r/WhatTrumpHasDone

The Trump administration is awarding $2 billion in grants to nine quantum-computing companies in deals that include U.S. government equity stakes, the Commerce Department said.

The move accelerates the administration’s plans to boost the nascent industry, which has attracted a wave of investment from investors and businesses in recent months.

The department has agreed to give $1 billion of the package to IBM, a leader in the race to build computers that use quantum mechanics to solve problems much faster than traditional supercomputers. Coupled with advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing has the potential to turbocharge scientific research, making it an economic and national security priority for President Trump.

IBM and other companies are working to develop specialized chips for quantum computing, a focus for the government in its bid to spur domestic supply chains. Chip maker GlobalFoundries is receiving $375 million in funding. The rest of the firms are expected to receive $100 million, except for startup Diraq, which is slated to get $38 million.

A slew of companies pursuing various approaches to quantum are slated to be awarded funds, including publicly traded firms D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing and Infleqtion.

The deals still need to be completed.

Premarket trading early Thursday pointed to large gains for the publicly traded companies involved, including about 7% for IBM and GlobalFoundries.

The funding for the quantum deals comes from the 2022 Chips and Science Act, which includes money for earlier stage technology projects. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has overhauled the office, asking semiconductor companies to increase their domestic investments and taking a nearly 10% stake in Intel, which has seen shares surge since the unusual deal.

The government will receive a minority equity stake in each quantum company, adding to a string of similar deals including rare-earths magnet maker Vulcan Elements and mining company MP Materials. The department didn’t provide details about the exact size and structure of each equity stake.

“The Trump administration is leading the world into a new era of American innovation,” Lutnick said in a statement.

The new funding comes as the administration works on an executive order focused on the industry, according to people familiar with the matter. Companies including Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google are also investing heavily in the space after recent quantum breakthroughs, attracting investors to the industry.

The sector is in a much better position and there is more line of sight to quantum really becoming a reality, a senior Commerce Department official said.

The Wall Street Journal previously reported the department was talking to quantum companies about funding and equity stakes.

Some tech analysts have said the quantum sector and others are too risky for the government to make equity investments, but Lutnick has argued that the deals are structured so taxpayers will ultimately benefit. The senior Commerce official said the agency did so many different deals to spread out its bets, acknowledging that it could take years for them to pan out.

“Everybody is excited about quantum because it is the next big thing. A lot of the expectations and hopes have yet to be realized,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a charity advocating for policies and systems to protect GPS satellites, signals, and users. One application of quantum has the potential to replace GPS, tech analysts say.

Quantum executives say the amount of time it takes to make advancements in the field is falling thanks to the investments and research breakthroughs such as more powerful chips. “We think now the time frames have actually collapsed,” IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna said in a March interview. He compares quantum to where AI chips were a decade ago.

The other quantum startups expected to receive funding are Atom Computing, PsiQuantum, and Quantiniuum.

Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments. Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated.

The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies should President Donald Trump restart the bombing campaign, according to the four sources familiar with the intelligence. It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term.

While the time to restart production of different weapons components varies, some US intelligence estimates indicate Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months, one of the sources, a US official, told CNN.

“The Iranians have exceeded all timelines the IC had for reconstitution,” the US official said.

Drone attacks are a particular concern for regional allies. If hostilities resume, Iran could augment its missile production capability — which has been significantly degraded — with more drone launches, to continue firing at Israel and Gulf countries that are well within range of both weapons systems.

Trump has repeatedly threatened to resume combat operations against Iran if the two countries fail to reach a deal to end the war, including saying publicly on Tuesday that he’d been an hour from restarting bombing, meaning these military capabilities could come into play.

Iran has been able to rebuild much faster than expected due to a combination of factors, ranging from support it is receiving from Russia and China to the fact that the US and Israel did not inflict as much damage as the two countries had hoped, one of the sources told CNN. For example, China has continued to provide Iran with components during the conflict that can be used to build missiles, two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments told CNN, though that has likely been curtailed by the ongoing US blockade.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told CBS last week that China is giving Iran “components of missile manufacturing” but declined to elaborate further.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun denied the allegation during a press conference, calling it “not based on facts.”

Meanwhile, Iran also still maintains ballistic-missile, drone-attack and anti-air capability despite the serious damage inflicted by US-Israeli strikes, according to recent US intelligence assessments, meaning the quick rebuilding of military production capacity isn’t starting from scratch.

A spokesperson for US Central Command declined to comment, saying the command does not discuss matters related to intelligence.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told CNN in a statement that “America’s military is the most powerful in the world and has everything it needs to execute at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

“We have executed multiple successful operations across combatant commands while ensuring the U.S. military possesses a deep arsenal of capabilities to protect our people and our interests,” Parnell added.

CNN reported in April that US intelligence assessed that roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers had survived US strikes. A recent report increased that figure to two thirds partially due to the ongoing ceasefire providing Iran with time to dig out launchers that might have been buried in previous strikes, according to sources familiar with the intelligence.

The US intelligence assessment total may include launchers that are currently inaccessible, such as those buried underground by strikes but not destroyed.

Thousands of Iranian drones still exist — roughly 50% of the country’s drone capabilities — two sources previously told CNN the intelligence indicated.

The intelligence also showed a large percentage of Iran’s coastal defense cruise missiles were intact, consistent with the US not focusing its air campaign on coastal military assets though they have been hitting ships. Those missiles serve as a key capability allowing Iran to threaten shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Taken together, recent US intelligence reports overwhelmingly suggest that the war has degraded Iran’s military capabilities, but not destroyed them, with the Iranians demonstrating they can effectively limit the long-term impact of the war by quickly reconstituting after those strikes.

That includes rebuilding its defense industrial base, which CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said on Tuesday has been largely eliminated.

“Operation Epic Fury significantly degraded Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones while destroying 90% of their defense industrial base, ensuring Iran cannot reconstitute for years,” Cooper testified during Tuesday’s hearing before the House Armed Services Committee.

