The key to understanding this morning’s Supreme Court ruling unfreezing American foreign aid is that two different rulings are at issue here, and teasing apart those technicalities reveals a loss that is perhaps more significant for the Trump administration than is first apparent.

The two orders both come from U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali. There’s his underlying temporary restraining order (TRO), which remains in effect (and which the government has neither tried to appeal nor sought emergency relief from), and then there’s his more specific order, which purported to enforce the TRO by obliging the government to pay somewhere from $1.5 billion to $2 billion of committed foreign-aid funds by February 26. It was that order that the government tried to appeal, and from which it sought emergency relief first in the D.C. Circuit Court and then in the Supreme Court. By issuing an “administrative stay” last Wednesday night, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily absolved the government of its obligation to comply with that order—but not with the underlying TRO, which generally requires the government to spend money that Congress has appropriated for foreign-aid funding.

Against that backdrop, the Court’s ruling today is more than a little confusing. Let’s start with what’s clear: A 5–4 majority (with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three Democratic appointees) denied the government’s application to vacate Judge Ali’s enforcement order. The Court’s ruling contains only one meaningful sentence, and it is maddeningly opaque:

Given that the deadline in the challenged order has now passed, and in light of the ongoing preliminary injunction proceedings, the District Court should clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.

This sentence (or, perhaps, an earlier draft of it) provoked a fiery and more than a little hypocritical eight-page dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, joined in full by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. But before getting to the dissent, let me try to read a couple of tea leaves out of this cryptic but important passage.

[Adam Serwer: Why Trump thanked John Roberts]

First, I think it’s meaningful that the majority denied the government’s application rather than dismissing it as moot. In English, that is the majority signaling that the government likely still must comply with the “pay now” order—the second of the two—albeit not on the original timeline. If the majority thought that the “pay now” order was no longer live because the deadline had come and gone, then the proper disposition would have been to dismiss the application as moot, not to deny it. (Indeed, although there are good reasons to not rely upon dissents to figure out what the majority held, Alito’s dissent seems to reinforce this reading.) This may seem like a very thin reed, but it’s a distinction I can’t imagine was lost upon the justices. The majority (and, apparently, the dissent) seems to agree that the government remains under not just the general obligation of the original TRO but the specific obligation of the “pay now” order.

Second, the clause about the district court clarifying the obligations that the government must fulfill to comply with the TRO strikes me as an invitation to Judge Ali to do exactly that—to issue a more specific order that (1) identifies the particular spending commitments that he believes the government must honor to comply with the TRO and (2) gives the government at least a little more than 48 hours to do so. The upshot is that, even if the Trump administration doesn’t have to pay the money immediately, it will have to do so very soon. That’s small solace to the organizations and people who have already had their lives upended by the spending freeze, but it’s a bigger loss for the Trump administration than the text may suggest.

Third, the timing of the ruling is striking. The Court handed down the order right at 9 a.m. this morning—less than 12 hours after the end of President Donald Trump’s address to Congress last night. It is just about impossible to imagine that the ruling was still being finalized overnight (or that the chief justice was somehow influenced by his awkward moment with Trump). If not, then there appears to have been at least some choice on the Court’s part to hand down the ruling after the president’s speech and not before it at the close of business yesterday—perhaps to avoid the possibility of Trump attacking the justices while several of them were in the audience. I’ve written before about the problem of the Court timing its rulings—and how it underscores the extent to which the justices are, and ought to admit that they are, playing at least some politics even with what should be a straightforward procedure for releasing rulings when they’re ready. This at least seems like it might be another example.

And fourth, here’s that 5–4 lineup again. Back in January, I wrote about how this particular 5–4 alignment (the chief justice, Justice Barrett, and the three Democratic appointees) is starting to show up in cases “in which the Chief Justice’s elusive but not illusory institutional commitments, and Justice Barrett’s emerging independence, are separating them from the other Republican appointees. For a host of reasons that I suspect are obvious, we may see more such cases sooner rather than later.”

