Trump Resurrects Dumbest Idea—and Wants to Cut Health Care to Fund It

The Trump administration is asking Congress for $152 million to transform Alcatraz into a “state-of-the-art secure prison facility,” as part of its 2027 budget proposal.

That would cover just the first-year costs of the redevelopment, which has been roundly criticized as ill conceived and a poor use of federal funds.

“For years, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has housed violent criminals in crumbling detention facilities,” reads the budget item. “Building on a $5 billion investment secured in the President’s [Working Families Tax Cut], the Budget further invests in BOP to ensure competitive pay, safe working conditions, and an end to longstanding correctional officer shortages. Within this level, the Budget also affirms the President’s commitment to rebuild Alcatraz as a state-of-the-art secure prison facility, providing $152 million to cover the first year of project costs.”

Donald Trump has seriously floated the possibility for almost a year, and members of his administration—such as former Attorney General Pam Bondi—have claimed that the site could be used to offload pressure from America’s existing prison network, potentially holding the likes of international drug traffickers.

The biggest problem with that plan: Alcatraz can only hold a maximum of 336 prisoners.

Yet several Republicans have already thrown their support behind the initiative, effectively lending credence to the idea that taxpayer funds should actually be used to rehabilitate the island prison. Immediately after Trump initially pitched the idea in May, Senator Eric Schmitt vaunted the plan as “very smart.” Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma senator recently turned homeland security secretary, also endorsed the scheme on X.

Representative Mary E. Miller even got to work itemizing a fantasy list of the most important Alcatraz inductees: “The first person to be sent to Alcatraz should be Anthony Fauci,” she wrote in May, referring to the pandemic-era director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In reality, there is practically zero possibility that the famed prison would reopen to house more prisoners. Alcatraz—which operated for just 29 years—was shut down in 1963 in part due to how expensive it was to operate. Data from the federal Bureau of Prisons shows that housing inmates at Alcatraz was three times more expensive than at other jails thanks to the fact that it is located on a remote island, requiring all of its resources, such as water, food, and fuel, to be shipped from the mainland.

“An estimated $3-5 million was needed just for restoration and maintenance work to keep the prison open. That figure did not include daily operating costs,” according to the Bureau of Prisons.

John Martini, an expert on Alcatraz’s history who previously served as an Alcatraz park ranger, told the San Francisco Chronicle in May that the building is “totally inoperable” and has no running water or sewage.

“It was falling apart and needed huge amounts of reconstruction, and that would have only brought it up to 1963 code,” Martini told the paper, noting that the building would need to be torn down and completely rebuilt to house prisoners again. “It was always an extremely expensive place to run.”

Meanwhile, the tourism centering around the former island prison rakes in $60 million in annual revenue. The site hosts 1.6 million annual visitors, according to the National Park Service.

Trump’s attachment to the penitentiary appears to be less practical than it is uncharacteristically romantic. The president has practically waxed poetic about Alcatraz, sentimentalizing it as representing something that’s “both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable.”

Meanwhile, the White House has proposed sweeping cuts to programs that actually would help Americans, such as slashing $5 billion from the National Institute of Health and $4 billion from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, as well as gutting funding to Planned Parenthood and poverty-alleviating community block grants (which the mock budget derogatorily refers to as a “duplicative slush fund for woke Community Action Agencies”).

The Trump administration officially sent Congress its 2027 budget proposal on Friday, and while the largest story that emerged from the mammoth document was that the president is looking to increase defense spending over 40 percent to a staggering $1.5 trillion, there are plenty more budget adjustments to laugh/shudder/weep over.

Among the social and health programs Trump is looking to cut in order to fund his bloodlust is the National Institutes of Health, the government’s main medical research branch. NIH was one of the main targets of DOGE cuts back in 2025; now Trump’s budget proposal looks to wrest $5 billion more from the department, alleging that NIH “broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”

The NIH has made major breakthroughs in the fields of vaccines, heart disease, and AIDS, and to date 174 researchers funded by the agency have won Nobel Prizes. But because of its willingness to fund research into LGBTQ and minority health, and its unwillingness to break with science to back MAGA’s most ridiculous medical claims, the agency has become a bugbear of the president.

Among the examples the Trump administration cites for its claim that the NIH is “wasteful and radical” are studies on how HIV risk affects the mental and sexual health of young men, and how sexually transmitted infections can occur between transgender women.

Reasoning for the cuts gets downright conspiratorial when the document begins rambling about NIH “funneling millions of dollars to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic, under Dr. Anthony Fauci.”