But Cooper’s testimony stands in stark contrast to US intelligence assessments examining Iran’s ability to rebuild its military capabilities and the timeline in which they are able to do so, with two sources telling CNN the intelligence is inconsistent with the descriptions provided by the CENTCOM commander.

One of the sources familiar with recent US intelligence assessments told CNN that the damage to Iran’s defense industrial base has likely set its ability to reconstitute back by a matter of months, not years. And some of Iran’s defense industrial base remains intact, which could further accelerate the timeline for reconstituting certain capabilities, the source noted.

All 50 states have average gas prices above $4 a gallon, AAA said Wednesday, with seven now topping $5 a gallon.

As the war with Iran approaches the three-month mark, soaring fuel prices are costing Americans millions of dollars a day, crushing small business profits, and driving a surge in inflation.

The national average now stands at $4.56 a gallon, AAA said.

California is the nation's high, at $6.15 per gallon, while Georgia is the lowest at $4.01 a gallon.

Some southern states had been holding the line at $3.98 or $3.99 a gallon in recent days.

The average price of a gallon of gas is up 53% since the war started.

There are signs that things could get much worse.

Widely watched GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan said Wednesday morning that the national average could hit an all-time record north of $5.03 per gallon if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed through mid-summer.

An American humanitarian group operating in the part of Africa affected by an Ebola outbreak said Tuesday that Trump administration cuts were “contributing to the rapid escalation” of the epidemic.

The International Rescue Committee said that after the funding cuts in March 2025, it was forced to reduce its health and preparedness work from five to just two sections in Ituri Province in the northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the epicenter of the outbreak.

“Funding cuts have left the region dangerously exposed,” said Heather Reoch Kerr, the rescue committee’s Congo country director. “The sharp rise in reported cases over the last few days reflects the reality that surveillance systems are now catching up with transmission that has likely been occurring for some time.”

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Tuesday at a meeting of health officials and diplomats at WHO headquarters in Geneva that he, too, was alarmed by the “scale and speed” of this Ebola outbreak, though he has not blamed the U.S. for it.

The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but announced Tuesday that it will fund the establishment of up to 50 treatment clinics and associated frontline efforts to treat Ebola in the Congo and Uganda. “Clinics will provide emergency Ebola screening, triage, and isolation capacity,” the department said in a statement.

“This additional funding announcement, in the first days of the epidemic, should send a clear message: the United States has an ironclad commitment to ensuring this response is fully resourced, rapid, and cooperative between key global health and humanitarian partners,” the State Department added. This funding will be provided mainly through the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, it said.

President Donald Trump pulled out of the WHO in January. He stopped paying the U.S.’s dues, which made up about 20 percent of the U.N. body’s annual budget, as of January 2025, before the U.S. withdrawal became effective. Trump said he was doing so partly because the WHO bungled the global response to Covid-19, an accusation the health body has rejected.

The WHO declared the Ebola outbreak “an international public health emergency” over the weekend.

The number of people suspected to have died from the disease jumped 30 percent in a day, from 100 to 130, and there are now more than 500 suspected cases, Tedros said. So far, 30 cases have been confirmed through testing in the DRC.

A rare strain of Ebola — Bundibugyo — for which there are no vaccines or treatments, sparked the outbreak. There have been more than 30 Ebola outbreaks in Africa since the deadly hemorrhagic fever was discovered in the 1970s, but only two previous ones involved Bundibugyo. The current one is already deadlier than those two, though far behind the death toll of more than 11,000 caused by the virus’ Zaire strain from 2014 to 2016 in west Africa.

The WHO said that the previous two outbreaks of Bundibugyo killed between 30 and 50 percent of the people who became infected — fewer than the Sudan and Zaire strains.

Early tests looked for infections with one of those strains and as a result, overlooked Bundibugyo, according to Matthew Kavanagh, the director of Georgetown University’s Center for Global Health Policy and Politics.

But the U.S. funding cuts have also played a role, Kavanagh said in a statement. “When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline [U.S. Agency for International Development] programs, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early,” he said.

Before 2025, the U.S. funded health and outbreak preparedness activities carried out by the International Rescue Committee in the eastern DRC, the group said in a statement. “This included waste management areas, triage zones, handwashing stations, showers, and latrines critical to safely managing infectious disease outbreaks,” the IRC said.

Kerr said the transmission of the Ebola virus in the current outbreak may be significantly higher than currently known and that the number of cases is expected to rise over the next few weeks. Cases have already emerged in major regional cities, and the outbreak’s epicenter is in a hard-to-reach, transient mining area where rebels are fighting, which could make virus containment more challenging.

Many health facilities in the area lack adequate protective equipment, the capacity to monitor the virus’ spread or the support needed to respond because of “years of underinvestment and recent funding cuts,” Kerr said in the IRC statement.

The group has started distributing protective equipment in the DRC and supports Uganda’s health ministry response, including screening people crossing the two countries’ borders. Uganda sits directly to the east and has reported two cases, including one death in its capital city of Kampala.

The State Department in a Monday statement outlined other measures it’s taken to respond to the outbreak.

The department said it had set up an interagency coordination cell and an incident management system in Washington within 24 hours of learning about the confirmed Ebola cases and that it convenes a daily meeting of leaders to prioritize the response.

“We are also working closely with [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and the U.S. military on potential repatriation of affected Americans, based on assessed exposure and health needs,” the department said in a statement.

A U.S. doctor who tested positive for the virus has been evacuated from the country to Germany’s Berlin Charité hospital.

Political operative and longtime Trump ally Michael Caputo filed the first known claim for the Justice Department’s new “anti-weaponization” fund Tuesday, seeking $2.7 million in restitution.

Caputo, who was a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services during President Donald Trump’s first term, says he was the target of “Crossfire Hurricane” — an FBI investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

Caputo posted a letter on X addressed to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche saying that “the machinery of government was clearly politically weaponized against my family from July 2016 to December 2025.”

