Wednesday April 22, 2026. Chump continues to be all over the map on Iran, Virginia votes for redistricting, Chump continues to wreck the economy (and destroy tax refunds), Senator Elizabeth Warren questions the Fed Chair nominee about Jeffrey Epstein, and much more.
Democrats’ success in pushing through one
of the country’s most aggressively gerrymandered congressional maps on
Tuesday in Virginia represented the latest example of the party’s
willingness to take the gloves off as it seeks to win back control of
Congress and thwart President Trump’s agenda.
It
was a stark reversal for a party that has decried partisan
gerrymandering for years. But Democrats said that the new map, which
could flip as many as four Republican-held seats blue, was necessary to
counter similar G.O.P. efforts in Texas and other states.
Their new mantra: It’s time to play hardball.
“While
many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the
opposite,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader from New York,
said in a statement after The Associated Press called the race.
“Democrats did not step back. We fought back. When they go low, we hit
back hard.”
The redistricting was a success despite the GOP using false fliers and advertisements of former President Barack Obama decrying the effort. Like most Democrats, Barack is opposed to gerrymandering. But when the Republicans got Texas to redistrict last year and attempted to force Indiana to as well, most Democrats -- including Barack -- saw this as not a policy to embrace forever more but an effort to fight back when Republicans were not playing fair.
And that's what voters in California earlier and voters yesterday in Virginia supported and agreed with.
Informally, the Virginia Democrats who control the state’s
legislature have given themselves power to gerrymander the state’s
districts as a short-term response to Republicans gerrymandering Texas and other states they control at the behest of President Trump.
The legislature has already created and adopted the
new district maps. They go into effect with the passage of this
amendment. But the Virginia Supreme Court could still decide that the
process by which the amendment was passed or the gerrymandering itself
violates the state’s constitution. Republicans have filed numerous suits
to stop the redistricting, and those have not been fully resolved. They
are expected to fail.
If this redistricting stands, it’s a huge
boon for Democrats. The maps adopted by Virginia Democrats are projected
to give the party up to a four-seat boost, potentially carrying 10 of the state’s 11 districts instead of the current six. Remember that the House is very narrowly divided today, with Republicans holding 217 seats and the Democrats 214. Every seat matters.
Trump has threatened to “take over” the election system, and the mid-decade gerrymandering spree he started is part of a multi-faceted plan to interfere
in the midterms. But while that has deeply destabilized American
democracy, the president hasn’t succeeded in stopping Democrats from
racking up a series of electoral victories
over the past year. The passage of the redistricting referendum in
Virginia is the latest sign of Democrats successfully fighting back.
President Trump announced an indefinite extension to his
ceasefire with Iran Tuesday as it became evident that peace talks
between the two countries were on the brink of collapse.
“Based
on the fact that the Government of Iran is seriously fractured, not
unexpectedly so and, upon the request of Field Marshal Asim Munir, and
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, of Pakistan, we have been asked to hold
our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and
representatives can come up with a unified proposal,” Trump wrote
on Truth Social. “I have therefore directed our Military to continue
the Blockade and, in all other respects, remain ready and able, and will
therefore extend the Ceasefire until such time as their proposal is
submitted, and discussions are concluded, one way or the other.”
The announcement came shortly after Vice President JD Vance
suspended his travel plans to Islamabad Tuesday to represent the United
States at the table. One source toldThe Wall Street Journal that
Vance pulled out because Iranian negotiators hadn’t committed to
showing up to the meeting. Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail
Baghaei confirmed as much, telling Iranian state broadcaster IRIB that
the meeting was called off due to “contradictory messages, inconsistent
behavior and unacceptable actions by the American side.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi added that the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is an “act of war” and a violation of the ceasefire.
Ben (MEIDASTOUCH NEWS) addresses it in this morning's video below.
From the start, Chump has repeatedly changed his story on
Iran -- including why he started the war -- to liberate the Iranian
people, that's what he started with -- and it was "liberate" and not "obliterate" as it became in April. All of these changing details
make it hard for Americans to follow his goals -- not that he's bothered
to define any goals or, for that matter, an end game. Daniel Dale (CNN) analyzes Chump's ever changing words and stories:
On Monday morning, President Donald Trump told The New York Post
that Vice President JD Vance was already on his way to Pakistan for
negotiations with Iran. “They’re heading over now,” the Post quoted
Trump as saying. “They’ll be there tonight, [Islamabad] time.”
