The Trump administration’s attack on gender-affirming care for minors bears all the hallmarks of its approach to healthcare policy.

Although it purports to reflect rigorous science, it’s almost entirely fact-free — indeed, replete with misinformation and disinformation. It ignores the procedures required by law for issuing major policy directives, but relies on bluster and threats to force its targets to comply with its orders, trampling the rule of law. It claims to be concerned with protecting the health of patients, but it puts them at risk.

And it has experienced a sturdy pushback from judges.

The most recent example is a ruling Saturday from Federal Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai of Eugene, Ore. Kasubhai summarily invalidated a Dec. 18 declaration issued by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. purporting to find that gender-affirming care for minors falls below the standard of healthcare for hospitals and threatening to terminate Medicaid and Medicare funding for those that deliver it.

Kasubhai’s ruling came in a lawsuit brought by 19 states, including California, and the District of Columbia, challenging Kennedy’s declaration. His ruling ticked all the relevant boxes.

The case, he wrote, shows how “a leader’s wanton disregard for the rule of law causes very real harm to very real people… When a leader acts without authority and in the absence of the rule of law, he acts with cruelty.”

He rejected the government’s terminology for the therapies and treatments at issue — that these are “sex-rejecting procedures” — and stated he would use the term “gender-affirming care” instead, because “in this Court all people will be treated with dignity.”

He specified the harm confronting patients and their parents seeking such care after consulting with their physicians, noting that by Kennedy’s own estimate, more than 30 hospitals and hospital systems had ceased providing gender-affirming care to minors after Kennedy’s declaration was published.

Most of those institutions were reacting not to any change in healthcare law, but to Kennedy’s threat to exclude them from Medicaid and Medicare, a seldom-imposed penalty that could force some to shut down. Kennedy’s declaration confronted healthcare providers with “the Hobson’s Choice to either stop providing gender-affirming care for minors or risk the loss of critical funding necessary to operate at all.”

Although the law sets forth detailed procedures that must be followed before withdrawing Medicaid or Medicare funds, Kasubhai noted, Kennedy’s declaration aimed to circumvent all that: “Immediate compliance was demanded.”

And he took a swipe at the Trump administration’s “break it and see if they can get away with it” approach to the law, citing its “repeated flouting of court orders and the rule of law.”

As Kasubhai observed, despite its legal feebleness, Kennedy’s declaration and its explicit threat has had a concrete impact on the provision of gender-affirming services to American youths. Numerous hospitals terminated or limited their services out of fear of devastating financial consequences if the government followed through.

Some hospitals, however, reversed course under pressure from patients’ families or court orders. Among them were Children’s Hospital-San Diego and Children’s Hospital of Orange County, which are both affiliated with Rady Children’s Health. But Superior Court Judge Matthew Braner of San Diego ordered the programs to continue at least until a court hearing next month.

At an earlier hearing, a Rady lawyer told Braner that the system was at “catastrophic risk” of losing its funding if the government pursued its campaign. Braner said he recognized that due to the government’s threat to Rady “you are between a rock and a hard place,” but questioned whether the threat was imminent: “The issue is how close is the rock and how close is the hard place.”

Kennedy’s declaration has roiled gender-affirming programs nationwide. Children’s Hospital Colorado suspended those services in January; that decision was upheld by a state judge, but the Colorado Supreme Court is pondering whether to order the services to resume.

Some providers suspended or terminated their services even before Kennedy’s Dec. 18 declaration, but after President Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 28, 2025, charging that medical professionals are “maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions.”

Trump ordered government agencies to investigate such services provided by recipients of federal funds. He specifically ordered Health and Human Services to look into whether Medicaid and Medicare rules could be deployed against those providing the services.

Trump’s order seemed to be an outgrowth of what I called a “deranged and despicable” claim he uttered during his presidential campaign that schoolchildren were being abducted by school authorities and subjected to gender surgery. This was a product, I wrote, of “Trump’s fantasyland”: No such incidents are known to exist.

More than 20 hospitals and health systems rolled back or suspended their transgender services for minors after Trump’s order. Among them was Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, which entirely terminated all its gender affirming services for minors in July and remains the only major California institution to have done so.