“They found nothing; we lost everything,” he added.

Caputo confirmed the document’s authenticity to NBC News.

Caputo said in his public letter that in 2021 he was the target of another investigation in connection to his One America News documentary about former President Joe Biden and Ukraine.

An intelligence assessment declassified in 2021 seemed to refer to Caputo’s documentary, titled “The Ukraine Hoax: Impeachment, Biden Cash, and Mass Murder with guest host Michael Caputo,” which he made after he had left HHS.

A 2017 assessment found that Russia had tried to influence the 2016 election. A bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report, signed off on by then-Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., validated the findings of that report.

The Justice Department established the nearly $1.8 billion fund Monday after Trump moved to dismiss a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns.

Trump said Monday that the fund, which he said he had no involvement in establishing, was meant to reimburse people who were “horribly treated.”

Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that said “anybody can apply” to get money from the fund, saying that hypothetically Hunter Biden could also make a plea for restitution.

Trump declined to answer a question Monday about whether he or his family would seek compensation from the fund, but Vance assured reporters Tuesday that the Trumps would not do so.

Critics have lambasted the fund, characterizing it as a “slush fund” Trump could use to “reward allies, including the nearly 1,600 defendants convicted or charged in connection with the January 6th attack on the Capitol.”

Blanche said at a Senate hearing Tuesday that payouts for the fund will be decided by a five-member commission, four members of which will be chosen by the attorney general and one who will be chosen in consultation with Congress.

An American exposed to the deadly hantavirus while on a cruise from Argentina said on Monday that she is not being allowed to leave a federal quarantine unit in Nebraska.

Angela Perryman, 47, received a federal quarantine order, a copy of which she provided to The New York Times, on Monday, after making plans to self-isolate in Florida. It requires her to stay at the National Quarantine Unit in Omaha until the end of May.

Ms. Perryman said she has been tested once for the hantavirus, and the results were negative. She is not experiencing symptoms, she said, although she did have brief conversations on the ship with a passenger who later died from the illness.

It was not immediately clear why Ms. Perryman was being required to stay, though federal law authorizes health officials to impose quarantines to prevent the spread of disease. Representatives from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Nebraska Quarantine Unit did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Federal health officials have previously said that the 18 American passengers from the cruise ship would need to be screened and monitored at the quarantine unit for several days. Officials had suggested that passengers might not be required to stay for the virus’s full 42-day incubation period.

“At some point, they may be able leave their medical centers to continue quarantines at home, depending on how they are doing,” Captain Brendan Jackson, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, said in a news conference last week after the passengers arrived in Omaha and Atlanta.

He said that each would have an “individualized decision plan.”

Ms. Perryman said she and the 17 other passengers were told during a video conference call with federal officials on Sunday that if they did not remain at the unit voluntarily, they would receive a mandatory quarantine order keeping them there.

Her order came on Monday, authorized by Jay Bhattacharya, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Citing federal public health law, it requires her to remain in the Nebraska facility for 21 days after her arrival, a period that expires on May 31.

That three-week period is when the risk of becoming symptomatic from the hantavirus is the highest.

The National Quarantine Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha is the only federally funded facility of its kind. Two passengers from the ship were originally sent to a facility in Atlanta, but have since been moved to Omaha.

A pair of Air Force refueling planes were flying high over Iraq two weeks into the U.S. and Israeli war against Iran. The KC-135 Stratotankers, which carry up to 200,000 pounds of jet fuel, function as flying gas stations, extending the reach of United States and allied aircraft far from air bases. On March 12, the two tankers collided. One of the planes safely landed with a badly damaged tail; the other crashed, killing six service members, constituting almost half of U.S. military fatalities in the conflict. The same day, U.S. Central Command said that the crash over Iraq’s western Anbar province had occurred in “friendly airspace” and had not been caused by hostile fire.

Initial intelligence reports told a different story. They indicated that the U.S. government had detected anti-aircraft fire by Iran-backed militias in the area around the time of the collision and that the pilots may have been forced to take evasive actions. The reports, which haven’t been previously made public, were described to us by two current officials and one former official. But Centcom’s leaders, citing different, more highly classified information, were convinced that those initial reports were mistaken. Militias had never fired surface-to-air missiles that could have threatened the aircraft, according to their assessment. The initial reports may have picked up instead on launches of missiles aimed at ground targets. That’s why the Pentagon statement asserted that no hostile fire was involved and that the skies were friendly. An Air Force–led investigation is expected to conclude that the disaster was an “avoidable mishap” by pilots operating in congested airspace, military officials told us.

Centcom’s quick and definitive public assessment of the incident, despite intelligence suggesting a more complicated picture, fits a Trump-administration pattern of omitting from its public statements important details about the conduct of the war. Senior officials have trumpeted military successes—two days before the crash, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the U.S. had “total air dominance”—and have downplayed the resilience of Iranian forces and their armed proxy groups across the Middle East.

The contrasting accounts of what preceded the crash point to the confusion of a crowded battlefield, as well as to the serious threat that Iran’s proxies in neighboring Iraq pose to the U.S. and Israeli war effort 23 years after President George W. Bush ordered Iraq’s invasion in pursuit of Saddam Hussein. President Trump said within hours of the start of the Iran war that one of his goals was to “ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces.”

But those groups remain a potent force: Iran-sponsored militias have pounded U.S. facilities across Iraq with relentless rocket and drone attacks since the war began, forcing a near-total evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. Iran’s proxies in Iraq also possess advanced arsenals, including ballistic missiles and anti-aircraft weapons. Early in the conflict, one official said, U.S. intelligence indicated that a refueling tanker narrowly avoided a militia missile in the same area of western Iraq where the deadly collision occurred. A Centcom spokesperson disputed that account, saying it had no indication of such an incident.

The war is now subject to a shaky cease-fire as the United States and Iran continue an extended standoff over control of the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for global energy supplies that Iran has effectively closed.