On one hand, it’s a bit alarming that Kavanaugh joined the dissent. On the other hand, for those hoping that the Court is going to be a bulwark against the (mounting) abuses of the Trump administration, it’s a cautiously optimistic sign that there may well be at least five votes to support lower-court rulings attempting to rein in those abuses.

In many ways, the dissent is far more illuminating than the majority’s order. As is unfortunately often the case with respect to Alito’s dissents from emergency applications, this one combines a remarkable amount of hypocrisy with statements that are either materially incorrect or, at the very least, misleading.

[Read: ‘Constitutional crisis’ is an understatement]

On page three of the ruling (page two of the dissent), for example, Alito writes that “the Government must apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste—not because the law requires it, but simply because a District Judge so ordered.” Of course, this completely misstates both the theory of the plaintiffs’ lawsuits and the gravamen of Judge Ali’s order. The whole point is that the law does require it—that Congress has mandated the spending and that the contractual obligations have been fulfilled. Indeed, Judge Ali’s “pay now” order is about work already completed for which the money was already due. If there is authority for the proposition that the government is not legally obliged to pay its bills, Alito doesn’t cite it. Yes, there may be separate questions about the courts’ power to compel the government, but that’s not the same thing as whether the “law requires” the government to pay its bills. Do the dissenters genuinely believe that the answer is no?

Alito also makes much out of the argument that sovereign immunity bars the claims against the government. But the Supreme Court has already held that relief under the Administrative Procedure Act can run to whether the government is obliged to pay expenditures to which the recipients are legally entitled. Alito asserts that actually ordering the government to pay those expenditures is something else entirely; suffice to say, I think that’s slicing the bologna pretty thin. His argument would have more force if Judge Ali’s “pay now” order was about funds for which the administrative processes haven’t fully run. But here, they have. And so it’s just a question of whether federal courts have the power to force the government to … enforce the law.

In that respect, contrast Alito’s analysis here with his dissenting 2023 opinion in United States v. Texas—in which he would have upheld an injunction by a single (judge-shopped) district judge that effectively dictated to the executive branch what its immigration-enforcement priorities must be. In explaining why the Biden administration should lose, he wrote:

Nothing in our precedents even remotely supports this grossly inflated conception of “executive Power,” which seriously infringes the “legislative Powers” that the Constitution grants to Congress. At issue here is Congress’s authority to control immigration, and “[t]his Court has repeatedly emphasized that ‘over no conceivable subject is the legislative power of Congress more complete than it is over’ the admission of aliens.” In the exercise of that power, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a law that commands the detention and removal of aliens who have been convicted of certain particularly dangerous crimes. The Secretary of Homeland Security, however, has instructed his agents to disobey this legislative command and instead follow a different policy that is more to his liking.

In 2023, Alito dismissed the view that courts could not push back against the president in such cases as a “radical theory.” In 2025, apparently, it’s correct. I wonder what’s changed?

Finally, Alito offers what I would euphemistically call a remarkable discussion of why the harm that the plaintiffs are suffering is insufficient to overcome the government’s case for a stay:

Any harm resulting from the failure to pay amounts that the law requires would have been diminished, if not eliminated, if the Court of Appeals had promptly decided the merits of the Government’s appeal, which it should not have dismissed. If we sent this case back to the Court of Appeals, it could still render a prompt decision.

In other words, the plaintiffs are being harmed not by the government’s refusal to pay them but by the D.C. Circuit’s refusal to exercise appellate jurisdiction over Judge Ali’s “pay now” order. I don’t even know what to say about this argument other than that, if that’s how irreparable harm worked, well, emergency relief (and the role of intermediate appellate courts) would look a heck of a lot different.

Alito closes by accusing the majority of imposing “a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.” This comes back to the central analytical flaw in the dissent: The “penalty” to which Alito is referring is the government’s underlying legal obligation to pay its debts. Debts aren’t a penalty; they are the literal cost of doing business. And if this is the approach that these four justices are going to take in all of the spending cases to come, that’s more than a little disheartening.