Except that wasn’t true. A bit later on Monday morning, people familiar with Vance’s plans told CNN’s Alayna Treene
that the vice president was expected to depart for Pakistan on Tuesday
for talks beginning Wednesday. Vance’s motorcade was soon spotted at the White House.
Trump’s
inaccurate remark might be shrugged off, the kind of little thing a
busy president could understandably get wrong. But it’s part of a
pattern that has accelerated over the past week – of this president
being incorrect about even the most basic of matters related to the Iran
war.
“One of the big differences between the
current round of US-Iran diplomacy and prior rounds is that this
administration and the President in particular are unreliable
narrators,” Eric Brewer, a former National Security Council
counterproliferation official, posted on social media on Friday. “Iran
watchers have gotten pretty good at parsing statements from both sides
over the years, but we’ve never had to contend with a US president that
is so outspoken and prone to exaggeration, fabrication, and outright
lies.”
Trump’s Monday claim about Vance’s
travel was only the latest in a series of false, dubious or unproven
comments about the war. Many of them were more substantive.
On
Friday, after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared that the
Strait of Hormuz would be “completely open” to commercial vessels
during the ongoing ceasefire, Trump posted that “the Hormuz Strait
situation is over” and that “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait
of Hormuz again.”
But the situation very
clearly wasn’t over: Trump himself had posted the same morning that the
US would continue its blockade on ships heading to or from Iranian
ports; Araghchi had said its opening of the strait only applied to a
specific Iran-approved path near its coastline rather than the lanes
ships had generally used before; and an Iranian official posted later in
the day that ships had to get approval from the navy of Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards and pay tolls.
As for Iran’s supposed agreement to never close the strait again? Iran announced the very next day that it was closing the strait again.
On Thursday, Trump claimed to reporters:
“The pope made a statement. He says, Iran can have a nuclear weapon.”
Pope Leo XIV, an unequivocal opponent of nuclear weapons, had not said that. In a Fox Business interview
that aired Wednesday, Trump claimed that Persian Gulf countries “were
not expected to be hit” by Iran. In reality, retaliatory Iranian strikes
on these countries was widely expected. In a Fox News interview the Sunday before last, Trump claimed
of Iran: “Their military is gone, everything’s gone.” But Iran very
obviously still had a military with destructive capabilities, though the
US and Israel had degraded them.
Trump’s
Monday claim about Vance was at least his second bit of misinformation
about his own vice president in two days. On Sunday, Trump told MS NOW
that Vance wouldn’t be part of the delegation to Pakistan for security
reasons. But after the president said that, “two senior US officials told MS NOW that Vance would, in fact, lead the delegation to Islamabad,” the outlet reported.
This
is bad and confusing to the American people. It also speaks poorly of
Chump at a time when questions about his health and dementia are being
asked more and more. Harry Thompson (DAILY BEAST) notes:
President Donald Trump’s mental sharpness is fading, according to a majority of Americans.
New poll results from Reuters/Ipsos
on Tuesday revealed Americans are questioning their leader’s
temperament, while his approval rating held at its lowest point since
his return to the White House.
The Daily Beast has long raised fears that Trump’s health could be failing,
even while other media outlets have chosen to overlook them. Now, it
seems the public is becoming increasingly concerned about something
alarming: his mind.
In all, 51 percent of respondents to the six-day opinion poll said his mental sharpness was “worse” than before.
Among them,14 percent of Republicans felt as such, as did 54 percent of independents and 85 percent of Democrats.
His erratic behavior and conflicting statements are all over the place but Chump's behavior also impact non-Americans. Cameron Adams (THE DAILY BEAST) notes:
Donald
Trump’s erratic and contradictory statements on his war with Iran have
alarmed the president’s own inner sanctum, as well as annoying Iranian
leaders.
Trump, 79, has repeatedly sent mixed messages on the state of the conflict with Iran, which is entering its eighth week.