Those killed in the March 12 crash include three active-duty airmen from the 6th Air Refueling Wing based in Tampa, Florida, and three National Guard airmen from the Ohio Air National Guard’s 121st Air Refueling Wing. A Pentagon official declined to comment, saying that providing details before the Air Force probe is complete would be premature. The official, like others we interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. A family member of one of the service members who was killed recently told us that the Pentagon relayed to him that the incident was under investigation but that it has not provided any more information since.

The Iraqi government is a U.S. security partner. Washington helped build up the country’s security forces in the more than two decades since the 2003 invasion. But the State Department says militias, which operate both within the state’s security apparatus and outside of it, have struck U.S. sites in Iraq more than 600 times with drone and missile attacks since the war began on the last day of February. Their targets have included bases, diplomatic facilities, and aircraft on the ground, Phillip Smyth, an independent analyst of Iraqi proxy groups, told us. Iraq is “definitely not a friendly airspace,” as the Pentagon asserted, Smyth said. The Iraqi militias have also claimed or carried out as many as 5,200 strikes on military and civilian targets in Persian Gulf countries as well as on Jordan and Syria.

Other Iranian proxies in the region include the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But the militias in Iraq, many of whose members are on Iraqi-government payrolls as part of the paramilitary Popular Mobilization Forces, may be the most potent and the least discussed, Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who studies Mideastern extremist groups, told us.

Israel has devastated Gaza in its campaign against Hamas and, in recent weeks, has targeted Hezbollah strongholds in southern Lebanon. Last year, the U.S. carried out a monthslong campaign against the Houthis to stop attacks on ships transiting around the Bab el-Mandeb, the strait that separates the Arabian Peninsula from the Horn of Africa. But Iran’s network of proxies in Iraq has faced comparatively fewer U.S. strikes since the Iran war began, reflecting a U.S. desire not to be seen as reengaging in Iraq two decades after its invasion. Neither the U.S. nor Israel has done much targeting of the groups’ top leadership in Iraq during that time, allowing the militias to preserve their command structures and maintain operations. “These guys have only consolidated more of the state,” Zelin said. “I suspect the same dynamics will continue unless the U.S. and its allies—or Iraqis themselves—decide they want to do something far more serious about it.”

Like the regime in Tehran, the Iraqi militias have sought to force the United States to expend costly air-defense munitions to protect personnel and facilities. U.S. officials, including Hegseth and General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have publicly minimized any concerns about the depletion of U.S. munitions. But not everyone in the administration trusts those assurances. In White House meetings, Vice President Vance has repeatedly questioned the Pentagon about the accuracy of such claims.

The U.S. military has been in intermittent conflict with Iraqi militias for more than 20 years. (Hegseth, who served in the Iraq war as a National Guardsman, has cited the hundreds of U.S. soldiers killed by those Iranian proxies as a justification for the current conflict.) In subsequent years, however, U.S. forces entered an awkward, arms-length alliance with the militias as both Washington and Baghdad battled the Islamic State. Today, the militias and their affiliated parties wield formidable political power, holding roughly one-third of the seats in Iraq’s 329-member Parliament, despite the United States’ role as Iraq’s chief Western ally.

The militias’ violence during the Iran war has intensified friction between Washington and Baghdad. In the past month, U.S. officials have suspended security aid to Iraq, halted the transfer of U.S. dollars generated by Iraqi oil sales, and thrown their support behind a new prime minister–elect in an effort to force the government to take on the militias.

The administration can apply that pressure because Trump is already inclined to pull remaining U.S. forces from Iraq and is willing to risk severing the relationship, Victoria Taylor, who served as a senior State Department official for Iraq and Iran during the Biden administration, told us. Trump recently withdrew U.S. forces from neighboring Syria, another center of what remains of the Islamist insurgency.

Kataib Hezbollah, which has been designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group since 2009, is the most powerful of the Iraqi militias equipped, trained, and funded by Iran. It’s the group that some of the early intelligence suggested had been targeting the U.S. tankers.

The group has a history of launching attacks on U.S. assets and allied targets across the Middle East. U.S. officials blamed it for the recent kidnapping of the American freelance journalist Shelly Kittleson in Baghdad. (She was released a week later.) Federal prosecutors also recently charged Mohammad Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an alleged senior member of Kataib Hezbollah, with involvement in at least 18 attacks or attempted attacks in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Two senior Iraqi officials told us that Kataib Hezbollah has an arsenal of advanced weapons, including ballistic missiles, and has begun manufacturing its own missiles and drones, as do Iran-linked militia groups in Lebanon and Yemen.

Among Iran-backed militias’ most powerful weapons is the 358, a surface-to-air missile that experts say can loiter before striking its target and reach an altitude of up to roughly 30,000 feet. Kataib Hezbollah is believed to have possessed the missile at one point in the past, though whether it still does is unclear. Iraqi officials do not believe that the group has used one so far in the war, and the militia does not appear to have successfully targeted any foreign aircraft.

Unlike in previous American wars, when the Pentagon allowed journalists to witness the wars alongside deployed forces, details about the Iran war have come almost exclusively from the top—and have been uniformly positive. Hegseth and Caine have held a number of Pentagon press briefings in which they have focused on the degradation of Iranian forces and missile capabilities as well as the overall number of targets hit—more than 13,000 inside Iran before the cease-fire kicked in.

Admiral Brad Cooper, the head of Centcom, has also participated, and last week he was on Capitol Hill, where he was pressed by lawmakers about the war’s civilian casualties. He said that Centcom was investigating one incident, the bombing of a school in southern Iran on the war’s first day, which killed about 170 people, in an apparently errant U.S. strike. But Airwars, a watchdog group that has worked closely with Centcom in the past, has identified some 300 incidents in the Iran war that involved civilian casualties that the group claims merit investigation. Whether those incidents involved U.S. or Israeli strikes is unclear. During his congressional testimony, Cooper said there were initial investigations into allegations of civilian casualties, but those have not yet found any U.S. involvement. Centcom declined to comment further.