The government’s threats, Children’s Hospital executives wrote in a staff email announcing the closure of its gender-affirmation clinic in June, are “no longer theoretical”; they are “threatening our ability to serve the hundreds of thousands of patients who depend on CHLA for lifesaving care.”

Some institutions have tread a narrow path around the threats from Trump and Kennedy. The executive order and Kennedy declaration both define gender-affirming care as the use of puberty blockers, hormone treatment, and surgery. Kaiser Permanente and Stanford Medicine, among other providers, have said they would cease surgical interventions for minors but continue the other therapies, knowing that gender-affirming surgical operations on minors are almost never performed.

Kaiser told me through a spokesman that it continues to provide gender-affirming care “aligned with state law and the applicable standards of care, and tailored to meet the needs of each patient.”

According to a 2024 study by researchers at Brown and Harvard of some 23 million insured minors, the prevalence of surgery among those aged 15 to 17 was 2.1 per 100,000 patients, or about 2 thousandths of a percent, 0.1 per 100,000 among those aged 13 or 14, and zero among those 12 or younger.

The statistics indicate that “concerns around high rates of gender-affirming surgery use, specifically among [transgender] minors, may be unwarranted,” the researchers concluded, adding that the low rate “likely reflects adherence to stringent standards of gender-affirming care” in the medical profession.

The threat to drive providers of gender-affirming care for minors out of government healthcare programs isn’t the only weapon the Trump administration has deployed. The Department of Justice issued subpoenas last year to more than 20 doctors and clinics, seeking evidence of healthcare fraud and other legal offenses. The targets, according to then-Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, were “medical professionals and organizations that mutilated children in the service of a warped ideology.”

At least four federal judges blocked some of those subpoenas as flagrantly illicit overreach. Two questioned the DOJ’s integrity, with one warning that a federal official’s inaccurate declaration could be interpreted as perjury. Another implied that a DOJ filing in his courtroom might have reflected “deliberate misuse … of court procedure.”

In January, the DOJ backed away from its demand for medical records that identify young patients who received gender-affirming care from CHLA; its action was part of a settlement with parents of transgender minors who feared that the subpoenas could be used to bring criminal charges against the parents of transgender children.

The campaign to undermine transgender treatments is sure to continue, in part because Republicans see transgender rights as a potent wedge issue to keep conservatives in their camp. They have a friend in the Supreme Court, which last year blessed a Tennessee law that banned puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors experiencing gender dysphoria.

The 6-3 ruling drew a ringing dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote that the court thereby “abandons transgender children and their parents to political whims.” With those words, she defined the Trump administration’s approach to healthcare in a nutshell.

But few of his crypto actions have attracted as much attention or scrutiny as his memecoin.

Unveiled three nights before the presidential inauguration in January 2025, $TRUMP emerged from a partnership between Mr. Trump and a longtime associate, the serial entrepreneur Bill Zanker. When the coins went on sale, the Trump family and its business partners collected a fee on each transaction, totaling at least $320 million in the first few months.

Last April, the coin’s backers tried to drive more sales by inviting investors to compete for 220 seats at an “intimate private dinner” with Mr. Trump at the Virginia golf club. In effect, the contest gave crypto traders and even foreign investors a way to funnel money into the Trump family’s coffers, with no public disclosure requirements.

The night of the event, protesters gathered near the club, led by Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, who called it “the Mount Everest of corruption.” Inside, Mr. Trump railed against the Biden administration as investors dined on filet mignon and “Trump organic field green salad.”

The president appeared undeterred by the backlash. This year, he hosted an even bigger contest.

On March 12, the $TRUMP coin’s official X account announced plans for the conference at Mar-a-Lago, featuring Mr. Trump as a lunchtime speaker alongside Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight champion, and Paolo Ardoino, who runs the crypto firm Tether. Attendees were also promised Trump-branded perfume, a commemorative Trump poster, a collectible Trump trading card and a “red beauty watch” emblazoned with the president’s name.

The contest’s rules were convoluted. For every coin purchased, investors would receive a point on a public leaderboard. Every hour the investors held onto those funds, another point would be awarded for each coin, a system designed to discourage anyone from selling. The contest was slated to end on April 10, with the top 297 investors earning spots at Mar-a-Lago; the top 29 would also get access to a smaller reception with Mr. Trump.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is planning to lay off 8,000 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, in May, as it seeks to cut costs to better prepare to do more with artificial intelligence.