His
comments to reporters and on social media are becoming so problematic
that it’s impacting the state of his war, according to a CNN report, which claims that as negotiators appeared close to a deal, Trump launched a media spree.
The
president posted on his Truth Social account on Sunday morning about
negotiations with Iran, threatening to “knock out every single Power
Plant, and every single Bridge in Iran” if they didn’t accept a deal on
offer from the U.S.
But just days earlier, on Friday afternoon, Trump had told CBS
that Iran had “agreed to everything,” including working with the U.S.
to remove their enriched uranium. Trump spoke to numerous outlets on
Friday about his war, including Bloomberg and Axios.
Trump
officials told CNN that the president’s running commentary on the war
has been detrimental and has inflamed Iran’s mistrust of the U.S.
Hafiz Rashid (THE NEW REPUBLIC) adds, "Trump’s remarks in the press didn’t help either. To Bloomberg, he claimed that Iran had agreed to an 'unlimited' suspension of its nuclear program, and he told CBS News that Iran had 'agreed to everything' and would remove its enriched uranium with help from the U.S. In an interview with Axios, he said 'I think we will get a deal in the next day or two,' with another meeting 'probably' coming on the weekend."
Economist
Henrietta Treyz warned Monday that soaring gas prices thanks to
President Donald Trump’s Iran war may soon be followed by another hit:
higher food costs.
“Food inflation is the next
shoe to drop,” Treyz, the Veda Partners co-founder and director of
economic policy, told MS NOW’s Katy Tur.
Treyz drew
a stark contrast between the economy during Trump’s second term
compared to when former President Joe Biden was leaving office.
“It’s
pretty amazing when you think about what the president inherited,” she
said. “We were coming off of continuous prosperity, lowering inflation,
prices coming down, growth in the manufacturing sector.”
There
was “literally nothing you could do to stop the economy under the A.I.
boom and all the rest,” she added, lamenting: “And now here we are.”
And for regular folks hoping that the meager tax refunds might help them through this period? They can give up on that. Nick Lichtenberg (FORTUNE) reports:
The
promise was simple and seductive: Pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act,
flood American wallets with historic tax refunds, and watch the consumer
economy roar. For a few weeks this winter, it looked like it might
actually work. Then the bombs started falling on Iran.
Now
Wall Street has delivered its verdict. Two of the most closely watched
economic research teams on the Street—Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley—reviewed the numbers and reached the same sobering conclusion:
The Iran war’s knock-on effect on oil prices has almost entirely
canceled out the biggest consumer tax windfall in years. For
lower-income Americans, the ledger may be in the red.
[. . .]
On
Feb. 28, U.S. and Israeli forces struck Iran. Within days, Brent crude
surged past $120 a barrel as Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz—through
which flows roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply—triggering what the
International Energy Agency called “the largest supply disruption in the
history of the global oil market.” American gas prices, which stood at
roughly $3.54 a gallon in early March, climbed to $4.11 by mid-April.
Goldman
Sachs put a dollar figure on the damage: Higher gasoline prices now
represent a roughly $140 billion annualized headwind to household
incomes. Morgan Stanley’s math is even blunter at the individual level—a
sustained 15% rise in gas prices is all it takes to fully offset the
average bump in tax refunds. Prices have risen nearly 40%.
“Rising
gasoline prices on the heels of the conflict in the Middle East are
likely to neutralize most, if not all, of the anticipated fiscal impulse
to household spending,” was the verdict from the Morgan Stanley U.S.
economics team, led by Michael Gapen, something reiterated by Heather
Berger, another economist on the Morgan Stanley U.S. team.
Donald
Trump has torn into the British prime minister over a former top U.K.
official’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, even though Trump himself was a
longtime friend of the late pedophile.
“Prime
Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom acknowledged that he
‘exercised wrong judgement’ when he chose his Ambassador to Washington,”
Trump wrote on Truth Social late Monday night.
“I
agree, he was a really bad pick,” the president added, before somewhat
confusingly signing off: “Plenty of time to recover, however!”
[. . .]
Trump,
like Mandelson, enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Epstein,
beginning in the late 1980s and lasting until the men are believed to
have had a falling-out over a real estate dispute in 2005.
