The Trump administration is launching a new private health tracking system that asks Americans to share their personal health data and medical records with private tech companies.
Officials say the system will broaden access to health records, provide digital tools to help manage diabetes and other conditions, and make monitoring wellness easier. Experts caution that there are a number of ethical and legal concerns.
The initiative, spearheaded by an administration that has already freely shared highly personal data about Americans in ways that have tested legal bounds, has been met with concern from digital privacy activists.
Also Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he will impose a 25% tariff on goods from India, plus an additional trade tax beginning Friday, because of India’s purchasing of Russian oil. And the president said Friday's launch of revised tariffs on the goods from multiple countries is firm.
Here's the latest:
More Trump administration figures who met Laura Loomer’s ire are out. A look at her influence
The president has downplayed the influence of Loomer, a right-wing provocateur known for her incendiary social media presence, in his administration’s decision-making.
But the list of administration officials who have drawn Loomer’s ire and swiftly thereafter gotten the axe from Trump has been growing.
Loomer, who has publicly encouraged Trump to purge aides she believes are insufficiently loyal to the “Make America Great Again” agenda, has taken credit for some of the ousters, tearing into some of Trump’s allies and advisers and calling out what she calls a “vetting crisis” within the White House.
Trump, meanwhile, has long praised Loomer while distancing himself at times from her most controversial comments and downplaying her direct impact on his choices.
▶ Read more about connections between Loomer’s criticism and administration departures
Trump, in another break from the norm, interviews 4-star general candidates
The president now meets with candidates for promotion to that rank, the White House has acknowledged. He has the meetings because he wants to make sure the military retains its superiority and leaders focus on fighting wars instead of being bureaucrats, a spokesperson said.
The meetings, however, are a departure from past practice, and knowledge of them has raised concerns about politicization of the top ranks. Trump has not always respected the longstanding tradition of walling off the military from partisan politics.
In June he mobilized the National Guard and then the Marines, sending hundreds of them into Los Angeles over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat with whom the president has feuded.
Trump followed up with a campaign-style rally at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where uniformed soldiers cheered as he criticized former President Joe Biden and other Democrats — raising concerns that he was using the military as a political prop.
Trump’s latest tariff deadline is approaching. Here are the trade deals the US has announced so far
The clock is ticking closer to the president’s latest tariff deadline of Aug 1. And while several more deals — or at least frameworks for them — have been reached since his last tariff deadline of July 9 came and went, talks with many countries are still in flux.
▶ Read more on what we know about the agreements announced so far, country by country
Brazil’s Lula reacts to Trump’s 50% tariffs on goods from his country
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva left an event about animal rights early after Trump signed the order.
Lula said he needed to defend “the sovereignty of the Brazilian people in light of the measures announced by the President of the United States.”
South Korean president hails trade deal with US
Lee Jae Myung said in a Facebook post that the agreement offers a chance to further strengthen economic cooperation and military alliance with the United States.
Lee said the $350 billion investment fund announced earlier by Trump is meant to solidify a foundation for bilateral cooperation on strategic industries. The fund will support South Korean companies’ entry to the U.S. market in areas where they excel, such as shipbuilding, semiconductors, secondary batteries, biotechnology and energy.
Lee also said the deal will remove uncertainty around South Korea’s export environment as the U.S. 15% tariff rate on goods from the country is lower or similar to what major trade competitors face.
“The government was only engaged in negotiations by placing a top priority on national interests,” Lee said. “It’s important to pull out a mutually beneficial agreement, rather than seeking unilateral benefits.”
After ‘back door’ to privatization remark, Bessent says administration committed to Social Security
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration is committed to protecting Social Security hours after saying that a new children’s savings program Trump signed into law “is a back door for privatizing Social Security.”
Bessent said Wednesday evening that the accounts created under Trump’s tax break-and-spending cut law “will supplement the sanctity of Social Security’s guaranteed payments.”
“This is not an either-or question: our Administration is committed to protecting Social Security and to making sure seniors have more money,” Bessent said on the social platform X.
