This week at Unbreaking, July 17

A blog entry posted by Unbreaking Team on July 17, 2025.

This week we have a new explainer on data security. We’re tracking the many ways the Trump administration is recklessly exploiting our sensitive data in a timeline, with more to come.

Plus: the latest on trans healthcare, food safety, equality at work, medical research funding, and Medicaid, below.

Data Security

Data security is the practice of keeping sensitive personal information (names, Social Security numbers, immigration status, health and tax records, etc) safe from unauthorized access, corruption, and abuse. Since day one, the Trump administration has recklessly exploited Americans’ sensitive data in efforts to deport immigrants, restrict access to critical benefits and services, and gut the federal workforce. The administration is undermining data security in three key ways:

• First, by gathering and consolidating sensitive data, and combining data from multiple sources in ways that violate privacy laws — including feeding federal data into private databases and unvetted artificial intelligence systems.
• Second, by expanding access to data from federal and local systems for unintended uses, including disclosing civilian data to law enforcement authorities and allowing unauthorized people access to highly sensitive systems.
• And third, by weakening protections against misuse of data by removing or undermining existing data security systems, firing federal employees responsible for data protection, and ignoring official information requests about how sensitive data has been accessed or used.

We have a brief explainer and timeline of events up, with more to come.

Transgender Healthcare

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a workshop that positioned doctors and clinics who provide gender-affirming care as targets for investigations into alleged “unfair or deceptive trade practices.” The workshop took place despite intense staff opposition at the FTC. That same day, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that they had sent more than twenty subpoenas to doctors and clinics who provide gender-affirming care to youth.

We don’t yet know what will happen with the DOJ subpoenas sent out last week. Clinics and doctors who received them will have to weigh the risk of noncompliance carefully against both federal and state privacy and shield laws.

But we do know that these two moves are part of a broader attempt to bully care providers into shutting down their services. And, sadly, it’s working. Since January clinics across the country have stopped providing gender affirming care — including in Hershey, Los Angeles, Stanford, Tucson, and more.

Equality at Work

Since Inauguration Day, the Trump administration and the DOGE initiative have fired more than a quarter million federal workers. Many additional layoffs had been temporarily halted, as more than half a dozen lawsuits proceeded through the courts. But the Supreme Court has now repeatedly intervened to permit large-scale layoffs to continue: Last week, they issued a stay of a lower court ruling that had halted many of the federal workforce reductions; the State Department moved forward with a 15% reduction just two days later. This week, they issued another stay, this time in a case against administration’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education. The three liberal justices dissented (PDF), noting that “only Congress has the power to abolish the Department.”

More layoffs — and more lawsuits — are anticipated. We have the full story in our explainer, and will be watching to see what happens from here.

Food Safety

Across the federal government, thousands of employees working on food safety have been fired as a result of two executive orders directing agencies to conduct cost-cutting layoffs. This week, the impact of these mass layoffs on the food safety system has continued to unfold. Following a Supreme Court decision allowing mass layoffs to proceed without Congressional authorization, HHS has begun finalizing layoffs announced in April. At the FDA, low staff morale because of the layoffs has led to resignations, compounding the problem. Responding to this growing crisis, the Senate Appropriations Committee, in its discretionary budget bill for 2025-2026, directed the FDA to ignore a federal hiring freeze in order to hire scientists, product reviewers, and inspectors. We will continue to keep an eye on this countermove as the discretionary budget winds its way through the House and the Senate.

This week, we also continued to see diminished transparency and oversight affecting federal food safety systems. In the same discretionary budget bill, Senate legislators criticized the FDA for holding closed advisory panels on infant formula, which took place against a background of the dismantling of key food safety advisory committees at the USDA. And the FDA has begun using a large language model, Elsa, to assist in decision-making for tasks like food labeling review and inspections prioritization. The rollout of Elsa across the agency has prompted concerns from staffers about inaccurate information and from industry and regulators about reduced transparency of decision-making.

Medical Research Funding

The administration has cancelled or frozen more than 2,600 medical research grants, with 3,200 more flagged for review and possible termination — adding up to more than $5 billion in lost funding. The process has been chaotic, and some of the cuts are blatantly ideological: a result of DOGE-directed screening and searches for flagged keywords like “women,” “trans,” “nonbinary,” “diversity,” or “COVID.” The attack on “woke DEI ideology” targets research focused on HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ health, reproductive health, addiction and mental health, health equity and systemic racial disparities, and more. In March, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) rescinded their scientific integrity policy, raising concerns that staffing and funding decisions are being made based on political factors rather than scientific merit. This week, NIH dismissed dozens of expert scientists vetted to review grant approvals, and is reportedly screening social media accounts of potential replacements for DEI content or views critical of the president.

Among grants marked for potential termination or suspension are research on pathogens such as bacteria and viruses, inaccurately citing the executive order threatening greater oversight of “gain-of-function” research, and grants using mRNA for research into cancer and vaccines. In addition, on July 7, during a joint NIH-FDA workshop, NIH announced that they will no longer be funding grant proposals that solely rely on animal testing, stating that grants must incorporate alternatives, despite the strict regulations governing use of animals and the lack of viable replacements.

Medicaid

On July 4, President Trump signed a budget bill that cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid. In our explainer, we’re providing short summaries of many of the cuts, along with information on when each part of the bill comes into force. A few quick ones:

• States will have to enforce work-reporting rules starting at the end of December 2026, though some could start earlier and some may get extensions.
• People eligible for Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act expansion will have to prove eligibility more frequently starting at the end of 2026.
• Refugees, people granted asylum, and some other lawfully present immigrants will no longer qualify for Medicaid starting in the fall of 2026.
• Changes to the way states get federal funding for their Medicaid programs begin in 2028.

KFF has a huge table with all the cuts and details, and we also like the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials’ nerdy but concise summary.

Up next

For next week, we’re working on a new page on due process and immigration detentions, as well as a deep dive into what’s happening with Medicaid. And we’ll continue to update on Bluesky. We look forward to hearing from you there.

Until then, we invite everyone to use and adapt our content for sharing with your readers and communities: everything on our site is available under a CC BY 4.0 license. We welcome translations, adaptations to other formats, and especially encourage organizers and journalists to make use of what we’ve developed. And if you make something with our content, please let us know — we’d love to hear from you.