[Read: Trump tests the courts]

As for what comes next, well, I’m not entirely sure. We know that Judge Ali is scheduled to hold a preliminary injunction hearing tomorrow. It is very possible that before then (or shortly thereafter) he will reimpose some kind of “pay now” mandate that, with the hints from the Supreme Court majority, is a bit more specific and has a slightly longer timeline. Of course, the government could seek emergency relief from that order, too, but I take today’s ruling as a sign that, so long as Judge Ali follows the Court’s clues, at least five justices will be inclined to deny such relief. That doesn’t do anything immediately for the plaintiffs and other foreign-aid recipients who are continuing to suffer debilitating consequences. But it does suggest that, sometime soon, the government really is going to have to pay out at least some of the money at issue in these cases (and, as important, perhaps other funding cases too).

The broader takeaway, though, is that this is now the second ruling (the first was Dellinger) in which the Court has, in the same ruling, moved gingerly but at the same time denied the relief that the Trump administration was seeking. Two cases are, obviously, a small data set. But for those hoping that even this Supreme Court will stand up, at least in some respects, to the Trump administration, I think there’s a reason to see today’s ruling as a modestly positive sign in that direction.

Yes, the Court could do even more to push back in these cases. But the fact that Trump is already 0–2 on emergency applications is, I think, not an accident, and a result that may send a message to lower courts, whether deliberately or not, to keep doing what they’re doing.

This article was adapted from a post on Steve Vladeck's Substack, One First.

Serena Kocourek dreaded the lullaby. She worked in a hospital, and every time a baby was born, staffers would play the same song over the loudspeaker. She was going through IVF, trying without success to conceive a baby. When the lullaby played, she told me, “I felt like I was two feet further away from finally being a mom.”

One thing helped: messaging her IVF coach, Kristin Dillensnyder. She’d say, “They just played the lullaby thing and I didn’t cry.” “Win,” Dillensnyder would respond. Or she’d remind Kocourek, “Just because somebody else is having a baby doesn’t mean that you can’t have a baby.” Dillensnyder also offered advice for staying hopeful during the grueling process of IVF: She suggested that Kocourek create a playlist of songs to listen to as she gave herself hormone injections. Kocourek liked that Dillensnyder had gone through IVF herself and would help her come up with responses to insensitive questions from family and friends about when she planned to get pregnant. Occasionally, in the middle of her day, she’d think, “I just need to step away. I just need to talk to Kristin real quick.”

IVF coaching may sound niche, but it’s far from the most specialized type of coaching on offer. These days, if a problem exists, there seems to be a coach for it. Having trouble focusing? An “executive function” coach might be right for you. Undecided about having kids? There’s a coach for that too. Too burned out to plan a “transformative” vacation? A travel coach can help you for $597 (a price that does not include the actual booking of the trip).

[Read: The teen-disengagement crisis]

Discovering all these types of coaches made me wonder: Whatever happened to asking people you know for advice? So I set out to try to understand why people hire coaches and what they get from the experience. Most of the coaching clients I spoke with asked to use only their first name because of the personal nature of the issues they sought help for. One woman, Sarah, sees a meditation coach for $350 a session, justifying it because she does not own “expensive purses or clothes.” Another woman, Liz, has, at various points, had a career coach, an executive coach, a doula (or birthing coach), a co-parenting coach, and two different accountability coaches who focus on diet and exercise. She recently added a Disney “concierge”—a coach for navigating the Magic Kingdom. Each one of her coaches costs at least a couple of hundred dollars a session. She told me that if she hasn’t done something important before and wants to do it right, she tends to hire a coach to help her. “Winging it is so not my style,” she said. “Why not go into it informed if you can?”

People have long sought advice for some of life’s biggest questions—marry that guy or don’t; take or don’t take that job. But over the past few decades, the options for living one’s best adult life have expanded so much that knowing the right or wrong way to do anything can be difficult. Today, many Americans can join a polyamorous triad, remain child-free by choice, launch a new career in their 30s, or dedicate themselves to running ultramarathons, all without ruffling any feathers within their community. “Identities are no longer given,” Michal Pagis, a lecturer of sociology and anthropology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who has studied coaching, told me. “They are now achieved … It’s a project.” A number of people seem to crave sounding boards for all of this identity making, especially if they want to do it “correctly”—i.e., in a way that is still impressive, if unconventional. Erik Baker, a Harvard historian and the author of Make Your Own Job, told me that coaching is the latest example of “the therapeutic culture that emerged in the United States in the 20th century: a sense of needing to have some kind of expert to help optimize your performance.” Being “normal” is no longer enough, so people hire coaches to help them transcend normal.

