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Washington Bends to RFK Jr.’s ‘MAHA’ Agenda on Measles, Baby Formula and French Fries

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Washington Bends to RFK Jr.’s ‘MAHA’ Agenda on Measles, Baby Formula and French Fries

Babies are not ordinarily a fixture of closed-door White House meetings.

But when Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, convened a group of women this month for a discussion on nutrition and other topics, a healthy-eating activist who calls herself “the Food Babe” was stunned to see President Trump’s press secretary with her eight-month-old on her lap.

While several female cabinet secretaries looked on, the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, lamented that baby formula seems healthier in Europe than in the United States, where a recent study found that many varieties are laden with added sugars. Last week, Mr. Kennedy met with formula makers and announced a push to expand options for “safe, reliable and nutritious infant formula.”

The activist, Vani Hari, was thrilled. “It was such an amazing opportunity to see some solidification of the MAHA agenda across the different cabinets,” she said, using the initials for Mr. Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. She called the event “a dream come true.”

The gathering of “MAHA Moms,” as Mr. Kennedy calls the corps of influencers and activists who follow him, was one of a series of choreographed events held in recent weeks by Mr. Kennedy, who occupies a highly unusual place in Washington. The scion of a famous Democratic family, his embrace of Mr. Trump, his tendency to spin wild theories out of kernels of truth and his promotion of what critics say is quack medicine have made him one of the most polarizing figures in the cabinet, even as he has developed a loyal following of his own.

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Yet even some critics of Mr. Kennedy applaud his focus on obesity and healthy eating. He makes powerful industries and civil servants uncomfortable, holding forth from his newly powerful perch as head of the Department of Health and Human Services on an eclectic menu of topics — offering up alternative remedy ideas one day while blasting industrial food companies the next.

Now companies and the government must contend with what might be called the Kennedy factor. So far, there has been little public pushback.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted information about vitamin A on its website after Mr. Kennedy promoted it as a measles treatment, to the consternation of public health officials who want him to advocate forcefully for vaccination.

A fast-food chain announced it had “RFK-d” its French fries by ditching seed oil for beef tallow, a type of rendered beef fat that is similar to lard, despite cardiologists who say it poses risks to the heart.

Infant formula makers, who came under scrutiny amid a shortage in 2022, said simply that they look forward to working with Mr. Kennedy. And after Mr. Kennedy instructed food executives to rid the food supply of artificial dyes, he followed up with a video message on social media: “They understand that they have a new sheriff in town.”

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Mr. Kennedy declined an interview request.

It is far too soon to know whether Mr. Kennedy will make a real impact or whether these early steps are more posturing than substance. The Trump administration is taking actions that would seem to undermine his goals, such as disbanding an expert committee studying how to spare infants from a deadly bacteria that contributed to the decision in 2022 to temporarily shut down an Abbott Nutrition infant formula plant.

Mr. Kennedy could run into resistance from Congress. His disdain for the refined oils made from certain plants — seed oils like canola, soy and corn — and the ultra-processed foods that contain them has alarmed Republicans including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, whose farmer constituents receive subsidies from the government to grow the plants that produce the oils.

Mr. Kennedy opposes the subsidies. Mr. Grassley publicly instructed him to “leave agricultural practice regulations to the proper agencies,” including the Agriculture Department. Mr. Kennedy said he agreed.

“That’s talk; I want to see what the action is,” Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, said of Mr. Kennedy’s ambitions to remake the food supply. “And if the only action is getting colors out of the food supply, that’s not enough.”

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Public health experts still have serious concerns about Mr. Kennedy, whose skepticism of vaccines has colored his response to a Texas measles outbreak. Biomedical researchers say that if he really wanted to make America healthy, he would block Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency from targeting the nation’s scientific enterprise by reducing jobs and cutting grants.

“I think he has to take the blame for it; he’s destroying science in America,” said Dr. Walter C. Willett, a pioneer in nutrition research at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

Yet so long as he is not talking about vaccines, Mr. Kennedy’s ideas are winning cautious support in some surprising places. Dr. Willett said he agrees with Mr. Kennedy that the National Institutes of Health should rebalance its research portfolio to spend more studying ways to prevent disease. Dr. Nestle praised him for taking on the food industry.

