A Biden-era health official who identifies as transgender is outraged that the current Department of Health and Human Services has changed his nameplate to showcase his birth name, Richard Levine, instead of his trans-identifying name, Rachel Levine. On Tuesday, HHS took to X to unapologetically confirm the change, which apparently took place during the Democrat-backed government shutdown. The portrait plaque is displayed in the HHS offices. Can confirm! https://t.co/PdErnBJVqh pic.twitter.com/yuZGMfK6xw — HHS (@HHSGov) December 9, 2025 Levine was upset about the change, calling it “petty” and an act of “bigotry.” “I’m not going to comment on this type of petty action,” Levine told NPR. However, he did respond through a spokesperson. “During the federal shutdown, the current leadership of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health changed Admiral Levine’s photo to remove her current legal name and use a prior name,” Adrian Shanker said, calling the change “bigotry against her.” The current HHS argued that the change better reflects their mission to express “gold standard science” at all times. “Our priority is ensuring that the information presented internally and externally by HHS reflects gold standard science,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said. “We remain committed to reversing harmful policies enacted by Levine and ensuring that biological reality guides our approach to public health.” During his tenure, Levine claimed the title of the “first female four-star officer” in a video boasting about “diversity” at HHS. He was also widely criticized for his support of so-called transgender “care” for minors, which opponents highlight is often irreversible and damaging to children. Additionally, Levine seemed to advocate for the censorship of opposing views on the issue. “There is substantial misinformation about gender-affirming care for transgender and gender-diverse individuals,” Levine said back in May 2022 during a presentation before the Federation of State Medical Boards in New Orleans. “We need to get our voices in the public eye, and we know how effective our medical community can be talking to communities, whether it’s at town halls, schools, conversations with others, and we need to use our clinicians’ voice to collectively advocate for our tech companies to create a healthier, cleaner information environment,” Levine added. Related: Top Biden Official Pushed Big Tech To Censor ‘Misinformation’ On Trans ‘Care’ For Minors, Video Shows

WASHINGTON — The head of the Food and Drug Administration is facing heavy fire from the pro-life community amid reports that he slow-walked a review of abortion drugs promised by Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The backlash followed a Bloomberg report on Monday stating that the FDA had delayed its review of the impacts of abortion drugs, specifically mifepristone — a review promised by both Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Commissioner Marty Makary. Two people familiar with the matter reportedly told Bloomberg that Makary requested that the review be put off until after the midterm elections. HHS Press Secretary Emily Hilliard told The Daily Wire on Tuesday afternoon that the FDA’s comprehensive scientific reviews “take the time necessary to get the science right,” adding, “That is what Dr. Makary is ensuring as part of the Department’s commitment to gold-standard science and evidence-based reviews.” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon similarly rejected the idea that Makary was acting ideologically, telling Bloomberg the “assertions that the FDA is slow-walking this review for political purposes are baseless.” The White House similarly backed Makary, telling The Daily Wire in a Tuesday afternoon statement that Makary is working hard to “ensure that Americans have the best possible, Gold Standard Science study of mifepristone.” A White House official also pushed back on the claim that the study is being “slow walked,” saying that comprehensive and exhaustive reviews take time. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks in the Oval Office on October 10, 2025, in Washington, DC.  (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) “The White House maintains the utmost confidence in Commissioner Makary, whose leadership at the FDA has delivered and continues to deliver one landmark victory for the American people after another, from cracking down on artificial ingredients in our food supply to conducting the first safety review of baby formula in decades,” Deputy White House Press Secretary Kush Desai said. “Uninformed attacks against Commissioner Makary from individuals outside the Administration will not change these facts.” But a number of high-profile pro-life leaders view the matter differently. They insist Kennedy and Makary promised a timely review of the abortion drugs, and, in their view, wasted time means more babies killed through abortion drugs, and more women harmed by their adverse effects. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the top pro-life groups in the United States, came out swinging on Tuesday morning with a statement condemning Makary, saying he should be “fired immediately” and accusing him of “undermining” the Trump/Vance pro-life agenda. “The FDA is doing nothing while every single day abortion drugs take the lives of children, put women and girls at serious risk, empower abusers and trample state pro-life laws,” said the organization’s president, Marjorie Dannenfelser. “The FDA needs a new commissioner who will immediately reinstate in-person dispensing as it existed under President Trump’s first term and immediately conduct a comprehensive study.” “Commissioner Makary is severely undermining President Trump and Vice President Vance’s pro-life credentials and their position that states should have the right to enact and enforce pro-life protections,” she added. “Makary must go.” Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who has been particularly vocal throughout the second Trump administration about the need to examine abortion drugs, also slammed Makary on Tuesday, saying that the Bloomberg report suggests the FDA “lied” to him and other members of Congress. “FDA needs to stop dithering & reinstate the mifepristone safety guardrails,” Hawley said. “Nothing less is acceptable.” NEW report saying FDA lied to me and other members of Congress & is not actively reviewing the chemical abortion drug at all. FDA needs to stop dithering & reinstate the mifepristone safety guardrails. Nothing less is acceptable https://t.co/33LVP5U1aL — Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 9, 2025 A pro-life leader who has engaged in conversations with the White House on the topic shared with The Daily Wire that the Tuesday report shattered the confidence of pro-life organizations advocating for the review, confirming inklings of delays that they had already heard. “I don’t think Senator Hawley is alone in his concerns,” the leader shared. Lila Rose, a well-known pro-life activist who heads the pro-life organization Live Action, warned in a post on X: “If Dr Makary will not act as head of the FDA to protect children and mothers he should be fired. Under his watch abortion pills kill preborn children and endanger women and the study he promised is nowhere to be found. End mail order abortion. Ban the abortion pill now!” SBA Pro-Life America cites peer-reviewed research that found three-quarters of emergency room visits within 30 days after a woman took abortion drugs were coded as severe or as critical. They also point to studies that found more than one in ten women experience at least one severe adverse event when taking the abortion drugs, and point out that complications can include hemorrhaging, infections, sepsis, and, in some cases, death. The Daily Wire reported in late November that 175 Republican lawmakers called on HHS to take “immediate action” to reinstate safety requirements on abortion drugs, highlighting the growing body of evidence showing that the drugs are causing severe and underreported harm to women, asking RFK Jr. and Makary to “at a minimum, reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone.” Until 2023, the FDA required abortion drugs to be administered to women under a doctor’s supervision. Under Joe Biden’s administration, that and other safety standards were removed, which the Biden White House justified by citing the coronavirus pandemic. “The need for urgent investigation and review of this drug comes in the wake of the Biden-Harris administration’s egregious action to remove critical safeguards that once applied to abortion drugs, and the FDA’s approval of a new abortion drug generic in September 2025,” wrote the lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN). “Under your leadership, HHS and FDA can reverse this wrong,” they conclude. “We urge you to immediately reinstate the REMS requiring in-person dispensing of mifepristone and to expedite the promised review by the FDA into the dangers of abortion drugs.”

Chicago could lose federal funding after a 26-year-old woman was set on fire on the city’s train system in what the Trump administration described as a “preventable attack.” Federal Transit Administration Administrator Marc Molinaro sent letters on Monday to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Democratic Governor JB Pritzker, directing them to immediately enhance safety on public transportation. Molinaro said that officials had failed to take the necessary steps to keep the public safe. “Creating a safe, reliable transit system is the responsibility of leaders at every level. CTA, the City of Chicago, and the State of Illinois have failed to meet this obligation,” Molinaro wrote. “If CTA does not promptly increase its law enforcement presence, FTA will act, including by withholding federal funds.” The letter comes after Bethany MaGee was doused in gasoline and set ablaze in an unprovoked attack on a Chicago train last month. Lawrence Reed, the man charged in the attack, had previously been arrested more than 70 times and had 15 criminal convictions. The letter said that officials needed to “implement immediate, measurable, corrective actions to reduce assaults on transit workers and passengers and to address unsafe conditions contributing to elevated violent crime rates.” “The horrific attack on Bethany MaGee onboard a CTA train has shaken not only Chicago but also every community that depends on public transportation. As FTA Administrator, I call on you as an elected leader and on Chicago transit officials to take decisive action on safety issues that lead to such tragedies.” “I will not accept the brutal assault of an innocent 26-year-old woman as an inevitable cost of providing public transportation,” Molinaro added. “The attack on Ms. MaGee was preventable. Transit leaders and elected officials who fail to enforce basic laws and permit disorder to erode the integrity of their systems are making deliberate choices that endanger riders.” According to Molinaro, violent crime on Chicago’s public transportation system is four times the national average, and assaults on passengers have surged 150% in the last five years. Molinaro directed Chicago officials to update the city’s public transportation agency safety plans and adopt appropriate measures to address violent crime. Pritzker and other Democratic officials have long downplayed crime rates in the Windy City, claiming high crime is part of being a big city.