In some ways, coaching stands in for the free, civic sources of support that over the past decade have been slowly fading away. People are less likely now to be members of the kinds of community groups or religious congregations where they might have previously sought help. In some circles, an idea has taken hold that asking strangers for advice without paying is gauche. Emailing someone to “pick their brain” has become a corporate misdemeanor. (“Set the precedent that you are not comfortable talking without a pre-booked and pre-paid official meeting,” goes some typical advice on how to respond to such an affront.)

People today also have fewer close friends than they used to, and they may be reluctant to rely on those friends for help. Overwhelmingly, the coaching clients I spoke with told me that they would not expect their (few, flawed, busy) friends to provide the same level of guidance that their coaches do. Friends and family members are biased. (“You never know if someone has your best interest in mind,” Liz told me.) A stranger who doesn’t know you seems more likely to be neutral. Friends may say clumsy or unsupportive things as they respond to your texts between meetings; a coach’s job is always to have the right mantra at hand.

[Read: Want to change your personality? Have a baby.]

In her book The Outsourced Self, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild writes that when it comes to advice, “anything you pay for is better.” A coach is like a super-friend—someone very smart and attentive who can help you make the best possible decision. Kiya Thompson, a travel coach, refers to her service “like a best friend pre-trip, during the trip, and … after the trip.” Dillensnyder, the IVF coach, told me that she sees herself as kind of like “a big sister”—one whose counsel is, presumably, better than your real sister’s. “Friends and family are really good,” Dillensnyder said. “However, they often give advice that is not helpful.” Another refrain I heard was that coaches allow you to be messy and depressed around them so that you can be bubbly and interesting around your friends. As another woman, Emily, put it to me about her weight-loss coach, “Your friends don’t want to listen to you talk about that all the time.”

But using coaching in this way undermines one important aspect of friendship: reciprocity. During a common type of friend hang, one person shares their problems for a while and the other person offers their best stab at some solutions. Then they switch. Pagis told me that debts—for example, owing someone a few minutes of uninhibited venting—“are important for social relations.” With coaching, however, “you are avoiding creating these debts.” If part of friendship is being there for each other, what becomes of the institution when you don’t have to be? When the well-heeled can afford to take their problems to a coach, friends risk becoming merely the people with whom we have pleasant catch-up brunches before we rush home to pay by the hour to give the real dirt to a stranger.

Yet the advice a coach dispenses may not be as reliable as clients hope. Coaches, who in many cases bear no qualifications other than personal experience, do not need to adhere to official standards. Some coaches might be only dabbling in the practice: A 2023 report by the International Coaching Federation, a credentialing body for some types of coaches, noted that the average coach spent just 12 hours a week coaching.

The casualness of these arrangements, and the lack of standards, can lead to disappointment—and little recourse—when people pay hundreds for coaching that turns out to be lackluster. One woman I spoke with, Maria, told me she was scrolling through TikTok when she came across a bariatric-surgery coach who promised to help her adjust to the dramatically different eating habits the procedure requires. “I booked a call with her,” Maria said, “and she sold me within, like, 20 minutes.” For about $500 a month, the coach would check Maria’s MyFitnessPal food log and text her an emoji assessing her performance—a fire emoji if she was doing well, for example. But during their one-on-one sessions, Maria felt like she was talking with the coach’s TikTok character rather than with a devoted adviser. “She has, like, five things that she repeats over and over again,” Maria said. She quit after two months.

