Kevin Drum

I've been wondering when we'd start hearing from RFK Jr. now that he's been confirmed, and it turns out today's the day.

First off, he's put a 90-day hold on a new oral COVID vaccine:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has paused a multimillion-dollar contract from the Biden administration to create a new COVID-19 vaccine, Fox News Digital has learned.

"While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services (HHS) support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including Vaxart’s," Kennedy said in comments provided to Fox News Digital on Tuesday.

He's also paused final testing of a new avian flu vaccine:

The review is part of a government push to examine spending on messenger RNA-based vaccines.... “While it is crucial that the US Department and Health and Human Services support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administration’s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production,” a spokesperson for HHS said in a written statement.

That statement from an HHS "spokesman" sure sounds similar to RFK Jr.'s statement about the new COVID vaccine. Blame Biden, change a word or two, and you're good to go.

In Texas, a measles outbreak has infected 124 people and produced the first measles death since 2015. RFK Jr. seemed unconcerned: "It’s not unusual. We have measles outbreaks every year." Maybe so, but we know exactly where this one came from:

In Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the current outbreak, the vaccine exemption rate was nearly 18% for the 2023-2024 school year, according to health department data.

A successful CDC campaign called "Wild to Mild" has been canceled. It had helped persuade people to get a flu shot, but RFK Jr. wanted to spend the money instead on spots highlighting "informed consent"—i.e., that you don't have to get a flu shot. Very helpful.

Next up: every year in March a CDC committee meets to decide which flu strains to target with the upcoming season's flu shot. The March meeting is important because (a) flu strains change every year, and (b) manufacturers need plenty of lead time to ramp up production of more than 100 million doses. But RFK Jr. has called off the meeting indefinitely:

A meeting of a committee which advises the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on vaccine policy has been canceled, a committee member told Reuters, the second such disruption to a federal vaccine advisory panel since Robert F. Kennedy Jr. became the nation’s top health official earlier this month.... The committee had been set to discuss the selection of strains to be included in the influenza virus vaccines for the 2025-2026 flu season.

Finally, RFK Jr. has apparently broken his childhood vaccine promise to Sen. Bill Cassidy:

To earn the vote he needed to become the nation’s top health official, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made a special promise to a U.S. senator: He would not change the nation’s current vaccination schedule.

But on Tuesday, speaking for the first time to thousands of U.S. Health and Human Services agency employees, he vowed to investigate the childhood vaccine schedule that prevents measles, polio and other dangerous diseases. “Nothing is going to be off limits,” Kennedy said.

It's been a busy couple of days for RFK Jr. Good luck, America.

The Kyiv Independent has obtained the full text of the mineral agreement between Ukraine and the US. My translation:

1. There is a fund. The US share of the fund will be "to the extent permissible under applicable United States laws." Details will come later in a Fund Agreement.
2. The fund will collect money contributed to the fund.
3. Ukraine will contribute to the fund 50% of all money earned from mining of natural resources.
4. The US supports a prosperous Ukraine.
5. The fund will invest in Ukranian projects, mainly mineral extraction.
6. Ukraine won't sign any deals that encumber the fund.
7. The fund is commercial in nature.
8. The Fund Agreement will ensure the fund can't evade sanctions.
9. The Fund Agreement will be developed soon.
10. This agreement will be part of lasting peace.
11. This agreement is binding.

I have no idea what the US gets out of this. Some unspecified share of an investment fund that may or not ever be profitable, I guess. It doesn't seem to be much of a deal.

There's still not a lot to report, but I'm much better. The doctors are planning to move me from DOU (extra care) to the regular hospital wing either later today or tomorrow. I'm much more alert and active than I was a week ago. And I've started a light bit of daily physical therapy, which basically means getting up and walking three feet to a chair. It doesn't sound like much, but sitting in a chair is surprisingly more tiring than lying in bed.

I'll try to walk a bit more today, but the one thing that hasn't improved very much is my breathing, which is still super shallow. It's very frustrating. Even the smallest movement has me immediately huffing and puffing, and I really, really want that to get better.

Hopefully this will start to respond to the PT pretty quickly. We'll see. The doctors are telling me I might be able to go home by Friday or the weekend. That would be nice.

UPDATE: Today's X-ray looks pretty good:

Bilateral patchy airspace opacities. Mild improvement of the opacity of the right upper and lower lung zone. No pleural effusions are seen. The cardiomediastinal silhouette is normal.

I happened to get curious about the size of SpaceX, which includes Starlink as a subsidiary. Here it is:

SpaceX is a private company and doesn't report revenue, so this is a collection of estimates from various analysts and media sources. It's not exact, but it's pretty close.