Studies conducted from both within and outside the NIH have looked into the “lab-leak theory” and found that while the Chinese government has been less than transparent about sharing genome data from the earliest contractors of Covid, there is little credible evidence supporting the idea that Chinese scientists accidentally created the virus, and that it is more likely Covid emerged from general contact between animals and humans.

“The weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover … either directly from bats or through an intermediate host,” the WHO concluded last year.

That hasn’t stopped the White House from running with the more inflammatory theory since the end of Trump’s first term, using it to justify racism against Chinese Americans and lend legitimacy to other unfounded conspiracies (cough, Chinese election fraud, cough).

Congress still holds the power of the purse, and tweaks to Trump’s budget proposal are undoubtedly coming. The bad news is that Republicans still command majorities in the House and the Senate, and will aim to pass the 2027 budget before the midterms, which look increasingly favorable for many Democrat challengers. Anything could happen, but for now, it’s looking grim for America’s premier medical research department.

The White House’s “Ice Maiden” has been unnerved by the lack of information reaching the president regarding the reality of the Iran war.

Three weeks into the conflict—in mid-March—White House chief of staff Susie Wiles forced a meeting of Donald Trump’s most trusted advisers to deliver the bad news. Privately, Wiles had urged the president’s inner circle to stop feeding him a rose-tinted interpretation of the conflict, fearing that Trump was largely unaware of the domestic fallout of the war just months ahead of a contentious midterm season, Time magazine reported Thursday.

Up until that point, Trump had been spoon-fed daily video compilations of various battlefield successes, a senior administration official told the publication. Trump was under the impression that stripping nuclear capabilities from Iran could be one of his greatest legacies as America’s forty-seventh president.

In reality, Americans were irate that Trump was pushing the country into another complicated and seemingly inexplicable Middle East conflict. National surveys have almost unilaterally conveyed as much. When the war began, an NBC News poll indicated that 52 percent of registered voters did not think the U.S. should have taken military action against Iran. That sentiment has only grown more severe in recent weeks: A CNN poll published Wednesday (before Trump’s address) showed that 66 percent of respondents either “somewhat disapprove” or “strongly disapprove” of “the U.S. decision to take military action in Iran.”

In the meantime, attacks on Iran’s oil and gas reserves—and the country’s decision to seal off the Strait of Hormuz, a vital energy transit point—have drastically ramped up the cost of gas around the globe.

The combination has struck fear in the Republican Party, whose lawmakers have taken to grumbling about the domestic ramifications of the war and the impact it will have at the ballot box come November.

Wiles urged her colleagues to be “more forthright with the boss” about the political and economic risks of pushing U.S. troops into Iran, according to Time.

Trump has attempted to off-road the conflict in the weeks since the meeting, working to peel America’s presence out of the region while still claiming victory for some of his biggest goals in Iran, such as decapitating Iran’s nuclear capabilities, dismantling Tehran’s ballistic missile program, and replacing Iran’s government with a slew of more U.S.-friendly politicians. Unfortunately for the president, it’s becoming increasingly unlikely that he’ll be able to do any of that on the White House’s advertised four-to-six week timeline. (The war is already in its fifth week.)

Former President Obama’s lead Iran negotiator, Wendy Sherman, admitted her X account was hacked Friday after posting a strangely worded message against the Iran war.

“We were promised strength. Instead, we are watching the greatest decline in our nation’s history unfold in real time. Our future is being traded away piece by piece for a war that was never truly ours,” the former U.S. deputy secretary of state posted on X. “Watch the video. Decide for yourself. #AmericaFirst#F35Falling#WarReality.”

Attached is unconfirmed footage shared by Iranian state media of a shot-down U.S. F-15 fighter jet, as well as unconfirmed images of its debris. What has been confirmed is that the Iranian military did shoot down a U.S. fighter jet over Iran, and Iranian officials have since called on civilians to search for and capture the pilot.

“It appears I have been hacked,” Sherman posted almost two hours later. “Recent tweet is not from me.”

It is unclear who the hackers are or where they came from, although they could likely be tied to Iran. For some reason, the post is still up on Sherman’s page.

The Pentagon has been misleading Americans about the destruction of Iran’s military arsenal, casting doubt on Donald Trump’s timeline for ending the war. 

After five weeks of military bombardment from the United States and Israel, roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers and thousands of one-way attack drones are still intact, according to an exclusive CNN report Thursday. Some of these assets may be inaccessible to the Iranian military, having been buried by strikes. 

Speaking on March 19 about the destruction of Iran’s military capabilities, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has pointed to the number of Iranian missile strikes, rather than the arsenal itself. He claimed that ballistic missile attacks against U.S. forces were “down 90 percent since the start of the conflict, same with one-way attack UAVS, think kamikaze drones.” 

