Our final briefing of 2025 covers updates in immigration, data security, and medical research funding, plus brand-new material in trans healthcare. It’s unusually long, but we found some good news to mix in with the bad.

After grant reinstatements, the total estimate of canceled and delayed NIH funding this year has dropped from more than $5 billion to $730 million.

The year in data security has been a mess of data grabs, consolidation across agencies, and expanding surveillance. We’ve also seen steady erosion of cybersecurity and data protections in the government, leaving all our information vulnerable to misuse and theft.

Our Trans Healthcare team has just published a brand-new chronological timeline of Trump administration and congressional attacks on the people and institutions providing gender-affirming care: unbreaking.org/issues/trans...

The administration has doubled down on two major parts of its immigration agenda: violent crackdowns in “blue” US cities and chaotic attacks on refugees and other people pursuing lawful immigration.

We’re beginning to wrap our first year of documenting the ways the Trump administration is making us sicker, poorer, and less safe.

Our update this week begins with Data Security news. Despite reports last week that DOGE has disbanded, Elon Musk–affiliated tech workers are still embedded across federal agencies and leading data pooling and destruction of data safeguards. www.wired.com/story/what-i...

While Thanksgiving in the US has some pretty … loaded origins, we can all benefit from practicing gratitude in the darkness of fall and in this political moment. A few of the many efforts we’re thankful for here at Unbreaking:

Unbreaking will be taking some downtime for the rest of November, so you’ll see our next briefing in December. In the meantime, you can catch up on our Data Security, Immigration, Medical Research, and Equality at Work work: unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

If you’ve been following the federal layoffs closely, you might be wondering what happened with the lawsuit seeking to block the Trump administration from firing people during the shutdown.

New analysis has revealed that the Trump administration terminated funding for 383 clinical trials between Jan and Aug 2025, affecting more than 74,000 participants. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

The end of the government shutdown brought good news for federal employees: The bill reverses layoffs made during the shutdown, and those who were furloughed or worked without pay should have started receiving backpay this week. unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

The fight against authoritarianism has many fronts. At Unbreaking, we choose to work against information overload and for collective understanding. On our Immigration timeline, we track major and representative events from across the US—now filterable by legal case: unbreaking.org/issues/immig...

The federal government continues to roll new datasets into its surveillance operation and use them to target immigrants. We learned this week that ICE’s Mobile Companion app now includes driver’s license data: www.404media.co/this-app-let...

Thanks to the work of @unbreaking.org's website team, we can filter on tags now! The immigration page is starting with tags for court cases, which is how we know that we are following nearly 50 of the things. unbreaking.org/issues/immig...

We quietly launched a new thing over on @unbreaking.org: letting folks filter our *in-depth* timelines down into the pieces they care about, to help them pull out the threads that are most relevant to them. This was a real team effort; can’t wait to see more of our pages roll out their own filters.

This week, we updated our pages on data security and surveillance, immigration, the federal workforce, and medical research funding. Our brisk, rigorously cited weekly briefing is live at Unbreaking: unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

Earlier this month, @propublica.org published a fascinating (and frankly horrifying) investigation into the Trump administration’s failure to inspect overseas facilities that process food for US consumers. You can read their report in full here: www.propublica.org/article/fore...

Last Wednesday marked the end of the longest government shutdown in US history, and Unbreaking will continue to update our resources as its effects become clear. In the meantime, our most recent briefing explores Medicaid and the loss of federal food safety oversight: unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

Our weekly briefing is out, this one touching on Medicaid but mostly looking at what we’re losing in federal food safety oversight. Spoiler, it is “things that keep our food from making us sick.” unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

The biggest news we have on the federal workforce this week relates to a lawsuit we’ve been watching in California. On October 28, the judge in that case indefinitely blocked mass layoffs during the government shutdown: www.npr.org/2025/10/28/n...

We have a new timeline up today on our Medical Research Funding page, documenting the onslaught of political, legal, and bureaucratic attacks on medical research since January: unbreaking.org/issues/medic...

Our Immigration and Data Security teams worked together this week to understand how immigration-linked data grabs and shoddy facial recognition apps are laying the groundwork for a surveillance state. unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

We have a new timeline up today on our Food Safety page, documenting how individual events continue to chip away at the personnel, regulations, and oversight mechanisms that make up our food safety systems: unbreaking.org/issues/food-...

The continued government shutdown means that NIH staff remain furloughed, with grant review panels postponed and delays of new and existing grants: www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

In Immigration this week, we saw more ICE raids around the country, expansions of immigration enforcement—often under the guise of crime reduction—in blue cities, and great reporting on the assembly of an unaccountable national police force. Our briefing is up: unbreaking.org/blog/this-we...