“When President Trump announced on Twitter that he was appointing R.F.K. Jr., he used the words industrial food complex,” she said. “I couldn’t believe that. It sounded just like me, and R.F.K. sounds just like me.”

At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Kennedy was identified as one of the top spreaders of misinformation by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which listed him as one of the “disinformation dozen.” His Instagram account was suspended in 2021, and reinstated in 2023 when he began his presidential bid.

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Now, as the health department leader, Mr. Kennedy has a much bigger platform from which he can shape American attitudes and beliefs.

Some of his assertions, public health experts say, have been just plain wrong. Mr. Kennedy, for instance, told Sean Hannity of Fox News that immunity to the measles vaccine wanes over time and thus “older people are essentially unvaccinated.”

That contradicts the C.D.C. website, which says measles, mumps, rubella vaccines “usually protect people for life” against measles and rubella, but mumps immunity may decrease over time. Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, agreed, saying, “The data continue to support that measles vaccine protects the vast majority of people lifelong.”

Last week, Mr. Kennedy proposed banning cell phones in schools, an idea with bipartisan backing. But in addition to citing children’s mental health, he made another, unsubstantiated claim: that cell phones “produce electromagnetic radiation” that can cause cancer.

So far, Mr. Kennedy also appears to be largely ignoring government experts. He has not had any in-person or virtual briefings on measles from infectious disease experts at the C.D.C., according to two people familiar with the response to the Texas outbreak. Instead, he receives written reports from the agency.

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An administration official said Mr. Kennedy meets daily with “career leadership” at H.H.S., the C.D.C.’s parent agency, to discuss matters including measles.

Health officials in Texas say Mr. Kennedy’s messages have been confusing. Dr. Katharine Wells, the director of public health in the city of Lubbock, said she is having trouble persuading parents to vaccinate their children because they think “vitamin A is protective, like the vaccine.”

But Kennedy allies were thrilled when the C.D.C. added a mention of vitamin A in its measles advisory on its website. Del Bigtree, Mr. Kennedy’s former communications director, lauded the move on a recent podcast. “My God,” he said, “do you see what a small step for mankind we just made?”

Mr. Kennedy is getting quiet advice from at least one person in the public health mainstream, Dr. Jeffrey D. Klausner, a professor at the University of Southern California who spent years with the C.D.C., including work on disease prevention in South Africa. Dr. Klausner, a neighbor of Mr. Kennedy’s in Los Angeles, said he is working to identify new members of the C.D.C.’s vaccine advisory committee, a panel Mr. Kennedy says is rife with conflicts of interest.

He said Mr. Kennedy has given him just one criteria: “He wants highly credentialed, unbiased people who can look at the science objectively.”

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Despite his promise of “radical transparency,” Mr. Kennedy is offering Americans a highly curated version of himself. Like Mr. Trump, he speaks to the public largely through social media and Fox News.

In a sense, Mr. Kennedy is offering a new twist on Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan; he wants United States customers to be able to buy Froot Loops, the colored sugary cereal, with the same ingredients — dyes made from colored blueberries and carrots, instead of chemicals — used in Canada, and French fries to be cooked like they are in Europe.

Mr. Kennedy’s crusade against seed oils has caught the eye of executives at Steak ’n Shake, which says it will now cook its fries in Mr. Kennedy’s preferred frying agent, beef tallow — even though nutrition experts say there is no evidence that tallow, a saturated fat akin to butter, is healthier than seed oils.

“He says he’s following the science,” Dr. Willett said. “If you look at the scientific evidence, that doesn’t take you to the conclusion that beef tallow is better than seed oils.”

An Indianapolis-based restaurant chain, Steak ’n Shake announced the switch this month on social media with a picture of a ball cap in Mr. Trump’s signature MAGA red that declared, “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again.” Mr. Kennedy, who otherwise appears to be no fan of French fries, traveled to a Florida Steak ’n Shake with Mr. Hannity, of Fox, and picked away at a basket of them for the cameras.