Despite Hegseth’s claims about America’s air dominance, the war has thrust American pilots into dangerous airspace over Iran. Iranian forces have shot down an American F-15E Strike Eagle and an A-10 Warthog. They have also damaged a F-35 stealth fighter jet, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing. After mounting major rescue operations, the Pentagon was able to safely recover the F-15 and A-10 aircrews.

Much about the March 12 incident in which the refueling tanker went down remains unknown. Soon after the crash, a coalition of Iran-backed Iraqi-militia groups known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq—which includes Kataib Hezbollah—claimed responsibility, saying that it had used “appropriate weaponry” to shoot down the tanker “in defense of our country’s sovereignty and its airspace violated by the aircraft of the occupation forces.” The coalition also claimed responsibility for damaging the second aircraft. American officials have dismissed those assertions as disinformation.

One of the U.S. officials we spoke with said that the pair of tankers was on a mission that involved refueling Israeli aircraft. Both Centcom and the Israel Defense Forces declined to comment. Iraqi officials described the tanker crash as an accident. One said the U.S. government asked members of Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service to help retrieve the fallen airmen. Centcom declined to comment on that too.

For now, the prospect of further U.S. casualties appears reduced after Trump said yesterday that he had held back a planned attack against Iran to give a new Iranian peace proposal a chance. The pause may also provide Iran’s proxy militias with the opportunity to regroup to harass U.S. forces anew.

State prosecutors on Monday charged a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent with assault in the January shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis, an incident that sparked violent protests at the height of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

The identity of the agent accused of firing the shot, Christian Castro, 52, had not been disclosed until Monday. Mr. Castro was charged with four counts of second-degree assault, a felony, and one count of falsely reporting a crime, a misdemeanor.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Castro had a lawyer.

A state investigation into the Jan. 14 shooting of the immigrant, Julio C. Sosa-Celis, had been stymied by the refusal of federal agencies to share information, including the names of the two agents involved in a chase that preceded the shooting.

Mr. Sosa-Celis, who was shot in the leg, was one of three people shot by federal agents during the immigration crackdown in Minnesota over the winter. Agents also shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Law enforcement officers are allowed to use deadly force if they reasonably perceive an imminent threat of death or great bodily harm to themselves or someone else.

Minnesota prosecutors have acknowledged that they face formidable practical and legal challenges in prosecuting federal agents for on-duty conduct. The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution gives federal officials broad immunity from state prosecution, but Minnesota officials say those protections not absolute.

The Trump administration said the crackdown, known as Operation Metro Surge, would root out illegal immigration and fraud amid insufficient cooperation from state and local officials. Minnesota’s Democratic leaders condemned the campaign as a constitutionally dubious occupation motivated by political animus. Federal judges expressed alarm about some of the administration’s actions.

After the surge, Minnesota’s attorney general and the Hennepin County attorney, both Democrats, took the unusual step of asking a federal judge to make federal authorities provide evidence from all three shootings. That lawsuit is unresolved.

The shooting of Mr. Sosa-Celis, who was in the United States without legal status, touched off hours of violent protests in Minneapolis. Some protesters ransacked the vehicles of federal agents and threw fireworks at officers. The scene became so tense that investigators left before they had finished collecting evidence.

Federal officials initially defended the shooting. The agent encountered Mr. Sosa-Celis after one of Mr. Sosa-Celis’s housemates fled in a car and led agents on a chase to his home.

Federal officials at first described a minutes-long attack on the agent there, with a broom and shovel. Kristi Noem, then secretary of homeland security, described it as “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.”

Both Mr. Sosa-Celis and the housemate, Alfredo A. Aljorna, who was also from Venezuela and in the country illegally, were charged with federal felonies.

Within weeks, the federal government’s account began to unravel. The charges against both men were dropped, and federal officials said they were instead investigating the agents. Video footage of the incident obtained by The New York Times showed no sustained attack with a shovel and contradicted the agent’s claim of a roughly three-minute beating. The encounter lasted about 12 seconds, the video showed.

The shooting of Mr. Sosa-Celis, who was not seriously injured, happened a few days after another ICE agent shot Ms. Good after a brief confrontation in a residential neighborhood. Later in January, federal agents killed Mr. Pretti, a nurse at the local Veterans Affairs hospital.

The two killings sparked protests in Minnesota and beyond. Todd Blanche, now the acting attorney general, said in late January that the F.B.I. would investigate Mr. Pretti’s killing alongside lawyers from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

The Department of Homeland Security has said that the agent who shot Ms. Good acted in self defense. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota sought to open a civil rights investigation into that shooting, but were overruled by senior administration officials, who instead instructed prosecutors to investigate the activism of Ms. Good’s partner. Several prosecutors resigned in protest.

Mr. Castro is the second immigration agent to be charged by Ms. Moriarty’s office over actions this winter. In April, Ms. Moriarty charged Gregory Donnell Morgan Jr. with assault, saying the agent had pointed a gun at motorists along a state highway in February. Mr. Morgan, 35, of Maryland, has an active warrant for his arrest, court records show.

President Donald Trump on Monday said he would ask the Justice Department to open an investigation into an error regarding mail-in ballots in Maryland, his latest clash with Democratic Gov. Wes Moore as he pushes unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud.

The Maryland State Board of Elections announced last week that it had been “made aware of an error by our mail-in ballot vendor” that led to some voters receiving ballots for the wrong party in the state’s upcoming primaries. Maryland State Administrator of Elections Jared DeMarinis said in a Friday statement that the board was working to address the error by sending replacement ballots.

He said over 500,000 voters had requested mail-in ballots, but added that only voters who were mailed ballots before May 14 were affected by the error.

Still, Trump claimed in a social media post, without evidence, that the state “sent out 500,000 Illegal Mail In Ballots, and they got caught!” adding that “nobody knows what’s happening with the first 500,000 they sent.”