Coaching can also be a problem if it replaces therapy, which, unlike coaching, is regulated and typically covered by insurance. Most coaches take pains to point out that they are not therapists, and most of the coaching clients I interviewed either have or have had therapists. Still, about 25 to 50 percent of coaching clients have a diagnosable mental-health condition, and they aren’t getting any formal mental-health treatment from their coaches, Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatry professor at Stanford, told me. “In my clinical work, it’s a common thing that comes up,” he said. “We recommend a therapist to someone, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, but I’m seeing a life coach.’”

[Read: The isolation of intensive parenting]

I do have a therapist. Even so, the more I dug into coaching, the more I wanted to understand what people saw in it. I soon had the opportunity to find out. In the course of my reporting, I spoke with Nell Wulfhart, a “decision coach” who, for $247 per hour-long session, helps her clients make one big life decision—as varied as whether to have kids or what color to paint their kitchen.

Wulfhart told me that she’s always had a “fixer brain,” and that often, she’s simply listening for what the person really wants to do anyway. “It just helps to have a totally neutral third party to check your work,” she said, “and make sure, ‘Yes, this is not a ludicrous risk you’re taking.’” What qualifications does she have? “Nothing,” she said. “People have said to me, ‘You’re so wise.’ And I was like, I think they mean you’re in your mid-40s.”

I’m allergic to people who embellish their credentials, so I liked that she admitted her lack thereof. I also liked that she has worked as a journalist, a profession I associate with straight shooters. And as it happened, I did have a decision I was struggling with. So I decided to book a session with her.

I told Wulfhart that I couldn’t decide whether to move to Florida or to Texas. She began asking me questions about what was important to me, what else I’d considered, and what each place had to offer me. Unlike my therapist, she didn’t ask about my childhood—in fact, she didn’t seem much interested in my backstory, my neuroses, or any of my usual patterns of behavior. “Why you feel this way is not that relevant,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you do feel this way.”

It did feel like talking with a super-friend—someone who was smart and likable, but also disinterested and ruthlessly rational. After about 30 minutes, she told me what I should do. It was what I’d wanted to do anyway.

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Shortly after Trump began a marathon speech, the Texas Representative shouted that the president did not have a mandate.

American politicians of both parties have always known that giving the response to a presidential address is one of the worst jobs in Washington. Presidents have the gravitas and grandeur of a joint session in the House chamber; the respondent gets a few minutes of video filmed in a studio or in front of a fake fireplace somewhere. If the president’s speech was good, a response can seem churlish or anti-climactic. If the president’s speech was poor or faltering, the opposition can only pile on for a few minutes.

So pity Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who got handed the task of a response to Donald Trump’s two hour carnival of lies and stunts. Slotkin gave a good, normal speech in which she laid out some of her party’s issues with Trump on the economy and national security.

It was so normal, in fact, that it was exactly the wrong speech to give.

But first, it’s important to note that it was a good speech. Slotkin wisely decided to forego any stagey settings, appearing in front of neatly placed flags instead of in her office or a kitchen. She gave a shout-out to her home state while managing to avoid folksy familiarity or posturing. She also stayed away from wonkery, speaking in the kind of clear language people use in daily conversation. (Okay, there was some thudding language about investment and “jobs of the future,” but these are minor speechwriting offenses.)

[Read: The Trump backers who have buyer’s remorse]

And to her credit, Slotkin reminded people that Elon Musk is an unaccountable uber-bureaucrat leading a “gang of 20 year olds” who are rummaging through the personal data of millions of Americans. As a senator from a state bordering Canada, she asked if Americans are comfortable kicking our sister nation in the teeth.

So what’s not to like? Slotkin—like so many in her party lately—failed to convey any sense of real urgency or alarm. Her speech could have been given in Trump’s first term, perhaps in 2017 or 2018, but we are no longer in that moment. The president’s address was so extreme, so full of bizarre claims and ideas, exaggerations and distortions and lies, that it should have called his fitness to serve into question. He preened about a cabinet that includes some of the strangest, and least qualified, members in American history. Although his speech went exceptionally long, he said almost nothing of substance, and the few plans he put forward were mostly applause bait for his Republican sycophants in the room and his base at home.

It’s easy for me to sit in my living room in Rhode Island and suggest what others should say. But in her response, Slotkin failed to capture the hallucinatory nature of our national politics. As a former Republican, I nodded when Slotkin said that Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave at what Slotkin called the “spectacle” of last week’s Oval Office attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But is that really the message of a fighting opposition? Is it an effective rallying cry either to older voters or to a new generation to say, in effect, that Reagan—even now a polarizing figure—would have hated Trump? (Of course he would have.) Isn’t the threat facing America far greater than that?

[Read: Lawful, but enormously destructive]

Slotkin’s best moment was when she pleaded with people to do more than be mere observers of politics, and said that doomscrolling on phones isn’t the same thing as genuine political engagement. And she issued her own Reaganesque call to remember that America is not just “a patch of land between two oceans,” that America is great because of its ideals. But her admonition to her fellow citizens not to fool themselves about the fragility of democracy, while admirable, was strangely detached from a specific attack on the source of that menace.

Did Americans vote for Kash Patel to lead the FBI, or RFK Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services, or Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense? Trump took time to recognize and praise all three of those men in his speech. So why not ask that question—directly and without needless throat clearing about the importance and necessity of change?

Slotkin’s response reflected the fractured approach of the Democrats to Trump in general. Some of them refused to attend tonight’s address, some of them held up little ping-pong paddles with messages on them (a silly idea that looked even worse in its execution), and others meandered out. One, Representative Al Green of Texas, got himself thrown out within the first minutes, a stunt that only gave Speaker Mike Johnson a chance to look strong and decisive, if only for a moment.

I’m not a fan of performative protest, and initially I thought the Democrats who chose to attend the address made the right call. But when Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as “Pocahontas,” they could have left en bloc, declaring once they were outside that they would take no part in any further demeaning of the House chamber—or, for that matter, of American democracy. Instead, they sat there and took it, their opposition to Trump a kind of hodgepodge of rage, bemusement, boredom, and irritation.

Slotkin’s address suffered from the same half-heartedness that has seized the Democrats since last November. Her response, and the behavior of the Democrats in general, showed that they still fear being a full-throated opposition party because they believe that they will alienate voters who will somehow be offended at them for taking a stand against Trump’s schemes.

Slotkin is a centrist—as she noted, she won in areas that also voted for Trump—and her victory in Michigan proved that centrism can be a powerful anchor against extremists. But centrism is not the same as meekness. America does not need a “resistance,” or stale slogans, or people putting those slogans on little paddles. It needs an opposition party that boldly defends the nation’s virtues, the rule of law, and the rights of its people.

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In 2000, the CDC declared that measles had been eliminated from the United States. But now America is at risk of losing that status: A measles outbreak has sickened more than 150 people in Texas and New Mexico since late January. An unvaccinated school-aged child recently died from measles in Texas—the first known death from measles in America in about a decade, and the first child to die from the disease since 2003. I spoke with my colleague Katherine J. Wu, who covers science and health, about why vaccination is the only way to prevent the spread, and how a surge in illnesses that had previously faded from American life could reshape childhoods.

Lora Kelley: Why is measles so reliant on vaccines to prevent its spread?

Katherine J. Wu: Measles is arguably the most contagious infectious disease that scientists know about. Researchers have estimated that, in a population where there’s zero immunity to measles, one infected person is going to infect roughly 12 to 18 other people. That is extremely high. In most cases, it is a respiratory infection that’s going to cause fever, cough, and rash, but it can also restrict breathing, cause complications such as pneumonia, and be deadly.

This is a disease that requires really, really high levels of vaccination to keep it out of a community, because it’s so contagious. Researchers have estimated that you want to see vaccination rates in the 95 percent range to protect a community. If you start to dip just a bit below that threshold, like even 92 percent or 90 percent, you start to get into trouble. Lower uptake creates an opening for the virus to start spreading. And the more unvaccinated people there are, the faster the virus will spread, and the more people will get seriously sick.

Lora: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that this recent outbreak is “not unusual” and pointed to past measles outbreaks. How do you view this current outbreak relative to other times when cases spiked, such as the 2019 outbreak in New York?