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“We’re very grateful to them for R.F.K.-ing their French fries,” he said.

Ms. Hari, the healthy-eating activist, called the Steak n’ Shake announcement “an interesting example of how we can make incremental changes to the food system to make it better than it was.” She said she intends to push Mr. Kennedy to make fast-food chains post all of their ingredients online.

Mr. Kennedy’s inner circle seems to be divided into two camps: those like Mr. Bigtree, who are drawn to him because of his stance on vaccination, and those like Ms. Hari and Calley Means, an author and health care entrepreneur, whose focus is nutrition and chronic disease. Mr. Means recently joined the White House as a special government employee to help carry out Mr. Kennedy’s agenda.

Mr. Kennedy has also inspired a MAHA movement in the states. On Monday, the governor of West Virginia signed legislation banning certain food dyes from school lunches.

Last week, Mr. Means was in Arizona, along with other Kennedy allies, to speak in favor of a “Make Arizona Healthy Again” bill that would ban certain chemicals from school lunch programs and prohibit candy, soda, chips and other junk foods from being purchased with the federal nutrition dollars formerly known as “food stamps.”

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Helene Leeds, who with her daughter founded Step It Up, a weight loss program, also testified, and was identified as a “MAHA Mom” by the MAHA Alliance, a group that backs Mr. Kennedy’s agenda. The moniker gave her pause.

“It’s new for me to be called that,” she said. “I mean, absolutely, I stand for health in everything that I do.” She added: “I also look at myself as a MAHA leader.”

After the MAHA Moms meeting, the White House posted video of Mr. Kennedy and some of his guests on social media stumbling over how to pronounce food ingredients like riboflavin. Mr. Kennedy posted photos with a message to the women: “You got me where I am today, and I will not let you down.”

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Community reacts to ICE shooting in Minnesota. And, RFK Jr. unveils new food pyramid

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Community reacts to ICE shooting in Minnesota. And, RFK Jr. unveils new food pyramid

Good morning. You’re reading the Up First newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox, and listen to the Up First podcast for all the news you need to start your day.

Today’s top stories

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman, yesterday. Multiple observers captured the shooting on video, and community members demanded accountability. Minnesota law enforcement officials and the FBI are investigating the fatal shooting, which the Trump administration says was an act of self-defense. Meanwhile, the mayor has accused the officer of reckless use of power and demanded that ICE get out of Minneapolis.

People demonstrate during a vigil at the site where a woman was shot and killed by an immigration officer earlier in the day in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Jan. 7, 2026. An immigration officer in Minneapolis shot dead a woman on Wednesday, triggering outrage from local leaders even as President Trump claimed the officer acted in self-defense. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey deemed the government’s allegation that the woman was attacking federal agents “bullshit,” and called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers conducting a second day of mass raids to leave Minneapolis.

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  • 🎧 Caitlin Callenson recorded the shooting and says officers gave Good multiple conflicting instructions while she was in her vehicle. Callenson says Good was already unresponsive when officers pulled her from the car. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claims the officer was struck by the vehicle and acted in self-defense. In the video NPR reviewed, the officer doesn’t seem to be hit and was seen walking after he fired the shots, NPR’s Meg Anderson tells Up First. Anderson says it has been mostly peaceful in Minneapolis, but there is a lot of anger and tension because protesters want ICE out of the city.

U.S. forces yesterday seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the north Atlantic between Iceland and Britain after a two-week chase. The tanker was originally headed to Venezuela, but it changed course to avoid the U.S. ships. This action comes as the Trump administration begins releasing new information about its plans for Venezuela’s oil industry.

  • 🎧 It has been a dramatic week for U.S. operations in Venezuela, NPR’s Greg Myre says, prompting critics to ask if a real plan for the road ahead exists. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded that the U.S. does have a strategy to stabilize Venezuela, and much of it seems to involve oil. Rubio said the U.S. would take control of up to 50 million barrels of oil from the country. Myre says the Trump administration appears to have a multipronged strategy that involves taking over the country’s oil, selling it on the world market and pressuring U.S. oil companies to enter Venezuela.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released new dietary guidelines for Americans yesterday that focus on promoting whole foods, proteins and healthy fats. The guidance, which he says aims to “revolutionize our food culture,” comes with a new food pyramid, which replaces the current MyPlate symbol.