Trump has long targeted mail-in voting, spreading conspiracy theories about the practice as the reason for why he lost his reelection bid in 2020. Since then, he has advocated for eliminating no-excuse mail voting — a practice that is common across red and blue states — in favor of allowing for only a very limited use of the voting method.

He signed an executive order in March seeking to crack down on the voting method, citing unfounded allegations about electoral fraud. The move quickly drew legal challenges from Democrats.

Trump blamed Moore for the problem. “He allowed this to happen in order to make sure that Democrats win,” the president wrote in a Monday afternoon post on Truth Social.

This year’s error has nothing to do with the upcoming general election.

The error sparked swift rebukes from Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters and Maryland’s conservative Freedom Caucus, who called on DeMarinis to release the state’s voter rolls to the federal government. The DOJ sued Maryland in December for access to the state’s voter registration list, which Maryland and other states have resisted handing over to the Trump administration.

The Trump administration has escalated its efforts to consolidate its power over elections ahead of this fall’s midterm elections. Both acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel have promised action — including arrests — in relation to the DOJ’s various probes into allegations of voter fraud in recent weeks.

Patel said last month that DOJ prosecutors would be making arrests “very soon” related to the 2020 election, which Trump and his allies have falsely claimed was tainted by widespread voter fraud for years, despite numerous independent reviews and audits finding no such evidence.

And Blanche said in a Sunday appearance on Fox News that the DOJ’s probe of a yearslong investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election would be made public “at the right time.”

Trump has sparred with Moore on several occasions in recent months, including a dispute over the National Governors Association’s annual gathering in Washington. Moore has served as vice chair of the bipartisan organization since July 2025.

Trump has also attacked the Maryland governor over his response to a January sewage spill in the Potomac River, even though the leak stemmed from a sewer line operated by DC Water and regulated by the federal government.

After U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained his mother, 2-year-old Orlin Hernandez Reyes moved into a shed.

His uncle, Samuel Maldonado Erazo, was charged with taking care of the toddler and his three cousins, the oldest of whom was 7, while Orlin’s mother and her sister waited in ICE detention to be deported to Honduras.

Maldonado had once served in the Honduran military, a co-worker later told investigators, and now lived in the Florida Panhandle. He was separated from Orlin’s aunt, and police said he drank heavily and whipped the children with a wire. Orlin repeatedly endured the worst of the abuse.

An autopsy showed he had multiple broken bones. There were signs his tiny body had been sexually battered. Authorities allege Maldonado repeatedly struck Orlin in the head, stomped on his body and burned his skin with a lighter. His hands bore bruises, a sign that Orlin had tried to shield himself from the blows. The coroner listed his cause of death as multiple blunt force traumas.

Maldonado has been charged with murder and pleaded not guilty.

In a statement a week after Orlin died, acting ICE director Todd M. Lyons berated Orlin’s mother, Wendy Hernandez Reyes, alleging that she had “abandoned” her child to the man who allegedly killed him — an undocumented immigrant who “never should’ve been in this country in the first place,” but was nonetheless allowed to care for the children while Orlin’s mother was in detention.

“Reyes chose to leave her son here with a violent murderer who took his life,” he asserted.

But a review of court records and the mother’s own account contradict ICE’s narrative and raise questions about how the Trump administration is deporting scores of parents, many without their children. Hernandez was detained by a sheriff’s deputy in Alabama while on her way to work. Local law enforcement agencies are increasingly carrying out immigration enforcement as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign.

The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office handed Hernandez over to ICE. She was deported back to Honduras less than a month after her arrest.

Hernandez does not match the profile of the “worst of the worst” criminals that the Department of Homeland Security has promised to prioritize for removal. She is a victim of domestic violence, her lawyer said, and has no criminal record. But in President Donald Trump’s second term, the stated goal is to remove as many undocumented immigrants as possible. That has increasingly included parents of young children, who are being placed in foster care, living with relatives or even left to fend for themselves — with little or no follow-up to ensure they are safe.

Nothing in federal law requires ICE — or any other agency — to check in with a child’s caregiver after detaining their parents, attorneys say. Agency policy calls for following parents’ wishes for their children, including removing them together, but immigration lawyers say requests to be deported as a family are often ignored. The lack of safeguards for the children left behind is considered a glaring blind spot in a system going full-tilt to deport record numbers of immigrants.

Hernandez said she repeatedly urged ICE officers to let her son go with her, but her pleas were met with silence.

“How could I abandon my son, if my son was the love of my life?” Hernandez, 29, said in an interview. “I did everything with my son. I am not a bad mother who left my child with a killer.”

ICE did not respond to questions about how officers handled the case and whether they checked on Orlin afterward. The Florida Department of Children and Families, which responds to allegations of abuse, also did not respond to questions about the case. It is unclear whether anyone reported concerns before Orlin collapsed and was pronounced dead at a hospital in Pensacola, Florida.

The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office said the officer stopped the car Hernandez was riding in for alleged traffic violations, checked the immigration status of all of the passengers inside as required by state law, and alerted ICE and sheriff’s officers who had been deputized to enforce immigration laws under an agreement known as 287(g).

Hernandez said she is currently in hiding in Honduras because ICE had previously deported her ex-partner after he was arrested in Pensacola for allegedly beating her and Orlin.

Orlin’s body remains at a morgue in Atlanta. Hernandez is trying to return to the United States to bury her son. She believes that, as an American, his grave site should be here.

Hernandez was pregnant with Orlin when she arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2022, following her sister to the U.S. in search of safety and a better life. Both had relationships with volatile and sometimes violent men, according to Hernandez’s lawyer, and often found protection in each other. Hernandez said she surrendered at a port of entry, with the help of a pastor in Mexico who worked in a migrant shelter, and was released to stay with a friend in Ohio while she awaited an asylum hearing.