Ousted MSNBC host Joy Reid finally asked the same question Republicans have been asking for months: Why did Democrats have so little curiosity about the contents of the Epstein Files when President Joe Biden was still in the White House and could have done something about it? Reid, speaking with popular “The Breakfast Club” host Charlamagne tha God, tore into former Attorney General Merrick Garland, who served throughout the Biden administration, for exactly that. WATCH: ?NEW: Joy Reid *TORCHES* Merrick Garland for failing to catch J6 Pipe Bomber & release Epstein Files? “Merrick Garland was there for 4 years! What were you doing!? The Epstein files. Merrick, what were you doing!? For 4 years!? You had the same evidence, the same files! Why… pic.twitter.com/00rcNrlFJA — Jason Cohen ?? (@JasonJournoDC) December 9, 2025 Reid began with a brief assessment of the January 6 pipe bomb case, noting that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department had wrapped that up rather neatly and pointedly asking what Garland had been up to that he couldn’t get the job done. “I don’t understand why he escapes the smoke. Even the Epstein files thing. I’m like, wait a minute. You’re telling me nine months into this administration, the podcast guys are claiming they caught the — now, I don’t know if this young man is the person that put the pipe bombs … but I know they said we solved the case in nine months,” Reid said. “Merrick Garland was there for four years. What were you doing?” she complained. “The Epstein files. Merrick, what were you doing? For four years? You had the same evidence, the same files. Why didn’t you release them? Merrick Garland did, to me, nothing for four years. He might as well not have been there.” With regard to the Epstein Files, the Justice Department is currently working to comply with the recently passed legislation mandating the release of all relevant documents that do not contain classified materials.

The United States is facing down an existential threat right now. That existential threat comes from a lack of willpower. It comes from a doubt about what America is. But in terms of foreign policy, that existential threat comes from a team-up that has been growing. That team-up is between China — which is really the sponsor state of the anti-American bloc — and its friends like Russia and Iran. The existential threat doesn’t mean that China is going to attack the United States. It does mean that as the United States recedes from the world, Russia will expand its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. China will expand its sphere of influence, not just in the Far East, but also in Africa, across the rest of Asia into South America. The United States is going to be in the unenviable position of having to withdraw from the world, and we will no longer be able to guarantee freedom of the seas. A United States with no economic allies, a United States that is a secondary partner for all the rest of these countries while China is a primary partner, is a United States that has an economy that is shrinking, a United States that is forced within its own borders. That is a problem. There is this bizarre notion that has arisen on the Right that if the United States were to be essentially an autarky and withdraw from the rest of the world, suddenly things would get better. The belief that the amount that we expend in foreign aid, for example, or military expenditure, is a complete waste of money, and if we just spent that money at home, then magically everything would get better. The problem, of course, is that the world is interconnected. The reason that you can obtain better, cheaper products that make your life easier every single day is because the interconnection of world trade makes that possible. And that, of course, is only possible because of the power of the United States economy and the power of the United States military. Why do I bring that up? Because China seems to be posing a broader and broader threat, and yet there is a bizarre unwillingness on the Left to acknowledge the threat that is China. And on the Right, there seems to be an unwillingness to deal with the actual realities of what it would mean to face down China in a responsible and coherent fashion. In the West, there is the bizarre perception that what we ought to do is radically increase tariffs, not just on China — which would be retaliatory and worthwhile — but on everywhere else.  That is a gigantic mistake. And it leads to questions about the overall policy of the United States vis-à-vis China. What exactly are we trying to do vis-à-vis China?  I’ve made the case that if you wish to face down China, you have to do a few things. One is that you need closer trade and security relationships, not more attenuated relationships, with other countries surrounding China, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India. Better relations with those countries will help box in and essentially isolate China. If China wants to cheat, if they don’t want to play by the rules, if China wishes to beggar its neighbor, let them pursue an autarkic economic policy. Autarky tends to make the country pursuing it poorer over time. Initially, it looks like an explosion of economic activity, but over time, as countries start pouring resources into less efficient modes of manufacturing in order to do it at home, rather than to import those products from abroad, they tend to empty themselves out. This is the common pattern in economics. Every mercantilist or fascist economic system that has worked like this shows very good early growth numbers. And then that growth curve eventually peters out, and the country ends up with economic stagnation. This happened in Japan. It happened in South Korea. If you go back prior to World