  • 🎧 “I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid,” Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert who was on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, tells NPR’s Allison Aubrey. Gardner says the new food structure, which features red meat and saturated fats at the top, contradicts decades of evidence and research. Poor eating habits and the standard American diet are widely considered to cause chronic disease. Aubrey says the new guidelines alone won’t change people’s eating habits, but they will be highly influential. This guidance will shape the offerings in school meals and on military bases, and determine what’s allowed in federal nutrition programs.

Special series

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Trump has tried to bury the truth of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. NPR built a visual archive of the attack on the Capitol, showing exactly what happened through the lenses of the people who were there. “Chapter 4: The investigation” shows how federal investigators found the rioters and built the largest criminal case in U.S. history.

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Political leaders, including Trump, called for rioters to face justice for their actions on Jan. 6. This request came because so few people were arrested during the attack. The extremists who led the riot remained free, and some threatened further violence. The government launched the largest federal investigation in American history, resulting in the arrest of over 1,500 individuals from all 50 states. The most serious cases were made by prosecutors against leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. For their roles in planning the attack against the U.S., some extremists were found guilty of seditious conspiracy. Take a look at the Jan. 6 prosecutions by the numbers, including the highest sentence received.

To learn more, explore NPR’s database of federal criminal cases from Jan. 6. You can also see more of NPR’s reporting on the topic.

Deep dive

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

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U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, DC.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Trump takes 325 milligrams of daily aspirin, which is four times the recommended 81 milligrams of low-dose aspirin used for cardiovascular disease prevention. The president revealed this detail in an interview with The Wall Street Journal published last week. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that anyone over 60 not start a daily dose of aspirin to prevent cardiovascular disease if they don’t already have an underlying problem. The group said it’s reasonable to stop preventive aspirin in people already taking it around age 75 years. Trump is 79. This is what you should know about aspirin and cardiac health:

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  • 💊 Doctors often prescribe the low dose of aspirin because there’s no benefit to taking a higher dose, according to a large study published in 2021.
  • 💊 Some people, including adults who have undergone heart bypass surgery and those who have had a heart attack, should take the advised dose of the drug for their entire life.
  • 💊 While safer than other blood thinners, the drug — even at low doses — raises the risk of bleeding in the stomach and brain. But these adverse events are unlikely to cause death.

3 things to know before you go

When an ant pupa has a deadly, incurable infection, it sends out a signal that tells worker ants to unpack it from its cocoon and disinfect it, a process that results in its death.

When an ant pupa has a deadly, incurable infection, it sends out a signal that tells worker ants to unpack it from its cocoon and disinfect it, a process that results in its death.

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  1. Young, terminally ill ants will send out an altruistic “kill me” signal to worker ants, according to a study in the journal Nature Communications. With this strategy, the sick ants sacrifice themselves for the good of their colony.
  2. In this week’s Far-Flung Postcards series, you can spot a real, lone California sequoia tree in the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris. Napoleon III transformed the park from a former landfill into one of the French capital’s greenest escapes.
  3. The ACLU and several authors have sued Utah over its “sensitive materials” book law, which has now banned 22 books in K-12 schools. Among the books on the ban list are The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. (via KUER)

This newsletter was edited by Suzanne Nuyen.

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Video: Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting

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Video: Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting

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Minnesota Governor Condemns ICE Shooting

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota slammed the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration agent. President Trump said that the agents had acted in self-defense.

This morning, we learned that an ICE officer shot and killed someone in Minneapolis. We have been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety, that someone was going to get hurt. Just yesterday, I said exactly that. What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV. And today, that recklessness cost someone their life.

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Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota slammed the fatal shooting of a woman by an immigration agent. President Trump said that the agents had acted in self-defense.