She later moved to Pensacola to be closer to her sister and gave birth to her son. While in Florida, she missed her court hearing, which resulted in an immigration judge ordering her deportation in 2023. Nonetheless, her dream was for Orlin to grow up in the U.S., and under the Biden administration, she was not a target for removal.

Orlin’s father followed them to Pensacola, but the couple’s relationship was unraveling.

In 2024, the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office responded to her home after a neighbor called 911 on her partner. The police report said that he had gotten drunk and that they argued. She grabbed the baby, then 18 months old, and hid in the bathroom, but police said her partner kicked in the locked door. As she fled, he allegedly hurled a wooden chair at her and Orlin and struck her in the head with a beer bottle.

A few months later, Trump won the presidential election with broad support in Florida, where she lived, and Alabama, where she worked. Trump immediately issued an executive order to enlist state and local police to assist his mass deportation program to “the maximum extent permitted by law.”

In Baldwin County, Alabama, Sheriff Anthony Lowery celebrated, calling it a “great day for Baldwin County and for the United States.” He said that under President Joe Biden, ICE often refused to arrest the undocumented immigrants his officers found during traffic stops. Officials in the previous administration asserted that officers should focus on preventing crime rather than apprehending people with civil immigration violations.

“The answer was no every time,” he told Midday Mobile host Sean Sullivan in January 2025, speaking of his department’s efforts to transfer undocumented immigrants to ICE under Biden. He said the Trump administration’s eagerness to engage local law enforcement in immigration enforcement had enabled them to arrest more undocumented people.

The Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office soon announced it was signing up for a federal program known as 287(g), for the section of the 1996 law that created it. The program offers three ways of collaborating with ICE, including a “task force” model that trains and encourages state and local officers to enforce federal immigration laws. The program gained renewed interest following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after reports found that some of the hijackers had been stopped for traffic violations.

But Justice Department investigations found that some localities later engaged in racial profiling targeting Latinos for unlawful arrests. President Barack Obama ended the task force collaborations with local departments, though 287(g) programs operating out of jails to identify criminals continued.

Only 135 police agencies across 16 states were signed up to participate in the initiative when Biden left office. The program now has more than 1,800 agreements spanning 39 states.

Hernandez separated from her partner after the 2024 incident, and her sister left Maldonado late last year. Around November, the sisters moved into a trailer together in Pensacola, to raise Orlin and Hernandez’s sister’s children, then ages 6, 4, and 2.

In their spare time they took the children to the playground. Hernandez’s phone is filled with photos and videos of Orlin eating french fries, his favorite food, wearing Spider-Man pajamas, and running fearlessly around the playground, flashing a dimpled smile at his mother as she followed closely behind.

The sisters found jobs laying concrete foundations for new houses for $150 a day across the state border in Mobile, Alabama, which required them to travel through Baldwin County.

On Jan. 8, a Baldwin County sheriff’s deputy pulled over the car they were riding in. Maj. Tony Nolfe said the vehicle was stopped around 6 a.m. in Bay Minette, a small city north of Mobile. The driver was cited for speeding, though Hernandez said he was not.

The deputy asked everyone in the car to show their IDs. The two sisters only had their Honduran passports. Nolfe noted that an Alabama state law requires officers to check the immigration status of people they stop and suspect are in the U.S. illegally. The deputy alerted ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations and sheriff’s deputies trained to help ICE under the 287(g) program, according to the sheriff’s office, Hernandez’s lawyer and federal records detailing her sister’s arrest.

At that point, Nolfe said, the federal agency took over the case. Hernandez and her sister were handcuffed along the side of U.S. Highway 31. The ICE officers who responded to the scene asked the women what they should do with their children, Hernandez said.

Hernandez told them she was a single mother and begged them to release her to care for her son.

Her sister was her emergency contact, and Maldonado the only relative the women could ask to care for the children. He had been abusive toward Hernandez’s sister, but never the children, she said.

“I had no other option,” Hernandez said. “The police stopped me. They didn’t want to release us.”

She reasoned it would be best for Orlin to stay with his cousins, who were more like siblings. On the morning of their arrest, Orlin and two of his cousins were with a babysitter and the oldest child was at school. ICE officers permitted Hernandez’s sister to call Maldonado. He assured them Orlin would be safe.

“Tell Wendy not to worry,” Hernandez said he told her sister. “The boy is going to be okay.”

Inside a Louisiana detention center, Hernandez said she made constant requests through an ICE-issued tablet to be reunited with her son. She did not want to leave the U.S. without him.

On the day she was deported, the tablet went dark. She said she and other crying mothers were shackled and loaded onto the planes without their children. One had recently given birth and her breasts were heavy with milk.

“I told them to help me with my boy,” Hernandez said. “I needed him.”

She was deported on Jan. 26, without her passport or other documents needed to prove her parentage and arrange Orlin’s return, Hernandez said. ICE did not respond to questions about that allegation, saying in a news release that Hernandez “chose not to take her U.S. citizen child with her.”

Hernandez said she scrambled to get the Honduran government to issue new documents and stayed in touch with Orlin by phone. Their conversations were often brief and she said neither Orlin nor Maldonado indicated anything was wrong. He turned 3 years old in February without her.

“You’ll be with me soon,” she told Orlin.

On March 4, her brother-in-law sent her an audio message saying that Orlin was sick.

Maldonado had taken Orlin to work and then left early to bring him home, where the child collapsed and Maldonado called 911, according to a police report. He told Hernandez authorities were interrogating him. An ambulance transported the child to a hospital.

Then Maldonado called with the hospital on the line: Orlin was dead.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “If I had known I would have looked for help. I would have gone to the church, the pastor would have helped. Nobody told me anything.”

The next day, Maldonado told authorities that he cared for the child and could explain the injuries. He said Orlin had been bitten by bugs and that he had dropped a 12-pack of soda on him accidentally. His public defender did not respond to requests for comment.

But Deanna Oleske, the chief medical examiner who declared the death a homicide, said the evidence contradicted Maldonado’s account. She said Orlin had a swollen stomach and testicles that were consistent with being “stomped on.”

