on visas to self-censor, NBC News reported.
• The Federal Emergency Management Agency said on Aug. 4 that it would not withhold grants from states and cities boycotting Israeli companies, according to the New York Times. The statement reverses a previous policy that prevented grant recipients from “limiting commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies.”

Reproductive rights

• The White House won’t require health insurance companies to cover in vitro fertilization (IVF), the Washington Post reported. This breaks with Trump’s 2024 campaign promise to mandate IVF coverage or have the government pay for the process. A single IVF cycle can cost between $15,000 and $30,000.
• A proposed Trump administration rule would stop pregnant veterans from getting abortion care in cases of rape, incest, or to protect their health at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals, the Washington Post reported. The proposal, filed on Aug. 4, seeks to revoke a Biden-era policy that expanded abortion access for veterans and their qualifying beneficiaries even in states with abortion bans.
• The Tennessee Attorney General’s office subpoenaed medical groups for their abortion records as part of a lawsuit over exceptions to the state’s abortion ban, the Guardian reported.

LGBTQ+ rights

• The Air Force said it won’t give transgender service members with 15-18 years of service the option to retire early, meaning they will lose their retirement benefits, according to the Associated Press. Trans service members will have to choose between “either taking a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be removed from the service,” the AP reported.
• U.S. delegates to the United Nations are objecting to the use of the word “gender” in U.N. documents and pushing the Trump administration’s anti-trans agenda globally, ProPublica reported.
• New Hampshire became the first state in New England to ban gender-affirming care for minors last week after Gov. Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, signed two bills into law, according to New Hampshire Public Radio.
• The Department of Homeland Security moved to prevent transgender women athletes from obtaining “extraordinary ability” visas that would allow them to compete in women’s sports, HuffPost reported. The policy targets a small group of people—about 5 percent of college athletes are international students, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) president told the Senate last year that he only knew of about ten trans athletes competing at the college level, according to HuffPost.

Immigration

• A federal judge has temporarily halted construction on the controversial immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades while she hears challenges brought forth by environmental groups, NPR reported. Those groups say construction will harm the Everglades’ water quality and further endanger the legally protected Florida panther.
• Immigrants without legal status who have applied for a green card or permanent residency via a citizen spouse or family member may now be subject to deportation. Depending on how the new policy is enforced, it could mark “a sea change in immigration enforcement and it will dissuade people who should be eligible to adjust to lawful permanent status from doing so,” an immigration law professor told NBC News.
• The U.S. Census may soon exclude undocumented immigrations, the New York Times reported on Aug. 7. The Trump-ordered changes to the Census, which is scheduled for 2030, could reallocate federal funding and congressional seats in ways that favor Republicans, according to the Times. A federal court stymied Trump’s previous attempt to change how the Census collects population data, in 2020. Back then, the Supreme Court declined to rule on the merits of the change; this time around, the justices could end up hearing a case on Trump’s latest census meddling.
• Rwanda will take up to 250 deported immigrants from the United States into its custody as part of a deal struck with the Trump administration, NBC News reported on Aug. 5. It’s unclear what, if anything, Rwanda will receive for accepting deported immigrants, according to the Associated Press. The agreement, which was reportedly inked back in June, comes amid an unprecedented effort by Trump to deport one million people from the U.S. per year. The U.S. has already deported immigrants to South Sudan, Eswatini, El Salvador, and other countries.

Health and science

• Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Aug. 5 that the agency is terminating more than $500 million in mRNA vaccine projects, NPR reported. Initiatives to develop additional Covid-19 and H5N1 bird flu vaccines were among those cut. The announcement followed new research suggesting H5N1 may spread through the air on dairy farms, according to the New York Times.
• The Trump administration delayed imposing a limit on Medicare reimbursements for bandages following a $5 million donation to a Trump super PAC by a biotech company that stood to lose money if the regulation took effect, the New York Times reported last week. The Biden-era policy, introduced in April 2024, would have restricted Medicare coverage of skin-like wound bandages to a list of 17 products it said had demonstrated effectiveness. Absent from that list was the biotech that donated to the Trump-affiliated super PAC.

DEI and civil rights

Rewire recommends

• Our podcast Boom! Lawyered is back for a quick summer session, as the Supreme Court gears up for its next term. This past week, Imani and Jess led a thought-provoking conversation with Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about how SCOTUS is blurring the line between church and state. You can listen to the episode here or—and this is some breaking news here—you can now watch B!L on YouTube.

Unwind

• Wednesday is back! Part one of the second season of the hit based on the Addams Family show just dropped on Netflix, and we cannot wait to see what our favorite little macabre weirdo is up to.
• We’re also obsessed with a new show, The Hunting Wives (also on Netflix). It’s a suspensful—and steamy—psychological thriller, with just the right amount of politics woven in.