By Jiawei Wang

January 8, 2026

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U.S. to exit 66 international organizations in further retreat from global cooperation

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U.S. to exit 66 international organizations in further retreat from global cooperation

The symbol of the United Nations is displayed outside the Secretariat Building on Feb. 28, 2022, at United Nations Headquarters.

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WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will withdraw from dozens of international organizations, including the U.N.’s population agency and the U.N. treaty that establishes international climate negotiations, as the U.S. further retreats from global cooperation.

President Trump on Wednesday signed an executive order suspending U.S. support for 66 organizations, agencies, and commissions, following his administration’s review of participation in and funding for all international organizations, including those affiliated with the United Nations, according to a White House release.

Most of the targets are U.N.-related agencies, commissions and advisory panels that focus on climate, labor, migration and other issues the Trump administration has categorized as catering to diversity and “woke” initiatives. Other non-U.N. organizations on the list include the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and Global Counterterrorism Forum.

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“The Trump Administration has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

Trump’s decision to withdraw from organizations that foster cooperation among nations to address global challenges comes as his administration has launched military efforts or issued threats that have rattled allies and adversaries alike, including capturing autocratic Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and indicating an intention to take over Greenland.

U.S. builds on pattern of exiting global agencies

The administration previously suspended support from agencies like the World Health Organization, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees known as UNRWA, the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO. It has taken a larger, a-la-carte approach to paying its dues to the world body, picking which operations and agencies it believes align with Trump’s agenda and those that no longer serve U.S. interests.

“I think what we’re seeing is the crystallization of the U.S. approach to multilateralism, which is ‘my way or the highway,’” said Daniel Forti, head of U.N. affairs at the International Crisis Group. “It’s a very clear vision of wanting international cooperation on Washington’s own terms.”

It has marked a major shift from how previous administrations — both Republican and Democratic — have dealt with the U.N., and it has forced the world body, already undergoing its own internal reckoning, to respond with a series of staffing and program cuts.

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Many independent nongovernmental agencies — some that work with the United Nations — have cited many project closures because of the U.S. administration’s decision last year to slash foreign assistance through the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

Despite the massive shift, the U.S. officials, including Trump himself, say they have seen the potential of the U.N. and want to instead focus taxpayer money on expanding American influence in many of the standard-setting U.N. initiatives where there is competition with China, like the International Telecommunications Union, the International Maritime Organization and the International Labor Organization.

The latest global organizations the U.S. is departing

The withdrawal from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, is the latest effort by Trump and his allies to distance the U.S. from international organizations focused on climate and addressing climate change.

UNFCC, the 1992 agreement between 198 countries to financially support climate change activities in developing countries, is the underlying treaty for the landmark Paris climate agreement. Trump — who calls climate change a hoax — withdrew from that agreement soon after reclaiming the White House.

Gina McCarthy, former White House National Climate Adviser, said being the only country in the world not part of the treaty is “shortsighted, embarrassing, and a foolish decision.”

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“This Administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies, and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country,” McCarthy, who co-chairs America Is All In, a coalition of climate-concerned U.S. states and cities, said in a statement.

Mainstream scientists say climate change is behind increasing instances of deadly and costly extreme weather, including flooding, droughts, wildfires, intense rainfall events and dangerous heat.

The U.S. withdrawal could hinder global efforts to curb greenhouse gases because it “gives other nations the excuse to delay their own actions and commitments,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson, who chairs the Global Carbon Project, a group of scientists that tracks countries’ carbon dioxide emissions.

It will also be difficult to achieve meaningful progress on climate change without cooperation from the U.S., one of the world’s largest emitters and economies, experts said.

The U.N. Population Fund, the agency providing sexual and reproductive health worldwide, has long been a lightning rod for Republican opposition, and Trump cut funding for it during his first term. He and other GOP officials have accused the agency of participating in “coercive abortion practices” in countries like China.

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When President Biden took office in January 2021, he restored funding for the agency. A State Department review conducted the following year found no evidence to support GOP claims.

Other organizations and agencies that the U.S. will quit include the Carbon Free Energy Compact, the United Nations University, the International Cotton Advisory Committee, the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the Pan-American Institute for Geography and History, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies and the International Lead and Zinc Study Group.

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