“Absolutely no toddler has ‘normal’ injuries like bruising to the back of the hand/knuckles from doing toddler stuff,” she told police, according to court records.

Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons called Orlin’s injuries “horrendous.”

A week after his death, ICE put out a news release disparaging his mother for leaving Orlin “with a violent murderer.”

“This little boy suffered extensively and died when his mother abandoned him to Maldonado-Erazo’s ‘care,’” Lyons said in a written statement shared with the media after Orlin died. “I encourage parents to self-deport with their children, but even if they choose not to do that, ICE gives them the opportunity to be removed with their kids.”

A state grand jury indicted Maldonado on March 26 for first-degree felony murder and aggravated child abuse, saying he inflicted “depraved” violence on Orlin from at least Feb. 1 until the day he died.

At a shadow hearing Friday led by Reps. Delia C. Ramirez (D-Illinois) and Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), Democratic lawmakers criticized 287(g) programs for scooping up parents with little regard for their children. Hernandez’s lawyer, Shalyn Fluharty, faulted the Alabama sheriff and ICE for Orlin’s death, and called on DHS to allow Hernandez to return to the U.S.

“I blame Baldwin County in Alabama for arresting a mom who was a passenger in a car doing absolutely nothing wrong, and I blame ICE and our leadership for allowing this to happen,” Fluharty said.

Hernandez is struggling to reconcile the whiplash of the past few months. In January, she was a mother, with a son, a job and hope of staying in the United States. Now her only child’s body sits in a morgue. But she said she won’t stop trying to get back to America. She needs to return to bury Orlin, she said, and to lay her eyes on him once more.

Cuba has acquired more than 300 military drones and recently began discussing plans to use them to attack the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, U.S. military vessels and possibly Key West, Fla., 90 miles north of Havana, according to classified intelligence shared with Axios.

The intelligence — which could become a pretext for U.S. military action — shows the degree to which the Trump administration sees Cuba as a threat because of developments in drone warfare and the presence of Iranian military advisers in Havana, a senior U.S. official said.

"When we think about those types of technologies being that close, and a range of bad actors from terror groups to drug cartels to Iranians to the Russians, it's concerning," the official said.

"It's a growing threat."

CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba on Thursday and bluntly warned officials there against engaging in hostilities. He also urged them to scrap their totalitarian government to end crippling U.S. sanctions, a CIA official told Axios.

"Director Ratcliffe made clear that Cuba can no longer serve as a platform for adversaries to advance hostile agendas in our hemisphere," that official said.

"The Western Hemisphere cannot be our adversaries' playground."

On Wednesday, the Department of Justice plans to unseal an indictment of Cuba's de facto leader, Raúl Castro, for allegedly ordering the 1996 downing of two planes flown by a Miami-based aid group called Brothers to the Rescue.

More sanctions against the island nation could be announced this week.

Cuba has been acquiring attack drones of "varying capabilities" from Russia and Iran since 2023, and has stashed them in strategic locations across the island, U.S. officials say.

Within the past month, Cuban officials have sought more drones and military equipment from Russia, the senior U.S. official said. The official cited intelligence intercepts that also indicated Cuban intelligence officials are "trying to learn about how Iran has resisted us."

Russia and China have high-tech espionage facilities for collecting "signals intelligence" (called SIGINT) in Cuba.

"We've long been concerned that a foreign adversary using that kind of location that close to our shores is highly problematic," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a Miami Republican, during a congressional hearing Tuesday.

In response to Diaz-Balart, Hegseth also confirmed Castro's complicity in ordering the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown.

The concerns about drone attacks on U.S. forces have been heightened by Iran's use of the unmanned aircraft in its response to the U.S. attacks that began Feb. 28.

Iran's drones have damaged American bases in the Middle East, helped close the Strait of Hormuz and menaced neighboring Persian Gulf states, along with missile attacks.

U.S. officials estimate that as many as 5,000 Cuban soldiers have fought for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, and that some informed the island's military leaders about the effectiveness of drone warfare. Russia has paid Cuba's government about $25,000 for each soldier deployed in Ukraine, U.S. officials estimate.

"They're part of the Putin meat grinder. They're learning about Iranian tactics. It's something we have to plan for," the senior official said.

The Castro regime is closer than ever to falling since it seized power in the 1959 revolution that brought it into conflict with the U.S., thanks largely to U.S. sanctions and the Marxist regime's financial mismanagement.

Cuba is classified as a state sponsor of terror by the U.S. and it's considered the "head of the snake," exporting revolutionary Marxism throughout Latin America.

One former Cuban ally, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, was removed from power in a Jan. 3 raid by the U.S.

Since Maduro's ouster, the U.S. has begun normalizing relations with Venezuela — and learned more about Cuba's drone program.

U.S. officials don't believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests. But U.S intelligence indicates the island's military officials have been discussing drone warfare plans in case hostilities erupt as relations with the U.S. continue to deteriorate.

Cuba doesn't have the ability to close the Straits of Florida in the same way Iran has brought shipping to a standstill in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. officials also don't believe Cuba is as much of a military threat as it was during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis

"No one's worried about fighter jets from Cuba. It's not even clear they have one that can fly," the senior U.S. official said.

"But it's worth noting how close they are — 90 miles," the official added. "It's not a reality we are comfortable with."

The Trump administration is adding generic medications to its direct-to-consumer drug sales website TrumpRx and billionaire Mark Cuban is set to attend the White House rollout Monday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter.

The administration has been touting its deals with pharmaceutical companies to reduce their prices for government programs and sell drugs directly to consumers as part of effort to address healthcare affordability ahead of the midterm elections this fall.

A White House official said President Donald Trump would announce an expansion of TrumpRx’s offerings. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Cuban didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Cuban, through his Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, sells mail-order medications directly to consumers for transparent prices.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts criticized Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the TrumpRx platform’s lack of generic options in a hearing last month.