Health departments around the country have noticed there's something strange happening with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: It's not showing up on schedule and there's been no communication about why.

The federal public health agency doles out most of the money it receives from Congress to state and local health departments, which then contract with local organizations. That's how public health work gets funded in the U.S.

According to two CDC staff members with knowledge of the agency's budget, the CDC has yet to receive its full funding for the 2025 fiscal year. NPR agreed not to name the staff members because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

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"If they can delay until the end of September, then that's it," the staffer adds. "Those projects are not going to happen. That money goes straight back to Treasury."

That's why both CDC staffers who spoke with NPR say this amounts to impounding the agency's funding.

The number of homicides is falling dramatically nationwide.

In 2024, murders fell by at least 14% across the U.S., according to analyses by the data firm AH Datalytics and the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank. Official data from the FBI goes only through 2023 but shows similar drops. Early analyses from AH Datalytics suggest the drop will be even bigger in 2025.

https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/planetary-defense/2025/04/02/nasa-update-on-the-size-estimate-and-lunar-impact-probability-of-asteroid-2024-yr4/

For years, Wellpath, the largest commercial provider of health care in jails and prisons across 37 states, has been the target of federal lawsuits and scrutiny by lawmakers for its practices that have been alleged to cause long-term health problems and the deaths of dozens of incarcerated individuals.

As part of the bankruptcy proceedings, a federal judge in Texas granted a pause in all lawsuits that involve Wellpath. Legal proceedings in such cases can take years in normal circumstances, but Wellpath's bankruptcy means dozens of those cases, like the Capaci case, are on hold for the foreseeable future.

Reporting Highlights

• An Insurer Sanctioned: Three states found United’s algorithmic system to limit mental health coverage illegal; when they fought it, the insurer agreed to restrict it.
• A Patchwork Problem: The company is policing mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, highlighting a key flaw in the U.S. regulatory structure.
• United’s Playbook Revealed: The poorest and most vulnerable patients are now most at risk of losing mental health care coverage as United targets them for cost savings.

Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements.

By the end of 2021, United’s algorithm program had been deemed illegal in three states.

But that has not stopped the company from continuing to police mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, ProPublica found, after reviewing what is effectively the company’s internal playbook for limiting and cutting therapy expenses. The insurer’s strategies are still very much alive, putting countless patients at risk of losing mental health care.

Hurricane Milton dumped so much rain over parts of Florida’s Tampa Bay area that it qualified as a 1-in-1,000-year rainfall event.

St. Petersburg had 18.31 inches of rain — or more than 1.5 feet — in the 24-hour period during which the storm made landfall, according to precipitation data from the National Weather Service.

That included a staggering 5.09 inches in one hour, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET — a level considered to have roughly a 0.1% chance of happening in any given year.

Black girls face more discipline and more severe punishments in public schools than girls from other racial backgrounds, according to a groundbreaking new report set for release Thursday by a congressional watchdog.

The report, shared exclusively with NPR, took nearly a year-and-a-half to complete and comes after several Democratic congressional members requested the study. Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, later with support from Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, asked the Government Accountability Office in 2022 to take on the report.

Over the course of the 85-page report, the GAO says it found that in K-12 public schools, Black girls had the highest rates of so-called "exclusionary discipline," such as suspensions and expulsions. Overall, the study found that during the 2017-18 school year, Black girls received nearly half of these punishments, even as they represent only 15% of girls in public schools.

• A new rule proposal from the Biden administration would prohibit products that are subject to U.S.-China tariffs from being eligible for a special customs exemption.

• The de minimis loophole allows packages with a value of less than $800 to enter the United States with relatively little scrutiny.

• Officials say a recent explosion in the number of de minimis shipments is due largely to Chinese-linked online retail giants like Shein and Temu.

What would happen inside an electromechanical central office if you left your phone off hook?

From the channel Connections Museum