We caught up on what’s been happening with the federal workforce since the shutdown began. Since January 20, the Trump admin’s DOGE has been linked to 289,000 job cuts. Federal job losses dramatically exceed every other kind of job loss this year: unbreaking.org/issues/equal...

This week, the administration continued to amass sensitive personal information about people in the US and also undermined more systems that protect data once the federal government holds it. People and states keep fighting back. unbreaking.org/issues/data-...

Congressional Democrats are refusing to authorize short-term measures to keep the government open unless Republicans agree to renew ACA subsidies, and possibly to reverse Medicaid cuts as well. As the shutdown enters its third week, we look at the ripple effects of this summer’s healthcare cuts.

The Trump administration has slashed hundreds of thousands of jobs this year, leaving many vital federal functions un- or under-staffed, and they don’t seem to be letting up. We updated our Equality at Work timeline this week, and here’s what we saw: unbreaking.org/issues/equal...

In its latest attack on academic freedom, the administration offered nine universities preferential access to federal funds in exchange for scrapping DEI, capping international student enrollment, and promoting conservative views on campus: www.wsj.com/us-news/educ...

Since our last update, the administration ramped up its quest for voter data, suing six more states that refused to give their voter rolls to the DOJ: www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...

The clear story in Immigration this week is the escalation of—and pushback against—the Trump administration’s militarized raids and warrantless stops in Democrat-run major cities. We’ve updated our timeline with a lot of events in this zone: unbreaking.org/issues/immig...

Amidst the other chaos of the government shutdown you might have missed the fact that the House’s version of the appropriations bill bans federal funding for all gender-affirming care, for any patient of any age. transitics.substack.com/p/the-new-ho...

Despite the ongoing massive cuts, we saw some wins for research at major universities in this update for our Medical Research Funding page: unbreaking.org/issues/medic...

In Data Security, we continue to see the Trump administration attempt to acquire & weaponize ever-larger swathes of personal data, including voting & medical records, financial data, & detailed information on benefits recipients. But states & judges are pushing back. unbreaking.org/issues/data-...

Many of the Trump administration’s immigration actions this summer fell into three connected categories: 1) They are making hundreds of thousands of lawfully present immigrants “illegal” and therefore deportable: www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/mass-...

At USDA, attacks on workers’ rights are threatening food safety. The USDA has canceled inspectors’ union contracts, which is likely to lead to more attrition, increase workloads, and compromise inspectors’ ability to raise food safety concerns. www.wpr.org/news/food-sa...

The realities of the budget reconciliation bill’s Medicaid work requirements are coming into view. More than half of states already struggle with Medicaid administration and many will likely fail to set up effective work-reporting systems by the bill’s deadline: ccf.georgetown.edu/2025/09/04/a...

While we continue to track the administration’s attacks on the federal workforce, one thing is becoming clear: federal spending is up while the government’s ability to deliver on basic services is declining. unbreaking.org/issues/equal...

This week in Immigration, legal rulings re-enabled several Trump administration actions previously blocked by lower courts. First up—racial profiling in California immigration raids is fine with the Supreme Court: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Recent turmoil at the CDC has been affecting food safety. Last week, a top food safety official at CDC resigned in response to the Trump administration’s firing of CDC director Susan Monarez. civileats.com/2025/08/28/c...

This past week, a whistleblower exposed DOGE’s insecure storage of 300 million Americans’ personal data, an event that may lead to every single Social Security Number needing to be changed. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...

We updated our immigration timeline with a dramatic middle-of-the-night legal challenge to the expulsion of unaccompanied Guatemalan children, plus the latest changes in other cases and administration actions. unbreaking.org/issues/immig...

In Jan, the Office of Personnel Management told providers to stop covering gender-affirming care for federal employees & dependents under 19 in 2026. This loss in coverage is now expanded to all ages & will affect ~17,000 transgender employees, plus an unknown number of dependents.

The Unbreaking team is taking next week off for some well-earned rest. We’ll be back with our regular updates after Labor Day. 👋

We have a new issue page up today, looking at the multi-pronged assault on both immigrants to the United States and the immigration system itself: unbreaking.org/issues/immig...

In late July, the USDA announced plans to transfer over half its DC-based staff, around 2,600 people, to five field offices around the country. apnews.com/article/agri...

Created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the mission of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was to protect Americans from “unfair, deceptive, and abusive financial practices.” www.consumerfinance.gov/data-researc...

As we build out our explainer on the ways the administration is undermining data security, we’ve collected some great coverage of government surveillance tech and privacy law. Here are some highlights: