Briefing: Data Security, Infectious Disease Control, Trans Healthcare
We’re back from our summer break and making a slight change to these newsletters: Our Friday briefings will now only include short-form updates from our issue teams. We’ll keep publishing issue-specific deeper dives (like this Data Security/Trans Healthcare double feature or this one from the Immigration team), but we’ll send them separately, as we do for contributions and commentaries from our team, and for updates on our work. Time for a little more breathing room for our editors and readers both.
Data Security
We added 24 items to our timeline. Federal judges have blocked Trump’s executive order to limit voting by mail and the proposed Postal Service rule implementing it. Meanwhile, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has confirmed what 11 district courts already decided: States do not have to hand over their sensitive voter data to the federal government. The administration also lost on data privacy at the Supreme Court, which ruled 6–3 that it’s reasonable for people to expect that their cell phone location data is private. Finally, the DOJ has filed a new round of lawsuits against states, this time seeking the private data of SNAP recipients.
Infectious Disease Control & Prevention
The Infectious Disease Control team added 13 new entries to our timeline. The quarantine period for the recent Andes hantavirus outbreak is officially over, but the CDC has now raised its Ebola response in Congo and Uganda to the highest level and, as of the end of June, the US has already racked up at least 2,000 measles cases, more than 90% of 2025’s total count. It usually takes time for healthy policy changes to unfold, but the consequences of allowing soldiers to skip their flu vaccines were both predictable and very fast. Two months in, after more than 300 got sick and one died, the vaccination mandate is now back in force, at least for new recruits.
Transgender Healthcare
The Trans Healthcare team added 5 new events to our timeline, and they’re all about the courts. Federal judges continued blocking DOJ subpoenas for trans youths’ private medical records (this time in New York and California) and have temporarily barred the federal government from forcibly detransitioning inmates. In Colorado, a hospital says that it’s complying with a court order to provide gender-affirming care to trans youth but claims that its doctors refuse to actually provide the care for fear of prosecution; families have filed a motion to hold the hospital in contempt. And in a new line of attack, the Federal Trade Commission and four states are suing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) over their widely adopted standards of care for trans youth.
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