Trump Makes Massive Cut to UPenn Funding Amid War on Trans Athletes

Trump is freezing $175 million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania in an effort to further vilify transgender athletes.

“Promises made, promises kept,” the White House said in an X post on Wednesday, sharing a Fox Business report on the news.

“President Trump has promised to protect female athletes. He has threatened to rip federal funding away from any university that defies his executive order banning biological males from infiltrating women’s sports, and he is doing it,” a Fox Business contributor said. “We are the first to report that President Trump has paused $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania over its controversial policies.”

A senior Trump official told Fox Business that “this is just a taste of what could be coming down the pipe for Penn.”

Trump’s Education Department opened up a Title IX investigation into Penn earlier this month because Penn had a trans woman, Lia Thomas, on its swim team in 2021. The National Collegiate Athletic Association announced its trans ban shortly afterward. Three of Thomas’s former teammates also filed a separate lawsuit citing Title IX violations.

The Trump administration also recently cut $400 million in funding from Columbia University over allegations of antisemitism.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks that the bird flu should be allowed to spread unchecked to identify birds that could be immune.

Kennedy said in a recent Fox News interview that farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” an idea that experts say would be dangerous and hurt the poultry industry.

“That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told The New York Times.

Every new infection of the H5N1 virus is a chance that it will mutate and become more powerful and spread further, although it still hasn’t been proven to spread between people. But if it were allowed to spread through millions of birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen said.

While Kennedy’s department doesn’t have any regulatory powers over farms, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins agrees.

“There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Rollins said on Fox News in February.

If this plan actually goes into effect, the virus would spread among a larger number of birds, putting more people and other animals at risk of infection. Right now, if a poultry farm has a positive test for the virus, it is reimbursed for culling its flocks to prevent its spread.

If the virus were allowed to spread on purpose, bird flu “infections would cause very painful deaths in nearly 100 percent of the chickens and turkeys,” Dr. David Swayne, a poultry veterinarian and former USDA employee, told the Times, adding that it would be “inhumane, resulting in an unacceptable animal welfare crisis.”

Kennedy isn’t even operating on the right information: He claimed in one interview that the virus didn’t seem to affect wild birds, but there are many documented cases of wild birds dying from H5N1. Kennedy also theorizes that some chickens and turkeys may be immune, but scientists say that poultry lacks the genes needed to resist the virus.

It seems that Kennedy’s pseudoscience is spreading unchecked as well. He’s already been putting his anti-vaccine beliefs into practice at HHS by curtailing multiple vaccine research projects and directing resources toward researching the debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism. His latest idea on the bird flu is dangerous and could end up having disastrous consequences for public health and U.S. agriculture.

Donald Trump is planning to nominate troves of loyalist judges to the federal judiciary, and their confirmations will likely go off without a hitch, according to Politico.

Trump is likely to unveil his first round of judicial nominations in the coming weeks, four people familiar with the conversations told Politico Tuesday. During Trump’s first administration, a whopping 234 judges were confirmed, some of whom proved to be fierce loyalists willing to upend Trump’s legal battles—such as Judge Aileen Cannon, who has since been floated for a potential seat on the Supreme Court.

This time, Trump is looking for more judges willing to demonstrate their fealty, according to Mike Davis, who served as the former chief counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley.

“They’re going to be looking for even more bold and fearless judges,” said Davis, who assisted Trump’s first administration in taking fights to the Supreme Court. “Judges who have been battle-tested.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he expected this round of nominees to be more “ideologically extreme.”

“They will be MAGAs, basically. Given the trend of the end of the last Trump term, we’re heading over a cliff in terms of fringe right wing views. They will have a litmus test on steroids,” Blumenthal warned.

Trump’s plan to reshape the judiciary comes as federal judges have become one of the last stoppages for the administration’s onslaught of unlawful legislation and executive actions.

Trump saw a double whammy of losses on Tuesday, when a federal judge blocked the implementation of his policy that would effectively bar transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. Another federal judge ordered a pause on cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, arguing that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s shuttering of the agency was likely unconstitutional because it had sidestepped congressional authority.

Separately, two federal judges have ruled that DOGE’s blanket dismissal of probationary federal employees was also illegal, setting the Trump administration scurrying to reinstate roughly 24,000 wrongfully terminated employees.

Over the weekend, Judge James Boasberg ordered a pause on Trump’s massive deportations under the Alien Enemies Act—but the administration continued undeterred, sending planefuls of people who the government claimed were gang members out of the country. When Boasberg accused Trump of defying a court order, the president called for him to be impeached. In a rare statement, Chief Justice John Roberts scolded Trump, saying that threatening to impeach judges wasn’t an “appropriate” response to disagreeing with a ruling.

But Trump has already begun to set the stage for outright ignoring the orders of any judges who rule against him, claiming that they must be biased. During an interview on Fox News Tuesday, Trump claimed he didn’t defy anything.

“I never did that, however we have bad judges. We have very bad judges. And these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed,” Trump said. The president claimed that Boasberg was a “lunatic” in any case that involved him.

Trump clearly hopes to flush out the judges who are willing to stand up to his legally dubious activity, while supplying more and more MAGAs to rubber-stamp his every whim.

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, stopping it from eliminating three nonprofit grant agreements made under the Biden administration and seizing back the funding.

EPA head Lee Zeldin tried to eliminate the programs as part of his attack on Biden’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which Congress established in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Zeldin posited that the program, like every other one the Trump administration doesn’t like, was a source of waste and fraud. But Judge Tanya Chutkan viewed these claims as “vague and unsubstantiated assertions,” according to Reuters.

The ruling affects $13.97 million of grant funding awarded to Climate United, Coalition for Green Capital, and Power Forward Communities. Chutkan’s temporary restraining order prevents Citibank from transferring the grant money out of their accounts, despite the EPA order.

While this certainly isn’t over, Chutkan’s ruling offers the environmental nonprofits temporary respite.

Donald Trump is planning to ramp up his ill-advised tariffs and place them on “trillions” of dollars in imports.

The Washington Post reports that most U.S. imports will get hit with the new fees on April 2, on a day Trump is calling “Liberation Day.” The news is causing shock waves among congressional Republicans and economists. Even White House officials are concerned, with discussions taking place involving Vice President JD Vance, aide Peter Navarro, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do, but from what they’re saying, it sounds functionally like new tariffs on all U.S. imports,” Joseph Politano, an economic policy analyst, told the Post.

The past few weeks of tariffs have upended the U.S. economy, hurting businesses and sending the stock market plunging. This new round of tariffs “seriously could make all of that look like a tempest in a teapot,” Politano said.

“It’s a liberation day for our country because we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries, including friend and foe,” Trump said on Monday.

Trump has pressed ahead with his tariffs despite criticism from the right, including his normal cheering section at Fox News. The network’s Maria Bartiromo snapped at Bessent in an interview on Tuesday, pointing out how businesses are upset with Trump’s economic decisions. Even Republican Senator Rand Paul has been trying to rally the rest of his party to come out against the tariffs. But none of that seems to be convincing the president, which means the worst is still yet to come for America’s economy.