Bessent’s remarks about privatizing Social Security, made at a forum hosted by Breitbart News, were striking after Trump’s repeated promises on the campaign trail and in office that he would not touch Social Security. It also reignited an issue that has dogged Republicans for years.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
US to share biometric data with Chile ‘to track criminals,’ Homeland Security’s Noem says
Secretary Kristi Noem said Wednesday during a visit to the South American nation that the United States will deploy the biometric technologies in partnership with Santiago to control migration and disrupt criminal networks,
“This arrangement is going to serve as a bridge to help Chile and the United States work towards bringing criminals to justice and knowing who is in our countries perpetuating crimes,” Noem said while signing the preliminary agreement with Chile’s security and justice ministers.
The Trump administration is seeking to bolster regional cooperation in its clampdown against transnational criminal groups.
The agreement allows Chilean officials to identify potentially dangerous people entering or exiting the country and share their biometric data, such as fingerprints and iris scans, with the Department of Homeland Security to prevent their travel to the U.S.
Judge orders Trump administration to explain why order to restore Voice of America wasn’t followed
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth essentially accused the administration of ignoring his orders to restore Voice of America’s operations and explain clearly what it is doing with the government-run outlet.
Lamberth gave the administration until Aug. 13 to explain how it will get VOA working again. VOA, which provides news to other countries and dates back to World War, II has been largely dark since March.
The judge said the administration needs to show what it is doing with the $260 million Congress appropriated for VOA’s operations this year.
Kari Lake, the adviser appointed by Trump to run government news agencies, said in June that 85% of employees at VOA and its overseers at the U.S. Agency for Global Media had lost their jobs. She called it a “long overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy.”
Lamberth said there is a process for eliminating funding that was previously appropriated: Congress must vote on it, as it recently did for NPR and PBS funding. But that did not happen with VOA, he said.
There was no immediate comment from the White House.
Trump announces trade agreement with South Korea
The president said the agreement reached Wednesday would impose a 15% tariff on goods from the Asian nation.
The countries have also agreed for South Korea to buy $100 billion in energy resources from the U.S. and give the U.S. $350 billion for “investments owned and controlled by the United States, and selected by myself, as president,” Trump said.
He also said in a social media post that new South Korean President Lee Jae-myung will visit the White House sometime in August.
Senate confirms Trump’s pick for National Counterterrorism Center, an ex-Green Beret with extremist ties
Joe Kent was confirmed on a 52-44 party-line vote as Republicans looked past his connections to right-wing extremists and support for conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Democrats strongly opposed his confirmation.
Kent will oversee an agency tasked with analyzing and detecting terrorist threats. He plans to target Latin American gangs and other criminal groups tied to migration.
Kent enters the role after two unsuccessful campaigns for Congress in Washington state, a military career that saw him deployed 11 times as a Green Beret and work at the CIA.
During his 2022 congressional campaign, Kent paid Graham Jorgensen, a member of the far-right military group the Proud Boys, for consulting. He also worked closely with Joey Gibson, founder of the Christian nationalist group Patriot Prayer, and attracted support from a variety of far-right figures.
During his confirmation hearing, Kent refused to distance himself from a conspiracy theory that federal agents somehow instigated the Capitol riot and false claims that Trump won the 2020 election.
Top Obama official says the US is in a constitutional crisis
Eric Holder, the former attorney general during the administration of President Barack Obama, made the remark Wednesday and said voter turnout will be key.
“We still have power. If people participate in elections, if people are engaged in civic activities, I think we can push back against this power grab,” Holder said at a Democratic forum convened by Senators Alex Padilla of California and Dick Durbin of Illinois to discuss voter suppression.
“Even in the face of a gerrymander that they’re proposing, election turnout will ultimately matter,” Holder added.
Padilla lamented the maps released by the Texas legislature Wednesday, saying “I wish this conversation wasn’t as timely as it is.”
Democratic lawmakers sue Trump administration to ensure access to ICE detention centers
A dozen members of Congress who have been blocked from making oversight visits at immigration detention centers filed the federal lawsuit Wednesday seeking to ensure they are granted entry into the facilities even without prior notice.