Issuing a permit is the very first step in residential construction. Everything else follows:

After the end of the 2022 housing boom, permit issuing settled in at 1.52 million for a while. Then there was something of a collapse in the winter of last year, and permits ever since have averaged about 50,000 less.

In January permits ticked down about 7% at an annual rate. That's not a big deal, but it does suggest we're not approaching any kind of recovery in the homebuilding market.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau was created as part of the Dodd-Frank banking reform law passed after the 2008 financial crisis. It's been a considerable success at . . . protecting consumer finances, claiming billions of dollars in various forms of enforcement action, civil penalties, and consumer savings.

Republicans have hated it from the start, trying repeatedly to kill it off in the courts without success. Today it's in limbo, still in existence but with leaders who have halted its enforcement activities and tried to fire everyone.

But David Dayen points out something interesting. Donald Trump can try to cripple the bureau with hostile leadership, but he can't flatly get rid of the CFPB and will have to fight continuously in court over how far he can legally rein it in. However, Congress can shut down certain regulations completely if they were passed in the final 60 days of the previous term.

There are several enticing possibilities here: capping overdraft fees; removing medical debt from credit reports; open banking; and more permissive changes to bank mergers. But none of those made it to Congress's hit list. Only one new regulation was hated enough to make it: the "larger participant" rule.

Wuzzat? Simple: It gives the bureau authority to regulate payment apps from non-banks like Google, Apple, and—you guessed it, X:

In other words, Republicans are primarily focused on boosting Elon Musk and other Big Tech CEOs as they enter digital payment markets, determined to make managing and transferring money a regulatory-free zone.

It’s no secret that Musk wants to build X into a payment app. The company announced a partnership with Visa in January to support peer-to-peer payment transactions and a digital wallet. X Money would be a candidate for the kind of supervision the CFPB set up for non-bank firms.

Ironically, the larger participant rule is one of the few that banks themselves support. They figure, reasonably enough, that if they're going to be regulated, then by God all those payment app upstarts should be regulated too. And they should be.

But Congress turns out not to care all that much about big banks. At least, not nearly so much as they care about pandering to the likes of Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley startups who think payment apps should be a rule-free Wild West. That's a bad idea. Recent history has been pretty clear about this: it doesn't matter if the word "bank" is on your letterhead. What matters is whether you walk like a bank and quack like a bank. If so, you're a bank whether you like it or not and you need to follow the same rules as banks when it comes to things like leverage, capitalization, and protection of customer funds.

For now, though, Silicon Valley is winning and Republicans want them to keep winning. This will last until some payment app collapses and takes a million customers with it—or so you'd think. But the crypto business also walks and quacks like a bank and has had so many meltdowns and collapses I can barely keep track of them all. However, they remain largely unregulated and are likely to stay that way under Donald Trump and congressional Republicans. So why not payment apps as well, as long as Elon Musk and other powerful figures are lobbying for it?

The Elon Musk email fiasco keeps getting weirder and weirder. After a dozen agencies advised their workers not to respond to Musk's email demanding that they justify their jobs, the White House ultimately backed them up:

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt reiterated to reporters that Cabinet secretaries have discretion over whether their employees need to answer Musk’s email..... “The president defers to his Cabinet secretaries, who he’s obviously entrusted to pursue the guidance relative to their specific workforce,” Leavitt said.

But it was too late. Musk had already gone ballistic:

Musk really doesn't get it. Of course it's a trivial email to answer. Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with asking employees to provide progress reports. But only if you're going to read them. By contrast, a couple of million reports dumped into the HR.gov mailbox are obviously just pointless makework, not anything actually useful. It's the very opposite of efficient.

And yet, Musk, remarkably, plans to do it all over again:

Hoo boy. Talk about not reading the room. Even Donald Trump is likely to get annoyed by Musk's insistence on refighting this stupid battle. Musk needs to understand that sometimes you need to just take the L and move on.

Still catching up with some stuff. Here's the latest on EV sales:

Following the great EV collapse of January 2024, sales resumed their old growth rate. However, sales collapsed once again in January 2025, so we'll have to wait to see how quickly they recover.

I have bad news for egg lovers. The average national price of a dozen eggs is already $5 thanks to avian flu.¹ But now the USDA forecasts a 41% additional increase through the end of the year:

A year from now you'll probably be paying $7 for a dozen eggs.

¹And possibly for other less forthright reasons as well.

Gallup has added Trump 2.0 to its Presidential Approval Center:

They have Trump at a 45% job approval this week.