At
multiple hearings since last year, members of the House Oversight
Committee have forced committee chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) to send out
subpoenas related to the late Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sexual
predator and former friend of President Donald Trump.
Democrats
got the ball rolling last summer with a subpoena for the Justice
Department’s files on Epstein, and in March, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)
forced a vote on subpoenaing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The
subpoenas have been damaging for Trump and awkward for Comer, who seems
to have found a novel solution: stop holding hearings or, at the very
least, stop calling them hearings. Six times since last year, the
committee has instead held “roundtables” on issues such as AI,
agriculture and military fitness standards.
The
roundtables look a lot like hearings, with experts testifying to members
about the topic at hand. But there’s a key difference: Committee
members can only call for votes during official hearings, making it
impossible for Democrats or rogue Republicans to try to issue further
subpoenas.
Yesterday, the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee issued the following:
Washington,
D.C. — Today, Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the House Committee
on Oversight and Reform, released the following statement on Oversight
Republicans’ decision to abandon official hearings in favor of informal
roundtables, designed to look like hearings, but with no formal rules,
procedure, or power, specifically to block bipartisan subpoena motions. A
memo detailing this issue was distributed to Democratic Committee
Members, which can be found here.
“Chairman
Comer and Republican leaders are now canceling hearings and are running
scared from Oversight Democrats. They want to eliminate our ability to
make motions, call witnesses, and subpoena Administration officials.
After seven bipartisan motions resulting in 18 successful subpoenas, it
seems that the White House and the Speaker are now trying to stop our
progress. But we won’t stop fighting until we get justice for the
Epstein survivors and stop the Trump corruption,” said Ranking Member
Robert Garcia.
Since Ranking Member Garcia
began leading the Minority in July 2025, Oversight Democrats have
successfully supported seven bipartisan subpoena motions, resulting in
18 subpoenas, including subpoenas advancing the Epstein investigation.
Unlike formal hearings, roundtables carry no rules, require no witnesses
to testify under oath, and provide no opportunity for Members to offer
motions or subpoenas. They also strip minority Members of basic
protections guaranteed under House rules, including the right to invite
witnesses and have their questioning time respected. Republican
Subcommittee Chair Rep. Glenn Grothman (WI-06) acknowledged the
roundtable strategy openly at a March 26, 2026 roundtable, stating that
the shift away from formal hearings was driven by concern over Members
making motions mid-hearing.
###
Comer
Pyle, please note, had insisted Hillary Clinton -- who had no
significant interaction with Jeffrey Epstein -- be deposed by the
Committee. But he has gone out of his way to prevent Donald and Melania
Chump from being deposed and to prevent Pam Bondi from being deposed.
Comer Pyle is a hack.
The "can of worms" that first lady Melania Trump opened up when she held a seemingly unprompted press conference about her ties to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein may be too much for President Donald Trump to survive, according to two analysts.
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz discussed Melania Trump's recent press conference on a new episode of the podcast, "The Court of History."
They speculated that Melania Trump must know something is about to be
revealed about her ties to Epstein, otherwise she wouldn't have felt
compelled to make some of the statements that she did.
Blumenthal described the address as a "can of worms" that the Trump administration has tried to avoid.
"Why is she so scared? That's the only question I have," Wilentz said.
"Why would she do such a thing? The Epstein files have been off. He's
blown up the Middle East in order to avoid the Epstein files. And here
is Melania Trump coming out in the middle of nowhere saying, 'I had
nothing to do with it in the way that you described.' Something's
bugging her. She knows that something's coming. Obviously, something
must be coming, or she wouldn't have done this."
Moving over to Kevin Warsh, Chump's nominee for Federal Reserve Chair.
Democratic
Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as the
next Federal Reserve chair over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, but Kevin
Warsh refused to answer her directly.
The
top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee accused Warsh of having
more than $100 million in investments, for which he has not disclosed
specific details to ethics officials or the public, as he seeks to
become the next head of the U.S. central bank.
“Do
the Juggernaut Fund or the THSDFS LLC invest in any companies
affiliated with President Trump or his family, companies that have
facilitated money laundering, Chinese-controlled companies, or financing
vehicles established by Jeffrey Epstein?” Warren asked at his
confirmation hearing on Tuesday.
