2,465 measles cases this year put the U.S. elimination status in doubt

Public health

This year's measles total has already passed all of 2025, with months still to run¹

The CDC counted 2,465 confirmed measles cases for 2026 as of August 6, past the 2,289 logged in all of 2025 and with more than four months of the year still to run.¹ Some 94% of the cases are tied to an outbreak, and 93% of patients were unvaccinated or of unknown status.¹² The Johns Hopkins tracker puts 2026 above every year since the United States eliminated the disease in 2000.³

U.S. measles, 2025 against 2026 so far.¹²

Measure	2025 full year	2026 to Aug 6
Cases	2 289	2 465
Outbreaks	48	38
Outbreak-linked	90%	94%
Hospitalized	11%	7%

No one has died of measles here this year, and hospitalizations have eased to 7% of patients from 11% in 2025.² Elimination is defined by continuous transmission, though, and measles has surfaced somewhere in the country every week since January 2025.⁴ That unbroken domestic spread can cost the status in a year with no deaths at all. A national committee reviews the year's record this month, and PAHO decides in November whether the U.S. keeps the designation it has held since 2000.²³

Drug policy

SAMHSA has cut federal grants off from test strips for people who use drugs⁵

A SAMHSA directive from late April barred federal grant money from the standard tools of harm reduction: fentanyl and xylazine test strips, sterile syringes, safer-smoking supplies, and overdose hotlines.⁵⁶ The carve-out runs by who holds the strip. The same test a police officer, EMT, or public-health worker may still buy with federal funds is off-limits the moment it is handed to the person who would use the drug.⁶ The administration says those supplies "facilitate illicit drug use and are incompatible with Federal laws," and names naloxone, which reverses an overdose, as what grants should fund instead.⁶ SAMHSA's acting leader signed the directive. STAT, the account closest to its release, identified him as Chris Carroll and called it a clear shift from harm reduction.⁷ Programs that hand out the strips are now losing them, NPR reported this week.⁶

Voting rights

Trump asks the Supreme Court to let his mail-in voting order take effect before the midterms⁸

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court on July 27 to let President Trump's March 31 order take effect nationwide for the November midterms, after the First Circuit left in place a Boston court's ruling that blocked it.⁸⁹ The order directs the Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to voters a state has cleared against its rolls.¹⁰ A coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia is fighting to keep it frozen, while 12 states led by Alabama back the administration.¹¹ The dispute is as much about timing as the order itself. The government argues the challengers sued too soon, positioning to invoke the rule against last-minute election changes,¹¹ while the Postal Service has told the court it is running out of time to build the ballot-list system the order would require.¹⁰ No ruling had issued as of August 10.⁸

Energy

The largest U.S. grid operator must now decide who pays for data centers' power¹²

FERC has ordered PJM, the largest U.S. grid operator, to write new rules for the big co-located loads of AI data centers, and to weigh whether those loads should pay a standing charge toward the shared transmission system.¹²¹³ The order, issued December 18, 2025, is still in its compliance phase, which is why the fight is live now: PJM had 60 days to propose the new services and continues to report back.¹³ The open question is narrow but expensive. A data center already pays to connect its own site, and the fight is over whether it also owes toward the grid every other customer leans on.¹² One modeled estimate, from Fortune, puts at about $23 billion the data-center costs already passed to the public through electricity bills.¹⁴