This week at Unbreaking, September 5
We’re back after a week away during which the news did not rest, but we did.
Immigration
We’ve updated our new Immigration timeline with a dramatic middle-of-the-night legal challenge to the expulsion of unaccompanied Guatemalan children, plus the latest changes in other cases and administration actions.
Transgender Healthcare
In January, the Office of Personnel Management told providers of plans under the Federal Employee Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs to stop covering gender-affirming care for people under 19 starting in plan year 2026. In mid-August, this planned loss in coverage was expanded to include people of all ages, and will eliminate gender-affirming care coverage for about 17,000 transgender employees, plus an unknown number of dependents.
We also recently learned new details about the subpoenas sent to at least 20 healthcare providers by the Department of Justice earlier this year. In the case of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the DOJ requested a shockingly broad range of information, including confidentiality-breaching records, communication transcripts, and patient information including social security numbers.
In the face of these growing legal threats, some states are stepping up to defend their LGBTQ+ residents. Illinois announced a state-wide legal hotline and online resource hub called IL Pride Connect, while Michigan’s Attorney General issued a strongly-worded reminder that withholding gender-affirming care violates the state’s anti-discrimination laws, specifically rebuking the University of Michigan’s decision to withhold this care at the administration’s request as “shameful, dangerous, and potentially illegal.” We have the full story on how healthcare providers are responding to the administration’s attacks on gender-affirming care in our explainer.
Data Security
This past week, a whistleblower exposed DOGE’s insecure storage of 300 million Americans’ personal data, an event that may lead to every single Social Security Number needing to be changed. We also learned that Attorney General Pam Bondi’s targeting of Democratic officials for mortgage fraud is apparently politically motivated and based on the “highly irregular” use of personal data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The DOJ has continued to escalate demands that states share voters’ personal information with federal law enforcement, and in response the Brennan Center for Justice launched a new tool to track these demands.
In better news, Flock, the automatic license plate reader company, paused all ongoing pilots with federal government agencies after it came to light that CBP had access to all 80,000 cameras nationwide. CA Attorney General Rob Bonta asked a court to block USDA demands for states’ SNAP data. And Senator Ed Markey wrote to Small Business Association Administrator Kelly Loeffler demanding information about whether DOGE used sensitive federal data to train its unauthorized “DOGE AI Deregulation Decision Tool” in an effort to cut government regulations by more than half. Stay tuned for our new in-depth explainer, coming soon, about how the administration is gathering and consolidating personal data at an unprecedented scale.
Food safety
In the past weeks, we’ve seen how turmoil at the CDC is hurting food safety. Last week, a top food safety official at the CDC resigned in response to the Trump administration’s firing of CDC director Susan Monarez. Additionally, recent reporting by NBC News revealed that in July, the CDC scaled back its main foodborne illness monitoring program, FoodNet, from eight tracked pathogens to just two. The cancellation of many federal grants for state health departments was a likely contributor to the reduction in surveillance, since the program is a state-federal partnership. Catch up on all the ways food safety is being threatened in our explainer.
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