Trump narrows the childhood vaccine schedule to 11 diseases

Public health

Vaccines beyond 11 diseases move to a case-by-case call with a doctor¹

An executive order signed on 10 August recommends universal childhood immunization against 11 diseases.¹ It moves the rest into a category the White House calls shared clinical decision-making, meaning the shot becomes a judgment a family makes with its doctor case by case.¹ The administration frames the change as a cut from 18 diseases, a figure it reaches by counting 17 diseases plus the RSV monoclonal-antibody immunization. NPR and other outlets give the reduction as 17 to 11.¹² The fact sheet sets the change against how far the schedule had grown. By 2024 it counted 84 or more vaccine doses in 57 or more shots for 17 diseases, against 23 doses in 7 shots for 7 diseases in 1980.¹ The same document says the US recommends more than twice as many doses as some European nations.¹ Trump tied the change to rising autism rates in his remarks at the signing, a claim NPR describes as thoroughly researched and debunked and one the order and the fact sheet do not mention.² The American Academy of Pediatrics rejected the change, and an academy expert said two healthy American children had died of measles in the past year.²

Executive power

An appeals court says Trump likely can't raze the East Wing for a ballroom³

A panel of the D.C. Circuit ruled 2 to 1 on 7 August that the president very likely lacks the authority to demolish and rebuild the East Wing as a 90,000-square-foot, $400 million ballroom without Congress signing off.⁴ Judges Millett and Garcia formed the majority and Judge Rao dissented.⁴ The National Trust for Historic Preservation had brought the suit. The court stayed its ruling for 14 days, and Trump said he would appeal to the Supreme Court.⁴ The majority stated the principle in plain terms: "Each President is a temporary tenant, not the owner, of the White House and its Executive Residence."⁴

National Guard

Property crime fell and violent crime rose in the Guard's year in Washington⁵

On the Metropolitan Police Department's own count, property crime in Washington fell 23 percent this year while violent crime rose 3 percent.⁵ A year after the National Guard deployment to the city began on 11 August 2025, the task force overseeing it could not say how the troops were bringing crime down.⁶ The steep earlier decline in violent crime, to a 30-year low in 2024 by the U.S. Attorney's Office's count, came before the troops arrived.⁶ More than 9,700 Guard members from over 20 states and territories have rotated through the city across the year, nearly 2,000 of them authorized to carry weapons.⁶ The Congressional Budget Office put the deployment's cost at about $55 million a month, and the Niskanen Center at $607 a day for each Guard member in the district.⁶

Homelessness policy

A judge sets aside HUD's homelessness-grant overhaul for skipping public comment⁷

On 7 August, Judge Mary McElroy of the federal district court in Rhode Island set aside HUD's June overhaul of the Continuum of Care program, the roughly $4 billion competition that funds local homelessness services.⁷⁸ She held that HUD had violated the Administrative Procedure Act by rewriting the terms without first opening the change to the public notice-and-comment the McKinney-Vento Act requires.⁷ The overhaul had carved out a $1.3 billion set-aside that steered money toward new transitional-housing and treatment projects and away from the permanent housing the program had favored.⁷

McElroy vacated the funding notice in its entirety but denied the plaintiffs a permanent injunction, holding that HUD may reissue the same conditions once it completes the notice-and-comment it skipped.⁷ The 20 states, the District of Columbia, and the nonprofits that sued had put the number of people at risk of losing housing at about 97,000, a figure the court recorded as the plaintiffs' own estimate and did not rule on.⁷