War II, this happened in Germany. One of the reasons that Germany, under the Nazis, had to become an expansionist power is because Germany tried to pursue economic autarky in the 1930s, and they saw, for a brief moment in time, a gigantic manufacturing boom, people getting off unemployment lines, moving out of the Weimar Republic era. But as it turns out, they were doing that based on state expenditures that made them less economically viable over the long term. And so then they had to turn to actual physical territorial expansionism. Autarky very often turns into a necessity for expanding your access to resources, which leads to invasions of other countries. It is not a coincidence that countries that tend to embrace a strong mercantilist policy, an economic policy that focuses on “Let’s build everything right here at home,” find that when they can’t, they have to expand their own territorial borders or the places under their immediate dominion. Free trade generally means that you don’t have to invade other places because you can trade with those other places. So, when you look at China, how would you stop China? We need to build up better security and economic relationships in the Far East, and also build up better security and economic relationships with Europe. That means that we can use tariffs as a way to force the Europeans to get rid of their non-tariff barriers. One of the ways I would be forcing the Europeans to pay their fair share is by using things like tariffs, in order to push the Europeans to pay their fair share. When it comes to, for example, the price of pharmaceuticals, Europe pays far less than what the actual market rate should be for pharmaceuticals, and then the United States ends up paying for that via our taxpayers and via our consumers. That’s just the way that it works. We should stop that. There are things that we can do to fight the non-tariff barriers and also the unfairness of our systems with Europe. But in the end, we should be pursuing freer trade and better relationships.  That’s because if you’re going to box in China, you need to offer both the carrot and the stick to China, but just carrots to our friends.  When it comes to offering carrots for our friends, we can offer a little bit of the stick in order to achieve the carrot. That is why I’m not against using tariffs as a way to pressure other countries to lower their tariffs. This is a case that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has made. You need to box China in. You need to treat them like the adversary they are. You need to build out other lines of supply. You need supply chains that are diversified, so we’re not as reliant on China. You need to cut off China’s allies at the knees. If we believe, as we should, that Russia is a geopolitical adversary of the United States, then obviously we should be pursuing an attempt to get Russia to stop invading Eastern Europe. And that means supporting allies in the region to the extent necessary to stop the Russians, because it’s not as though Russia and China aren’t talking to each other. They’re talking very extensively to each other. If we are attempting to form a better relationship with India, then we should be attempting to form a better relationship with them. We should be trying to make trade relations with India so beneficial to India that they don’t want to trade with the Chinese. There are natural differences in opinion between China and India, which have nearly come to blows several times over the course of the last several decades. India and China are not working hand in glove. They have actual territorial conflicts. We could be attempting to pry India out of China’s sphere of influence.  These are all things that a responsible foreign policy would do. And then we certainly would not be shipping many of the most important components in the battle for the future to China. China is already stealing our intellectual property. China is already cheating when it comes to trade relationships. China is already badgering its neighbors. Why should we be sending some of our most sophisticated microchips produced in the United States? Why should we be allowing those to flow into China? Even if we’re going to argue that it’s only a marginal increase in China’s capacity, why would we allow that increase in China’s capacity? China is our geopolitical enemy. They are our opponent. Trying to pretend otherwise is foolish because if you allow China to continue pursuing its normal policies, China will blow itself out. China has a serious demographic problem. It does not have enough people. China is in steep demographic decline. Even though they have a billion people, they do not have enough human beings to be able to generate the economic growth necessary to pay for their gigantic redistributionist schemes and mercantilist ideas. They have an enormous debt problem. They’ve been burying that debt problem in local and regional debt issues, and then building gigantic empty cities rooted in debt that they’re taking out from their own citizens and against their own citizens. We tend to look at the fact that China builds some nice things and say, “Wow, they must be doing it right.” But the fact is that mercantilism looks systematic when you look at the areas where it succeeds, but looks like a trash heap when you look at the areas where it doesn’t succeed. The areas where you don’t succeed in a centralized economy are the areas that tend to be ignored, and there are a lot of them. Capitalism looks really messy, but it has a much higher hit rate because capital follows the best ideas. You don’t just keep investing in bad ideas the way you do with a centralized economic system, like China. There are ways to box in China. The question is whether the United States will actually do it.