The complaint says the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are obstructing Congressional oversight of the centers at a time when there has been an increase in ICE arrests, with reports of raids across the country and people taken into custody at immigration courts.
By law members of Congress are allowed to visit ICE facilities and do not have to give any notice. But increasingly members have been stopped at the door. ICE officials have said a new rule requires a seven-day waiting period and they prohibit entry to field offices.
The lawsuit asks the court for full and immediate access to all ICE facilities.
▶ Read more about the lawsuit
Trump calls GOP’s Josh Hawley a ‘second-tier Senator’
The remark came in a social media post following a committee action on Hawley’s legislation that would ban members of Congress from trading stocks.
Trump complained that Hawley blocked another proposal from Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., that would have forced a review of stock trades by Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker emerita.
“Why would one ‘Republican,’ Senator Josh Hawley from the Great State of Missouri, join with all of the Democrats, to block a Review,” Trump said.
Hawley did not immediately respond to Trump’s post.
“We have an opportunity here today to do something that the public has wanted to do for decades,” Hawley told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. “And that is to ban members of congress from profiting on information that frankly only members of congress have on the buying and selling of stock.”
Trump talks up new medical records push at White House event
“For decades, America’s health care networks have been overdue for a high tech upgrade,” the president said in at the White House, where he hosted the event to talk about the administration’s effort to streamline medical records.
“The existing systems are often slow, costly and incompatible with one another, but with today’s announcement, we take a major step to bring health care into the digital age.”
The effort would allow major health care and tech companies to agree on standards for electronic medical records in hopes they will seamlessly transfer between doctors. Trump said the guidelines will also make it simple for patients to access their records.
Trump boasted that health care providers will “finally be able to kill the clipboard,” referring to the physical pieces of paper on clipboards that patients fill out at doctors’ offices.
Companies represented in the crowd of about 200 people included Apple, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Amazon.
Brown University strikes agreement to resolve discrimination complaints and restore federal funding
The Ivy League school agreed to pay $50 million to workforce development organizations in Rhode Island over 10 years as part of the agreement, along with other concessions in line with the president’s political agenda. Brown will adopt the government’s definition of “male” and “female,” for example, and must remove any consideration of race from the admissions process.
University President Christina H. Paxson said the deal preserves its academic independence. The terms include a clause saying the government cannot dictate curriculum or the content of academic speech at Brown.
The deal has numerous similarities with one signed last week by Columbia that the government called a roadmap for other universities. Unlike that agreement, however, Brown’s does not include an outside monitor.
The agreement includes a pledge from Brown not to “maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts to achieve race-based outcomes, quotas, diversity targets, or similar efforts.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the deal ensures students will be judged “solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”
Ousted vaccine panel members say rigorous science is being abandoned
The 17 experts who were fired by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from a government vaccine committee last month say they have little faith in what the panel has become.
Kennedy accused the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of being too closely aligned with manufacturers. He handpicked replacements including several vaccine skeptics.
In a commentary published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the former panel members wrote that Kennedy — a leading voice in the anti-vaccine movement before becoming the government’s top health official — and his new panel are abandoning rigorous scientific review and open deliberation. That was clear, they said, during the new panel’s first meeting.
“That meeting was a travesty, honestly,” said former ACIP member Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatric infectious diseases expert at Stanford University.
What we know about a new health data tracking system being announced by White House
The president’s planned announcement of a new private health tracking system that would make it easier for patients to access their health records and monitor their wellness is raising a host of privacy concerns.
The collaboration between the federal government and Big Tech would allow patients to more seamlessly track and share their medical records or data among doctors, hospital systems and health apps, the administration and participating companies say.
More details of the system are expected to be announced during a White House event dubbed “Making Health Technology Great Again” later Wednesday.
▶ Read more on what we know about the system
Trump signs order to close tariff loophole on imports under $800
The president said the government now has systems in place to enforce his February order closing the “de minimis” loophole, in which goods worth less $800 could enter America duty-free.
Trump signed an order for all goods coming into the U.S. to be inspected and taxed, essentially ending a vehicle that enabled merchants such as Temu and Shein to send cheap products into the country.
The Associated Press