Warsh
did not answer her question directly but instead started to talk about
the role of the Fed and broader ethics scandals Warren had previously
referenced.
“Will you answer my question, please?” Warren cut him off.
“I
asked, you have $100 million in undisclosed assets, and what I’m asking
is, are any of those with this outfit that invests in companies
affiliated with President Trump or his family, companies that have
facilitated money laundering, Chinese-controlled companies, or financing
vehicles set up by Jeffrey Epstein? It’s a yes or no question,” Warren
repeated.
[. . .]
But
Warsh avoided sharing any investments tied to Epstein as he was grilled
on Tuesday. Warren pointed out again that he was not directly answering
her.
“Mr.
Warsh, are you refusing to tell us if you have investments in, for
example, vehicles set up to advance Jeffrey Epstein? Is that what you’re
telling us?” Warren repeated, focusing on the late convicted sex
offender. “You just won’t tell us?”
“Senator,
what I’m telling you is that those assets that you represent as
Juggernaut will be sold if I’m confirmed before I take office and sign
the oath of office,” Warsh said about the hedge fund.
A
federal judge on Monday ordered the release of a mother and five
children who have been detained longer than any other family in a Texas
immigration detention center. They have been held since the arrest of
the children’s father nearly a year ago after an anti-semitic
firebombing attack in Colorado.
Hours after the judge's decision, the family had yet to be released.
Hayman
El Gamal and her five children, who have been in detention more than 10
months, were detained in June after the arrest of El Gamal’s ex-husband
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45. He has been charged in connection with the
attack in Boulder on a group calling for the release of Israeli hostages
in Gaza.
El Gamal, who has divorced Soliman,
has said that she and the children knew nothing about his alleged plans.
The couple divorced after his arrest and his family's detention.
"We
are hopeful and vindicated by this decision, however the government has
not yet released this family and we are insisting it do so
immediately,” said Eric Lee, the mother and children’s attorney.
He said El Gamal and her children had a mixed reaction to the news.
“The
family feels vindicated, as well, by this decision and also they have
gone through enough in the last 10 and a half months of detention to
know it’s not over yet because of how brazenly and sadistic the White
House has been to this family and five innocent children,” Lee said.
Let's wind down with this from Senator Adam Schiff's office:
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Adam Schiff
(D-Calif.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck
Schumer (D-N.Y.) led 16 Senators in urging the
Trump administration to immediately reverse course on their illegal
and dangerous decision to seek unprecedented access to
the personal medical records of millions of federal workers,
retirees, and their families.
According to a notice by the White House Office of Personnel
Management, this effort would involve the widespread aggregation of
individuals’ health data, including medical visits, prescriptions, and
treatment histories. The Senators express
deep concern regarding such sweeping access of private medical data,
which violates core principles of the law and places the personal
information of Americans at serious risk of
potential cyberattacks, unauthorized access and political exploitation.
“This proposal is another step in the stated goal of traumatizing the
federal workforce, this time by requiring the most sensitive health
information about federal employees and their families to be shared with
OPM. We are deeply concerned this information will be used in
employment actions, including actions related to hiring, suitability
determinations, appeals, reductions in force, disability accommodation
requests, labor-management relations, and performance reviews,” the Senators wrote.
“We strongly urge you to cease any further consideration of this
proposal. Our federal employees work every day to serve the American
people and deserve to have their health data protected,” the Senators continued.
In addition to Schiff, Warner, and Leader Schumer this letter is also
signed by Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), John Fetterman (D-Pa.), Kirsten
Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Angus King Jr. (I-Maine), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.),
Andy Kim (D-N.J.), Angela Alsobrooks (D-Md.). Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Tim
Kaine (D-Va.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.),
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.).
The full text of the letter can be found here and below.
Dear Director Kupor,
We are writing with grave concern regarding the Information
Collection Request (ICR) noticed in the Federal Register on December 12,
2025, by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). If implemented, this
proposal would require health insurance carriers that participate in
the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) and Postal Service Health
Benefits (PSHB) programs to report broad medical record data of federal
workers, retirees, and their families to OPM on a monthly
basis. According to the notice, this effort would involve the widespread
aggregation of these individuals’ health data, including medical
visits, prescriptions, and treatment histories. This proposal raises
profound statutory, constitutional, and public health concerns. We
demand that OPM immediately reverse this action and abstain from any
future efforts to illegally collect federal workers’ sensitive health
data.