Meta told its employees about the layoffs in a Thursday memo that said the company will also close 6,000 open roles. Bloomberg earlier reported about the memo.

Meta is among tech companies that have cut thousands of workers since 2022 after going on a hiring spree during the COVID-19 pandemic. From restructuring to AI investments, tech executives have cited various reasons for layoffs.

Amazon, Snap, Block and other tech companies have continued to slash their workforces this year, flooding the competitive job market with more talent. From January to March, tech companies announced 52,050 layoffs, up 40% from the same period last year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Here’s what you need to know about the latest cuts expected at Meta:

How is Meta doing financially?

Meta has been growing its digital ads business and is expected to outpace its rivals this year, becoming the world’s top player in digital ads. Emarketer estimates that the company’s global net ad revenue will reach $243.46 billion in 2026, surpassing Google’s projected $239.54 billion for the first time.

The company is spending heavily on artificial intelligence and new hardware such as smartglasses. In 2025, Meta’s full-year net income was roughly $60 billion, a 3% decline compared to 2024.

Meta is doing better than many in the industry, but still slashing headcount for many types of jobs. Its rival Snap, reported a net loss of $460 million last year and is laying off 16% of its workforce. Snap is cutting 247 workers at its Santa Monica headquarters and 73 at its Palo Alto office, according to filings last week with the California Employment Development Department.

Why is Meta cutting more jobs?

Meta told employees the cuts are part of the company’s efforts to become more efficient and offset investments.

“This is not an easy tradeoff and it will mean letting go of people who have made meaningful contributions to Meta during their time here,” Janelle Gale, chief people officer at Meta said in the memo to staff.

Reports of upcoming layoffs were leaked, prompting Meta to inform employees about the cuts this week.

“I know this is unwelcome news and confirming this puts everyone in an uneasy state, but we feel this is the best path forward, given the circumstances,” the memo stated.

Reuters reported in March that layoffs could impact 20% or more of the company because Meta is trying to offset the cost of its AI investments. The company is also encouraging workers to become more efficient by using AI tools to do tasks such as code.

Meta Chief Executive and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone of himself. And Zuckerberg said in 2025 that he thought AI will be able to write code like a mid-level engineer.

Construction continues at the Beaver Dam Commerce Park where a new Meta data center is being built on March 31, 2026 in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin.

(Joe Timmerman/Wisconsin Watch via Getty Images)

But the company is also facing other challenges that could increase its expenses, analysts say. That includes lawsuits accusing the company of harming the mental health of young people and more regulations that could restrict the use of social media.

In March, the company lost lawsuits in California and New Mexico that involved child safety. In one case, a Los Angeles jury found that Meta and YouTube were negligent for designing addictive features that harmed the mental health of a California woman. Meta plans to appeal, adding to its legal expenses.

Families of victims speak to the press on March 25 after hearing the verdict outside Los Angeles County Superior Court during one of the coordinated lawsuits alleging that Meta and YouTube are designed to hook young users and cause them a variety of negative mental health effects..

(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)

Meanwhile, U.S. adults are expected to spend less time on Facebook next year. On Instagram, it’s expected to grow slightly, according to eMarketer.

“Meta is really at a sort of crossroads moment, even though its business is doing well,” said Minda Smiley, a senior analyst at eMarketer who focuses on social media.

Meta shares are basically unchanged so far this year and last traded around $660 on Thursday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is up around 5% over the same period.

Has Meta cut thousands of jobs before?

Yes, Meta has cut thousands of workers several times in the past, but pointed to different reasons for the cuts.

In 2022 and 2023, the company slashed more than 20,000 roles during its “year of efficiency.” Several tech companies were cutting back after hiring during the pandemic.

Last year, Meta slashed 3,600 jobs, saying the cuts were performance-based, though some workers pushed back against that characterization.

Then in January, the company said it was cutting more than 1,000 workers and closing several content studios as it focuses more on the development of smartglasses. The cuts hit Meta’s Reality Labs division, where employees work on the metaverse, digital spaces where people socialize, work and learn.

Meta laid off engineers, recruiters, product managers and other workers in its California offices, filings to a state government agency showed.

As of December, Meta had nearly 79,000 workers.