While the number of strikes may have plunged, Iran’s arsenal has only been halved, according to U.S. intelligence sources.  

Still, while speaking to the nation Wednesday night, Trump emphasized the damage to Iran’s military arsenal. “Their ability to launch missiles and drones is dramatically curtailed, and their weapons factories and rocket launchers are being blown to pieces,” he said. 

“We’ve done all of it,” he continued. “Their navy is gone, their air force is gone, their missiles are just about used up or beaten.”  

One U.S. official who reviewed the intelligence cast doubt on the American military’s ability to resolve the conflict in only two or three weeks, as Trump suggested during his speech. 

“We can keep f**king them up, I don’t doubt it, but you’re out of your mind if you think this will be done in two weeks,” the official said.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell dismissed CNN’s reporting as “completely wrong.”

“The United States military has delivered a crippling series of blows to the Iranian regime,” Parnell said. “We are far ahead of schedule on accomplishing our military objectives: Destroy Iran’s missile arsenal, annihilate their navy, destroy their terrorist proxies, and ensure Iran can never obtain a nuclear weapon.”

Israeli intelligence estimated that the number of remaining Iranian missiles was closer to 20 or 25 percent of the original arsenal, not including launchers that were inaccessible.

It’s worth noting that this is where Iran’s arsenal stands weeks after Trump announced that the war in Iran was already won. 

A massive overhaul is in the cards among the higher echelons of the Trump administration.

Donald Trump is “very angry” with his Cabinet thus far and is considering “moving” several officials, according to an administration official who spoke with Politico.

Others are at risk of being axed from their jobs entirely. Some of the people that Trump has expressed frustration with include Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, both of whom could lose their jobs “imminently,” according to three people “with knowledge” of the president’s thinking, who confirmed the rumors to Politico.

No final decisions have yet been made about Lutnick or Chavez-DeRemer, and it is not clear who would replace them. Publicly, the White House stressed its faith in Trump’s appointees, writing in a statement that ​​both Lutnick and Chavez-DeRemer are “doing a great job standing up for American workers, and they continue to have President Trump’s full support.”

But officials circling the White House have very different opinions when they’re allowed to speak candidly. One senior administration official told Politico that Lutnick is on “thin ice,” though they noted that Trump has considered firing him before and backed off. Pink-slipping Lutnick would give Trump the ability to say, “I’m making changes on the economy,” according to one official—a message that could be enormously valuable to Republicans ahead of a particularly contentious midterm season.

Trump dismissed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Thursday, thrusting her out of government and into the private sector. Her dismissal was reportedly supposed to occur Friday but was rushed due to rampant speculation about her replacement that consumed Washington Wednesday night.

An unidentified senior administration source who spoke with The Daily Mail Thursday claimed that Bondi begged Trump to reconsider, pleading to give her more time in the role, but Trump was adamant about her departure. Among the speculated reasons for her sudden exit include her handling of the Epstein files—which remains the president’s most resilient and egregious scandal—and the president’s apparent belief that Bondi tipped off California Representative Eric Swalwell to an FBI smear campaign. Swalwell has denied Bondi gave him any information.

But Bondi’s firing could be the tip of the iceberg. Trump has reportedly also surveyed his advisers about ousting Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who recently irritated Trump by shielding a former deputy who disagreed with the president’s war with Iran.

Another senior official told Politico that the high-level reorg is focused on members of his administration who he believes have either “underperformed or who have generated too much negative attention.”

Trump axed Kristi Noem from her position atop the Department of Homeland Security last month immediately following a string of abysmal appearances before Congress. Her position atop the Trump administration had become increasingly tenuous in recent months due to a series of scandals, though most notably after ICE agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, marring Trump’s immigration agenda—a chief MAGA priority—in the process.

For what was meant to be the Golden Age of America, it’s sure looking like a recession could be on the cards.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ jobs report Friday found the U.S. added 178,000 jobs in March, surpassing expectations. But hidden in that good news was something else: The job losses in February were far worse than previously reported. Initially reported as a loss of 92,000 jobs, the labor market actually lost a total of 133,000 jobs that month.

This update means that February represented the largest U.S. job loss since December 2020, during the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The labor market has been consistently brutal since Trump took office in January 2025. Yearly job growth was the worst it had been outside of a recession since 2003.

“March was somewhat encouraging, but it’s been a rocky year for the labor market with almost no hiring since last April,” Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, told CNBC. “The March data will keep the Federal Reserve on hold, but no one is declaring victory yet. It’s likely to be a tough spring for job-seekers.”