Since January 2025, federal employees have been pushed into early
retirement, illegally fired, demonized, seen their civil service
protections weakened, and more. This proposal is another step in the
stated goal of traumatizing the federal workforce, this time by
requiring the most sensitive health information about federal employees
and their families to be shared with OPM. We are deeply concerned this
information will be used in employment actions, including actions
related to hiring, suitability determinations, appeals, reductions in
force, disability accommodation requests, labor-management relations,
and performance reviews.
Such sweeping access to personal health information would violate
the core principles of the Health Insurance Portability and
Accountability Act (HIPAA), which was enacted to strictly regulate how
protected health information (PHI) can be disclosed to ensure that
patient data is shared only for limited, clearly defined purposes. Mass,
centralized access to identifiable medical records absent
individualized consent, clear necessity, or narrowly tailored legal
authority undermines those protections and lacks a valid statutory
basis. Both HIPAA regulations that apply to all covered entities as well
as the Privacy Act statute that governs the federal government’s use of
data about individuals require only the minimum amount of information
necessary to be shared;[1] the data collection contemplated in this
proposal to collect individualized medical claims data from all federal
employees, retirees, and their families every month would far exceed
those legal limits and violate OPM’s statutory authority.
Furthermore, this proposal threatens the foundational principle
of confidentiality between a patient and their health care
provider. Patients must be able to trust that sensitive
disclosures regarding mental health, chronic illness, or other deeply
personal conditions will remain private. If individuals with health care
coverage through FEHB and PSHB fear their medical records will be
accessed by government agencies for unclear or non-clinical purposes,
millions of Americans may withhold critical information from their
providers or forego health care services altogether. This erosion of
trust directly harms medical care and public health outcomes.
The risks of misuse of the data to be shared in OPM’s proposal
and subsequent data breaches cannot be overstated, as large, centralized
databases of health records are prime targets for cyberattacks and
unauthorized access. Past incidents across industries demonstrate that
even “secure” systems are vulnerable, and breaches involving health data
have historically exposed millions of individuals to identity theft,
discrimination, and long-term privacy harms. Expanding access to PHI
increases the number of potential failure points and amplifies these
risks.
Additionally, the potential for secondary use or mission creep is
deeply concerning. This administration has demonstrated a cavalier
approach toward utilizing sensitive data, breaking down firewalls that
work to protect individuals’ privacy and security, and an incompetence
in protecting that data. In January 2026, the Department of Justice
admitted in a legal filing that employees of President Trump and Elon
Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) stole
individuals’ Social Security data and stored it improperly. And as a
data point that DOGE was never truly about efficiency, the legal filing
also noted that one employee was working with an advocacy group to try
and connect Social Security data with voter rolls in order to “find
evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain
States.” Additionally, the effort by the Department of Health and Human
Services to share Medicaid enrollee data with the Department of Homeland
Security for immigration enforcement purposes raises serious concerns
that this data collection would serve a far more nefarious purpose than
those stated in the Federal Register.
Finally, we have substantial constitutional concerns regarding
OPM’s proposal. The Supreme Court has recognized a protected privacy
interest in avoiding disclosure of highly personal information,
including medical data. While not absolute, this interest requires that
government intrusions be justified, narrowly tailored, and accompanied
by clear safeguards. Broad policies without individualized
justifications raise Fourth Amendment concerns and encroach on
Americans’ reasonable expectations of privacy. We do not believe any
employee, including federal employees, should be forced to give up basic
rights to privacy as a condition of their employment,
especially regarding their health information.
For these reasons, we strongly urge you to cease any further
consideration of this proposal. Our federal employees work every day to
serve the American people and deserve to have their health data
protected. Protecting patient privacy is not a bureaucratic obstacle,
but a cornerstone of ethical medicine, legal compliance, and public
trust. Any effort to modernize or improve data systems must prioritize
strict privacy protections, transparency, and respect for individual
rights.