Katherine: The current outbreak actually is not as big as the 2019 New York one yet. And we almost lost our elimination status for measles then. But there are ways in which I would argue that this one is worse than the 2019 outbreak. An unvaccinated kid has died. We haven’t had a reported measles death in this country in about a decade. If the situation worsens, that death might only be the first.

Lora: Could people who are vaccinated be affected by a measles outbreak?

Katherine: The MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, generally provides immunity from measles for decades. But there are kids who are not old enough to be fully vaccinated against measles (kids get one shot at 12 to 15 months and then again at 4 to 6 years old). And it’s rare, but some people, including immunocompromised people, might not respond well to vaccination and may not be protected by it. Also, as people get further from their vaccination date, they may be more vulnerable to the disease. The more measles is around, the more vulnerable even the vaccinated population will be.

Lora: Measles hasn’t been a big issue in this country for a long time. What tools does America have to fight this disease if it resurges in a big way?

Katherine: Because this disease spreads so quickly, the main tool we’ve used to fight it is vaccination. And if people are letting that go, we’re in trouble. There are no antivirals for measles. Doctors generally just have to do what they can to manage the symptoms. Plus, health-care workers aren’t used to diagnosing or dealing with measles cases anymore, which makes it easier for outbreaks to get out of control.

Lora: How might the recent layoffs at federal agencies focused on public health and disease affect America’s ability to respond to outbreaks?

Katherine: I do worry that a lot of the public-health workforce is slowly getting hollowed out, including at the CDC. We’re going to lose our ability to prevent and stop epidemics—we saw resources that researchers rely on to track outbreaks temporarily disappear from the CDC website in January and February, for example. If people’s attitudes keep shifting away from childhood vaccination, a whole other host of diseases could creep in. In refusing the MMR vaccine, you are by definition also refusing protection against the mumps and rubella.

And RFK Jr. has made rampant speculations about the MMR vaccine being more dangerous than the disease itself, which is completely untrue. This week, he published an op-ed on the Fox News website acknowledging the importance of vaccinating against measles but also framing vaccination as a “personal” choice, and described nutrition as “a best defense against most chronic and infectious illnesses.” I can promise that no multivitamin will work against measles as well as the MMR vaccine, which has been proved safe and effective at protecting people from disease. Measles, meanwhile, can kill.

Lora: What would more frequent outbreaks mean for America’s kids and their childhood?

Katherine: In the world kids live in now, when they get sick with a disease they catch from other children, it’s not that big of a deal most of the time. Measles outbreaks are just so different from the colds picked up from day care or the stomach bugs you catch at Disneyland. If we choose to let measles and other vaccine-preventable diseases come back, there will be more childhood mortality. Kids might get pneumonia more often. They might be hospitalized more often. Some might grow up with permanent brain damage. Childhood will not only be about whether a kid is going to get a good education or make enough friends. It will once more be about whether a kid can survive the first few years of their life.

Related:

RFK Jr. is America’s leading advocate for getting measles, Benjamin Mazer writes. The return of measles

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

​Trump’s tariffs are his most inexplicable decision yet. The nicest swamp on the internet Good on Paper: You may miss wokeness.

Today’s News

The Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on most imports from Canada and Mexico, and doubled tariffs for China. In response, Canada put 25 percent tariffs on billions of dollars of American goods, Mexico will announce retaliatory tariffs on Sunday, and China will add tariffs on some American imports on March 10. Donald Trump will deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress tonight at 9 p.m. ET, in which he is expected to lay out his vision for his second term. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that last week’s Oval Office meeting was “regrettable” and proposed a partial cease-fire with Russia to resume peace negotiations.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Bettmann / Getty; Harold M. Lambert / Getty.

When America Persecutes Its Teachers

By Clay Risen

Several states, most notably Florida, have ordered schools and colleges to restrict or eliminate courses on gender, while groups such as Moms for Liberty have rallied parents to police curricula and ban books from school libraries. Ideological battles over education may be proxies for larger conflicts—Communism in the ’40s and ’50s; diversity, equity, and inclusion today. But such fights are particularly fierce because of how important schools are in shaping American values. To control the country’s education system is, in no uncertain terms, to control the country’s future.

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