The rough months come while Trump spends millions in taxpayer money on a golden ballroom for himself and his cronies (not to mention billions on his unpopular and unauthorized Iran war). Some Jay Gatsby parallels spring to mind—although at least Gatsby’s lavish spending was guided by unrequited love and a desire to fit in. Trump’s is more just because he’s a senile egoist.

A U.S. fighter jet was reportedly shot down by Iran on Friday. Iran is offering a “precious prize” to anyone who captures the pilot alive.

Iranian state media reported, and U.S. officials have anonymously confirmed to various outlets, that an American F-15 fighter jet was shot down over southern Iran. If confirmed by the U.S. military, this would be the first time Iran shot down a fighter jet over the country since the war began five weeks ago.

The Trump administration has thus far refused to publicly comment on the news.

There are conflicting reports as to whether the pilot of the jet was able to successfully eject before the crash. But just in case they did, Iranian state media is encouraging anyone who can to hunt them down.

“If you capture the enemy pilot or pilots alive and hand them over to the police, you will receive a precious prize,” an anchor said.

This is yet another nightmare scenario on the thirty-fifth day of a war that Trump has been declaring over for weeks. The image of Iran civilians going after a downed U.S. pilot does not align with the rhetoric of Iran being subdued and defeated like Trump and Defense Secretary Hegseth have been saying. And while Iran has claimed to have shot U.S. planes down before, it has not gone on live TV to invoke a manhunt for a U.S. soldier.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rampant racism and sexism extend further than we previously knew.

Hegseth has made efforts to block or delay the promotion of more than one dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and the Marines, according to nine U.S. officials familiar with the process who spoke with NBC News.

“There is not a single service that has been immune to this level of involvement by Hegseth,” one of the U.S. officials told NBC News.

These leaks come just hours after Hegseth removed General Randy George, the Army’s chief of staff, in the midst of Donald Trump’s reckless war in Iran. George had recently asked to meet Hegseth to discuss his decision to thwart promotions for female and Black service members, but Hegseth refused, two of the U.S. officials told NBC News. Clearly, military officials aren’t pleased with Hegseth’s decisions.

The apparent reasons to block these promotions varied but seemed to have nothing to do with conduct—more with the identities of the officers and what they represented to Hegseth.

Two officials told NBC News that the officers whose advancement were blocked had been supportive of mask mandates or were Black or female, and therefore attached to the DEI programs Hegseth has spent months railing against. Another officer was denied a promotion due to their affiliation with former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, the officials said.

Hegseth blocked the promotions of three Marines, including two women and one Black man. He held up a list of naval officers who’d been selected to become one-star admirals, sparking concern that some could be removed over race or gender. In the Air Force, female officers and members of racial minority groups were pulled off a list for promotion, among others.

Hegseth’s moves could also prove dangerous, considering the U.S. is in the middle of a war. Preventing senior officers from taking over their new posts could hurt military readiness.

The man tapped to fill Pam Bondi’s shoes isn’t any better at handling the Epstein files than she was.

Hours after Donald Trump named him as Bondi’s temporary successor on Thursday, acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche took to Fox News, weaving a bold-faced lie about the celebrity pedophile investigation to the network’s conservative audience.

“The Department of Justice has now released all the files with respect to the Epstein saga,” Blanche said. “[Former] Attorney General Bondi and I appeared in front of Congress voluntarily a couple weeks ago to answer any questions they had. We have made every single congressman—senator—available to come and see any document, redacted or unredacted, that they want.

“To the extent the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward,” Blanche added.

But the notion that the DOJ has released everything it has on the Epstein files just isn’t true.

The agency has released roughly 3.5 million pages of evidence related to Epstein’s crimes, but according to a memo from Blanche’s former office in January, the DOJ’s “collection efforts resulted in more than 6 million pages being identified.” That would suggest the agency has only released about half of the evidence that DOJ employees had already determined to be related to the case.

Failing to provide all of the documentation related to the Epstein files is in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress and signed by Trump into law in November.

Lawmakers were quick to call out the discrepancy in Blanche’s numbers, indicating that the Epstein files are likely to be just as big an issue for the new DOJ chief as for his predecessor.

“This is a lie. About 50 percent of the files have been released and per our subpoena it’s illegal to withhold them,” wrote California Representative Robert Garcia on X, responding to a clip of the interview. “Blanche may think it’s over, but we are just getting started.”

At least one Republican similarly put Blanche to task, reminding the new DOJ head of the looming release deadline.

“Congratulations AG Blanche,” posted Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie. “Now you have 30 days to release the rest of the files before becoming criminally liable for failure to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”